Rensselaer Union, Volume 10, Number 31, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 April 1878 — The Boy Who Advised. [ARTICLE]

The Boy Who Advised.

The architect who plans high front' steps to a house is in league with certain boys who have a “large and assorted stock” of meanness bom in their natures. Proof of this can be found any day in the week in Detroit, and the latest was gathered in no later than Saturday afternoon. A very nice young man, dressed in the nobbiest style, ana sporting a cane which never cost less than a dollar, walked up the high front steps of a Jefferson avenue mansion and' pulled the bell. It was plain enough even to the driver of a street car that the young mait had an affection for some one in that house, and that he was about to meet his chariner. But, it wasn’t so plain to a stub-nosed boy who was drawing a picture of an Indian warrior on the flagstones with a piece of indigo. He looked up, quit his work, and loafing along to the gate he called out: “ Them air folks don’t want any patent tooth-paste to-day!” The'nobby young man gave a sudden start of surprise, but he instantly realized the vastness of the gulf separating him and that street boy, and he did not reply. “ Owr folks dqp’t want any clotbee-

wringer* to-day, and you want to hear me!'"called the boy. The young man heard Mm. Several pedestrian* also heard him, and aa they looked up the young man wondered why no one answered the bell. “ I’m telling you fellow up there,” said the bov, “that we don't keep no boarding house here! If you want cheap board you must go around the corner and three blocks straight on! Do you propose to pay in advance?” As no one came to the door the young man pulled the bell again. “ I’m telling you that you can’t pass yourself off on us as a grasshopper sufferer!” shouted the boy. “If you want some cold vittlos go around to the side ga|e!” Four pedestrians had halted on the other side of the street, and the young man looked down on the boy and soft* ly said: “Boy, can you catch ten cents?” “We don’t sign no petishuns here for a national monument to the inventor of the dish-prfn!” replied the boy. “ What I’m talking to you is that you want to go around to the cook’s door!” The young man wished a wish containing 413 grains fine that the builder of those high steps had been dead for forty years, but the door didn’t open, and the boy hung right to him calling out: “ Hain’t I been telling you that you can’t get in there! You may be the private watchman on this block, but you can’t go around pulling front doorbells and putting on airs: If I have to argy much longer I’ll call the police!” “ Ive got a half a dollar here, boy!” said the young man, as he turned around. “ Let’s see how it looks!” softly replied the lad. But the half dollar was at home. The young man searched for it in vain, and the disgusted boy turned to the men across the street and called out: “ Isn’t it agin the law for a fellow to be taking a beeswax impression of a front door lock in the daytime?” They started to come over, and the young man hurried down the steps and up the street. He gave the boy just one look. It was a look in which railroad collisions and steamboat blow-ups were equally mixed and then frosted with a Bogardus-kicker. “ Oh! ye kin wink at me and try to buy me off!” growled the boy, “but these principles of honesty were painted all over me when I was a baby, and they can’t bo rubbed out nor bought up for wealth!” Just then a young lady threw open the door and smiled and bowed and got as far as: “ Why, Fwed!” when she discovered he wasn’t there. The footman was out and she had waited to “fix up,” and “Fwed" had gone. She backed in and shut the door, and the mean boy got down to finish his Indian, muttering: “ If he couldn’t raise fifty cents to reward me, how’d he ever manage to git that gal one o’ them corsets with a hundred and ninety bones in it!”— Detroit Free Press. .