Peck's Bad Boy in an airship

by George W. Peck

I always supposed that an orphanage was a place where they tried to make an orphan feel that it wasn’t such a great loss not to have a regular home, among your people as long as you could be lovingly cared for in big bunches by charitable people, who would act like a High School to you, and when you got a diploma from an orphans’ home you could go out into the world and hold up your head like a college graduate, but I can see from my experience at this alleged home that when we boys get out the police will have a tab on us, and we will be pinched like tramps.

What encouragement is there to learn anything but being chambermaid to cows? Gee, but I never want to look a cow in the face again. When I failed to milk that cow and she galloped all over the place, and kicked my liver around where my spleen ought to be, the one-eyed warden of the place told me I must practice on that cow till I got so that I could milk her with my eyes shut, and that I wouldn’t get much to eat until I could show him that I was a he-milkmaid of the thirty-third degree.

I told him I saw a machine last year at the State Fair that had a suction pump that was put on to the cow’s works, and by touching a button the milk and honey flowed into a pail, and if he would get such a machine I could touch the button all right. He said the orphanage couldn’t afford to buy such a machine, but if I wanted to invent any device to milk cows I could go ahead, but it was up to me to produce milk, one way or another.

Well, an idea struck me just like being hit with a base ball bat, and in a short time I was ready.

I got a clothes wringer out of the laundry, and went to corral the cow. I thought if a clothes wringer could squeeze the blue water out of a wash tub of clothes, it would squeeze a pail of milk out of a cow, so I took my clothes wringer and the milk pail and got under the cow and gathered all her four weiners together in my hands and put the ends of them between the rubber rollers, just easy, and the boys gathered round to see where my inventive genius was going to get off at. Then when my audience was all ready to cheer me, if the machine worked, I took hold of the handle of the machine, which was across my lap, and turned the crank with a yuck motion, until all the cow’s weiners went through between the rollers, and I noticed the cow flinched, and just there one of the sophomore boys threw a giant firecracker under the cow’s basement near the milk pail, and when the explosion came, just when I was cranking her up a second time and turning on the high speed clutch, the cow bleated as though she had lost her calf, and she went up into the air like the cow that jumped over the moon, and she went across the country on a cavalry charge, with me hanging on the handle of the wringer with one hand, on her tail with the other, and the boys giving the orphan school yell, and the cow bellowing like a whole drove of cattle that have smelled blood around a slaughter house.

Gosh, but I never had such an excursion. The cow went around the house and on to the porch where the manager and some women were, and finally rushed into the kitchen, and everybody came and tied me loose from the cow, and got the clothes wringer off her vital parts, and shooed her back to the barn, and then they took me to the manager’s office, and I fainted away.

Gosh, But I Never Had Such an Excursion!

When I came to the one-eyed manager had a bandage over his nose where the handle of the clothes wringer hit him when he tried to turn the handle back to release the pressure on the cow’s bananas, and he was so mad you could hear him “sis,” like when you drop water on a hot griddle.

He got up and took me by the neck and wrung it just like I was a hen having its neck wrung when there is company coming and he dropped me “kerplunk” and said I had ruined the best cow on the place by flattening out her private affairs so that nothing but skim milk could ever get through the teats, and he asked me what in thunder I was doing, milking a cow with a clothes wringer, when I ought to have known that a clothes wringer would squeeze the milk up into the second story of the cow.