“Not much,” said the boy, as he see he was paralizing the grocery man. “Women have been about the same ever since Eve. She got mashed on the old original dude, and it stands to reason that Solomon's wives were no better than the mother of the human race. Statistics show that one woman out of every ten is red headed. That would give Solomon an even hundred red headed wives. Just that hundred red headed wives would be enough to make an ordinary man think that there was a land that is fairer than this. Then there would be, out of the other nine hundred, about three hundred blondes, and the other six hundred would be brunettes, and mabe he had a few albinos, and bearded women, and fat women, and dwarfs. Now, those thousand women had appetites, desires for dress and style, the same as all women. Imagine Solomon saying to them. 'Girls, lets all go down to the ice cream, saloon and have a dish of ice cream.' Can you, with your brain muddled with codfish and new potatoes, realize the scene that would follow? Suppose after Solomon's broom brigade bad got seated in the ice creamery, one of the red headed wives should catch Solomon winking at a strange girl at another table. You may think Solomon did not know enough to wink, or that he was not that kind of a flirt, but he must have been or he could never had succeeded in marrying a thousand wives, in a sparcely settled country. No, Sir, it looks to me as though Solomon in all his glory, was an old masher, and from what I have seen of men being bossed around with one wife, I don't envy Solomon his thousand. Why, just imagine that gang of wives going and ordering fall bonnets. Solomon would have to be a king, or a Vanderbilt to stand it. Ma wears five dollar silk stockings, and Pa kicks awfully when the bill comes in. Imagine Soloman putting up for a few thousand pair of silk stockings. I am glad you will sit down and reason with me in a rational way about some of these Bible stories that take my breath away. The minister stands me off when I try to talk with him about such things, and tells me to study the parable of the Prodigal Son, and the deacons tell me to go and soak my head. There is darn little encouragement for a boy to try and figure out things. How would you like to have a thousand red headed wives come into the store this minute and tell you they wanted you to send carriages around to the house at 3 o'clock so they could go for a drive? Or how would you like to have a hired girl come rushing in and tell you to send up six hundred doctors, because six hundred of your wives had been taken with cholera morbus? Or—”
“O, don't mention it,” said the grocery man, with a shudder. “I wouldn't take Solomon's place, and be the natural protector of a thousand wives if anybody would give me the earth. Think of getting up in a cold winter morning and building a thousand fires. Think of two thousand pair of hands in a fellow's hair! Boy, you have shown me that Solomon needed a guardian over him. He didn't have sense.”
“Yes,” says the boy, “and think of two thousand feet, each one as cold as a brick of chocolate ice cream. A man would want a back as big as the fence of a fair ground. But I don't want to harrow up your feelings. I must go and put some arnica on Pa. He has got home, and says he has been to a summer resort on a vacation, and he is all covered with blotches. He says it is mosquito bites, but Ma thinks he has been shot full of bird shot by some water melon farmer. Ma hasn't got any sympathy for Pa because he didn't take her along, but if she had been there she would have been filled with bird shot, too. But you musn't detain me. Between Pa and the baby I have got all I can attend to. The baby is teething, and Ma makes me put my fingers in the baby's mouth to help it cut teeth. That is a humiliating position for a boy as big as I am. Say, how many babies do you figure that Solomon had to buy rubber toothing rings for in all his glory?”
And the boy went out leaving the grocery man reflecting on what a family Solomon must have had, and how he needed to be the wisest man to get along without a circus afternoon and evening.
CHAPTER XXVI.
FARM EXPERIENCES. THE BAD BOY WORKS ON A FARM FOR A DEACON—
HE KNOWS WHEN HE HAS GOT ENOUGH—HOW THE DEACON MADE HIM
FLAX AROUND—AND HOW HE MADE IT WARM FOR THE DEACON.
“Want to buy any cabbages?” said the bad boy to the grocery man, as he stopped at the door of the grocery, dressed in a blue wamus, his breeches tucked in his boots, and an old hat on his head, with a hole that let out his hair through the top. He had got out of a democrat wagon, and was holding the lines hitched to a horse about forty years old, that leaned against the hitching post to rest, “Only a shilling apiece.”
“O, go 'way,” said the grocery man. “I only pay three cents apiece.” And then he looked at the boy and said “Hello, Hennery, is that you? I have missed you all the week, and now you come on to me sudden, disguised as a granger. What does this all mean?”
“It means that I have been the victim of as vile a conspiracy as ever was known since Cæesar was stabbed, and Marc Antony orated over his prostrate corpse in the Roman forum, to an audience of supes and scene shifters,” and the boy dropped the lines on the sidewalk, said, “whoa, gol darn you,” to the horse that was asleep, wiped his boots on the grass in front of the store and came in, and seated himself on the old half bushel. “There, this seems like home again.”