Percy Beckle went out walking in the silent hours of night; the
neighbors all were talking, and his wife was filled with fright. She
would sit beside the window, her lone watch to keep, and would tell her
friends and children he was walking in his sleep. She married him in
Pottsville, for better or for worse; he was a hard-shell Baptist, and
didn’t smoke or curse; but he entered in the service of the U. S.
Government, passed examination and to Panama was sent.
When the doctors looked him over it was found he had no brain, so they
put him as a gumshoe on an early morning train, and there he met a
charmer whose skin was very brown; for a year she took his coin away,
and then she turned him down.
He then became a Redman, a thing he shouldn’t do, and later thought it
better to become a Kangaroo. He started chasing petticoats wherever one
he saw, and the Kangaroos got after him; ’twas so against their law(?).
Meantime his wife was hungry and his babies had no shoes; the Redmen
took and threw him out, he didn’t pay his dues; his poor wife took to
drinking, to while the time away, and Mrs. C. L. E. sent her to
Brooklyn, U. S. A.
Now, Percy kept the chase up for nigh another year; his business was to
ascertain if females acted queer. The women feared to speak or look,
they hated him so much, but Percy knew them like a book, being
Pennsylvania Dutch.
He would go to Sam’s on Sundays, and to the Central, too, and would sit
and tell the vultures of the many things he knew. If he saw a female
passing he would bow and scrape and smile, and if she turned her nose
up he would criticize her style. (The brute!)
At last he went and sickened, he was feeling very sad; the plots he made
had thickened, and the women all were mad. Decks said he had nephritis.
They all pronounced him ill. But he died of feminitis, and he lies on
Money Hill.