Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 43, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 November 1883 — THE BAD BOY. [ARTICLE]

THE BAD BOY.

“Well, I never see ft boy change as Chave,” said the grocery man to the boy, as he came in with a poor, dirty-looking tramp, and bought him a pound of crackers and a big piece of cheese, and, as the tramp sat down on a soip box and began to go through the fodder as though it was a banquet, and the boy looked out of the window at the rain that was falling, the grocery man added: “What has got into you? You haven’t got religion, have you?” “Naw, I guess not,” said the boy, as he slyed a pickle out of a barrel to the tramp. “That is, I haven’t got it by any regular rule, but may be it is in my system. I tell you, old oleomargerine, I have always beeni in for fun, and haven’t cared much how I had it, but lately I have had more fun making people happy than I ever had making pa jump around. Don’t you know if yon see a person who is m hard luck and thinks the world is all a fraud, and who almost wants to be run over by a freight train, and you go to work and surprise the person with a bit of kindness, smuggle a warm meal down him before he knows it, it makes your heart feel as though you had got to loosen your belt? I never knew there was so much suffering in the world until that humane society fellow hired mo to go around with him to hold his horse while he relieved distress, but the woods are full of people who have no drawers to wear in winter, and who would faint away at sight of a roast of beef. Gosh, I wish I had a million dollars!” “Oh, what would you do with $1,000,000?” asked the grocery man, as he watched the tramp pick his teeth with a sliver off the soap-box. “If you had $1,000,000 you would buy a dude suit of clothes, and a trotting wagon with red wheels, and a horse that could trot in 2:10. And you would part your hair in the middle and wear yellow gloves and say * g-lang.’ That’s the kind of a millionaire you would be.” “No, sir! You are no guesser,” said the boy, as he gave the tramp a glass of cider. “I would buy out a bakery and a meat market, and when poor people hadn’t anything to eat I would invite them to call on Hennery. Then I would take SIOO,OOO and go around paying a month’s rent in advance for people. If some poor people knew they would not be bothered about paying rent for a month, they would be so happy they would ache. Then I would buy 10,000 pairs of red flannel drawers, regular old thick ones, all sizes, and sell them to poor people and take their notes for the pay. You see, some people wouldn’t like to have drawers given to them, but if you to4>k their notes they would feel as though they bought the drawers, and then you could have a bonfire and burn up the notes. But I had rather be able to work Kniracles than be a millionaire. If I jould take stones and turn them into loaves of bread, and water into wine, the way Christ did, I would set up business at a stone quarry and open a free bakery, and would take the Milwaukee river and make it into wine and tell the poor people to help themselves. It would make the breweries sick, but they could ship their beer to Texas and Colorado. I tell you, wliat this country needs is a fellow that can make a bakery out of a stone quarry by a simple turn of the wrist, and I had rather have such a job than to be President. If I could turn hard heads into bread it would be picnic. I would take a big stone and go to the home of a poor woman who had nothing to eat in the house and tell her I had brought her some bread, and I would hand her a stone as big as a peck-measure, and she would see it was a stone, an d the tears would come into her eyes, and she would look sorry because I was so mean, and while she was wiping her eyes on the under side of her apron I would touch the stone with my magic wand, and turn it into a loaf of salt-rising bread, or brown bread, with a mansard' roof on, and the look the poor woman would give me when she found the stone was bread would be worth a thousand dollars, and I would go away feeling pretty cunning. I should want to be able to turn cord wood into canvas hams, too. ” “Yes, that is all right for talk, but you ain’t no angel, yet,” said the grocery man. “The detective in this ward says he is shadowing a lot of you boys that are holding clandestine meetings in a barn and he thinks you are up to some deviltry. You better look out or the detective will have you boys all pulled.” “Don’t you worry about us,” said the boy, as he gave the tramp a quarter to buy the next meal, and told' him not to (mention it, when the tramp began to thank him. “That detective is too smart for his boots. We have formed a society for playing jokes on poor widows this winter. I have got nine boys in our neighborhood to join the society, and we are going to make it hot for widows, and don’t you forget it. The humane society man is going to tell us when they take load of wood to a poor widow’s house, aud us boys are going to sneak up to her house after , dark, armed to the teeth with buck- ’ jaws and saw-bucks, and axes, and before a widow knows what kind of a gang we are, we are going to saw up her wood and split it, and carry it in. We made the darnde3t mistake last night, on the South Side, though. We found a load of wood next to a poor widow’s house and sawed it up, and carried it in, and after we had got it all done, a Dutch cigar-maker, next door, who owned the wood, got mad about it and made us pay $4 for the wood. It took all the money we had, but it was fun,, and the widow never knew where the wood came from. I had to sell my states to raise my share, but there is no ice, anyway. I suppose that detective thicks he will run on to a kit of burglar tools when he makes a raid on us in the bam, but he will find us filing saws. Pa says us boys have struck a lead now that makes him proud of us, and if we can’t find wood enough to saw he will buy some. If he does we will give it to somebody that is poor. "We are not sawing wood for people that are able to hire a Polacker to saw it.” “Well, you take the cake,” said the grocery man, as he cleared up the Single crumb that the tramp left. “One spell I expected you would bring up in

State prison, and now I wouldn’t b« surprised any Sunday to go to church aud find you in the pulpit.” “No, yon needn’t expect to find me in a pulpit,” said the boy, as he scratched a match on his pants to light the tramp’s pipe. “I shall practice, and not preach.”— Peck’s Sun.