Pecks Compendium of Fun | Page 2

We Come Too Particular by Half What the
Country Needs What the Democrats Will Do We Will Celebrate Why
not Raise Wolves?

ILLUSTRATIONS.
A Scene in Paradise "Ah, my Friends, Look Down Into That Burning
Lake!" An Intrusive Nigger At the Telephone Behind the Scenes
Bossing the Pillow "Do not Pass me by!" Drummers Trying to Pray
"Get Thee to a Nunnery!" "Happy New Year, Mum!" Hiawasamantha,
the Dusky Daughter of the Golden West "I Want to be an Angel" It
Looked Like an old Dripping Pan "It is F-f-four Sizes too Big!" John
McCullough Killing a Texas Steer "Just as I am" "Keno!" Martindale
Climbs a Pole "Me Long Lost Duke!" Mystery of a Woman's Clothes
New Way of Taking Seidlitz Powders No More Apples for the Minister
"Oh, That Will be all Right" "Pa Grabbed Her by the Polonaise"
"Sard," and the Greek Slave Sacred Memories Slippery Oysters
Swallow-Tails on the Climb The Lady of the Seventh Ward The Old
Back Number Girl The Old Man Tries His Hand The Resorter The
Rotund Urso The Sexton in all His Glory The Startled Cat The Tenor
Arrayed in all His Glory The Wandering Oyster "Thereby Hangs a
Tail." "This is too Allfired Much!" "Too Late, Pa, I Die at the Hand of
an Assassin!" Turning the Proper Dingus "Yell, or go Down!"

PECK'S COMPENDIUM OF FUN.

THE NEW COAL STOVE.
We never had a coal stove around the house until last Saturday. Have
always used pine slabs and pieces of our neighbor's fence. They burn
well, too, but the fence got all burned up, and the neighbor said he
wouldn't build a new one, so we went down to Jones' and got a coal
stove.
After supper we took a piece of ice and rubbed our hands warm, and
went in where that stove was, resolved to make her draw and burn if it
took all the pine fence in the first Ward. Our better-half threw a quilt
over her, and shiveringly remarked that she never knew what real solid
comfort was until she got a coal stove.
Stung by the sarcasm in her remark, we turned every dingus on the
stove that was movable, or looked like it had anything to do with the
draft, and pretty soon the stove began to heave up heat. It was not long
before she stuttered like the new Silsby steamer. Talk about your heat!
In ten minutes that room was as much worse than a Turkish bath as
Hades is hotter than Liverman's ice-house. The perspiration fairly fried
out of a tin water cooler in the next room. We opened the doors, and
snow began to melt as far up Vine street as Hanscombe's house, and
people all round the neighborhood put on linen clothes. And we
couldn't stop the confounded thing.
We forgot what Jones told us about the dampers, and she kept a biling.
The only thing we could do was to go to bed, and leave the thing to
burn the house up if it wanted to. We stood off with a pole and turned
the damper every way, and at every turn she just sent out heat enough
to roast an ox. We went to bed, supposing that the coal would
eventually burn out, but about 12 o'clock the whole family had to get
up and sit on the fence.
[Illustration: TURNING THE PROPER DINGUS.]
Finally a man came along who had been brought up among coal stoves,
and he put a wet blanket over him and crept up to the stove and turned
the proper dingus, and she cooled off, and since that time has been just

as comfortable as possible. If you buy a coal stove you got to learn how
to engineer it, or you may get roasted.
PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
HIS PA IS DISCOURAGED.
"Say, you leave here mighty quick," said the grocery man to the bad
boy, as he came in, with his arm in a sling, and backed up against the
stove to get warm. "Everything has gone wrong since you got to
coming here, and I think you are a regular Jonah. I find sand in my
sugar, kerosene in the butter, the codfish is all picked off, and there is
something wrong every time you come here. Now you leave."
"I aint no Joner," said the boy as he wiped his nose on his coat sleeve,
and reached into a barrel for a snow apple. "I never swallered no whale.
Say, do you believe that story about Joner being in the whale's belly, all
night? I don't. The minister was telling about it at Sunday school last
Sunday, and asked me what I thought Joner was doing while he was in
there, and I told him