class="pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">Turning the Proper Dingus

PECK’S COMPENDIUM OF FUN.

THE NEW COAL STOVE.

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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.

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.

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“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