An exchange has the following item which may seem all right, but it will
get some young fellow's back broke yet:
“An Illinois justice has decided that courting is a public necessity,
and must not be interrupted; therefore, if a young man wanted to kiss a
girl he might put her father out of the room first if he liked.”
The publication of the above may cause some smart youth to do something
he will regret. The lame, sickly-looking father of a girl may come into
the parlor some night and find the warm-haired youth on the sofa with
the girl, and when the old man speaks of it being time to stop such
nonsense, the young man, with this judicial decision in his mind, will
tell his prospective father-in-law to wipe off his vest and go to bed.
The old man will spit on his hands and grasp the warm-haired young man
by the county seat and tie him up in a double bow knot, and pin a scarf
on him, and throw him out on the path to the gate, and then he will turn
and slap the girl across where the dress is plaited, and she will go up
stairs with her hand on her heart, as it were, and the old man will jump
up and say “Whoop?”
The young men of this country have got gall enough about visiting girls
in the evening at their homes without filling their heads with any such
ideas in regard to their legal rights. There are very few fathers who
would quietly submit to being told to go away by a youth with a striped
neck tie and pants too short at the bottom.
These sparkers are looked upon by parents generally as a nuisance, and
often they are right. Nine-tenths of the sparking is done by boys who
haven't got their growth, and they look so green that it is laughable
for old folks to look at them. They haven't generally got a second
shirt, and they are no more qualified to get married than a steer is to
preach. And yet marrying is about the first thing they think of.
A green boy, without a dollar, present or prospective, sparking a girl
regularly and talking of marrying is a spectacle for gods and men. He
should be reasoned with, and if he will not quit it until he is able
to support a wife, and to know who he loves, and the difference between
love and passion, he should be quarantined or put in a convent erected
on purpose for such cases.
Nine-tenths of the unhappy marriages are the result of green human
calves being allowed to run at large in the society pasture without any
pokes on them. They marry and have children before they do moustaches;
they are fathers of twins before they are proprietors of two pairs of
pants, and the little girls they marry are old women before they are
twenty years old. Occasionally one of these gosling marriages turns out
all right, but it is a clear case of luck.
If there was a law against young galoots sparking and marrying before
they have all their teeth cut, we suppose the little cusses would evade
it some way, but there ought to be a sentiment against it. It is time
enough for these bantams to think of finding a pullet when they have
raised money enough by their own work to buy a bundle of laths to build
a hen house. But they see a girl who looks cunning, and they are afraid
there is not going to be girls enough to go around, and they begin
their work real spry; and before they are aware of the sanctity of the
marriage relation, they are hitched for life, and before they own a
cook-stove or a bedstead they have to get up in the night and go for a
doctor, so frightened that they run themselves out of breath and abuse
the doctor because he does not run too; and when the doctor gets there
he finds that there is not enough linen in the house to wrap up a doll
baby.
It is about this time that a young man begins to realize that he has
been a colossal fool, as he flies around to heat water and bring in the
bath tub, and as he goes whooping after his mother or her mother, he
turns pale around the gills, his hair turns red in a single night, and
he calls high heaven to witness that if he lives till morning, which
he has doubts about, he will turn over a new leaf and never get married
again until he is older. And in the morning the green-looking “father”
is around before a drug store is open, with no collar on, his hair
sticking every way, his eyes blood-shot and his frame nervous, waiting
for the clerk to open the door so he can get some saffron to make tea
of.
Less than a year ago he thought he was the greatest man there was
anywhere, but he sits there in the house that morning, with his wedding
coat rusty and shiny, his pants frayed at the bottom and patched in the
seat, and the nurse puts in his arm a little bundle of flannel with a
baby hid in it, and he holds it as he would a banana, and as he looks at
his girl wife on the bed, nearly dead from pain and exhaustion, and
he thinks that there are not provisions enough in the house to feed a
canary, a lump comes in his throat and he says to himself that if he
had it to do over again he would leave that little girl at home with her
mother; and he would, till he had six dollars to buy baby flannel and
ten dollars to pay the doctor.