The time for getting to the Michigan Central depot at Chicago was so
limited that no regularly prepared supper could be secured, and so it
was necessary to take a sandwich at the central depot. There has been
great improvement made in the sandwiches furnished in Chicago, in the
last ten years. In 1870 it was customary to encase the sandwiches in
pressed sole leather. The leather was prepared by a process only known
to a Prussian, and the bread and ham were put in by hydraulic pressure,
and the hole soldered up.
About four years ago, the Prussian who had the secret said something
unkind to a pitcher of a baseball club, and the pitcher took up one of
the sandwiches and pitched it curved at the Prussian's eye. His funeral
was quite largely attended, considering that he was a man who was
retiring, and who made few acquaintances; but the secret of making the
soles and uppers of railroad sandwiches died with him.
It was about this time that corrugated iron shutters were invented, and
that material was at once utilized to make lids for sandwiches, while
the under jaw of the appetite-destroying substance was made of common
building paper, the whole-varnished with neats foot oil, and kiln dried
in a lime kiln.
Our object in eating one of the sandwiches, was to transfer, if
possible, the headache to the stomach, on the principle that the quack
doctor cured a patient of paralysis by throwing him into fits, claiming
that he was not much on paralysis, but he was hell on fits. The entrance
of the piece of sandwich into the stomach--that is, the small pieces
that we were able to blast off with the imperfect appliances at hand in
the tool box of a wrecking car--was signaled by the worst rebellion
that has been witnessed in this country since 1860. The stomach, liver,
lungs, spleen and other patent insides got up an indignation meeting,
with the stomach in the chair. In calling the meeting to order the
stomach said unaccustumed as it was to public speaking, it felt as
though the occasion demanded a protest, and that in no uncertain tone,
against the habit the boss had of slinging anything into the stomach
that came in his way, without stopping to consider the effect on the
internals.
The chair remarked that it had heretofore had a good many hard doses to
take, notably, army bacon, and later some black bread that the boss had
shoved in while hunting out in Minnesota in 1876, and again last year
when a pan full of beans from Bill Wall's Wolf river boom boarding house
was sent down without any introduction, the stomach said it had felt
like throwing up the “sponge,” and drawing out of the game, but it had
thought better of it, and had gone on trying to digest things till now.
But this last outrage, this Chicago sandwich, was too much.
“See here,” says the stomach, holding up a piece of the iron lid of the
sandwich so the liver could see it, “what kind of a junk shop does he
take this place for?”
The liver got the floor and suggested that the stomach was making
a terrible fuss about a little thing, and told the stomach it had
evidently forgotten the good things that had been sent down from above
in times gone by.
“You seem to forget,” says the liver, becoming warmed up, “the banquets
the boss never fails to attend, the nice dinners he sometimes gets at
home, and the wild canvas-back duck he sends down when he goes to
Lake Koshkonong, as well as the Palmer House dinners that occasionally
surprise us. I move that the stomach be reprimanded for kicking and
trying to get up a muss, and that this meeting adjourn and we all go
about our business.”
The stomach tried to get in a word edgewise, but it was of no use, and
the thing was about to break up in a row, when we went to sleep in one
of the elegant Michigan Central sleepers, and in the morning the stomach
was coaxing for something more, and didn't seem to care what it was.
No young man should ever take two girls to a picnic. We don't care how
attractive the girls are, or how enterprising a boy is, or how expansive
or far-reaching a mind he has, he cannot do justice to the subject if he
has two girls. There will be a clashing of interests that no young
boy in his goslinghood, as most boys are when they take two girls to a
picnic, has the diplomacy to prevent.
If we start the youth of the land out right in the first place, they
will be all right, but if they start out by taking two girls to a picnic
their whole lives are liable to become acidulated, and they will grow up
hating themselves.
If a young man is good natured and tries to do the fair thing, and a
picnic is got up, there is always some old back number of a girl who has
no fellow who wants to go, and the boys, after they all get girls and
buggies engaged, will canvass among themselves to see who will take this
extra girl, and it always falls to this good natured young man. He says
of course there is room for three in the buggy.
Sometimes he thinks maybe this old girl can be utilized to drive the
horse, and then he can converse with his own sweet girl with both hands,
but in such a moment as ye think not he finds that the extra girl is
afraid of horses, dare not drive, and really requires some holding to
keep her nerves quiet. He tries to drive with one hand and console his
good girl, who is a little cross at the turn affairs have taken, with
the other, but it is a failure, and finally his good girl says she will
drive, and then he has to put an arm around them both, which gives more
or less dissatisfaction the best way you can fix it.
If we had a boy who didn't seem to have any more sense than to make a
hat rack of himself to hang girls on in a buggy, we should labor with
him and tell him of the agonies we had experienced in youth when the
boys palmed off two girls on us to take to a country picnic, and we
believe we can do no greater favor to the young men just entering the
picnic of life than to impress upon them the importance of doing one
thing at a time, and doing it well.
*****
A young couple from Green county stopped at a Janesville hotel on their
wedding tour, and when they went to bed they were in a hurry and blew
out the gas instead of turning it off. In the night a terrible smell was
heard around the house, and suspicion naturally pointed to the bridal
chamber. The door was pounded on but there was no response, and the
people feared the young folks had gone to heaven, so the door was broken
down. They had not gone to heaven, but they were both senseless, and
were dragged out into the open air, with little ceremony and less
clothes. They were brought out of the stupor, when they looked at each
other in a reproachful manner, and as they pulled on their clothes they
each acted as though if they had known the horrors of married life they
would have remained single all their lives.