[ROPE LADDERS.]
The law to compel hotel keepers to provide rope ladders for every room above the second floor, is said not to be enforced, though it should be by all means. The law ought to be amended so as to compel guests to get up once or twice during the night and run up or down the rope ladder, outside the window, in their night clothes, so as to be in practice in case of fire. When every room is provided with rope ladders there will be lots of fun. Those men who invariably blow out the gas, will probably think they have got to come down stairs on the rope ladder in the morning, and it will take an extra clerk to stand in the alleys around a hotel, with a shot gun, to keep impecunious guests from going away from the tavern via rope ladder. And then imagine an Oshkosh man in a Milwaukee hotel, his head full of big schemes, and his skin full of beer. He has been on a “bum,” and is nervous, and on being shown to his room he sees the rope ladder coiled up under the window, ready to spring upon him. He stares at it, and the cold sweat stands all over him. 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.
[A DOCTOR OF LAWS.]
A doctor at Ashland is also a Justice of the Peace, and when he is called to visit a house he don’t know whether he is to physic or to marry. Several times he has been called out in the night, to the country, and he supposed some one must be awful sick, and he took a cart load of medicines, only to find somebody wanted marrying. He has been fooled so much that when he is called out now he carries a pill-bag and a copy of the statutes, and tells them to take their choice.
He was called to one house and found a girl who seemed feverish. She was sitting up in a chair, dressed nicely, but he saw at once that the fatal flush was on her cheek, and her eyes looked peculiar. He felt of her pulse, and it was beating at the rate of two hundred a minute. He asked her to run out her tongue, and she run out eight or nine inches of the lower end of it. It was covered with a black coating, and he shook his head and looked sad. She had never been married any before, and supposed that it was necessary for a Justice who was going to marry a couple to know all about their physical condition, so she kept quiet and answered questions.
She did not tell him that she had been eating huckleberry pie, so he laid the coating on her tongue to some disease that was undermining her constitution. He put his ear on her chest and listened to the beating of her heart, and shook his head again. He asked her if she had been exposed to any contagious disease. She didn’t know what a contagious disease was, but on the hypothesis that he had reference to sparking, she blushed and said she had, but only two evenings, because John had only just got back from the woods where he had been chopping, and she had to sit up with him.
The doctor got out his pill bags and made some quinine powders, and gave her some medicine in two tumblers, to be taken alternately, and told her to soak her feet and go to bed, and put a hot mustard plaster on her chest, and some onions around her neck.
She was mad, and flared right up, and said she wasn’t very well posted, and lived in the country, but if she knew her own heart she would not play such a trick as that on a new husband.