Rensselaer Republican, Volume 16, Number 5, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 October 1883 — Life in the Suburbs. [ARTICLE]

Life in the Suburbs.

“Hello, Mr. Spivkins, moving again ?” “Yes, you see me here amid the debris of a once happy home,” replied Spivkins, “but my wife called the dance, so I grabbed the coal-scuttle and swung in for another cotillion with the furniture van. The twins and the canary bird are coming with the next load. ” “Been living in flats again?” asked the news man. “Oh, no! Flats are not lofty enough, now. My wife grew ambitious. She wanted a place in the suburbs, one of those fifteen-mifmte walks from the train, Swiss cottage, gable-ended country mansions, with every modern convenience and lots of expense, where we would be free from the dust and smoke of the city, have plenty of butter and eggs, fresh air and a goat for the children. ” “ And you had a goat ?” “Oh, yes, we had several; one wasn’t enough.” “Hows that?” “Why, it was too exhausting upon one to keep all the trees in the neighborhood barked, eat up all the old boots, hoopskirts and tramp down all the adjoining gardens, and not liking to show any partiality among neighbors, or prejudice against this particular goat, I got several to assist him. ” , __j "And the butter and eggs? You had “Plenty, yes! kept all the dogs in the neighborhood lean trying to suck them as fast as the hens laid them.” “Did your hens lay so fast ?” “Oh, no, not my hens—no, these were the grocery-man’s hens had their hands full a-setting. Why, I h(id one hen that sat four weeks under J a barrel, in a tub of water that never laid au egg in her life. Another sat on a screw-driver and a monkey-wrench in a horse-trough for a fortnight, and so determined was she to become a mother that six roosters with a peck of worms couldn’t tempt her to move. We fin* ally concluded it was cheaper and more v convenient to buy eggs and wait for another generation of chickens, so the grocery man was called in. To really enjoy country life and get health, pure air and lots of mud, a man never wants to go beyond the suburbs. He inust keep within hearing of the street-car driver’s whistle, and the tin-pedler’s voice. He must carry home a marketbasket every night, and occasionally a bundle of brooms and a ham; and then when be sits down on the back porch at

eve, with a towel over his bald head, to keep the mosquitoes off, he will think with fondness unimaginable of those $lO apiece roasting-ears and $3 tomatoes that 'his wife and the gardner are going to raise next summer, if his purse holds out.- Have you bought yOur ticket to the gymnasium yet?” “No?” £ ■ “Well, don’t do it. Go and buy yon a place in the suburbs.”— Cincinnati Commercial Gazette.