Pecks Compendium of Fun | Page 6

me a dozen times. And do you remember how we played it on the
professor, and made him believe that I had the chicken pox? O,
gentlemen, a glorious immortality awaits you beyond the grave for
lying me out of that scrape."
The fat man hitched around uneasy in his chair and said they all seemed
to have forgotten the principal event of that excursion, and that was
how he tried to lift a bull dog over the fence by the teeth, which had

become entangled in a certain portion of his wardrobe that should not
be mentioned, and how he left a sample of his trousers in the
possession of the dog, and how the farmer came to the college the next
day with his eyes blacked, and a piece of trousers cloth done up in a
paper, and wanted the professor to try and match it with the pants of
some of the divinity students, and how he had to put on a pair of
nankeen pants and hide his cassimeres in the boat house until the
watermelon scrape blew over and he could get them mended.
Then the small brunette minister asked if he was not entitled to some
credit for blacking the farmer's eyes. Says he: "When he got over the
fence and grabbed the near horse by the bits, and said he would have
the whole gang in jail, I felt as though something had got to be done,
and I jumped out on the other side of the wagon and walked around to
him and put up my hands and gave him 'one, two, three' about the nose,
with my blessing, and he let go that horse and took his dog back to the
house."
"Well," says the red haired minister, "those melons were green, anyway,
but it was the fun of stealing them that we were after."
At this point the door opened and the host entered, and, pushing the
smoke away with his hands, he said: "Well, gentlemen, you are
enjoying yourselves?"
They threw their cigar stubs in the spittoon, the solemn man laid the
brier wood pipe where he got it, and the fat man said:
"Brother Drake, we have been discussing the evil effects of indulging
in the weed, and we have come to the conclusion that while tobacco is
always bound to be used to a certain extent by the thoughtless, it is a
duty the clergy owe to the community to discountenance its use on all
possible occasions. Perhaps we had better adjourn to the parlor, and
after asking divine guidance take our departure."
PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
HE BECOMES A DRUGGIST.

"Whew! What is that smells so about this store? It seems as though
everything had turned frowy," said the grocery man to his clerk in the
presence of the bad boy, who was standing with his back to the stove,
his coat-tails parted with his hands, and a cigarette in his mouth.
"May be it is me that smells frowy," said the boy as he put his thumbs
in the armholes of his vest, and spit at the keyhole in the door. "I have
gone into business."
"By thunder, I believe it is you," said the grocery man, as he went up to
the boy and snuffed a couple of times and then held his hand to his
nose. "The board of health will kerosene you if they ever smell that
smell, and send you to the glue factory. What business have you gone
into to make you smell so rank?"
"Well, you see Pa began to think it was time I learned a trade, or a
profession, and he saw a sign in a drug store window 'boy wanted,' and
as he had a boy he didn't want, he went to the druggist and got a job for
me. This smell on me will go off in a few weeks. You know I wanted to
try all the perfumery in the store, and after I had got about forty
different extracts on my clothes, another boy that worked there he fixed
up a bottle of benzine and assafety and brimstone, and a whole lot of
other horrid stuff, and labeled it 'rose geranium,' and I guess I just
wallered in it. It is awful, aint it? It kerflummixed Ma when I went into
the dining-room the first night that I got home from the store, and broke
Pa all up. He said I reminded him of the time they had a litter of skunks
under the barn. The air seemed fixed around where I am, and
everybody seems to know who fixed it. A girl came into the store
yesterday to buy a satchet, and there wasn't anybody there but me, and I
didn't know