UNEXPECTED.
He had been trying to impress upon the children in the school, in the capacity of a temperance lecturer, that though it was right and proper to relieve suffering and poverty, it was much better to find out the cause of it all—drink, of course—and remove that; and so with everything.
“Now,” he said, “suppose your father some morning came downstairs, and, on going to the cellar, found it flooded; what would he do first? Would he begin bailing the water out?”
“No, of course not.[{52}]”
“Now, what would be the first thing he’d do?”
After a short silence, a shrill, piping voice cried out:
“Why, he’d carry on awful!”
SUMMERTIME IN THE COUNTRY.
By MAX ADELER.
We have moved into the country to stay for a few weeks with some of our relations. They gave us such very warm and repeated invitations that we concluded to make some sacrifice to go, to oblige them, and I had no idea how much they appreciated our company until the end of the first week, when they handed me a bill for fifty dollars for board for three of us.
Life in the country is very charming in summertime. We sleep in the spare room in the garret, where the temperature gets up to one hundred and four degrees. The roof has not been repaired since Columbus landed, and consequently it is full of apertures. For any one who wants to study astronomy while lying in bed, our garret offers phenomenal advantages; but whenever it rains at night there is nothing to be done but to make a raft out of the clothes horse and some bed slats, and float the family until daylight. It is sometimes an exciting apartment. A few nights ago, while hitting at a mosquito with a shuck pillow, I knocked a wasps’ nest off of one of the rafters, and in the morning we had knobs as big as hickory nuts all over our faces and legs.
It is a good thing to live out here in the country, because the early-morning air is so healthful. We get our morning air very early. The family is routed out at four o’clock, so that the men may go to the harvest field, and if we lie abed, there will be nothing to eat until dinnertime. To be sure, that would not make any very great difference, if we could live without food, for country diet is not as attractive as I hoped it would be.
We always have salt ham and fried potatoes for breakfast; then we have boiled ham and potatoes for dinner, and cold potatoes and sliced ham for supper. On Sundays we have two kinds of ham and stewed potatoes, and potato pudding for dessert. When I asked for milk for the children, they said they were using all the milk to fatten the calves.
They apologized for not having butter because the hucksters who supplied it hadn’t come. I threw out a hint about raspberries, but they said the man at the store was expecting them every day from the city, and I would have to wait. They get their potatoes from the city, too, and the ham was cured in Cincinnati.
The only vegetable that grows here is cabbage, but we are not allowed to eat it, because they trade it off at the store for potatoes, and they swap their chickens to the huckster for butter—that is, their young chickens. We had for dinner one day a hen that cackled during the War of 1812. She ate like a piece of india-rubber boot.
One of the finest things about living in the country is that you can wander off to some shady spot and lie in luxurious ease upon the grass, dreaming away the hours. And while you are dreaming away the hours, straddle bugs will probably crawl up your pantaloons and bite you, and caterpillars will insert themselves between your shirt collar and neck. When you get home you find that you have caught a frightful cold from lying on the damp grass, and while you are sneezing, you learn that one of[{53}] the children has fallen out of the haymow and run a pitchfork through his calf, and that the other one has been pitched over the fence by the Durham bull.
Then, we like to sit out in the cool of the evening and enjoy the calm, quiet solitude of the place. There is a canal at the end of the lawn, and when we get enough of the quiet solitude, the Mary Jane, of Pencader, will come along, and we will be entertained by the captain, who swears violently at the boy because he does not stimulate the mules to sufficient activity. As he wakes the echoes with his abnormal profanity, we suddenly put the children to bed to protect them from demoralization; and then, when the hind mule has kicked at the boy three or four times, the boat passes upstream, and silence once more returns.
We sit there until bedtime, beating off the mosquitoes with one hand and scratching the bites with the other. And as soon as we get into our garret with a candle the atmosphere is filled with bugs, which dance around the room and beat against the walls until we go to sleep.
It is a good thing to live in the country, because the children have such a chance to obtain vigorous health. They begin the summer in the country with prickly heat. Before that is cured they get cholera morbus from eating green apples.
Afterward they catch mumps from the children on the next farm, and at intermediate periods they get bitten by the dog, they come near drowning in the creek, they are sunstruck, they rub against poison vine in the woods and swell up, they are tangled in the mower and lose fingers in the feed cutter, they are run over by the ox cart and ground up in the threshing machine.
Then they cry all night in our garret, and eat so much at meals that the owner of the house looks sour at them and growls out something about raising the price of board; and they wear out clothes enough to run an orphan asylum for a couple of years.
One of the best things about the country is that it gives you a chance to go a-fishing. We fish in the creek. After digging for a couple of hours in search of worms, we go to the water and throw in. I get a bite and pull up, and the line winds tightly around the limb of a tree. Then I shin up the tree and undo it, and throw in again. After several more ineffectual bites, I pull up an eel, and find that he has swallowed the hook.
Everybody knows how it is with an eel. You might as well try to hold a streak of lightning. When he has covered your boots with slime, he bites the line off and wriggles back into the water. When you have put on a new hook, you get a bite, and jerk out a muddy snag, and then you catch one small minnow and find that you have been sitting in a puddle of water, waiting for him to nibble.
As your bait is exhausted, you conclude to go home, where you can put some ointment on your blistered hands and face, and pick the ticks out of your skin and have sewed up the rents made in your trousers by the blackberry bushes, and get ready for the mosquitoes in the evening.
There are some very peculiar charms about rural life, and the farmer is the noblest man on earth. But as for me, I believe I prefer existence in an alley in the city to even temporary residence among the agricultural population.[{54}]