Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 29, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 August 1884 — Beautifully Left. [ARTICLE]

Beautifully Left.

Girls have a certain plnck in undertaking wickedness which is quite disproportionate to the danger incurred, says the San Francisco Chronicle. As a fact, what a girl imagines to be an adventure of great danger generally ends in being a mere uninteresting experience. Two young ladies of my acquaintance had long sought to paralyze the male parent of one of them by some simply cold-blooded, horrible exhibition of crime. The female parent had proved too easy of paralysis and they had given up bothering about her. The old gentleman was the one whose blood they proposed to make run cold. They were very wicked at that age. They finally struck upon a deliberate piece of criminality, which they made up their minds calmly to invite him to witness. They occupied one bed-room. They went out and bought a packet of cigarettes, which they with great fear and trembling managed to convey into the apartment, where they hid it in anticipation of the coming dangerous design. After dinner they sat down before the fire, lit a cigarette apiece, stuck their feet upon the mantlepiece, having previously dispatched the servant to to request the male parent to chine to their room. They were in a state of bodily and mental excitement. Neither of them spoke. They were each wondering how it would end. They were positive the old man would be absolutely knocked speechless first. Then he would walk up, pluck the cigarettes from their lips, box their ears, and send them to bed. They would dare him—they would defy him. As they heard his steps on the stairs they grew nervous, but they had put their lips to the cigarettes, they had plunged headlong into vice, and they Would not weaken. The old gentleman cameJn. They smoked away defiantly, waiting for his outburst. He came up to them. He looked at them. Then he said: “I don’t know why you shouldn’t if you want to, ” and walked out again. The two criminals looked at one another, then at the door, then at one another again. They did not say anything. They threw the cigarettes into the fire and felt that, as votaries of vice, they were a distinct and decided failure.