Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 32, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 September 1883 — THE BAD BOY. [ARTICLE]

THE BAD BOY.

“What are you sitting there like a bump on a log for?" asked the groceryman of the bad boy, as the youth had sat on a box for half an hour with his hands in hie pockets, looking at a hole in the floor until his eyes were set like a dying Horse. “What are you thinking of, anyway ? It seems to me boys set around and think more than they used to when I was a boy,” and the grocery man brushed the wilted lettuce and shook it, and tried to make it stand up stiff’ and crisp before he put it out doors, but the contrary lettuce, which had been picked the day before, looked so tired that the boy noticed it. “That lettuce reminds me of a girl. Yesterday I was in here when it was new, like the girl going to the picnic, and it was as fresh, and proud, and starched up, and kitteny, and full of life, and as sassy as a girl starting out for a picnic. To-day it has got back from the picnic, and, like the girl, the starch is all taken out, and it is limber, and languid, and tired, and can’t stand up alone, and it looks as though it wanted to' be laid at rest beside the rotten apples in the alley rather than be set out in front of a store to be sold to honest people and give them the gangrene of the liver,” and the boy put ■on a Health Commissioner air that frightened the grocery man, and he threw the lettuce out the back door. “You never mind about my lettuce,” said the grocery man. “I can attend to my affairs. But now tell me what you thinking about here all the morning.” “I was thinking what a fool King Solomon was,” said the, boy, with the air of one who has made a statement that has got to be argued pretty strong io make it hold water. “Now look a-here,” said the groceryman, in anger, “I have stood it to have you play tricks on me, and have listened to your condemned foolishness without a murmur as long as you have confined yourself to people now living, but when you attack Solomon, the wisest man, the great King, and call him a fool, friendship ceases, and you must get out of this store. Solomon in all his glory, is aTriend df mine, and no fool boy is going to abuse Ifim in my presence. Now you dry up!” ■ “Sit down on the ice box,” said the boy to the grocery man. “What you need is rest. You are overworked. Your alleged brain is equal to wilted lettuce, and it can devise ways and means to hide rotten peaches under good ones, so as to sell them to blind ■orphans, but when it comes to grasping great questions, your small brain cannot comprehend them. Your brain may go up sideways to a great question, and rub against it, but it cannot surround it, and grasp it. That’s where you are deformed. Now,, it is different with me. I can raise brain to sell to you grocery men. Listen. This S&lomon is credited with being the wisest man, and yet history says he had a thousand wives. Just think of it You have got one wife, and pa has got -one, and all the neighbors have one, if they have had any kind of luck. Does not one wife make you pay attention? Wouldn’t two wives break you up? Wouldn’t three cause you to see stars? How would ten strike you? Why, man alive, you do not grasp the magnitude of the statement that Solomon had a thousand wives. A thousand wives, standing side by side, would reach about four blocks. Marching by fours it would take them twenty minutes to pass a given point. The largest summer resort hotel only holds about 500 people, so Sol would have had to hire two hotels if he took his wives ®ut for a day in the country. If you would stop to think you would know niore.” The grocery man’s eyes had begun to stick out as the bad boy continued, as though the statistics had never been brought to his attention before, but he wi% bound to * stand by his old friend Solomon, and he said, “Well, Solomon’s wives musf' have been different from our wives of the present day.” ‘•Not much,” said the boy, as he Saw he was paralyzing the grocery man. • “Women have been about the same ever siuce Eve.' She get mashed on the old original dude, and it stands to reason that Solomon’s wives were no better than the mother of the human race. Statistics show that one woman out of every ten is red-headed. That would give Solomon an even hundred red-headed wives. Just that hundred red-headed wives would be enough to make an ordinary man think that there ■was a land that is fairer than this. Then there would be, out of the other 900, about 300 blondes, and the other €OO would be brunettes, and maybe he had a few albinos, and bearded women, and fat women, and dwarfs. Now, those thousand women had appetites, desires for dress and style, the same as all women. Imagine Solomon saying to them, ‘ Girls, let’s all go down to the ice-cream saloon and have a dish of ice cream.’ Can you, with your brain muddled with codfish and new potatoes, realize the scene that would follow ? Suppose, after Soloman’s broom-brigade had got seated in the ice-creamery, one of the red-headed wives should catch Solomon winking at a strange girl at another table. You may think Solomon did not know enough to wink, or that he was not that kind of a flirt, but he must have been ■or he could never have succeeded in marrying a thousand wives, in a sparsely-settled country. No, sir, it looks to me as though Solomon, in all his glory, was an old masher, and, from what I have seen of men being bossed around with one wife, I don’t envy Solomon his thousand. Why, just imagine that gang of wives going and ordering fall bonnets. Solomon would have to be a King or a "Vanderbilt to stand it. Ma wears $5 silk stockings, and pa kicks aWfully when the bill comes in. Imagine Soldmon putting up for a "feV thdusand v pair of silk stockings. I am glad you will sit doWn and reason with me in a rational way about some of these Bible stories that take my ’breath away. The minister stands me off when I try to talk with him about such things, and tells me to study the parable of the Prodigal Son, and the deacons tell me to go and soak my head. There is darn little encouragement for

• boy to try and figure out things. How would you like to have a thousand red-headed-wives come into the store |his minute and tell you they wanted you to send carriages around to the house at 3 o’clock so they could go for a drive ? Or how would you like to have a hired girl come rushing in and tell yon to send up 600 doctors, because 600 of your wives had been taken with cholera morbus ? Or ” “Oh, don’t mention it,” said the grocery man, with a shudder. “I wouldn’t take Solomon’s place, and be the natural protector of 1,000 wives if anybody would give me the earth. Think of getting up in a cold winter morning and building 1,000 fires. Think of 2,000 pair of hands in a fellow’s hair! Boy, you have shewn me that Solomon needed a guardian over him. He didn’t have sense.” “Yes,” says the boy, “and think of 2,000 feet, each one as cold as a brick of chocolate ice-cream. A man would want a back as big as the fence to a fair ground. But I don’t want to harrow up your feelings. I must go and put some arnica on pa. He has got home, and says he has been to a summer resort on a vacation, and he is all covered with blotches. He says it is mosquito bites, but ma thinks he has been shot full of bird shot by some watermelon farmer. Ma hasn’t got any sympathy for pa because he didn’t take her along, butPif she had been there she would have been filled with bird shot, too. But you musn’t detain me. Between pa and the baby I have got all I can attend to. The baby is teething, and ma nfakes me put my fingers in ’the baby’s mouth to help it cut teeth. That is a humiliating position for a boy as big as I am. Say, how many babies do you figure that Solomon had to buy rubber teething-rings for, in all his glory ?” And the boy went out leaving the grocery man reflecting on what a family Solomon must have had, and how he needed to be the wisest man to get along without a circus, afternoon and evening.— Peck’s Sun.