Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 8, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 March 1884 — THE BAD BOY. [ARTICLE]

THE BAD BOY.

“Get out of here now, pretty lively,” said the grocery man to the bad boy, as he came in rubbing his hands and trying to be pleasant “A boy that will loaf around here and eat things, and kick when I ask him to help me sort over potatoes, can’t stay in my store. Git!* and the grocery man picked up a link of sausage and looked mad. “O, go hate yourself,” said the boy as he drew a knife and cut a slice oif the grocery man’s weapon, and began eating it, as unconcerned as possible. “When you want work done, say so, and I will help you, but when you say ‘let’s go and have some fun’ sprouting potatoes or carrying in coal, that is too thin. When you say that, you are a gay deceiver, and you are guilty of false pretenses. But quit lying and call it by its right name, work, and you catch Hennery, but not with funny chaff. But I have got all the work I want on my hands now. I have been appointed pa’s guardian, by ma, and I am straining every nerve to keep pa out of politics.” “Good gracious!” said the grocery man in alarm, “I am sorry for your pa, if he has got his head set on going into politics. I was in politics one year myself, and it has taken me five years to get out and pay my debts, and now every ward politician owes me for groceries. You see, they came to me and wanted me to run for Supervisor. They said I was just the man they wanted, a man with a large head, one who was a business man, and who would not kick at the expenditure of a few dollars when he could make a barrel of money. They said if I was on the Board of Supervisors I could be placed on a committee that handled the funds, and I could make the purchases of groceries and provisions for all the county institutions, the poor-house, house of correction, insane asylum, hospitals, and everything, and I could buy them at my own store at my own price, and in two years I could be rich as any man in town. Well, I never had a proposition strike me so favorably, and I went in head over appetite. For a month I went around our ward night and day, spending money, and the politicians came to the store and traded when I was out, and had it charged, and when the caucus was held I only got one vote for Supervisor, and voted that myself. Well, the politiciaps tried to explain to me, but I bought a revolver, and they kept away. Do you know, the next day after the caucus I didn’t have twenty dollars, worth of groceries in the store, and the clerk was dying of lonesomeness? Whatever your pa does, dont let him go into politics, for he will bring up in the inebriate asylum, sure.” “Well, pa has got it bad, but he is too numerous. He has been yearning for two years for a political campaign to open. I don’t suppose there is a citizen who enjoys politics as much as pa. He stays out nights till the last place is closed, and is the first man on deck in the morning. He has drank with more candidates, more different times, than anybody, and when he is so full that he can’t drink he takes a cigar, and brings it home. His guests have been smoking up old election cigars ever since the Hancock campaign, and some of them are awful. But this time they are going to run pa for aiderman, and he has opened the campaign with a corkscrew. Pa thinks that the position of aiderman is greater than governor, because aidermen wear a badge, and have influence. But pa is overdoing the thing. He wants to please everybody, and he has promised to put ninety-seven men on the police force, has promised forty-four men the position of bridgetender, and there is only one bridge in his ward. He promises the saloon keepers to reduce the price of licenses, and allow them to keep open all night, and he has promised the prohibition temperance people to raise saloon licenses to a thousand dollars and close every saloon in town. The result is going to be if pa is not elected he will kill himself, and if he is elected the people will kill him, so somebody has got to save pa. ” “You can’t do it as long as the fever is on,” said the grocery man. “You have got to watch him, and when he meets with def sat or reverses in politics, then fire some sense into him. But as long as he is red-hot in a campaign, nothing will stop him. I have seen a politician who was full of enthusiasm and beer, fall into the river and drown, and the police pulled him out and then rolled him on a barrel, and pretty soon he came to and the first thing he said was ‘ Bah for Tilden. Set ’em up again! ’ You would have thought that man would quit politics, and try and lead a different life, but the next day he was going whooping around, electioneering in the saloons and on street corners, with a cork life preserver strapped around him. He is alive yet, and is an aiderman. When a man gets into politics it takes possession of him, and wherever he is he is getting in his work for his party. There was a ward politician that I knew once that used to make a specialty of laboring with the working men. One day he was on top of a building that was being erected, arguing with a bricklayer, when his foot slipped and he fell off. As he was going down he passed a hod carrier going up with a load of mortar. You would think that man would forget politics, as he was falling, and say his prayers, or pick out a soft place to strike on the sidewalk, but he didn’t. As he passed the hodcarrier he yelled to him, ‘ Don’t forget the caucus to-night in your ward, and get out all the boys.’ He stuck in a bed of soft mortar, which saved his life, and as they took a hoe and pulled him to the surface, he scraped the mortar out of his eyes, and as a doctor came up to set his bones he asked the doctor if he had made np his mind how to vote this year. No, sir, there is no room in a politician for anything except politics. I was never so annoyed in my life as I was once in church when they put a politician in my pew, and when we got up to sing and opened the hymnbook, the politician had a Republican Presidential ballot under his thumb, and I had to read it all through. Dear me, if jrou can get you pa out of politics do it, if you have to scare the life out of him.” ' “Let ma and me alone for that,” said I the boy. “We are experimentig withn

phosphorus, and some night when the campaign is fairly opened, and pa comes home late at night acting crooked, he will see the handwriting on the wall of a dark room, and the skeletons and snakes and animals and things that will visit him will break him up. If every politician had a good little boy to look after him he might be saved or killed, which would be better than lingering in politics to be cut down like a flower after he had gone through his property and lost his health,” and the boy went out to learn to draw a skeleton on the wall with phosphorus, and the grocery man sat and thought of his own experience as a politician.— Peck’s Sun.