THE TANGO SKIRT AND THE WOMAN.
E had a jolly holdup in the Central house last night, and the way that Tango skirt was hung put the women in a fright. A preacher took a snapshot of that violent expose, and sent it off to Comstock, to New York, U. S. A. ’Twas fun to see the women steer their husbands out the door, and Murtha said, “We’ll be doggoned if we’ll dance here any more.” ---- bowed his head and blushed, and wore a look of shame, and the management felt awful, and said we’re not to blame. The captains and lieutenants said that Tango was a sin, while the roughnecks and the vultures sat ’round and wore a grin. The learned judges from the Zone to the balconies went to look, and the only baldhead not around was that of Colonel Took. Poor Deeps and Jimmy Terry came in to take a squint; the dancers acted merry, but finally took a hint that their dancing was unseeming, as the females all were hurt, and Deeps put on his glasses to diagnose that skirt. He said ’twas sixteen inches wide, and just above the knee there’s nothing but horizon, as every one can see; there’s not a bit of cotton cloth, nor a tiny bit of lace—nothing but the electric light a-shining through the space. Then he turned to order drinks up, for the waiter came to him, and Terry he got busy and diagnosed a limb. There were shouts and shrieks of feeling and echoes of applause; men were drunk and reeling, went forth with loud haw-haws. The persons we call human, when all is said and done, at the antics of a woman looked on and called it fun.
AN EPIC OF THE ZONE.
ERCY BECKLE went out walking in the silent hours of night; the neighbors all were talking, and his wife was filled with fright. She would sit beside the window, her lone watch to keep, and would tell her friends and children he was walking in his sleep. She married him in Pottsville, for better or for worse; he was a hard-shell Baptist, and didn’t smoke or curse; but he entered in the service of the U. S. Government, passed examination and to Panama was sent.
When the doctors looked him over it was found he had no brain, so they put him as a gumshoe on an early morning train, and there he met a charmer whose skin was very brown; for a year she took his coin away, and then she turned him down.
He then became a Redman, a thing he shouldn’t do, and later thought it better to become a Kangaroo. He started chasing petticoats wherever one he saw, and the Kangaroos got after him; ’twas so against their law(?). Meantime his wife was hungry and his babies had no shoes; the Redmen took and threw him out, he didn’t pay his dues; his poor wife took to drinking, to while the time away, and Mrs. C. L. E. sent her to Brooklyn, U. S. A.
Now, Percy kept the chase up for nigh another year; his business was to ascertain if females acted queer. The women feared to speak or look, they hated him so much, but Percy knew them like a book, being Pennsylvania Dutch.
He would go to Sam’s on Sundays, and to the Central, too, and would sit and tell the vultures of the many things he knew. If he saw a female passing he would bow and scrape and smile, and if she turned her nose up he would criticize her style. (The brute!)