On circus day W.H.H. Cash, the great railroad monopolist of New Lisbon, was in the city. He had just made a few hundred thousand dollars on a railroad contract, and he decided to expend large sums of money in buying dry goods. He went into one of our stores and was passing along up the floor, when a black-eyed girl with a dimple in her chin, pearly teeth, red pouting lips, who was behind the counter, shouted, “cash, here!” Mr. Cash turned to her, a smile illuminating his face as big as a horse collar. He is one of the most modest men in the world, and as he extended his great big horny hand to the girl, a blush covered his face, and the perspiration stood in great beads on his forehead. “How do yeu dew?” said Cash, as she seemed to shrink back in a frightened manner. They gazed at each other a moment, in astonishment, when another girl, perhaps a little better looking, further on, said, “Here, Cash, quick!” He at once made up his mind that she was the one that had spoken to him the first time, so he said, “Beg your pardon, miss,” to the black-eyed girl, and went on to where the other girl was wrapping up a corset in a base ball undershirt. As he approached her she smiled, supposing he wanted to buy something. He thought she knew him, and he sat down on a stool and put out his hand and said, “How have you been?” She didn’t seem to shake very much, but asked him if there was anything she could show him. He thought may be it was against the rules for the clerks to speak to anybody, unless they were buying something, so he said, “Yes, of course. Show me corsets, stockings, anything, gaul dumbed if I care what.” She was just beginning to look upon him as though she thought he had escaped, when a little blonde on the other side of the store, as sweet as honey, shouted, “Cash, Cash, I need thee every hour. Come a running.” To say that Cash was astonished, is drawing it mild. He knew that they all wanted him, but he couldn’t make out how they seemed to know his name. He looked at the little blonde a minute, trying to think where he had met her, when he decided to go over and ask her. On the way over he thought she resembled a girl that used to live in Portage. He went up to her, and with a smile that was childlike and bland, he said, “Why, how are you, Samantha?” The little blonde looked daggers at him. “Didn’t you use to wait on tables there at the Fox House, at Portage?” The girl picked up a roll of paper cambric, and was about to brain him, when the floor walker came along, and asked what was the matter. Cash explained that since he came into the store, three or four girls had yelled to him, and he couldn’t place them. “There,” says he, as another girl yelled “Cash,” “there’s another of ‘em wants me,” and he was going to where she was, when the floor walker asked him if his name was Cash. “You bet your liver it is,” said Cash. It was then explained to him that the girls were calling cash boys. He thought it over a minute and said, “Sold, by the great baldheaded Elijah. Won’t you go down and take something? Invite all of them. The girls can take soda. I’ll be gaul blasted if I ever had such a rig played on me.” And he went out into the glare of the sunlight, with his hat pulled down over his eyes, and just then the circus procession came along, and he followed off the elephants. There are lots of worse men than Cash.
[TO WHAT VILE USES MAY WE COME.]
A dispatch from Chicago, says that three men were shot on “a boat used for the vilest purposes.” We never knew that the newspapers were printed on boats there in Chicago.
[THE ADVENT PREACHER AND THE BALLOON.]
There occasionally occurs an accident in this world that will make a person laugh though the laughing may border on the sacrilegious. For instance, there is not a Christian but will smile at the ignorance of the Advent preacher up in Jackson county who, when he saw the balloon of King, the balloonist, going through the air, thought it was the second coming of Christ, and got down on his knees and shouted to King, who was throwing out a sand bag, while his companion was opening a bottle of export beer, “O, Jesus, do not pass me by.”
“DO NOT PASS ME BY!”
And yet it is wrong to laugh at the poor man, who took an advertising agent for a Chicago clothing store for the Savior, who he supposed was making his second farewell tour. The minister had been preaching the second coming of Christ until he looked for him every minute. He would have been as apt to think, living as he did in the back woods, that a fellow riding a bicycle, with his hair and legs parted in the middle, along the country road, was the object of his search.