George W. Peck

“ I look back at the happiness of the past two weeks, during which I have been permitted to gaze into the fond blue eyes of my loved one, and carry her rubbers to school for her to wear home when it rained, to hear the sweet words that fell from her lips as she lovingly told me I was a terror, and as I think it is all over, and that I shall never again place my arm around her waist, I feel as if the world had been kicked off its base and was whirling through space, liable to be knocked into a cocked hat, and I don’t care a darn. ”

“ Her back gets up like a cat, she bends over towards him, her forward leg gets out of joint at the knee, her neck takes a cramp, her mouth opens and she lolls, her eyes roll like a steer that has turned the yoke, and just before she dies she falls into the arms of the deceased and they are ready. For a moment they stand and squirm like angle-worms on a hook, and froth at the mouth, and look, as they stand there, like a pile driver that has been run into by an engine. ”

“ If Hamlet simply shakes the spider off, and goes on with the funeral unconcerned, then Miss Dickinson is a man. But if Hamlet screams bloody murder, throws the skull at the grave digger, falls over into the grave, tears his shirt, jumps out of the grave and shakes his imaginary skirts, gathers them up in his hands and begins to climb up the scenes like a Samantha cat chased by a dog, and gets on top of the first fly and raises Hamlet’s back and spits, then Miss Dickinson is a woman. ”

“ The grizzly old granger, who never buttons the collar of his shirt, and whose Adam's apple looks like a hen's head, will stay by the camels, hours at a time, the pious church man feels at home among the sacred cattle, the strong-arm holdup man will linger by the grizzly bear, the prize-fighter will haunt the lions' den, the garroter will gaze lovingly at the tigers, the sneak thief seems to love the hyenas, and the big game hunters watch the deer and elk. Some of us who have brains love the monkeys, they are so human. ”

“ What would you think of my going out on a farm and learning to be a farmer? I ride by farms and see farmers and boys at work, or lying in the shade, or drinking out of a jug, or sitting on loads of hay, or riding a horse plowing corn, and it seems to me they have an easy life, and they must make money; and if I can't enlist to fight Filipinos, nor go to the Klondike, I want to be a farmer. What do you think, Uncle Ike?” and the boy looked up into the old man's face appealingly. ”

“ There is laughter everywhere, except when the Emperor drives by, escorted by his bodyguard, on the finest horses in the world; then every citizen on the street stops smiling and laughing; all stand at attention, and every face takes on a solemn, patriotic, almost a fighting look, as though each man would consider it his happiest duty and pleasure to walk right up to the mouth of cannon and die in his tracks for his pale-faced, haggard and loved Emperor. ”

“ Think of a frail little woman whose life has been one bed of thorns, and whose happy hours have been so few that if an hour seems to open to her with happiness she dare not enjoy it for fear there is a mistake, and it is not hers to enjoy. In the wreck of her life's ambitions and hopes she has saved only a dear little girl and her heart is so bound up in her that it ceases to beat when she thinks that God may forget that the little one is all she has, and call her home.
One day the little one comes home with fever, takes to her bed, and for weeks is just on the line between earth and heaven. ”

“ Death is always a sad thing to contemplate. One day we are full of health, and joy, and cold victuals, and the next we are screwed down in a box, a few words are said over our remains, a few tears are shed, and there is a race to see who shall get back from the cemetery first; and though we may think we are an important factor in the world's progress, and sometimes feel as though it would be unable to put up margins and have to stop the deal, the world goes right along, and it must annoy people who die to realize that they don't count for game. ”

“ You mean to tell me you had rather pursue your course as a train robber, away out here in the mountains with no doctor within a hundred miles of you, and no way to spend your money after you get it, sleeping nights on the rocks and eating canned stuff you pack in here after robbing a grocery, than to enter the realms of high finance and be respected by the people, and be one of the people, with no price on your head, one of the great body of eighty million men who rule a country that is the pride of the earth? ”

“ Hunger was gnawing at my stomach, and the horse was gnawing at my legs, and I was gnawing at a hard tack which I had found in the saddle-bag. Every little while I would hear a noise, and my hair would raise my hat up, and it would seem to me as though the next minute a volley would be fired at me, and I shrunk down between the piles of baggage on my saddle to be protected from bullets. Suddenly the moon came out from behind a cloud and around a turn in the road a solitary horseman might have been seen coming towards me. I never have seen a horse that looked as high as that horse did. ”

“ I tell you, old man, the way to appreciate our great statesmen, soldiers and scholars is to think of them just as plain, ordinary citizens, doing the things men do nowadays. It does dad and I more good to think of Washington and his friends camping out down the Potomac, on a fishing trip, sleeping on a bed of pine boughs, and cooking their own pork, and roasting sweet potatoes in the ashes, eating with appetites like slaves, than to think of him at a state dinner in the white house, with a French cook disguising the food so they could not tell what it was. ”

“ If I should go off sudden, with all my sins on my head, and this burnt cork on my face, I should probably be a neighbor to you, way down below, and they would give me a job as fireman, and I should feel bad for you every time I chucked in a nuther chunk of brimstone, and thought of you trying to swim dog fashion in the lake of fire, and straining your eyes to find an iceberg that you could crawl up on to cool your parched hind legs. If I don't die slow so I will have time to repent, and be saved, I shall be toasted brown. ”

“ On this great day we are accustomed to leave our business to hired men, and burn with patriotism, and ginger pop, fill ourselves with patriotic ferver, and beer, shout the battle cry of freedom, and go home when the day is over with our eye-winkers burned off, and to sleep with a consciousness that a great duty has been performed, and that we have got bank notes to pay on the morrow. ”

“ I have been there, boy, and there is no escape without taking to the woods, and love will make a trail through the forest, and over glaciers, and catch you if you don't watch out. So when love gets into your system, that way, just hold up your hands as though a hold-up man had the drop on you with a revolver, and let the girl go through you. ”

“ If it wasn't for my conscience I could take the presidency of a life insurance company, and rob right and left, equal to any of the crowned heads who are now in the business. But if I was driving in my automobile and should run over a poor woman who might be a policy holder, I could not act as would be expected of me, and look around disdainfully at her mangled body in the road, and sneer at her rapidly-cooling remains, and put on steam and skip out with my mask on. ”

“ The little mother, hardly able to be upon her feet, believes as firmly as she believes that she lives, that her darling will die, and that two hearts will be buried in the coffin, and yet she watches beside her night and day with smiles on her face, sings to her as though her heart were filled with happiness, and occasionally gives expression to a jolly laugh, just to brace up her little darling, and make her believe there is no danger, and when the doctor says “she will live,” the brave little mother goes to her room and cries for the first time, and faints away. ”

“ You remember that Ferris wheel at the Chicago world's fair, and how we thought it was the greatest thing ever made of steel, so high that it made us dizzy to look to the top of it, and when we went up on the wheel we thought we could see the world, from Alaska to South Africa, and we marveled at the work of man and prayed that we be permitted to get down off that wheel alive, and not be spilled down through the rarified Chicago atmosphere and flattened on the pavement so thin we would have to be scraped up off the pavement with a case knife, like a buckwheat cake that sticks to the griddle. ”

“ I had paid eight dollars of my bounty for that pipe, and I said to the leader: “Boss, I can stand a joke as well as anybody, but when you capture me, in a fair fight, you have no right to jab my mule with a saber, or call me names. I am a meek and lowly soldier of the army of the right, and want to so live that I can meet you all in the great hereafter, but by the gods I can whip the condemned galoot that stole my meershaum pipe. You think I am pious, and a non-combatant, but I am a fighter from away back, and don't you forget it.” ”

“ That kind of a boy will be the one who will lie in the shade when he grows up, and not work in the sun. Didn't you ever see a dog half-way down a woodchuck hole, kicking dirt into the bosom of the boy's pants who is backing him, suddenly back out of the hole, wag his tail and wink his eyes, full of dirt, at the boy who is working the hole with him, and then run out his tongue and loll, and look at the fellows who are sitting around waiting for the last act, in the shade, and say to them, as plain as a dog can talk, 'You fellows make me tired. ”

“ If the boy’s shirt is sleeveless, his hat crownless, and his pants a bottomless pit, the bullhead will bite just as well as though the boy is dressed in purple and fine linen, with knee breeches and plaid stockings. The bull head seems to be dozing—bulldozing we might say—on the muddy bottom, and a stranger might say that he would not bite. But wait. There is a movement of his continuation, and his cow-catcher moves gently toward the piece of liver. He does not wait to smell of it, and canvas in his mind whether the liver is fresh. It makes no difference to him. ”

“ When the time comes that the people wear collars and are led by chains, and they have to stand on their hind legs and speak to their rich and arrogant masters for bones, and hold meat on their noses until Wall street snaps its fingers, you will want to come out here in the mountains and live the free life of a train robber with a conscience. ”

“ Everybody here acts like he was at a picnic in the woods, with a large barrel of beer, with perspiration oozing down the outside, and a spigot of the largest size, which fills a schooner at one turn of the wrist, and every man either smiles or laughs out loud, and you feel as though there was happiness everywhere, and that heaven was right here in this greatest German city. ”

“ There is something, some sort of electricity that runs from a boy to a circus, and all the teachers in the world cannot break the connection. A circus is the boys' heaven.
You may talk to him about the beautiful gates ajar, and the angel band in heaven that plays around the great white throne, and he can't understand it, but the least hint about the circus tent, with the flap pulled to one side to get in, and the band wagon, and the girls jumping through hoops, and the clown, and he is onto your racket at a jump. ”

“ War is a football game also, and the recruiting officers are not looking for the weak sisters who can't push and shove, and fight, and fall over each other, and when wounded laugh and say it is nothing serious. A country that has a majority of its boys growing up to fight on the football field for fun, has no cause to fear any war that may come to it, for if they will fight like that in good nature, to uphold the colors of their college, what will they do to uphold 'Old Glory,' which comprises the dearest colors in all the world? ”

“ The rope ladder returns his gaze, and seems to move and to crawl towards his feet. For a moment he is powerless to move. His hair stands on end, his heart ceases to beat, cold and warm chills follow each other down his trousers legs and he clutches at the air, his eyes start from their sockets, and just as the rope ladder is about to wind around him, and crush his life out, he regains strength enough to rush down stairs head over appetite, and tell the clerk about the menagerie up stairs. O, there is going to be fun with these rope ladders, sure. ”

“ I was never so glad of anything in my life. We stopped, and I examined my clothes, and they were perfectly dry. The excitement and warmth of the body had acted like a drying-room in a laundry. Then I laid down under a fence and went to sleep, and dreamed I was in hades, building a corduroy bridge across the Styx, and that the devil repremanded me for building it in the wrong place. When I awoke I was so stiff with rheumatism that I had to be helped up from under the fence, and they put me in an ambulance with a soldier who had his jaw shot off. ”

“ The old man had missed the boy around the grocery, and with no one to keep his blood circulating, and his temperature occasionally soaring above the normal, he had failed in health, and had read with mixed feelings of joy, fear and resentment that the Bad Boy and his dad had arrived home, and he knew it could not be long before the boy would blow in, and he was trying to decide whether to meet the boy cheerfully and with a spirit of resignation, or to meet him with a club, whether to give him the glad hand, or form himself into a column of fours to drive him out when he came. ”

“ If I have any more love for one country than another, I do not know which it is, only when I see a Russian, even one of those Cossacks that rode so well, I feel like taking him by the hand and telling him, when he goes home, to go up to the Winter palace and give my love to the Czar, because I always have before me the picture of that Russian fleet in New York harbor, when things were hot. ”

“ If the paste is sour, and smells bad, he looks at us with a mournful expression, and goes away looking as though it was a mighty mean trick to play on a cockroach, and he runs about as though he was offended. When a package of wedding cake is placed on the desk he is the first one to find it out, and he sits and waits till we cut the string, when he goes into it and walks all over the cake till he strikes the bridal cake, when he gets onto it, stands on his head and seems to say, “Yum, yum,” and is tickled as a girl with a fresh beau.
There is human nature in a cockroach. ”

“ I once saw a dead dog in the river, with bull heads and dog-fish ripping him up the back, and I keep thinking I had rather be that dog, in a nice river at home, with bullheads that I knew chewing me at their leisure, than to be a dead boy miles down in the ocean, with strange fish and sea serpents quarreling over the tender pieces in me. ”

“ There is nothing that is so hard to explain as a long hair of another color, or hair pins and blue bows and pieces of switch. They are gone and we miss them. No more shall we hear the young Christian slip on the golden stairs and roll down with his boot heel pointing heavenward, while the wail of a soul in anguish comes over the banisters, and the brother puts his hand on his pistol pocket and goes out the front door muttering a silent prayer, with blood in his eyes. ”

“ When the body was brought out of the house, and the procession started down the street for the grave, a drum major, with a staff in his hand, came along by me, and I have always thought my horse took the drum major for the ring master of a circus, for he reared up and walked on his hind feet, and pawed the air, and made a spectacle of me that made me so ashamed that I wanted to be killed. I had the brigade colors in one hand, and had only one hand and two feet to cling on the horse by, and I must have looked like a cat climbing the roof of a whitewashed barn. ”

“ Walking a block or two beside this girl will be to you better than a trip to Europe, and a look at her face will seem to you a glimpse of heaven, and angels, and you will leave her after the too short interview, and you will be glad you are alive, and then you may see her riding in a street car with another, and you will want to commit murder. When these things occur, boy, you are in love, and you have got it bad. You think you don't love anybody, but you will. ”

“ It is about this time that a young man begins to realize that he has been a colossal fool, as he flies around to heat water and bring in the bath tub, and as he goes whooping after his mother or her mother, he turns pale around the gills, his hair turns red in a single night, and he calls high heaven to witness that if he lives till morning, which he has doubts about, he will turn over a new leaf and never get married again until he is older. ”

“ I have listened to music, in my time, that has been pretty bad, and which has sent cold chills up my back, and caused me pain, but I never heard any bad music that seemed to grate on my nerves as did the noise my horse made in chewing the half of my last hard-tack, and the look of triumph the animal gave me was adding insult to injury. ”

“ We doubt if a boy ever descended into the patent insides of a bullhead, to mine for Limerick hooks, that did not, before his work was done, run a horn into his vital parts. But the boy seems to expect it, and the bullhead enjoys it. We have seen a bullhead lay on the bank and become dry, and to all appearances dead to all that was going on, and when the boy sat down on him and got a horn in his elbow, and yelled murder, the bullhead would grin from ear to ear, and wag his tail as though applauding for an end core. ”

“ The people look mad and savage when they are not drinking, as though they were only looking for an opportunity to commit murder, and then when they take a drink of gin, instead of smiling and smacking their lips as though it was good and braced them up, they look as though they had been stabbed with a dirk and they put on a look of revenge, as though they would like to wring a child's neck or cut holes in the people they meet. ”

“ You know that if anything happens the first thought of the conductor is the safety of the women and children, at the expense of his own safety. And when your loved ones come home safe, and you meet them at the train, and the conductor stands upon the platform as the train backs into the depot, looking at nobody, but his eye fixed upon the chances of accident, you always feel as though you wanted to put your arm around him and say, “Bully for you, old boy.” ”

“ Yes; but if she ever finds out about that pigs' foot ease, she will make you think your trousers are warmer than your hair. You strike me as being a boy that resembles a tornado. No one knows when you are going to become dangerous, or where you are going to strike. You and a tornado are a good deal like a cross-eyed man; you don't strike where you look as though you were aiming, and suddenly you strike where you are not looking, and where nobody is looking for you to strike. Nature must have been in a curious mood when she produced cross-eyed men, red-headed boys and tornadoes. ”

“ That is the feeling I had for the king when he came up to us and greeted dad as the father of the bad boy and patted me on the shoulder and said: “And so you are the boy that has made more trouble than any boy in the world, and had more fun than anybody, and made them all stand around and wonder what was coming next. You're a wonder. Strange the American people never thought of killing you.” ”

“ Never again shall we witness the look of agony on the face of the good brother when we refuse to give five dollars toward helping discharged criminals to get a soft thing, while poor people who never committed a crime and have never been supported by the State are amongst us feeling the pangs of hunger. No more shall we be compelled to watch the hard looking citizens who frequent the reading room of the association for fear they will enter our office in the still watches of the night and sleep on the carpet with their boots on. ”