A \ B \ C \ D \ E \ F \ G \ H \ I \ J \ K \ L \ M \ N \ O \ P \ R \ S \ T \ U \ V \ W \Z

Peck's Compendium of Fun by George W. Peck

G >> George W. Peck >> Peck\'s Compendium of Fun



Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
file which includes the original illustrations.
See 14815-h.htm or 14815-h.zip:
(http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/1/4/8/1/14815/14815-h/14815-h.htm)
or
(http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/1/4/8/1/14815/14815-h.zip)





PECK'S COMPENDIUM OF FUN

Comprising the Choicest Gems of Wit, Humor, Sarcasm and Pathos
of America's Favorite Humorist,

GEORGE W. PECK,

Editor of "Peck's Sun" Milwaukee

Illustrated by Eminent Artists

Chicago

1886







CONTENTS.


About Hell
Another Dead Failure
Anna Dickinson
A Bald-headed Man Most Crazy
A Case of Paralysis
A Doctor of Laws
A Hot Box at a Picnic
A Lively Train Load
A Mad Minister
A Musical Critique
A Peck at the Cheese
A Plea for the Bull Head
A Sewing Machine Given to the Boss Girl
A Safe Investment
A Tony Slaughter-House
A Trying Situation
An Arm That is not Reliable
An Editor Burglarized
Banks and Banking
Bounced from Church for Dancing
Boys and Circuses
Boys will be Boys
Broke up a Prayer Meeting
Buying a Stone Crusher
"Cash!"
Camp Meetings in the Dark of the Moon
Church Keno
Colored Concert Troupes
Dogs and Human Beings
Effects of Mineral Water
Expedition in Search of a Doughnut
Failure of a Solid Institution
Fishing for Pieces of Women
Fooling with the Bible
George Washington
Granite Head Cheese
Internal Improvements
Joke on the Hat
Killing Big Game
Large Mouths are Fashionable
La Crosse Nebecudnezzer Water
Laying up Apples in Heaven
Mr. Peck's Sunday Lecture
Nearly Broke up the Ball
Our Blue-Coated Dog-Poisoners
Our Christian Neighbors Have Gone
Palace Cattle Cars

PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
He Becomes a Druggist
He is too Healthy
He Quits the Drug Business
His Pa an Inventor
His Pa Dissected
His Pa Goes Calling
His Pa Goes Skating
His Pa Gets Boxed
His Pa Gets Mad
His Pa Joins a Temperance Society
His Pa Jokes Him
His Pa is Discouraged
His Pa Kills Him
His Pa Mortified

Religion and Fish
Rope Ladders
Sardineindianapolis
Seven Year Old Horses
Summer Resorting
Take Your Latin Straight
Terror in Church
The Bob-Tailed Badger
The Boy and the Goat
The Difference
The Difference in Horses
The Fire New Year's Day
The Giddy Girl's Quarrel
The Gospel Car
The Infidel and His Silver Mine
The Knight and the Bridal Chamber
The Legend of the Lake
The Man from Dubuque
The Mistake About It
The Naughty But Nice Church Choir
The New Coal Stove
The Sudden Fire-Works at Racine
The Uses of the Paper Bag
The Waters of La Crosse
The Way to Name Children
The Way Women Boss a Pillow
The Woodcock
Those Bold Bad Drummers
Those Step Ladders!
Tragedy on the Stage
Trains Without Conductors
Try to Save Two Shillings
Unscrewing the Top of a Fruit Jar
Why the Fever Did'nt Spread
Woman-Dozing a Democrat
Wonders of the Stage


ELECTRIC FLASHES.

Anna Dickinson as "Mazeppa"
A Black Bear at Onalaska
A Dead Sure Thing
A Fashion Item
A Good Land Enough
A Lecturer Should Know What He Talks About
A Loan Exhibition
A New Sparking Scheme
An Odorous Bohemian
Base Ingratitude
Buttermilk Bibbers
Cats on the Fence
Christmas Trees
Col. Ingersoll Praying
Comforting Compensations
Convenient Currency
Crushing Nihilism
Enterprising Chicago!
Fish Hatching in Wisconsin
Frozen Ears
Gathered Waists!
Geological Survey
Give us War
Good Templars on Ice
Hard on Fond Du Lac
He Would'nt Have His Father Called Names
How Farmers May Get Rich
"How Sharper Than a Hound's Tooth!"
How to Invest a Thousand Dollars
How to Reach Young Men
Hunting Dogs
Insecure Abodes
Lunch on the Cars
Mattie Mashes Minnesota
Merrie Christmas
More Dangerous Than Kerosene
Mrs. Langtry
One of Beecher's Converts
Preparing for War
Raising Elephants
Registry of Electors
Selling Clams
She was no Gentleman
Southern "Honaw"
Spurious Tripe
Sure of Heaven
Supreme Court Judges and U.S. Senators
Ten Days in Love
The Advent Preacher and the Balloon
The Day We Reached Canada
The Dog Law
The Glorious Fourth of July
The Mule not the Eagle
The Old Sweet Songs
The Political Outlook
The Power of Eloquence
The Thirsty Gopher
The Universalist Bath
The Universal Object
The Wicked Mon Kee
The Wrong Corpse
Three Inches of Leg
To What Vile Uses May 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 I interpreted the story this way, that the whale was fixed
up inside with upper and lower berths, like a sleeping car, and Joner had
a lower berth, and the porter made up the berth as soon as Joner came in
with his satchel, and Joner pulled off his boots and gave them to the
porter to black, and put his watch under the pillow and turned in. The
boys in Sunday school all laffed, and the minister said I was a bigger
fool than Pa was, and that was useless. If you go back on me, now, I won't
have a friend, except my chum and a dog, and I swear, by my halidom, that
I never put no sand in your sugar, or kerosene in your butter. I admit the
picking off of the codfish, but you can charge it to Pa, the same as you
did the eggs that I pushed my chum over into last summer, though I thought
you did wrong in charging Christmas prices for dog days eggs. When my
chum's Ma scraped his pants she said there was not an egg represented on
there that was less than two years old. The Sunday school folks
have all gone back on me, since I put kyan pepper on the stove, when they
were singing 'Little Drops of Water,' and they all had to go out doors and
air themselves, but I didn't mean to let the pepper drop on the stove. I
was just holding it over the stove to warm it, when my chum hit the funny
bone of my elbow. Pa says I am a terror to cats. Every time Pa says
anything, it gives me a new idea. I tell you Pa has got a great brain, but
sometimes he don't have it with him. When he said I was a terror to cats I
thought what fun there is in cats, and me and my chum went to stealing
cats right off, and before night we had eleven cats caged. We had one in a
canary bird cage, three in Pa's old hat boxes, three in Ma's band box,
four in valises, two in a trunk, and the rest in a closet up stairs.

"That night Pa said he wanted me to stay home because the committee that
is going to get up a noyster supper in the church was going to meet at our
house, and they might want to send me on errands. I asked him if my chum
couldn't stay too, 'cause he is the healthiest infant to run after errands
that ever was, and Pa said he could stay, but we must remember that there
musn't be no monkey business going on. I told him there shouldn't be no
monkey business, but I didn't promise nothing about cats. Well, sir, you'd
a dide. The committee was in the library by the back stairs, and me and my
chum got the cat boxes all together, at the top of the stairs, and we took
them all out and put them in a clothes basket, and just as the minister
was speaking, and telling what a great good was done by these oyster
sociables, in bringing the young people together, and taking their minds
from the wickedness of the world, and turning their thoughts into
different channels, one of the old tom cats in the basket gave a 'purmeow'
that sounded like the wail of a lost soul, or a challenge to battle. I
told my chum that we couldn't hold the bread-board over the clothes basket
much longer, when two or three cats began to yowl, and the minister
stopped talking and Pa told Ma to open the stair door and tell the hired
girl to see what was the matter up there. She thought our cat had got shut
up in the storm door, and she opened the stair door to yell to the girl,
and then I pushed the clothes basket, cats and all down the back stairs.
Well, sir, I suppose no committee for a noyster supper, was ever more
astonished. I heard Ma fall over a willow rocking chair, and say, 'scat,'
and I heard Pa say, 'well. I'm dam'd,' and a girl that sings in the choir
say, 'Heavens, I am stabbed,' then my chum and me ran to the front of the
house and come down the front stairs looking as innocent as could be, and
we went in the library, and I was just going to tell Pa if there was any
errands he wanted run my chum and me was just aching to run them, when a
yellow cat without any tail was walking over the minister, and Pa was
throwing a hassock at two cats that were clawing each other under the
piano, and Ma was trying to get her frizzes back on her head, and the
choir girl was standing on the lounge with her dress pulled up, trying to
scare cats with her striped stockings, and the minister was holding his
hands up, and I guess he was asking a blessing on the cats, and my chum
opened the front door and all the cats went out. Pa and Ma looked at me,
and I said it wasn't me, and the minister wanted to know how so much cat
hair got on my coat and vest, and I said a cat met me in the hall and
kicked me, and Ma cried, and Pa said 'that boy beats hell,' and the
minister said, I would be all right if I had been properly brought up, and
then Ma was mad, and the committee broke up. Well, to tell the honest
truth Pa basted me, and yanked me around until I had to have my arm in a
sling, but what's the use of making such a fuss about a few cats. Ma said
she never wanted to have my company again, 'cause I spoiled everything.
But I got even with Pa for basting me, this morning, and I dassent go
home. You see Ma has got a great big bath sponge as big as a chair
cushion, and this morning I took the sponge and filled it with warm water,
and took the feather cushion out of the chair Pa sits in at the table, and
put the sponge in its place, and covered it over with the cushion cover,
and when we all got set down to the table Pa came in and sat down on it to
ask a blessing. He started in by closing his eyes and placing his hands up
in front of him like the letter V, and then he began to ask that the food
we were about to partake off be blessed, and then he was going on to ask
that all of us be made to see the error of our ways, when he began to
hitch around, and he opened one eye and looked at me, and I looked as
pious as a boy can look when he knows the pancakes are getting cold, and
Pa he kind of sighed and said 'Amen' sort of snappish, and he got up and
told Ma he didn't feel well, and she would have to take his place and pass
around the sassidge and potatoes, and he looked kind of scart and went out
with his hand on his pistol pocket, as though he would like to shoot, and
Ma she got up and went around and sat in Pa's chair. The sponge didn't
hold more than half a pail full of water, and I didn't want to play no
joke on Ma, cause the cats nearly broke her up, but she sat down and was
just going to help me, when she rung the bell and called the hired girl,
and said she felt as though her neuralgia was coming on, and she would go
to her room, and told the girl to sit down and help Hennery. The girl sat
down and poured me out some coffee, and then she said, 'Howly Saint
Patrick, but I blave those pancakes are burning,' and she went out in the
kitchen. I drank my coffee, and then took the big sponge out of the chair
and put the cushion in the place of it, and then I put the sponge in the
bath room, and I went up to Pa and Ma's room, and asked them if I should
go after the doctor, and Pa had changed his clothes and got on his Sunday
pants, and he said, 'never mind the doctor, I guess we will pull through,'
and for me to get out and go to the devil, and I came over here. Say,
there is no harm in a little warm water, is there? Well, I'd like to know
what Pa and Ma and the hired girl thought. I am the only real healthy one
there is in our family."


THREE INCHES OF LEG.

Blanche Williams, of Philadelphia, who met with an accident at Fairmount
Water-works, by which one leg was broken, and rendered three inches
shorter than the rest of her legs, has recovered $10,000 damages. It would
seem, to the student of nature, to be a pretty good price for three inches
of ordinary leg, but then some people will make such a fuss.


MORE DANGEROUS THAN KEROSENE.

The regular weekly murder is reported from Peshtigo. Two men named Glass
and Penrue, got to quarreling about a girl, in a hay loft, over a barn.
Glass stabbed Penrue quite a number of times and he died. There is nothing
much more dangerous, unless it is kerosene, than two men and a girl, in a
hay loft quarreling.


TEN DAYS IN LOVE.

There is a fearfully harrowing story going the rounds of the papers headed
"Ten Days in Love." It must have been dreadful, with no Sunday, no day of
rest, no holiday, just nothing but love, for ten long days. By the way,
did the person live?


BOYS WILL BE BOYS.

Not many months ago there was a meeting of ministers in Wisconsin, and
after the holy work in which they were engaged had been done up to the
satisfaction of all, a citizen of the place where the conference was held
invited a large number of them to a collation at his house. After supper a
dozen of them adjourned to a room up stairs to have a quiet smoke, as
ministers sometimes do, when they got to talking about old times, when
they attended school and were boys together, and _The Sun_ man, who was
present, disguised as a preacher, came to the conclusion that ministers
were rather human than otherwise when they are young.

One two-hundred pound delegate with a cigar between his fingers, blew the
smoke out of the mouth which but a few hours before was uttering a
supplication to the Most High to make us all good, punched a thin elder in
the ribs with his thumb and said: "Jim, do you remember the time we
carried the cow and calf up into the recitation room?" For a moment "Jim"
was inclined to stand on his dignity, and he looked pained, until they all
began to laugh, when he looked around to see if any worldly person was
present, and satisfying himself that we were all truly good, he said: "You
bet your life I remember it. I have got a scar on my shin now where that
d--blessed cow hooked me," and he began to roll up his trouser leg to show
the scar. They told him they would take his word, and he pulled down his
pants and said:

"Well, you see I was detailed to attend to the calf, and I carried the
calf up stairs, assisted by Bill Smith--who is preaching in Chicago; got a
soft thing--five thousand a year, and a parsonage furnished, and keeps a
team, and if one of those horses is not a trotter then I am no judge of
horseflesh or of Bill, and if he don't put on an old driving coat and go
out on the road occasionally and catch on for a race with some
wordly-minded man, then I am another. You hear me--well, I never knew a
calf was so heavy, and had so many hind legs. Kick! Why, bless your old
alabaster heart, that calf walked all over me, from Genesis to
Revelations. And say, we didn't get much of a breeze the next morning, did
we, when we had to clean out the recitation room?"

[Illustration: SACRED MEMORIES]

A solemn-looking minister, with red hair, who was present, and whose eyes
twinkled some through the smoke, said to another:

"Charlie, you remember you were completely gone on the professor's niece
who was visiting there from Poughkeepsie? What become of her."

Charlie put his feet on the table, struck a match on his trousers, and
said:

"Well, I wasn't gone on her, as you say, but just liked her. Not
too well, you know, but just well enough. She had a color of hair that I
could never stand--just the color of yours, Hank--and when she got to
going with a printer I kind of let up, and they were married. I understand
he is editing a paper somewhere in Illinois, and getting rich. It was
better for her, as now she has a place to live, and does not have to board
around like a country school ma'am, as she would if she had married me."

A dark haired man, with a coat buttoned clear to the neck, and a
countenance like a funeral sermon, with no more expression than a wooden
decoy duck, who was smoking a briar-wood pipe that he had picked up on a
what-not that belonged to the host, knocked the ashes out in a spittoon,
and said:

"Boys, do you remember the time we stole that three-seated wagon and went
out across the marsh to Kingsley's farm, after watermelons?"

Four of them said they remembered it well enough, and Jim said all he
asked was to live long enough to get even with Bill Smith, the Chicago
preacher, for suggesting to him to steal a bee-hive on the trip. "Why,"
said he, "before I had got twenty feet with that hive, every bee in it had
stung 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 what it
was, and I took down everything in the store pretty near before I found
it, and then I wouldn't have found it only the proprietor came in. The
girl asked the proprietor if there wasn't a good deal of sewer gas in the
store, and he told me to go out and shake myself. I think the girl was mad
at me because I got a nursing bottle out of the show case with a rubber
muzzle, and asked her if that was what she wanted. Well, she told me a
sachet was something for the stummick, and I thought a nursing bottle was
the nearest thing to it."

Copyright (c) 2007. bestextbooks.com. All rights reserved.

Robert Baden Powell - "My Adventures as a Spy"

Arnold Bennett - "Hugo"

Arthur Thomas Quiller Couch (Q) - "Nicky Nan, Reservist"

Steward Edward White - "The Silent Places"