Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 47, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 December 1883 — Dude and Pension. [ARTICLE]

Dude and Pension.

Two dudes were on & railroad parlor ear, riding between two cities, and,’as they sat in the smoking-room languidly puffing at little cigarettes, they conversed in the native tongue of the dude, not noticing a bald-headed man who was buried in a newspaper. The conversation of the dudes turned upon what business was the most desirable for a person who did not want to do anything except to eat, and drink and be’clothed, and one remarked that he had rather own a farm and spend the income from it than anything he knew of. The other dude, who was a facetious individual with about as much brain as a canary bird, said, “Well, don’t you know, I think I had rather draw a pension fi;om the Government. That is the easiest business, by Jove, there is going, don’t you know ?” The bald-headed man was mad enough to have brained the dude with a toy balloon, but he held his temper, until the two dudes began to laugh at the witticism, and then he conld contain himself no longer, and, turning to the two nine spots who were sitting together in a corner of the smoking apartment, and standing up before them so they could not get out, with his face flushed, and each hair on the side of his head feeling like a porcupine quill, he said: “And so you think drawing a pension is the easiest business there is going, do you? Do yon realize what you are talking about ? Do you know that the men who draw pensions have been through more suffering, privation and sorrow than you ever dreamed of? Do you consider it easy to march thousands of miles on foot over muddy roads, sleeping on the frozen ground and living on hard tack, and fighting between meals ? Do you yrant to draw a pension at the expense of health? Dp you know that the men who draw pensions, of whom you speak so flippantly, have been burned with Southern fevers until every bone has ached night and day for twenty years? Do you know that some of the men who draw pensions have had limbs shot off by cannon, and had limbs cut off by doctors’ saws, and that some’of them carry bullets in their bodies to-day, and that' every move they make is full of pain ? Haven’t you heard that some of the pensioners were starved in rebel prisons, until they would have mortgaged their immortal souls—which you may not possess—for a piece of bread so dry and dirty that a hog would not eat it unless .it was soaked in water ? Did you never read of some of the pensioners being bayoneted, and carrying sores for fifteen years, that would not heal ? You—you poor imitation of a human being—look upon drawing a pension as an easy business, when it has cost the pensioner the best part of his life and all his health. Would you sleep out on a rail fence, your body dripping wet, contracting rheumatism at every breath you draw, and then call drawing a pension a nice, safe, easybusine s? You laugh at a remark at the expense-of a pensioned soldier, when you are not tit for a soldier to wipe Ids feet on. Why, condemn you, I have a mind to throw both of you through that plate-glass window, when I think of the barrels of tears that have been shed by wives and mothers and sisters for every dollar that was ever paid for pensions,” and the old man began to take off his coat, when the conductor came in and wanted to know what the row was. On being told, he ordered the dudes into the baggage-car, and he sat down with the bald-headed old map, and they talked about old times, when they were both in the same regiment, in a Southern swamp, and the two dudes were not born. —Peck’s Sun.