Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 33, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 September 1883 — THE BAD BOY. [ARTICLE]

THE BAD BOY.

“Want to buy any cabbages?” said the bad boy to the grocery man, as he stopped at the door of the grocery, dressed in a bine wamus, his breeches tucked in. his boots, and old hat on his head, with a hole that let out his hair through the top. He Jtiad got out of a democrat wagon, and was holding the lines hitched to a horse about 40 years old, that leaned against the hitchingpost to rest.. “Only a shilling apiece.” “Oh, go ’way,” said the grocery man. “I only pay 3 cents apiece.” And then he looked at the boy and said, “Hello, Hennery, is that you ? I have missed you all the week, and now you come on to me sudden, disguised as a granger. What does this all mean ?” “It means that I have been the victim of as vile a conspiracy as ever was known since Csesar was stabbed and Mark Antony orated over his prostrate corpse in the Roman forum, to an audience of supes and sceneshifters, "and the boy dropped the lines on the sidewalk, said, “Whoa, gol darn you,” to the horse that was asleep, wiped his boots on the grass in front of the store and came in and seated himself on the old half bushel. “There, this seems like home again.” “What’s the row? Who has been playing it on you ?” and the grocery man smelled a sharp trade in cabbages, as well as other farm odors. “Weil, I’ll tell you. Lately our folks have been constantly talking of the independent life of the farmer, and how easy it is, and how they would like it if I would learn to be a farmer. They said there was nothing like it, and several of the neighbors joined in and said I had the natural ability to be one of the most successful farmers in the State. They all drew pictures of the fun it was ’ to work on a farm, where you could get your work done and take your fish-pole and go off and catch fish, or a gun and go out and kill game, and how you could ride horses, and pitoh hay, and Smell the sweet perfume, and go to husking-bees and dances, and everything,, and they got me worked up so I wanted to go to work on a farm. Then an old deacon that belongs to our church, who runs a farm about eight miles out of town, he came on the scene and said he wanted a boy, and if I-would go out and work for him he would be easy on me because he knew my folks, and we belonged to the same church. I can see it now. It was all a put-up job on me, just like they play threecard monte on a fresh stranger. I was took in. By gosh, I have been out there a week, and here’s what there is left of me. The only way I got a chance to come to town was to tell the farmer I could sell cabbage to you for a shilling apiece. I knew you sold them for 15 cer?ts and I thought you would give a shilling. So the farmer said he would pay me my wages in cabbages at a shilling apiece and only charge me a dollar for the horse and wagon to bring them in. So you only pay 3 cents. Here are thirty cabbages, which will come to 90 cents. I pay a dollar for the horse, and when I get back to the farm I owe the farmer 10 cents, beside working a week for nothing. Oh, it is all right. I don’t kick, but this ends farming for Hennery. I know when I have got enough of an easy life on a farm. I prefer a hard life, breaking stones on the streets, to an easy, dreamy life on a farm.” “They did play it on you, didn’t they, ” said the grocery man. “But wasn’t the old deacon a good man to work for ?” “Good man nothin’,” said the boy, as he took up a piece of horse-radish and began to grate it ©n the inside of his rough hand. “I tell you there’s a heap of difference in a deacon in Sundayschool, telling about sowing wheat and tares, and a deacon out on a farm in a hurrying season, when there is hay to get in and wheat to harvest all at the same time. I went out to the farm Sunday evening with the deacon and Eis wife, and they couldn’t talk too much about the nice time we would have and the fun; but the deacon changed more than forty degrees in five minutes after we got out to the farm. He jumped out of the wagon and pulled off his coat, and let his wife climb out over the wheel, and yelled to the hired girl to bring on the milk-pail, and told me to fly around and unharness the horse, and throw down a lot of hay for all the work animals, and then told me to run down to the pasture and drive up a lot of cows. The pasture was half a mile away, and the cows were scattered around in the woods, and the mosquitoes were thick, and I got all covered with mud and burrs, and stung with thistles, and when I got the cattle near to the house the old deacon yelled to me that I was slower than molasses in the winter, and then I took a club and tried to hurry the cows, and he yelled at me to stop hurrying, ’cause I would retard the flow of milk. By gosh I was mad. I asked for a mosquito bar to put over me next time I went after the oows, and the people all laughed at me, and when I sat down on the fence to scrape the mud off my Sunday pants, the deacon yelled like he does in the revival, only he said, ‘Come, come, procrastination is the thief of time. You get up and hump yourself and go and feed the pigs.’ He was so darn mean that I could not help throwing a burrdock bur against the side of the cow he was milking, and it struck her right in the flank on the other side from where the deacon was. "Well, you’d a dide to see the cow jump up and blat. All four of her feet were off the ground at a time and I guess most of them hit the deacon on his Bunday vest, and the rest hit the milkpail, and the cow backed against the ence and bellered, and the deacon was all covered with milk and cowhair, and he got up and throwed the three-legged stool at the cow and hit her on the horn and it glanced off and hit me on the pants just as I went over the fence to feed the pigs. I didn’t know a deacon could talk so sassy at a cow, and come so near swearing without actually saying cuss-words. Well, I lugged swill until I was homesick to my stomach, and then I had to clean off horses, and go to the neighbors about a mile away to borrow a lot of rakes to use the next day. I was so tired I almost cried, and then I had to draw two barrels of water with a well-

bucket, to cleanse for washing the next day, and by that time I wanted to die. It was most 9 o’clock, and I began to think about supper, when the deacon said all they had was bread and milk for supper Sunday night, and I rasseled with a tin basin of skun-milk, and some old back-number bread, and I wanted to go to bed, but the deacon wanted to know if I was heathen enough to want to go to bed without evening prayers. There was no one thing I was less mashed on than evening prayers about that minute, but I had to take a prayer half an hour long on top of that skimmilk, and I guess it curdled the milk, for I hadn’t been in bed more than half an hour before I had the worst colic a boy ever had, and I thought I should die all alone up in that garret, on the floor, with nothing to make my last hours pleasant but some rats playing with ears of seed corn on the floqr, and mice running through some dry pea-pods. But, oh, how different the deacon talked in the evening devotions from what he did when the cow was galloping on him in the barn-yard. Well, I got through the colic and was just getting to sleep when the deacon yelled for me to get up and hustle down stairs. I thought maybe the house was on fire, ’cause I smelled smoke, and I got into my trousers and came down stairs on a jump, yelling ‘fire,’ when the deacon grabbed me and told me to get down on my knees, and before I knew it he was into the morning devotions, and then he said ‘ amen ’ and jumped up and said for us to fire breakfast into us quick and get to work doing the chores. I looked at the clock and it was just 3 o’clock in the morning, just the time pa comes home and goes to bed in town, when he is running a political campaign. Well, sir, I had t 6 jump from one thing to another from 3 in the morning till 9 at night, pitching hay, driving reaper, raking and binding, shocking wheat, hoeing corn, and everything, and I never got a kind word. I spoiled my clothes, and I think another week would make a pirate of me. But during it all I had -the advantage of a pious example. I tell you, you think more of such a man as the deacon if you don’t work for him, but only see him when he comes to town, and you hear him sing ‘Heaven is my Home,’through his nose. Heavven is farther from his home than any place I ever heard of. He would be a good mate on a Mississippi river steamboat if he could swear, and I guess he could soon learn, Now, you take these cabbages and give me 90 cents, and I will go home and borrow 10 cents to make up the dollar, and send my chum back with the horse and wagon and my resignation. I was not cut out for a farmer. Talk about fishing, the only fish I saw was a salt white fish we had for breakfast one morning, which was salted by Noah, in the ark,” and while the grocery man was unloading the cabbages the boy went off to look for his chum, and later the two boys were seen driving off towards the farm with the fish poles sticking out of the hind end of the wagon.— Peck's Sun.