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Peck's bad boy abroad

by George W. Peck · English · Gutenberg #25489 · 368,160 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Peck's bad boy abroad
        Being a humorous description of the bad boy and his dad in their journeys through foreign lands

        1904

Author: George W. Peck

Illustrator: Dan Sayre Groesbeck
        R. W. Taylor


        
Release date: May 16, 2008 [eBook #25489]
                Most recently updated: February 22, 2018

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25489

Credits: Produced by David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PECK'S BAD BOY ABROAD ***




Produced by David Widger





PECK'S BAD BOY ABROAD

By Hon. Geo. W. Peck

Being a Humorous Description of the Bad Boy and His Dad in Their
Journeys Through Foreign Lands, Their Visits to Crowned Heads, the
Manners and Customs of the People, and the Bad Boy's Never Ending
Efforts to Provide Fun No Matter Where He Is.

Profusely Illustrated by D. S. Groesbeck And R. W. Taylor

THOMPSON & THOMAS - 1904




CONTENTS


CHAPTER I.

The Bad Boy and His Chum Call on the Old Groceryman After Being Away at
School--The Bad Boy's Dad in a Bad Way


CHAPTER II.

The Bad Boy and His Dad Ready for Their Travels--The Bad Boy Labels the
Old Man's Suit Case--How the Cowboys Made Him Dance Once


CHAPTER III.

The Bad Boy Writes About the Fun They Had Going to Washington--He
and His Dad Call on President Roosevelt--The Bad Boy Meets One of the
Children and They Disagree


CHAPTER IV.

The Bad Boy and His Dad Visit Mount Vernon--Dad Weeps at the Grave of
the Father of Our Country


CHAPTER V.

The Bad Boy and His Dad Have Dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria--The Bad Boy
Orders Dinner--The Old Man Gets Stuck--Tries to Rescue a Countess in
Distress


CHAPTER VI.

The Bad Boy Writes the Old Groceryman About Ocean Voyages--His Dad Has
an Argument Over a Steamer Chair.


CHAPTER VII.

The Bad Boy and His Dad Eat Fog--Call on Astor--A Dynamite Outrage


CHAPTER VIII.

The Bad Boy Writes About the Craze for Gin in the White-chapel
District--He Gives His Dad a Scare in the Tower of London


CHAPTER IX.

The Bad Boy and His Dad Call on King Edward and Almost Settle the Irish
Question


CHAPTER X.

The Bad Boy Writes of Ancient and Modern Highwaymen--¦ They Get a Taste
of High Life in London and Dad Tells the Story of the Picklemaker's
Daughter


CHAPTER XI.

The Bad Boy Writes About Paris--Tells About the Trip Across the English
Channel--Dad Feeds a Dog and Gets Arrested


CHAPTER XII.

The Bad Boy's Second Letter from Paris--Dad Poses as a Mormon Bishop
and Has to Be Rescued--They Climb the Eiffel Tower and the Old Man Gets
Converted


CHAPTER XIII.

The Bad Boy's Dad and a Man from Dakota Frame Up a Scheme to Break the
Bank, But They Go Broke--The Party in Trouble


CHAPTER XIV.

The Bad Boy and His Dad Have an Automobile Ride--They Run Over a
Peasant--Climb “Glaziers”--Dad Falls Over a Precipice, But Is Rescued by
the Guides After a Hard Time of It


CHAPTER XV.

Dad Plays He Is an Anarchist--They Give Alms to the Beggars and the Bad
Boy Ducks a Gondolier and His Dad in the Grand Canal


CHAPTER XVI.

The Bad Boy Writes from Naples--Dad Sees Vesuvius and Calls the Servants
to Put Out the Fire--They Have Trouble with a “Dago” in Pompeii


CHAPTER XVII.

The Bad Boy and His Dad Climb Vesuvius--A Chicago Lady Joins the Party
and Causes Trouble


CHAPTER XVIII.

The Bad Boy Makes Friends with Some Italian Children--Dad is Chased by
Lions from the Coliseum--” Not Any More Rome for Papa,” says Dad


CHAPTER XIX.

The Bad Boy and His Dad Visit the Pope--They Bow to, the King of Italy
and His Nine Spots--Dad Finds That “The Catacombs” Is Not a Comic Opera


CHAPTER XX.

The Bad Boy Tells About the Land of the Czar and the Trouble They Had to
Get There--Dad Does a Stunt and Mixes It Up with the People and Soldiers


CHAPTER XXI.

Dad Sees a Russian Revolution and Faints--'The Bad Boy Arranges a Wolf
Hunt--Dad Threatens to Throw the Boy to the Wolves


CHAPTER XXII.

Dad Wears His Masonic Fez in Constantinople--They Find the Turks
Sensitive on the Dog Question--A College Yell for the Sultan Sends Him
Into a Fit


CHAPTER XXIII.

The Bad Boy and His Dad Meet the Cream of the Harem--“Little Egypt” Does
a Dancing Stunt--The Sultan Wants to Send Fifty Wives to the President


CHAPTER XXIV.

The Bad Boy and His Dad Arrive in Cairo--At the Hotel They Meet Some
Egyptian Princesses--Dad Rides a Camel to the Pyramids and Meets with
Difficulties


CHAPTER XXV.

The Bad Boy and His Dad Climb the Pyramids--The Bad Boy Lights a Cannon
Cracker in Rameses' Tomb--They Flee from Egypt in Disguise


CHAPTER XXVI.

The Bad Boy Writes About Gibraltar--The Irish-English Army--How He Would
Take the Fortress--Dad Wants to Buy the “Rock”


CHAPTER XXVII.

The Bad Boy Writes of Spain--They call On the King and the Bad Boy Is At
It Once More--They See a Bull Fight and Dad Does a Turn


CHAPTER XXVIII.

The Bad Boy and His Dad at Berlin--They Call On Emperor William and His
Family and the Bad Boy Plays a Joke on Them All


CHAPTER XXIX.

The Bad Boy Writes from Brussels--He and Dad See the Field of Waterloo
and Call on King Leopold, and Dad and the King Go in for a Swim--The Bad
Boy, a Dog and Some Goats Do the Rest


CHAPTER XXX.

The Bad Boy's Delayed Letter About Holland and Cuba--Dad and the Boy Go
for a Drive in a Dog-Cart--They Have a Great Time--Land in Cuba and See
the Island We Fought For





PECK'S BAD BOY ABROAD.




CHAPTER I.

     The Bad Boy and His Chum Call on the Old Grocery-man After
     Being Away at School--The Bad Boy's Dad in a Bad Way.

The bad boy had been away to school, but the illness of his father had
called him home, and for some weeks he had been looking about the old
town. He had found few of his old friends. His father had recovered
somewhat from his illness, and one day he met his old chum, a boy of his
own age. The bad boy and the chum got busy at once, talking over the
old times that tried the souls of the neighbors and finally the bad boy
asked about the old groceryman, and found that the old man still held
out at the old stand, with the same old stock of groceries, and they
decided to call upon him, and surprise him. So after it began to be
dark they entered the store, and found the old groceryman sitting on a
cracker box by the stove, stroking the back of an old maltese cat that
had a yellow streak on the back, where it had been singed by crawling
under the red-hot stove. As the boys entered the store the cat raised
its back, its tail became as large as a rolling pin, and the cat began
to spit, while the old groceryman held up both hands and said:

[Illustration: Don't shoot, Please 019]

“Don't shoot, please, but one of you go behind the counter and take
what there is in the cash drawer, while the other one can reach into my
pistol pocket and release my pocketbook. This is the fifth time I have
been held up this year, and I have got so if I am not held up about so
often I can't sleep nights.”

“O, put down your hands and straighten out that cat's back,” said the
bad boy, as he slapped the old groceryman on the back so hard his spine
cracked like a frozen sidewalk. “Don't you know us, you old geezer? We
are the only and original Peck's Bad Boy and his Chum, come to life, and
ready for business,” and the two boys danced a jig on the floor, covered
an inch thick with the spilled sugar of years ago, the molasses that had
strayed from barrel, and the general refuse of the dirty place, which
had become as hard as asphalt.

“O, dear, it is worse than I thought,” said the old groceryman as he
laughed a hysterical laugh through the long whiskers, and he hugged the
boys as though he had a liking for them, notwithstanding the suffering
they had caused him. “By gosh, I thought you were nothing but common
robbers, who just wanted my money. You are old friends, and can have the
whole place,” and he poured some milk into a basin for the cat, but the
animal only looked at the two boys as though she knew them, and watched
them to see what was coming next.

The bad boy looked around the old grocery, which had not changed a
particle during the time he had been away, the same old box of petrified
prunes, the dried apples that could not be cut with a hatchet, the
canned stuff on the shelves had become so old that the labels had curled
up and fallen off, so it must have been a guess with the old groceryman
whether he was selling a can of peas or tomatoes, and the old fellow
standing there as though the world had gone off and left him, as his
customers had.

“Well, wouldn't this skin you,” said the bad boy, as he took up a
dried prune and tried to crack it with a hatchet on a two-pound weight,
turning to his chum who was stroking the singed hair of the old cat the
wrong way. “Say, old man, you ought to get a hustle on you. Why don't
you clean out this shebang, and put in a new stock, of goods, and have
clerks with white aprons on, and a girl bookkeeper, and goods that
people will buy and eat and not get sick? There is a grocery down street
that is as clean as a whistle, and I notice all your old customers go
there. Why don't you keep up with the times?”

“O, I ain't running a dude place,” said the old man, as he took a piece
of soft coal and put it in the old round stove, and wiped the black off
his hands on his trousers. “I am trying to get rid of my customers. I
have got money enough to live on, and I just stay here waiting for the
old cat to die. I have only got six customers left, and one of them has
got pneumonia, and is going to die, then there will be only five. When
they are all gone I shall sit here by the stove until the end comes.
There is nothing doing now to keep me awake, since you boys quit getting
me mad. Say, boys, do you know, I haven't been real mad since you quit
coming here. The only fun I have had is swearing at my customers when
they stick up their noses at my groceries. It's the funniest thing, when
I tell an old customer that if they don't like my goods they can go plum
to thunder, they get mad and go somewhere else to trade. Times must be
changing. Years ago, the more I abused customers the more they liked it,
and I just charged the goods to them with a pencil on a piece of brown
wrapping paper. I had four cracker boxes full of brown wrapping paper
with things charged on the paper against customers, but when anybody
wanted to pay their account it made my head ache to find it, and so one
day I balanced my books by using the brown wrapping paper to kindle the
fire. If you ever want to get even with the world, easy, just pour a
little kerosene on your accounts, and put them in the stove. I have
never been so free from worry as I have since I balanced my books
in the stove. Well, I suppose you have come home on account of your
dad's sickness,” said the old groceryman, turning to the bad boy,
who had written a sign, 'The Morgue,' and pinned it on the window. “I
understand your dad had an operation performed on him in a hospital.
What did the doctors take out of him?”

“Dad had an operation all right,” said the bad boy, “but he is not as
much interested in what they took out of him, as what he thinks they
left in. They said they removed his appendix, and I guess they did, for
dad showed me the bill the doctors rendered. The bill was big enough so
they might have taken out a whole lot more. If I had been home I would
never have let him be cut into, but ma insisted that he must have an
operation. She said all the men on our street, and all that moved in our
set, had had operations, and she was ashamed to go out in society and
be forced to admit that dad never had an operation, She told dad that
he could afford it better than half the people that had operations, and
that a scar criss-cross on the stomach was a badge of honor. He never
got a scar in the army, and she simply would not be able to look people
in the face unless dad was operated on. Dad always was subject to
stomach ache, but until appendicitis became fashionable he had always
taken a mess of pills, and come out all right, but ma diagnosed the case
the last time he was doubled up like a jack-knife, and dad was hustled
off to the hospital, and they didn't do a thing to him.

“He told me about it since I came home, and now he lays the whole thing
to ma, and I have to stand between them. He is going to get even with
ma, though. The first time she complains of anything going on inside
of her works, he is going to send her right to a hospital and have the
doctors do their worst. Dad said to me, says he:

“'Hennery, if you ever feel anything like a caucus being held inside
you, don't you ever go to a hospital, but just swallow a stick of
dynamite and light the fuse, then there won't be anything left inside to
bother you afterwards. When I got to the hospital they stripped me for
a prize fight, put me on a table made of glass, and rolled me into the
operating room, gave me chloroform and when they thought I was all in,
they took an axe and chopped me. I could feel every blow, and it is a
wonder they left enough of your old dad for you to hug when you came
home.'

“Say, it is kind of pitiful to hear dad talk about the things they left
in him.”

“What things does he think they left in him,” asked the old groceryman,
as he looked frightened, and felt of his stomach, as though he
mistrusted there might be something wrong with him, too.

“O, dad has been reading in the papers about doctors that perform
operations leaving sponges, forceps, and things inside of patients, when
they close up the place, and since dad has got pretty fussy since his
operation he thinks they left something in him. Some days he thinks they
left a roll of cotton batting, or a pillow, or a bale of hay, but when
there is a sharp pain inside he thinks they left a carving knife, but
for a week he has settled down to the belief that the doctors left a
monkey wrench in him, and he is just daffy on that subject. Says he can
feel it turning around, as though it was miscrewing machinery, and
he wants to consult a new doctor every day as to what he can take to
dissolve a monkey wrench, so it will pass off through the blood and
pores of the skin. He has taken it into his head that nothing will save
his life except to travel all over the country, and the world. I am to
go with him to look after him.”

[Illustration: Doctors left a monkey wrench in him 025]

“By ginger, it's great! Just think of it. Traveling all over the world
and nothing to do but nurse my old dad who thinks he is filled with
hardware and carpenter's tools. Gee! but I wish you could go,” said
the bad boy, as he put him arm around his chum. “Maybe we wouldn't
make these foreigners sit up and take an interest in something besides
Royalty and Riots.”

“Well,” said the groceryman, “they will have my sympathy with you alone
over there.”

“But before you start on the road with your monkey-wrench show, you come
in here and let me put up a package of those prunes to take along. They
will keep in any climate, and there is nothing better for iron in the
blood, such as your dad has, than prunes. Call again, bub, and we will
arrange for you to write to your chum from all the places you go with
your dad, and he can come in here and read the letters to me and the
cat.”

“All right, old Father Time,” said the bad boy, as he drew a mug of
cider out of the vinegar barrel, and took a swallow. “But what you want
to do is to get a road scraper and drive a team through this grocery,
and clean the floor,” and the boys went out just ahead of the old man's
arctic overshoes, as he kicked at them, and then he went back and sat
down by the stove and stroked the cat, which had got its back down
level again, after its old enemies had gone down the street, throwing
snowballs at the driver of a hearse.

[Illustration: Went out just ahead of the old man's arctic overshoes
027]

“It is a solemn occupation to drive a hearse,” said the bad boy.

“Not so solemn as riding inside,” said the chum.




CHAPTER II.

     The Bad Boy and His Dad Ready for Their Travels--The Bad Boy
     Labels the Old Man's Suit Case--How the Cowboys Made Him
     Dance Once.

The old groceryman was in front of the grocery, bent oyer a box of
rutabagas, turning the decayed sides down to make the possible customer
think all was not as bad as it might be, when a shrill whistle down the
street attracted his attention. He looked in the direction from which it
came, and saw the bad boy coming with a suit case in one hand and a sole
leather hat box in the other, and the old man went in the store to say
a silent prayer, and to lay a hatchet and an ax handle where he could
reach them if the worst came.

“Well, you want to get a good look at me now,” said the bad boy, as he
dropped the valise on the floor, and put the hat box on the counter,
“for it will be months and maybe years, before you see me again.”

“Oh, joy!” said the old groceryman, as he heaved a sigh, and tried to
look sorry. “What is it, reform school, or have the police ordered you
out of town? I have felt it coming for a long time. This is the only
town you could have plied your vocation so long in and not been pulled.
Where are you going with the dude suit case and the hat box?”

“Oh, dad has got a whole mess more diseases, and the doctors had a
conversation over him Sunday, and they say he has got to go away again,
right now, and that a sea voyage will brace him up and empty him out so
medicine over in Europe can get in its work and strengthen him so he can
start back after a while and probably die on the way home, and be buried
at sea. Dad says he will go, for he had rather die at sea than on land,
'cause they don't have to have any trouble about a funeral, 'cause all
they do is to sew a man up in a piece of cloth, tie a sack of coal to
his feet, slide him off a board, and he goes kerplunk down into the salt
water about a mile, and stands there on his feet and makes the whales
and sharks think he is a new kind of fish.”

“Gee! but that is a programme that appeals to me as sort of uncanny,”
 said the old man. “Is your dad despondent over the outlook? What new
disease has he got?”

[Illustration: Pasted a tomato can label on the suitcase 31]

“All of 'em,” said the boy, as he took a label off a tomato can and
pasted it on the end of the suit case. “You take an almanac and read
about all the diseases that the medicine advertised in the almanac
cures, and dad has got the whole lot of them, nervous prostration,
rheumatism, liver trouble, stomach busted, lungs congested, diaphragm
turned over, heart disease, bronchitis, corns, bunions, every darn thing
a man can catch without costing him anything. But he is not despondent.
He just thinks it is an evidence of genius, and a certificate of
standing in society and wealth. He argues that the poor people who have
only one disease are not in it with statesmen and scholars. Oh, he is
all right. He thinks if he goes to Europe all knocked out, he will class
with emperors and dukes. Oh, since he had that operation and had his
appendix chopped out, he thinks there is a bond of sympathy between him
and King Edward that will cause him to be invited to be the guest of
royalty. He is just daffy,” and the bad boy took a sapolio label out of
a box and pasted it on the other end of the valise.

“What in thunder and lightning are you pasting those labels on your
valise for?” said the old man, as the boy reached for a Quaker oats
label and a soap advertisement and pasted them on.

“Oh, dad said he wished he had some foreign labels of hotels and things
on his valise, to make fellow travelers believe he had been abroad
before, and I told him I could fix it all right. You see, if I paste
things all over the valise he will think it is all right, 'cause he
is near sighted,” and the boy pasted on a label for 37 varieties of
pickles, and then put on an advertisement for hair restorer on the hat
box.

“Say, here's a fine one, this malted milk label, with a New Jersey cow
on the corner,” said the old man, as he began to take interest in the
boy's talent as an artist. “And here, try one of these green pea can
labels, and the pork and beans legend, and the only soap. Say, if you
and your dad don't create a sensation from the minute you take the train
till you get back, you can take it out of my wages. When are you going?”

“To-morrow night,” said the boy, as he put more labels on the hat box,
and stood off and looked at them with the eye of an artist. “We go to
New York first to stay a few days and see things, and then we take a
steamer and sail away, and the sicker dad is the more time I will have
to fill up on useful nollig.”

“Hennery,” said the old groceryman, as his chin trembled, and a tear
came to his eye. “I want to ask you a favor. At times, when you have
been unusually mean, I have thought I hated you, but when I have said
something ugly to you, and have laid awake all night regretting it, it
has occurred to me that you were about the best friend I had. I think it
makes an old man forget his years, to be chummy with a live boy, full of
ginger, and I do like you, condemn you, and I can't help it. Now I want
you to write me every little while, on your trip, and I will read your
letters to the customers here in the store, who will be lonely until
they can hear that you are dead. The neighbors will come in to read your
letters, and it will bring me custom. Will you write to me, boy, and
pour out your heart to me, and tell me of the different troubles you get
your dad into, for surely you cannot help finding trouble over there if
you go hunting for it. Promise me, boy.”

“You bet your life I will, old pard,” said the bad boy. “I shall have to
have some escape valve to keep from busting. I was going to write to
my chum, but he is in love with a telephone girl, and he don't take any
time for pleasure. I will write you about every dutch and duchess we
meet, every prince and pauper, and everything. You watch my smoke, and
you will think there is a train afire. I hope dad will try and restrain
himself from wanting to fight everybody that belongs to any country but
America. He has bought one one these little silk American flags to wear
in his button hole, and he swears if anybody looks cross-eyed at that
flag he will simply cut his liver out, and toast it on a fork, and eat
it. He makes me tired, and I know there is going to be trouble.”

“Don't you think your dad's mind sort of wanders?” said the old
groceryman, in a whisper, “It wouldn't be strange, after all he has gone
through, in raising you up to your present size, if he was a little off
his base.”

“Well, ma thinks he is bug-house, and the hired girl is willing to go
into court and swear to it, and that experience we had coming home from
the Yellowstone park some time ago, made me think if he was not crazy he
would be before long, You see, we had a hot box on the engine, and had
to stay at a station in the bad lands for an hour, and there were a mess
of cow boys on the platform, and I told dad we might as well have some
amusement while we were there, and that a brake-man told me the cow boys
were great dancers, but you couldn't hire them to dance, but if some man
with a strong personality would demand that they dance, and put his hand
on his pistol pocket they would all jump in and dance for an hour. That
was enough for dad, for he has a microbe that he is a man of strong
personality, and that when he demands that anybody do something they
simply got to do it, so he walked up and down the platform a couple of
times to get his draw poker face on, and I went up to one of the cow
boys and told him that the old duffer used to be a ballet dancer, and he
thought everybody ought to dance when they were told to, and that if the
spell should come on him, and he should order them to dance, it would be
a great favor to me if they would just give him a double shuffle or two,
just to ease his mind.

“Well, pretty soon he came along to where the cowboys were leaning
against the railing, and, looking at them in a haughty manner, he said:
'Dance, you kiotes, dance,' and he put his hand to his pistol pocket.
Well, sir, I never saw so much fun in my life. Four of the cow boys
pulled revolvers and began to shoot regular bullets into the platform
within an inch of dad's feet, and they yelled to him: 'Dance your own
self, you ancient maverick; whoop 'er up!' and by gosh! dad was so
frightened that he began to dance all around the platform, and it was
like a battle, the bullets splintering the boards, and the smoke filling
the air, and the passengers looking out of the windows and laughing,
and the engineer and fireman looking on and yelling, and dad nearly
exhausted from the exertion. I guess if the conductor had not got the
hot box put out and yelled all aboard, dad would have had apoplexy.”

[Illustration: He began to dance all around the platform 037]

“When he let up, the cow boys quit shooting, and he! 'ol aboard the train
and started. I stayed in the smoking car with the train butcher for more
than an hour, 'cause I was afraid if I went in the car where dad was he
would make some remark that would offend my pride, and when I did
go back to the car he just said: 'Somebody fooled you. Those fellows
couldn't dance, and I knew it all the time.' Yes, I guess there is no
doubt dad is crazy sometimes, but let me chaperone him through a few
foreign countries and he will stand without hitching all right. Well,
goodby, now, old man, and try and bear up under it, till you get a
letter from me,” and the bad boy took his labeled valise and hat box and
started.




CHAPTER III.

     The Bad Boy Writes About the Fun They Had Going to
     Washington--He and His Dad Call on President Roosevelt--
     The Bad Boy Meets One of the Children and They Disagree.

Washington, D. C--My Dear Old Skate: I didn't tell you in my last about
the fun we had getting here. We were on the ocean wave two days, because
the whole country was flooded from the rains, and dad walked the quarter
deck of the Pullman car, and hitched up his pants, and looked across the
sea on each side of the train with a field glass, looking for whales and
porpoises. He seems to be impressed with the idea that this trip abroad
is one of great significance to the country, and that he is to be a sort
of minister plenipotentiary, whatever that is, and that our country is
going to be judged by the rest of the world by the position he takes on
world affairs. The first day out of Chicago dad corraled the porter in a
section and talked to him until the porter was black in the face. I told
dad the only way to get respectful consideration from a negro was to
advocate lynching and burning at the stake, for the slightest things, so
when our porter was unusually attentive to a young woman on the car dad
hauled him over the coals, and scared him so by talking of hanging, and
burning in kerosene oil, that the negro got whiter than your shirt, and
when he got away from dad he came to me and asked if that old man with
the red nose and the gold-headed cane was as dangerous as he talked.
I told him he was my dad, and that he was a walking delegate of the
Amalgamated Association of Negro Lynchers, and when a negro did anything
that he ought to be punished for they sent for dad, and he took charge
of the proceedings and saw that the negro was hanged, and shot, and
burned up plenty. But I told him that dad was crazy on the subject
of giving tips to servants, and he must not fall dead when we got to
Washington if dad gave him a $50 bill, and he must not give back any
change, but just act as though he always got $50 from passengers. Well,
you'd a dide to see that negro brush dad 50 times a day, and bring a
towel every few minutes to wipe off his shoes, but he kept one eye,'
about as big as an onion, on dad all the time, to watch that he didn't
get stabbed. The next morning I took dad's pants from under his pillow,
and hid them in a linen closet, and dad laid in his berth all the
forenoon, and had it out with the porter, whom he accused of stealing
them. The doctors told me I must keep dad interested and excited, so he
would not dwell on his sickness, and I did, sure as you are a foot high.
Dad stood it till almost noon, when he came out of his berth with his
pajamas on, these kind with great blue stripes like a fellow in the
penitentiary, and when he went to the wash room I found his pants
and then he dressed up and swore some at everybody but me. We got to
Washington all right, and I thought I would bust when dad fished out a
nickel and gave it to the porter, and we got out of the car before the
porter came to, and the first day we stayed in the hotel for fear the
negro would see us, as I told dad that porter would round up a gang of
negroes with razors and they would waylay us and cut dad all up into
sausage meat.

[Illustration: Fished out a nickel and gave it to the porter 042]

Dad is the bravest man I ever saw when there is no danger, but when
there is a chance for a row he is weak as a cat. I spect it is on
account of his heart being weak. A man's internal organs are a great
study. I spose a brave man, a hero, has to have all his inside things
working together, to be real up and up brave, but if his heart is
strong, and his liver is white, he goes to pieces in an emergency, and
if his liver is all right, and he tries to fight just on his liver, when
the supreme moment arrives, and his heart jumps up into his throat, and
wabbles and beats too quick, he just flunks. I would like to dissect a
real brave man, and see what condition the things inside him are in, but
it would be a waste of time to dissect dad, 'cause I know all his inner
works need to go to a watchmaker and be cleaned, and a new main spring
put in.

Well, this morning dad shaved himself, and got on his frock coat, and
his silk hat, and said we would go over to the white house and have
a talk with Teddy, but first he wanted to go and see where Jefferson
hitched his horse to the fence when he came to Washington to be
innogerated, and where Jackson smoked his corn cob pipe, and swore and
stormed around when he was mad, and to walk on the same paths where
Zachariah Taylor Zacked, Buchanan catched it, and Lincoln put down
the rebellion, and so we walked over toward the white house, and I was
scandalized. I stopped to pick up a stone to throw at a dog inside the
fence, and when I walked along behind dad, and got a rear view of his
silk hat, it seemed as though I would sink through the asphalt pavement,
for he had on an old silk hat that he wore before the war, the darnedest
looking hat I ever saw, the brim curled like a minstrel show hat, the
fur rubbed off in some places, and he looked like one of these actors
that you see pictures of walking on the railroad track, when the show
busts up at the last town. I think a man ought to dress so his young
son won't have a fit. I tried to get dad to go and buy a new hat, but he
said he was going to wait till he got to London, and buy one just like
King Edward wears, but he will never get to London with that hat, 'cause
to-night I will throw it out of the hotel window and put a piece of
stove pipe in his hat box.

Well, sir, you wouldn't believe it, but we got into the white house
without being pulled, but it was a close shave, 'cause everybody looked
at dad, and put their forefingers to their foreheads, for they thought
he was either a crank, or an ambassador from some furrin country. The
detectives got around dad when we got into the anteroom, and began to
feel of his pockets to see if he had a gun, and one of them asked me
what the old fellow wanted, and I told them he was the greatest bob cat
shooter in the west, and was on his way to Europe to invite the emperors
and things to come over to this country and shoot cats on his preserve.
Well, say, you ought to have seen how they stepped one side and waltzed
around, and one of them went in the next room and told the president dad
was there, and before we knew it we were in the president's room, and
the president began to curl up his lip, and show his teeth like some one
had said “rats.”

[Illustration: President began to curl up his lip 045]

He got hold of dad's hand, and dad backed off as though he was afraid of
being bitten, and then they sat down and talked about mountain lion and
cat shooting, and dad said he had a 22 rifle that he could pick a cat
off the back fence with every time, out of his bedroom window, and I
began to look around at the pictures. Dad and the president talked about
all kinds of shooting, from mudhens to moose, and then dad told the
president he was going abroad on account of his liver, and wanted a
letter of introduction to some of the kings and emperors, and queens,
and jacks, and all the face cards, and the president said he made it a
practice not to give any personal letters to his friends, the kings,
but that dad could tell any of them that he met that he was an American
citizen, and that would take him anywhere in Europe, and then he got
up and began to show his teeth at dad again, and dad gave him the grand
hailing sign of distress of the Grand Army and backed out, dropped his
hat, and in trying to pick it up, he stepped on it, but that made it
look better, anyway, and we found ourselves outside the room, and a lot
of common people from the country were ready to go in and talk politics
and cat shooting.

Well, we looked at pictures, and saw the state dining room where they
feed 50 diplomats at a time on mud turtle and champagne, and a boy about
my size looked sort of disdainful at me, and I told him it he would come
outside I would mash his jaw, and he said I could try it right there
if I was in a hurry to go, and I was starting to give him a swift punch
when a detective took hold of my arm and said they couldn't have any
scrap there, 'cause the president's son could not fight with common
boys, and I asked him who he called a common boy, and then dad said we
better go before war broke out in a country that was illy prepared for
hostilities on a large scale, and then I told a detective that dad was
liable to have one of his spells and begin shooting any minute, and
then the detectives all thought dad was one of these president
assassinationists, and they took him into a room and searched him, and
asked him a whole lot of fool questions, and they finally let us out,
and told us we better skip the town before night.

[Illustration: I was starting to give him a swift punch 047]

Dad got kind of heavy-hearted over that and took a notion he would like
to see ma again before crossing the briny deep, so you came near having
your little angel again soon. This weakness of dad's didn't last long,
for we're looking for a warm time in New York and old Lunnon.

So long,

Hennery.




CHAPTER IV.

     The Bad Boy and His Dad Visit Mount Vernon--Dad Weeps at the
     Grave of the Father of Our Country.

New York City.--My Dear Uncle Ezra: I got a letter from my chum this
morning, and he says he was in the grocery the day he wrote, and you
were a sight. He says that if I am going to be away several months you
will never change your shirt till I get back, for nobody around the
grocery seems to have any influence over you. I meant to have put you
under bonds before I left, to change your shirt at least quarterly, but
you ought to change it by rights every month. The way to do is to get
an almanac and make a mark on the figures at the first of the month,
and when you are studying the almanac it will remind you of your duty to
society. People east here, that is, business men in your class, change
their shirts every week or two. Try and look out for these little
matters, insignificant as they may seem, because the public has some
rights that it is dangerous for a man to ignore.

Dad and I have been down to Mount Vernon, and had a mighty solemn
time. I think dad expected that we would be met at the trolley car by
a delegation of descendants of George Washington, by a four-horse
carriage, with postilions and things, and driven to the old house, and
received with some distinction, as dad had always been an admirer
of George Washington, and had pointed with pride to his record as a
statesman and a soldier, but all we saw was a bunch of negroes, who
told us which way to walk, and charged us ten cents apiece for the
information.

At Mount Vernon we found the old house where George lived and died,
where Martha told him to wipe his feet before he came in the house, and
saw that things were cooked properly. We saw pictures of revolutionary
scenes and men of that period, relics of the days when George was the
whole thing around there. We saw the bed on which George died, and then
we went down to the icehouse and looked through the fence and saw the
marble coffins in which George and Martha were sealed up. Say, old man,
I know you haven't got much reverence, but you couldn't look through
that fence at what remains of the father of his country without taking
off your hat and thinking good things while you were there.

[Illustration: Saw the marble coffins in which George and Martha 050]

I was surprised at dad; he cried, though he never met George Washington
in all his life. I have seen dad at funerals at home, when he was a
bearer, or a mourner, and he never acted as thought it affected him
much, but there at Mount Vernon, standing within eight feet of the
remains of George Washington, he just lost his nerve, and bellered, and
I felt solemn myself, like I had been kept in after school when all the
boys were going in swimming. If a negro had not asked dad for a quarter
I know dad would have got down on his knees and been pious, but when
he gave that negro a swift kick for butting in with a commercial
proposition, in a sacred moment, dad come to, and we went up to the
house again. Dad said what he wanted was to think of George Washington
just as a country farmer, instead of a general and a president. He said
we got nearer to George, if we thought of him getting up in the morning,
putting on his old farmer pants and shirt, and going downstairs in his
stocking feet, and going out to the kitchen by the wooden bench, dipping
a gourd full of rain water out of a barrel into an earthen wash basin
and taking some soft soap out of a dish and washing himself, his shirt
open so his great hairy breast would catch the breeze, his suspenders,
made of striped bed ticking, hanging down, his hair touseled up until
he had taken out a yellow pocket comb and combed it, and then yelling
to Martha to know about how long a workingman would have to wait for
breakfast. And then dad said he liked to think of George Washington
sitting down at the breakfast table and spearing sausages out of a
platter, and when a servant brought in a mess of these old-fashioned
buckwheat cakes, as big as a pieplate, see George, in imagination, pilot
a big one on to his plate, and cover it with sausage gravy, and eat
like he didn't have any dyspepsia, and see him help Martha to buckwheat
cakes, and finally get up from breakfast like a full Christian and go
out on the farm and count up the happy slaves to see if any of them had
got away during the night.

By ginger, dad inspired me with new thoughts about the father of his
country. I had always thought of Washington as though he was constantly
crossing the Delaware in a skiff, through floating ice, with a cocked
hat on, and his coat flaps trimmed with buff nankeen stuff, a sort of
a male Eliza in “Uncle Tom's Cabin,” getting away from the hounds that
were chasing her to chew her pants. I was always thinking of George
either chopping cherry trees, or standing on a pedestal to have his
picture taken, but here at the old farm, with dad to inspire me, I was
just mingling with Washington, the planter, the neighbor, telling the
negroes where they would get off at if they didn't pick cotton fast
enough, or breaking colts, or going to the churn and drinking a quart
of buttermilk, and getting the stomach ache, and calling upstairs to
Martha, who was at the spinning wheel, or knitting woolen socks, and
asking her to fix up a brandy smash to cure his griping pains. I thought
of the father of his country taking a severe cold, and not being able
to run into a drug store for a bottle of cough sirup, or a quinine pill,
having Martha fix a tub of hot mustard water to soak those great feet of
his, and bundle him up in a flannel blanket, give him a hot whisky, and
put him to bed with a hot brick at his feet.

Then, when I looked at a duck blind out in the Potomac, near the shore,
I thought how George used to put on an old coat and slouch hat and take
his gun and go out in the blind, and shoot canvas-back ducks for dinner,
and paddle his boat out after the dead birds, the way Grover Cleveland
did a century later. I tell you, old man, the way to appreciate our
great statesmen, soldiers and scholars is to think of them just as
plain, ordinary citizens, doing the things men do nowadays. It does dad
and I more good to think of Washington and his friends camping out down
the Potomac, on a fishing trip, sleeping on a bed of pine boughs, and
cooking their own pork, and roasting sweet potatoes in the ashes, eating
with appetites like slaves, than to think of him at a state dinner in
the white house, with a French cook disguising the food so they could
not tell what it was.

O, I had rather have a picture of George Washington and Lafayette coming
up the bank of the Potomac toward the house, loaded down with ducks, and
Martha standing on the porch of Mount Vernon asking them who they bought
the ducks of and how much they cost, than to have one of those big
paintings in the white house showing George and Lafayette looking as
though they had conquered the world. If the phonograph had been invented
then, and we could listen to the conversation of those men, just as they
said things, it would be great. Imagine George saying to Lafayette, so
you cotild hear it now: “Lafe, that last shot at that canvasback you
made was the longest shot ever made on the Potomac. It was a Jim dandy,
you old frog eater,” and imagine Lafayette replying: “You bet your life,
George, I nailed that buck canvasback with a charge of number six shot,
and he never knew what struck him.” But they didn't have any phonographs
in those days and so you have got to imagine things.

How would Washington's farewell address sound now in a phonograph,
or some of George's choice swear words at a slave that had ridden a
sore-backed mule down to Alexandria after a jug of rum. I would like to
run a phonograph show with nothing in the machine but ancient talk from
George Washington, but we can have no such luck unless George is born
again.

Old man, if you ever get a furlough from business, you go down to Mount
Vernon and revel in memories of the father of his country. If you go,
hunt up a negro with a hair lip, that is a servant there, and who used
to be Washington's body servant, unless he is a liar, and tell him I
sent you and he won't do a thing to you, for a dollar or so. I told that
negro that dad was a great general, a second Washington, and he wore
all the skin off his bald head taking off his hat to dad every time dad
looked at him, and he bowed until his back ached, but when we were going
away, and dad asked me what ailed the old monkey to act that way, the
old negro thought these new Washingtons were a pretty tough lot.

All the time at Mount Vernon I couldn't get up meanness enough to
play any trick on dad, but I picked up a sort of a horse chestnut or
something, with prickers on it as sharp as needles, and as we were
getting on the trolley I slipped it down the back of dad's pants, near
where his suspenders button on, and by the time we sat down in the car
the horse chestnut had worked down where dad is the largest, and when he
leaned back against the seat he turned pale and wiggled around and asked
me if he looked bad.

[Illustration: Slipped it down the back of dad's pants 057]

I told him he looked like a corpse, which encouraged him so he almost
fainted. He asked me if I had heard of any contagious diseases that were
prevalent in Virginia, 'cause he felt as though he had caught something.
I told him I would ask the conductor, so I went and asked the conductor
what time we got to Washington, and then I went back to dad and told
him the conductor said there was no disease of any particular account,
except smallpox and yellow fever, and that the first symptom of smallpox
was a prickling sensation in the small of the back.

Dad turned green and said he had got it all right, and I had the
darndest time getting him back to the hotel at Washington. Say, I had to
help him undress, and I took the horse chestnut and put it in the foot
of the bed, and got dad in, and I went downstairs to see a doctor, and
then I came back and told him the doctor said if the prickly sensation
went to his feet he was in no danger from smallpox, as it was an
evidence that an old vaccination of years ago had got in its work and
knocked the disease out of his system lengthwise, and when I told dad
that he raised up in bed and said he was saved, for ever since I went
out of the room he had felt that same dreaded prickling at work on his
feet, and he was all right.

I told dad it was a narrow escape and that it ought to be a warning
to him. Dad has to wear a dress suit to dinner here and cough up money
every time he turns around, 'cause I have told the bell boys dad is a
bonanza copper king, and they are not doing a thing to dad.

O, I guess I am doing just as the doctors at home ordered, in keeping
dad's mind occupied.

Well, so long, old man, I have got to go to dinner with dad, and I am
going to order the dinner myself, dad said I could, and if I don't put
him into bankruptcy, you don't know your little

Hennery.




CHAPTER V.

     The Bad Boy and His Dad Have Dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria--
     The Bad Boy Orders Dinner--The Old Man Gets Stuck--Tries to
     Rescue a Countess in Distress.

Waldorf-Astoria, New York.--Dear Uncle Ezra: We are still at this
tavern, but we don't do anything but sleep here, and stay around in
the lobby evenings to let people look at us, and dad wears that old
swallow-tail coat he had before the war, but he has got a new silk hat,
since we got here; one of these shiny ones that is so slick it makes his
clothes look offul bum. We about went broke on the first supper we
had, or dinner they call it here. You see, dad thought this was about a
three-dollar-a-day house, and that the meals were included, like they do
at Oshkosh, and so when we went down to dinner dad said we wouldn't do
a thing to old Astor. He let me order the dinner, but told me to order
everything on the bill-of-sale, because we wanted to get the worth of
our three dollars a day. Well, honest, I couldn't order all there was,
'cause you couldn't have got it all on a billiard table. Say, that list
they gave me had everything on it that was ever et or drunk, but I told
dad they would fire us out if we ordered the whole prescription, so all
I ordered was terrapin, canvasback duck, oysters, clams, crabs, a lot of
new kinds of fish, and some beef and mutton, and turkey, and woodcock,
and partridge, and quail, and English pheasant, and lobster and salads
and ices, and pie and things, just to stay our stomachs, and when it
came to wine, dad weakened, because he didn't want to set a bad example
to me, so he ordered hard cider for hisself and asked me if I wanted
anything to drink, and I ordered brown pop. You'd a been tickled to see
the waiter when he took that order, 'cause I don't s'pose anybody ever
ordered cider and brown pop there since Astor skinned muskrats for a
living, when he was a trapper up north. Gosh, but when they brought that
dinner in, you ought to have seen the sensation it created. Most of the
people in the great dining hall looked at dad as though he was a Crases,
or a Rockefeller, and the head waiter bowed low to dad, and dad thought
it was Astor, and dad looked dignified and hurt at being spoken to by a
common tavern keeper. Well, we et and et, but we couldn't get away with
hardly any of it, and dad wanted to wrap some of the duck and lobsters
and things in a newspaper and take it to the room for a lunch, but the
waiter wouldn't have it. But the cyclone struck the house when dad and
I got up to go out of the dining-room, and the waiter brought dad the
check.

[Illustration: The waiter brought dad the check 063]

“What is this?” said dad, as he put on his glasses and looked at the
check which was $43 and over.

“Dinner check, sir,” said the waiter, as he straightened back and held
out his hand.

“Why, ain't this house run on the American plan?” said dad, as his chin
began to tremble.

“No, sir, on the Irish plan,” said the waiter. “You pays for what you
horders,” and dad began to dig up. He looked at me as though I was to
blame, when he told me to order all there was in sight. Well, I have
witnessed heart-rending scenes, but I never saw anything that would
draw tears like dad digging down for that $43. The doctors at home had
ordered excitement for dad, but this seemed to be an overdose, and I
was afraid he would collapse and I offered him my glass of brown pop to
stimulate him, but he told me I could go plumb, and if I spoke to him
again he would maul me. He got his roll half out of his pistol pocket,
and then talked loud and said it was a damoutridge, and he wanted to see
Astor himself before he would allow himself to be held up by highwaymen,
and then all the other diners stood up and looked at dad, and a lot of
waiters and bouncers surrounded him, and then he pulled out the roll,
and it was pitiful to see him wet his trembling thumb on his trembling
dry tongue and begin to peel off the bills, like you peel the layers off
an onion, but he got off enough to pay for the dinner, gave the waiter
half a dollar, and smiled a sickly smile at the head waiter, and I
led him out of the dining-room a broken-down old man. As we got to the
lobby, where the horse show of dress-suit chappies was beginning the
evening procession, I said to dad: “Next time we will dine out, I
guess,” and at that he rallied and seemed to be able to take a joke, for
he said: “We dined out this time. We dined out $43,” and then we joined
the procession of walkers around, and tried to look prosperous, and
after awhile dad called a bell boy, and asked him if there wasn't a good
dairy lunch counter near the Waldorf, where a man could go and get a
bowl of bread and milk, and the bell boy gave him the address of a
dairy lunch place, and I can see my finish, 'cause from this out we will
probably live on bread and milk while we are here, and I hate bread and
milk.

It got all around the hotel, about the expensive dinner dad ordered for
himself and the little heir to his estate, and everybody wanted to get
acquainted with dad and try to get some stock in his copper mine. I had
told dad about my telling the boys he was a bonanza copper miner, and
he never batted an eye when they asked him about his mine, and he looked
the part.

[Illustration: One man wanted dad to cash a check 067]

One man wanted dad to cash a check, 'cause the bank was closed, and he
was a rich-looking duke, and dad was just going to get his roll out and
peel off some more onion, when I said: “Not on your tintype, Mr. Duke,”
 and dad left his roll in his pocket, and the duke gave me a look as
though he wanted to choke me, and went away, saying: “There is Mr.
Pierpont Morgan, and I can get him to cash it.” I saved dad over a
hundred dollars on that scheme, and so we are making money every minute.
We went to our room early, so dad could digest his $43 worth of glad
food.

Gee, but this house got ripped up the back before morning. You remember
I told you about a countess, or a duchess, or some kind of high-up
female that had a room next to our room. Well, she is a beaut, from
Butte, Mont., or Cuba, or somewhere, for she acts like a queen that has
just stepped off her throne for a good time. She has got a French maid
that is a peacharino. You know that horse chestnut, with the prickers
on, that I put in dad's pants at Washington. Well, I have still got it,
and as it gets dry the prickers are sharper than needles, sharper even
than a servant's tooth, as it says in the good book. I thought I would
give dad a run for his money, 'cause exercise and excitement are good
for a man that dined heartily on $43 worth of rich food, so when we went
to our room I told dad that I was satisfied from what a bell boy told
me that the countess in the next room, who had gold cords over her
shoulders for suspenders, was stuck on him, because she was always
inquiring who the lovely old gentleman was with the sweet little boy.
Dad he got so interested that he forgot to cuss me about ordering that
dinner, and he said he had noticed her, and would like real well to get
acquainted with her, 'cause a man far away from home, sick as a dog,
with no loving wife to look after him, needed cheerful company. So I
told him I had it all arranged for him to meet her, and then I went out
in the hall, sort of whistling around, and the French maid came out
and broke some English for me, and we got real chummy, 'cause she was
anxious to learn English, and I wanted to learn some French words; so
she invited me into the room, and we sat on the sofa and exchanged words
quite awhile, until she was called to the telephone in the other room.
Say, you ought to have seen me. I jumped up and put my hand inside
the sheets of the bed, and put that chestnut in there, right about the
middle of the bed, and then, after learning French quite a spell, with
the maid, we heard the countess getting off' the elevator, and the maid
said I must skip, 'cause it was the countess' bed-time, and I went back
and told dad the whole thing was arranged for him to meet the countess,
in a half an hour or so, as she had to write a few letters to some
kings and dukes, and when she gave a little scream; as though she was
practicing her voice on an opera, or something, dad was to go and rap
at the door. Gosh, but I was sorry for dad, for he was so nervous and
anxious for the half hour to expire that he walked up and down the room,
and looked at himself in the mirror, and acted like he had indigestion.
I had told the maid that she and the countess must feel perfectly safe,
if anything ever happened, 'cause my dad was the bravest man in the
world, and he would rush to the rescue of the countess, if a burglar got
in in the night, or the water pipes busted, or anything, and all she had
to do was to screech twice and dad would be on deck, and she must open
the door quicker-n scat, and she thanked me, and said she would, and for
me to come, too. Say, on the dead, wasn't that a plot for an amateur to
cook up? Well, sir, we had to wait so long for the countess to get on
the horse chestnut that I got nervous myself, but after awhile there
came a scream that would raise your hair, and I told dad the countess
was singing the opera. Dad said: “Hennery, that ain't no opera, that's
tragedy,” but she gave two or three more stanzas, and I told dad he
better hustle, and we went out in the hall and rapped at the door of the
countess' room, and the maid opened it, and told us to send for a doctor
and a policeman, 'cause the countess was having a fit. Well, say, that
was the worst ever. The countess had jumped out of bed, and was pulling
the lace curtains around her, but dad thought she was crazy, and was
going to jump out of the window, and he made a grab for her, and he
shouted to her to “be cam, be cam, poor woman, and I will rescue you.”
 I tried to pacify the maid the best I knew how, and dad was getting the
countess calmer, but she evidently thought he was an assassin, for every
little while she would yell for help, and then the night watchman came
in with a house policeman, and one of them choked dad off, and they
asked the countess what the trouble was, and she said she had just
retired when she was stabbed about a hundred times in the small of the
back with a poniard, and she knew conspirators were assassinating her,
and she screamed, and this old bandit, meaning dad, came in, and the
little monkey, meaning me, had held his hand over her maid's mouth, so
she could not make any outcry.

[Illustration: Night watchman came in with a house policeman 071]

Well, I got my horse chestnut all right, out of the bed, and the
policeman told the countess not to be alarmed, and go back to bed, and
they took dad and I to our room, and asked us all about it. Gee, but
dad put up a story about hearing a woman scream in the next room, and,
thinking only of the duty of a gentleman under the circumstances, rushed
to her rescue, and all there was to it was that she must have had a
nightmare, but he said if he had it to do over again, he would do the
same. Anyway, the policeman believed dad, and they went off and left us,
and we went to bed, but dad said: “Hennery, you understand, I don't want
to make any more female acquaintances, see, among the crowned heads,
and from this out we mingle only with men. The idea of me going into a
woman's room and finding a Floradora with fits and tantrums, and me, a
sick man. Now, don't write to your ma about this, 'cause she never did
have much confidence in me, around women with fits.” So, Uncle Ezra, you
must not let this get into the papers, see?

Well, we have bought our tickets for Liverpool, and shall sail
to-morrow, and while you are making up your cash account Saturday night,
we shall be on the ocean. I s'pose I will write you on the boat, if they
will tie it up somewhere so it will stand level. Your dear boy. Hennery.




CHAPTER VI.

     The Bad Boy Writes the Old Groceryman About Ocean Voyages--
     His Dad Has an Argument Over a Steamer Chair.

On Board the Lucinia, Mid-ocean.

Dear Old Geezer.

I take the first opportunity, since leaving New York, to write you,
'cause the boat, after three days out, has got settled down so it runs
level, and I can write without wrapping my legs around the table legs,
to hold me down. I have tried a dozen times to write, but the sea was so
rough that part of the time the table was on top of me and part of the
time I was on top, and I was so sick I seem to have lost my mind, over
the rail, with the other things supposed to be inside of me. O, old man,
you think you know what seasickness is, 'cause you told me once about
crossing Lake Michigan on a peach boat, but lake sickness is easy
compared with the ocean malady. I could enjoy common seasickness and
think it was a picnic, but this salt water sickness takes the cake. I am
sorry for dad, because he holds more than I do, and he is so slow
about giving up meals that he has paid for, that it takes him longer to
commune with nature, and he groans so, and swears some.

[Illustration: I am sorry for dad, because he holds more than I do 074]

I don't see how a person can swear when he is seasick on the ocean, with
no sure thing that he will ever see land again, and a good prospect of
going to the bottom, where you got to die in the arms of a devil fish,
with a shark biting pieces out of your tender loin and a smoked halibut
waiting around for his share of your corpse, and whales blowing syphons
of water and kicking because they are so big that they can't get at you
to chew cuds of human gum, and porpoises combing your damp hair with
their fine tooth comb fins, and sword fish and sawtooth piscatorial
carpenters sawing off steaks. Gee, but it makes me crawl. I once saw a
dead dog in the river, with bull heads and dog-fish ripping him up the
back, and I keep thinking I had rather be that dog, in a nice river at
home, with bullheads that I knew chewing me at their leisure, than to be
a dead boy miles down in the ocean, with strange fish and sea serpents
quarreling over the tender pieces in me. A man told me that if you smoke
cigarets and get saturated with nickoteen, and you are drownded, the
fish will smell of you, and turn up their noses and go away and leave
your remains, so I tried a cigaret, and, gosh, but I had rather be et
by fish than smoke another, on an ocean steamer. It only added to my
sickness, and I had enough before. I prayed some, when the boat stood on
its head and piled us all up in the front end, but a chair struck me on
the place where Fitzsimmons hit Corbett, and knocked the prayer all out
of me, and when the boat stood on her butt end and we all slid back the
whole length of the cabin, and I brought up under the piano, I tried to
sing a hymn, such as I used to in the 'Piscopal choir, before my voice
changed, but the passengers who were alive yelled for some one to choke
me, and I didn't sing any more. Dad was in the stateroom when we were
rolling back and forth in the cabin, and between sicknesses he came
out to catch me and take me into the stateroom, but he got the rolling
habit, too, and he rolled a match with an actress who was voyaging for
her health, and they got offully mixed up. He tried to rescue her, and
grabbed hold of her belt and was reeling her in all right, when a man
who said he was her husband took dad by the neck and said he must keep
his hands off or get another nose put on beside the one he had, and then
they all rolled under a sofa, and how it came out I don't know, but the
next morning dad's eye was blacked, and the fellow who said he was her
husband had his front teeth knocked out, and the actress lost her back
hair and had to wear a silk handkerchief tied around her head the rest
of the trip, and she looked like a hired girl who has been out to a
saloon dance.

The trouble with dad is that he butts in too much. He thinks he is the
whole thing and thinks every crowd he sees is a demonstration for him.
When the steamer left New York, there were hundreds of people on the
dock to see friends off, and they had flowers to present to Unfriends,
and dad thought they were all for him, and he reached for every bunch of
roses that was brought aboard, and was going to return thanks for them,
when they were jerked away from him, and he looked hurt. When the gang
plank was pulled in, and the boat began to wheeze, and grunt, and move
away from the dock, and dad saw the crowd waving handkerchiefs and
laughing, and saying _bon voyage_, he thought they were doing it all for
him, and he started in to make a speech, thanking his fellow countrymen
for coming to see him off, and promising them that he would prove a true
representative of his beloved country in his travels abroad, and that
he would be true to the stars and stripes wherever fortune might place
him, and all that rot, when the boat got so far away they could not hear
him, and then he came off his perch, and said, “Hennery, that little
impromptu demonstration to your father, on the eve of his departure from
his native land, perhaps never to return, ought to be a deep and lasting
lesson to you, and to show you that the estimation in which I am held
by our people, is worth millions to you, and you can point with pride to
your father.” I said “rats” and dad said he wouldn't wonder if the boat
was full of rats, and then we stood on deck, and watched the objects of
interest down the bay.

[Illustration: A speech, thanking his fellow countrymen 078]

As we passed the statue of Liberty, which France gave to the republic,
on Bedloe's Island, dad started to make a speech to the passengers, but
one of the officers of the boat told dad this was no democratic caucus,
and that choked him off, but he was loaded for a speech, and I knew
it was only a matter of time when he would have to fire it off, but I
thought when we got outside the bar, into the ocean, his speech would
come up with the rest of the stuff, and I guess it did, for after he
began to be sea sick he had to keep his mouth shut, which was a great
relief to me, for I felt that he would say something that would get this
country in trouble with other nations, as there were lots of foreigners
on board. I heard that J. Pierpont Morgan was on board, and I told
everybody I got in conversation with that dad was Pierpont Morgan, and
when people began to call him Mr. Morgan, I told dad the passengers
thought he was Morgan; the great financier, and it tickled dad, and he
never denied it. Anyway, the captain put dad and I at his own table,
and he called me “Little Pierp,” and everybody discussed great financial
questions with dad, and everything would have been lovely the whole
trip, only Morgan came amongst us after he had been sea sick for three
days, and they gave him a seat opposite us, and with two Morgans at the
same table it was a good deal like two Uncle Tom's in an Uncle Tom's
Cabin show, so dad had to stay in his stateroom on account of sickness,
a good deal. Then dad got to walking on deck and flirting with the
female passengers. Say, did you ever see an old man who was stuck on
hisself, and thought that every woman who looked at him, from curiosity,
or because he had a wart on his neck, and watch him get busy making 'em
believe he is a young and kitteny thing, who is irresistible? Gee,
but it makes me tired. No man can mash, and make eyes, and have a love
scene, when he has to go to the rail every few minutes and hump hisself
with something in him that is knocking at the door of his palate, to
come out the same way it went in. Dad found a widow woman who looked
back at him kind of sassy, when he braced up to her, and when the ship
rolled and side-stepped, he took hold of her arm to steady her, and she
said maybe they better sit down on deck and talk it over, so dad found
a couple of steamer chairs that were not in use, and they sat down near
together, and dad took hold of her hand to see if she was nervous, and
he told me I could go any play mumbletypeg in the cabin, and I went in
the cabin and looked out of the window at dad and the widow. Say, you
wouldn't think two chairs could get so close, and dad was sure love
sick, and so was she. The difference between love sick and sea sick is
that in love sick you look red in the face and snuggle up, and squeeze
hands, and look fondly, and swallow your emotion, and try to wait
patiently until it is dark enough so the spectators won't notice
anything, and in sea sickness you get pale in the face, and spread
apart, and let go of hands, and after you have stood it as long as
you can you rush to the rail and act as though you were going to jump
overboard, and then stop sudden and let-'er-go-gallagher, right before
folks, and after it is over you try to look as though you had enjoyed
it. I will say this much for dad, he and the widow never played a duet
over the rail, but they took turns, and dad held her as tenderly as
though they were engaged, and when he got her back to the steamer chair
he stroked her face and put camphor to her nose, and acted like an
undertaker that wasn't going to let the remains get away from him. They
were having a nice convalescent time, just afore it broke up, and hadn't
either of them been sick for ten minutes, and dad had put his arm around
her shoulders, and was talking cunning to her, and she was looking
lovingly into dad's eyes, and they were talking of meeting again in
France in a few weeks, where she was going to rent a villa, and dad was
saying he would be there with both feet, when I opened the window and
said, “The steward is bringing around a lunch, and I have ordered two
boiled pork sandwiches for you two easy marks.” Well, you'd a dide to
see 'em jump. What there is about the idea of fat pork that makes people
who are sea sick have a relapse, I don't know, but the woman grabbed her
stum-mix in both hands and left dad and rushed into the cabin yelling
“enough,” or something like that, and dad laid right back in the chair
and blatted like a calf, and said he would kill me dead when we got
ashore. Just then an Englishman came along and told dad he better get
up out of his chair, and dad said whose chair you talking about, and the
man said the chair was his, and if dad didn't get out of it, he would
kick him in the pants, and dad said he hadn't had a good chance at an
Englishman since the Revolutionary war, and he just wanted a chance
to clean up enough Englishmen for a mess, and dad got up and stood at
“attention,” and the Englishman squared off like a prize fighter, and
they were just going to fight the battle of Bunker Hill over again, when
I run up to an officer with gold lace on his coat and lemon pie on his
whiskers, and told him an old crazy Yankee out on deck was going to
murder a poor sea sick Englishman, and the officer rushed out and took
dad by the coat collar and made him quit, and when he found what the
quarrel was about, he told dad all the chairs were private property
belonging to the passengers, and for him to keep out of them, and he
apologized to the Englishman and they went into the saloon and settled
it with high balls, and dad beat the Englishman by drinking two high
balls to his one. Then dad set into a poker game, with ten cents ante,
and no limit, and they played along for a while until dad got four
jacks, and he bet five dollars, and a Frenchman raised him five thousand
dollars, and dad laid down his hand and said the game was too rich for
his blood, and when he reached in his vest pocket for money to pay for
his poker chips he found that his roll was gone, and he said he would
leave his watch for security until he could go to his state room and get
some money, and then he found that his watch had been pinched, and the
Englishman said he would be good for it, and dad came out in the cabin
and wanted me to help him find the widow, cause he said when she laid
her head on his shoulder, to recover from her sickness, he felt a
fumbling around his vest, but he thought it was nothing but his stomach
wiggling to get ready for another engagement, but now he knew she had
robbed him. Say, dad and I looked all over that boat for the widow, but
she simply had evaporated. But land is in sight, and we shall land at
Liverpool this afternoon, and dad is going to lay for the widow at the
gang plank, and he won't do a thing to her. I guess not. Well, you will
hear from me in London next, and I'll tell you if dad got his money and
watch back.

Hennery.




CHAPTER VII.

     The Bad Boy and His Dad Eat Fog--Call on Astor--A Dynamite
     Outrage.

London, England.

Dear Old Man:

Well, sir, if a court sentenced me to live in this town, I would appeal
the case, and ask the judge to temper his sentence with mercy, and hang
me. Say, the fog here is so thick you have to feel around like a blind
goddess, and when you show up through the fog you look about eighteen
feet high, and you are so wet you want to be run through a clothes
wringer every little while. For two days we never left the hotel, but
looked out of the windows waiting for the fog to go by, and watching the
people swim through it, without turning a hair. Dad was for going right
to the Lord Mayor and lodging a complaint, and demanding that the fog be
cleared off, so an American citizen could go about town and blow in his
money, but I told him he could be arrested for treason. He come mighty
near being arrested on the cars from Liverpool to London. When we got
off the steamer and tried to find the widow who robbed dad of his
watch and roll of money, but never found her, we were about the last
passengers to reach the train, and when we got ready to get on we found
these English cars that open on the sides, and they put you into a box
stall with some other live stock, and lock you in, and once in a while
a guard opens the door to see if you are dead from suffocation, or have
been murdered by the other passengers. Dad kicked on going in one of the
kennels the first thing, and said he wanted a parlor car; but the guard
took dad by the pants and gave him a shove, and tossed me in on top of
dad, and two other passengers and a woman in the compartment snickered,
and dad wanted to fight all of 'em except the woman, but he concluded to
mash her. When the door closed clad told the guard he would walk on his
neck when the door opened, and that he was not an entry in a dog show,
and he wanted a kennel all to himself, and asked for dog biscuit. Gee,
but that guard was mad, and he gave dad a look that started the train
going. I whispered to dad to get out his revolver, because the other
passengers looked like hold up men, and he took his revolver out of
his satchel and put it in his pistol pocket, and looked fierce, and the
woman began to act faint, while the passengers seemed to be preparing
to jump on dad if he got violent. When the train stopped at the first
station I got out and told the guard that the old gentleman in there
was from Helena, Montana, and that he had a reputation from St. Paul
to Portland, and then I held up both hands the way train robbers make
passengers hold up their hands. When I went back in the car dad was
talking to the woman about her resembling a woman he used to know in
the states, and he was just going to ask her how long she had been so
beautiful, when the guard came to the side door and called the woman out
into another stall, and then one of the passengers pulled out a pair
of handcuffs and told dad he might as well surrender, because he was a
Scotland yard detective and had spotted dad as an American embezzler,
and if he drew that gun he had in his pocket there would be a dead
Yankee in about four minutes. Well, I thought dad had nerve before, but
he beat the band, right there. He unbuttoned his overcoat and put his
finger on a Grand Army button in his buttonhole, and said, “Gentlemen,
I am an American citizen, visiting the crowned heads of the old world,
with credentials from the President of the United States, and day after
tomorrow I have a date to meet your king, on official business that
means much to the future peace of our respective countries. Lay a hand
on me and you hang from the yard arm of an American battleship.” Well,
sir, I have seen a good many bluffs in my time, but I never saw the
equal of that, for the detective turned white, and apologized, and asked
dad and I out to luncheon at the next station, and we went and ate all
there was, and when the time was up the detective disappeared and dad
had to pay for the luncheon, but he kicked all the way to London, and
the guard would not listen to his complaints, but told him if he tried
to hold up the train he would be thrown out the window and run over by
the train. We had the compartment to ourselves the rest of the way to
London, except about an hour, when the guard shoved in a farmer who
smelled like cows, and dad tried to get in a quarrel with him, about
English roast beef coming from America, but the man didn't have his
arguing clothes on, so dad began to find fault with me, and the man
told dad to let up on the kid or he would punch his bloody 'ed off. That
settled it, when the man dropped his “h,” dad thought he was one of the
nobility, and he got quite chummy with the Englishman, and then we
got to London, and dad had a quarrel about his baggage, and after
threatening to have a lot of fights he got his trunk on the roof of a
cab, and in about an hour we got to the hotel, and then the fog began an
engagement. If the fog here ever froze stiff, the town would look like
a piece of ice with fish frozen in. Gee, but I would like to have it
freeze in front of our hotel, so I could take an ax and go out and chop
a frozen girl out, and thaw her till she came to.

Say, old man, if anybody ever wants to treat you to a trip to Europe,
don't come here, but go to some place where they don't think they
can speak English. You can understand a Nitalian or a Frenchman, or a
Dutchman, who can't speak English, and knows he can't, better than you
can an Englishman who thinks he can speak English, and can't, “don't you
know.” Everything is “don't you know.” If a servant gives you an evening
paper, he says, “'Ere's your paiper, don't you know,” and if a man
should--I don't say they would, but if a man _should_ give you a civil
answer, when you asked him the name of a street, he would look at you
as though you were a cannibal, and say, “Regent street, don't you know,”
 and then he would act as though you had broken him of his rest. Dad
asked more than a dozen men where Bill Astor lived, and of all the
population of London I don't believe anybody knows, except one newsboy.
We rode half a day on top of a bus, through streets so crowded that the
horses had to creep, and dad hung on for fear the bus would be tipped
over, and finally we got out into the suburbs, where the rich people
live, and dad said we were right on the trail of King Edward, and we got
off and loitered around, and dad saw a beautiful place, with a big iron
fence, and a gate as big as a railroad bridge, and dad asked a newsboy
who lived there, and the boy made up a face at dad and said, “H'astor,
you bloke,” and he put out his hand for a tip. It was the first civil
answer dad had received in London, so he gave the boy a dollar. The boy
fell over on the sidewalk, dead, and dad started to go away for fear he
would be arrested for murder, but I kicked the boy on the pants, and he
got up and yelled some kind of murdered English, and more than a dozen
newsboys came on a gallop, and when the boy told them what had happened
they all wanted dad to ask them questions. I told the boys dad was
Andrew Carnegie, and that he was giving away millions of dollars, so
when dad got to the gate of the beautiful H'astor place, the boys yelled
Andrew Carnegie, and a flunkey flunked the gate open and dad and I went
in, and walked up to the house. Astor was on the veranda, smoking a
Missouri corn cob pipe, and drinking American beer, and seemed to
be wishing he was back home in America. Dad marched right up to the
veranda, like a veteran soldier, and Astor could see dad was an American
by the dandruff on his coat collar, and Astor said, “You are an American
citizen and you are welcome. Once I was like you, and didn't care a
continental dam for anybody, but in a moment of passion I renounced my
country, swore allegiance to this blawsted country, and everybody hates
me here, and I don't dare go home to collect my rent for fear I will be
quarantined at Ellis Island and sent back to England as an undesirable
emigrant who has committed a crime, and is not welcome in the land where
I was born. Old man, have a glass of Milwaukee beer and let's talk of
your home and my birthplace, and forget that there is such a country as
England.” Dad sat down on the porch, and I went out on the lawn chasing
peacocks and treeing guinea hens, and setting dogs on the swans, until a
butler or a duke or something took me by the collar and shook me till my
teeth got loose, and he took me back to the veranda and sat me down on
the bottom step so hard my hair raised right up stiff, like a porcupine.
Then I listened to dad and Astor talk about America, and I never saw a
man who seemed to be so ashamed that he was a brevet Englishman, as he
did. He said he had so much money that it made his headache to hear the
interest accumulate, nights, when he couldn't sleep, and yet he had no
more enjoyment than Dreyfus did on Devil's Island. He had automobiles
that would fill our exposition building, horses and carriages by the
score, but he never enjoyed a ride about London, because only one person
in ten thousand knew him, and those who did looked upon him with pity
and contempt because he had renounced his country to get solid with the
English aristocracy, and nobody would speak to him unless they wanted to
borrow money, and if they did borrow money from him he was afraid they
would pay it back, and make him trouble counting it. He told dad he
wanted to get back into America, and become a citizen again of that
grand old country of the stars and stripes, and asked dad how he could
do it, for he said he had rather work in a slaughter house in America
than be a grand duke in England. I never saw dad look so sorry for a man
as he did for Astor, and he told him the only way was to sell out his
ranch in London and go back on an emigrant ship, take out his first
papers, vote the democratic ticket and eventually become a citizen.
Astor was thinking over the proposition, and dad had asked him if he
was not afraid of dynamiters, when he shuddered and said every day he
expected to be blown sky high, and finally he smelled something burning
and said the smell reminded him of an American 4th of July. You see, I
had been sitting still on the step of the veranda so long I got nervous,
for something exciting, so I took a giant firecracker out of my
pocket and lit the long tail, and shoved it under the porch and looked
innocent, and just then one of the flunkies with the tightest pants you
ever saw came along and patted me on the head and said I was a nice boy,
and that made me mad, and when he went to sit down beside me on the step
I took my horse chestnut out of my pocket and put it on the step just
where he sat down, and how it happened to come out so I don't know, it
must have been Providence.

[Illustration: Now I lay me down to sleep 094]

You see just as the flunkey flunked on the chestnut burr, the fire
cracker went off, and the man jumped up and said '“Ells-fire, h'am
blowed,” and he had his hands on his pants, and the air was full of
smoke, and dad got on his knees and said, “Now I lay me,” and Mr. Astor
fainted all over a rocking chair and tipped beer bottles on the veranda
and more than forty servants came, and I told dad to come on, and we got
outside the gate, ahead of the police, and got a cab and drove quicker
than scat to the hotel, and I ast dad what he thought it was that went
off, and he said “You can search me,” but he said he had got enough of
trying to reform escaped Americans, and we got in the hotel and laid
low, and the newspapers told about a dynamite outrage, and laid it to
anarchists. Well I must close, cause we are going to see the American
minister and get a date to meet King' Edward. We won't do a thing to
Edward.

Yours,

Hennery.




CHAPTER VIII.

     The Bad Boy Writes About the Craze for Gin in the
     Whitechapel District--He Gives His Dad a Scare in the Tower
     of London.

London, England.--My Dear Chum: I received your letter yesterday, and it
made me homesick. Gee, but if I could be home there with you and go down
to the swimming hole and get in all over, and play tag in the sand, and
tie some boy's pants and shirt in knots, and yell that the police are
coming, and all grab our clothes under our arms and run across lots with
no clothes on, and get in a barn and put on our clothes, and dry our
hair by pounding it with a stick, so we would not get licked when we got
home, life would be worth living, but here all I do is to dodge people
on the streets and see them look cross when they step on me.

Say, boy, you will never know your luck in being a citizen of good old
America, instead of a subject of Great Britain, because you have got
to be rich or be hungry here, and if you are too rich you have got no
appetite. You have heard of the roast beef of old England, but nobody
eats it but the dukes and bankers. The working men never even saw
a picture of a roast beef, and yet we look upon all Englishmen as
beef-eaters, but three-fourths of the people in this town look hungry
and discouraged, and they never seem to know whether they are going to
have any supper.

I went down to a market this morning where the middle class and the very
poor people buy their supplies, and it would make you sick to see them.
They buy small loaves of bread and a penny's worth of tea, and that is
breakfast, and if a man is working he takes some of the bread to work
for lunch, and the wife or mother buys a carrot or a quarter of a
cabbage, and maybe a bone with a piece of meat about as big as a fish
bait, and that makes supper, with a growler of beer.

Say, the chunk of meat with a bone that an American butcher would throw
at a dog that he had never been introduced to would be a banquet for a
large family over here.

I have been down into the White Chapel district, which is the Five
Points of London, and of the thousands of tough people I saw there
was not a man but looked as though he would cut your liver out for a
shilling, and every woman was drunk on gin. What there is about gin that
makes it the national beverage for bad people beats me, for it looks
like water, tastes like medicine and smells like cold storage eggs. At
home when a person takes a drink of beer or whisky he at least looks
happy for a minute, and maybe he laughs, but here nobody laughs unless
somebody gets hurt, and that seems to tickle everybody in the White
Chapel district.

The people look mad and savage when they are not drinking, as though
they were only looking for an opportunity to commit murder, and then
when they take a drink of gin, instead of smiling and smacking their
lips as though it was good and braced them up, they look as though
they had been stabbed with a dirk and they put on a look of revenge,
as though they would like to wring a child's neck or cut holes in the
people they meet.

Two drinks of gin makes a man or woman look as though they had swallowed
a buzz saw. I always thought drinking liquor made people think they were
enjoying themselves, or that they took it to drive away care and make
them forget their sorrows, but when these people drink gin they seem
to do it the way an American drinks carbolic acid, to end the whole
business quick.

At home the drinker drinks to make him feel like he was at a picnic.
Here every drinker acts like a suicide, who only hopes that he may
commit a murder before the gin ends his career. And there are hundreds
of thousands of people in this town who have no ambition except to get
a bit of bread to sustain them till they can get a drink of gin, and
gradually they let up on bread entirely and feed on gin, and look like
mad dogs and snarl at everybody they see, as much as to say: “What are
you going to do about it?”

[Illustration: Snarl at everybody they see 101]

A good square American meal would give them a fit, and they would go to
a hospital and die if the meal could not be got out of them.

Gosh, but I was glad to get out of the White Chapel district, and I kept
looking back for fear one of the men or women would slit me up the back
with a butcher knife, and laugh like an insane asylum inmate.

Do you know, those people who drink gin and go hungry are different from
our American murderers. Our murderers will assault you with a smile, rob
you with a joke on their tongue's end, and give you back car fare when
they hold you up, and if they murder you they will do it easy and lay
you out with your hands across on your breast and notify the coroner,
but your White Chapel murderer wants to disembowel you and cut you up
into chunks, and throw your remains head first into something nasty,
and if you have money enough on your person to buy a bottle of gin your
murderer is as well satisfied as though he got a roll. Some men in our
country commit murders in order to get money to lay away so they can
live a nice, respectable life and be good ever afterwards, but your slum
murderer in London just kills because his stomach craves a drink, and
when he gets it he is tame, like a tiger that has eaten a native of
India.

You may think this letter is a solemn occasion because I tell you about
things that are not funny, but if you ever traveled abroad you will find
that there is no fun anywhere except in America unless you make it or
buy it.

We are taking in the solemn things first in order to get dad's mind in a
condition so he can be cured of things he thinks ail him. I took dad to
the Tower of London, and when we got out of it he wanted to have America
interfere and have the confounded place burned down and grass sown on
the site and a park made of it.

The tower covers 13 acres of ground, and there are more things brought
to a visitor's attention that ought to be forgotten than you ever
thought about.

I remember attending the theater at home and seeing Richard the Third
played, and I remember how my sympathies were aroused for the two little
boy princes that were murdered by Richard the Third, but I thought it
was a fake play, and that there was nothing true about it, but, by gosh,
it was right here in the Tower of London that the old hump-backed cuss
murdered those little princes, and dad and I stood right on the spot,
and the beef-eater who showed us around told us all the particulars. Dad
was indignant, and said to the beef-eater:

[Illustration: Stood around and let Richard kill those princes 098]

“Do you mean to tell me you stood around and let Richard kill those
princes without uttering a protest or protecting them or ringing for
the police? By the great hornspoon, you must have been accessory to the
fact, and you ought to be arrested and hung,” and dad pounded his cane
on the stone floor and looked savage.

The beef-eater got red in the face and said: “Begging your pardon, don't
you know, but h'l was not 'ere at the time. This 'istory was made six
'undred years ago.”

Dad begged the man's pardon and told him he supposed the boys were
murdered a year or two ago, and he gave the beef-eater a dollar, and he
was so gratified I think he would have had a murder committed for dad
right there and then if dad had insisted on it.

You feel in going through the tower like you was in an American
slaughter house, for it was here that kings and queens were beheaded
by the dozen. They showed us axes that were used to behead people, and
blocks that the heads of the victims were laid on, and the places where
the heads fell on the floor. It seemed that in olden times when a king
or a queen got too gay, the anti-kings or queens would go to the palace
and catch the king or queen in the act, and take them by the neck and
hustle them to the tower, and when a king or queen got in the tower they
went out on the installment plan, and after being thrown in the gutter
for the mob to recognize, and walk on the bodies, they would bring
them back in the tower, and seal them up in a pigeon hole for future
generations to cry over.

All my life I have had in our house to look at a picture of beautiful
Anne Boleyn, and here I stood right where her head was cut off, and I
couldn't help thinking of how we in America got our civilization from
the descendants of the English people who cut her head off.

By ginger, old chum, it made me hot. I didn't care to look at the old
armor, or the crown jewels, which make you think of a cut glass factory,
but I reveled in the scenes of the beheading. I never was stuck much
on kings and queens, but it seems to me if they had to murder them they
ought to have given 'em a show, and let them fight for their lives,
instead of getting into a trap, like you would entice a rat with cheese,
and then cut their heads off.

I suppose it is right here that we inherited the desire to lynch and
burn at the stake the negroes that commit crime and won't confess at
home. When anything is born in the blood you can't get rid of it without
taking a dose of patriotism and purifying the blood, and I advise you
never to visit the Tower of London, unless you want to feel like going
out and killing some one that is tied up with a rope.

Hearing of these murders and seeing the place where they were committed
does not give you an idea of fair play and you don't feel like taking
some one of your size when you fight, but you get to thinking that if
you could catch a cripple who couldn't defend himself you would like to
take a baseball club and maul the stuffing out of him. You become imbued
with the idea that if you went to war you would not want to stand up
and fight fair, but that you would like to get your enemy in a bunch
and drop dynamite down on him from a balloon, and kill all in sight, and
sail away with an insane laugh.

Gee, but another day in this tower, and I would want to go home and
murder ma, or the neighbors.

The only thing we have got in America that compares with the Tower of
London and its associates is the Leutgert sausage factory in Chicago,
where Leutgert got his wife into the factory, murdered her, and is
alleged to have cut her up in pieces and made sausage of the meat, given
the pieces with gristle in to his dogs, boiled the bones until they
would run into the sewer, dissolved the remnants in concentrated lye,
and sold the sausage to the lumber Jacks in the pine woods.

I expect Chicago will buy that sausage factory and make a show of it, as
London does the tower, and you can go and see it, and feel that you are
as full of modern history as I am of ancient history, here in London.

I could see that dad was getting nervous every time a new beheading
was described to us, and I thought it was time to wake him up. In going
through the room where the old armor was displayed the beef eater told
us who wore the different pieces of armor, and he said at times the
spirit of the dead came back to the tower and occupied the armor, and
I noticed that dad shied at some of the pieces of armor, so when we got
right into the midst of it, and there was armor on every side, and dad
and the beef eater were ahead of me, and dad was walking fast in order
to get out quick, I pushed over one of the pieces, and it went crashing
to the floor and the noise was like a boiler factory exploding, and the
dust of centuries rose up, and the noise echoed down the halls.

Well, you'd a died to see dad and the beef eater. Dad turned pale and
got down on his knees, and I think he began to pray, if he knows how,
and he trembled like a leaf, and the beef eater got behind a set of
armor that Cromwell or some old duck used to wear, and said, “Wot in
the bloody 'ell is the matter with the h'armor?” and then a lot of other
beef eaters came, and they thought dad was the spirit of King John, and
they stampeded, and finally I got dad to stop praying, or whatever it
was that he was doing, and I led him out, and when he got into the open
air he recovered and said. “'Ennery, 'hi have got to get out of Lunnon,
don't you know, because me 'eart is palpitating,” and we went back to
the 'otel, to see if our invitation to visit King Hedward had arrived.

[Illustration: Beefeater's stampede 107]

Say, we are getting so we talk just like English coachmen, and you won't
hundredstand us when we get 'ome. Yours, with a haccent.

'Ennery.




CHAPTER IX.

     The Bad Boy and His Dad Call on King Edward and Almost
     Settle the Irish Question.

London, H-england.--Dear Uncle Ezra: The worst is over, and dad and I
have both touched a king. Not the way you think, touching a king for a
hand-out, or borrowing his loose change, the way you used to touch dad
when you had to pay for your goods, but just taking hold of his hand and
shaking it in good old United States fashion.

The American minister arranged it for us. He told somebody that Peck's
Bad Boy and his dad were in town, and just wanted to size up a king and
see how he averaged up with United States politicians, and the king set
an hour for us to call.

Well, you'd a dide to see dad fix up. Everybody said, when we showed our
card at the hotel, notifying us that we were expected at Marlboro House
at such a time, that we would be expected to put on plenty of dog. That
is what an American from Kalamazoo, who sells breakfast food, said,
and the hotel people said we would be obliged to wear knee breeches
and dancing pumps and silk socks, and all that kind of rot, and men's
furnishers began to call upon us to take our measure for clothes, but
when they told us how much it would cost, dad kicked. He said he had
a golf suit he had made in Oshkosh at the time of the tournament, that
every one in Oshkosh said was out of sight, and was good enough for
any king, and so he rigged up in it, and I hired a suit at a masquerade
place, and dad hired a coat, kind of red, to go with his golf pants and
socks, and he wore canvas tennis shoes.

[Illustration: Suit he had made in Oshkosh 111]

I looked like a picture out of a fourteenth century book, but dad looked
like a clown in a circus. One of dad's calves made him look as though he
had a milk leg, cause the padding would not stay around where the calf
ought to be, but worked around towards his shin. We went to Marlboro
House in a hansom cab, and all the way there the driver kept looking
down from the hurricane deck, through the scuttle hole, to see if we
were there yet, and he must have talked with other cab drivers in sign
language about us, for every driver kept along with us, looked at us and
laughed, as though we were a wild west show.

On the way to the king's residence it was all I could do to keep dad
braced up to go through the ordeal. He was brave enough before we got
the invitation, and told what he was going to say to the king, and you
would think he wasn't afraid of anybody, but when we got nearer to the
house and dad thought of going up to the throne and seeing a king in all
his glory, surrounded by his hundreds of lords and dukes and things, a
crown on his head, and an ermine cloak trimmed with red velvet, and a
six-quart milk pan full of diamonds, some of them as big as a chunk of
alum, dad weakened, and wanted to give the whole thing up and go to a
matinee, but I wouldn't have it, and told him if he didn't get into the
king row now that I would shake him right there in London and start in
business as a Claude Duval highwayman and hold up stage coaches, and
be hung on Tyburn Tree, as I used to read about in my history of
Sixteen-String Jack and other English highwaymen. Dad didn't want to see
the family disgraced, so he let the cabman drive on, but he said if
we got out of this visit to royalty alive, it was the last tommyrot he
would indulge in.

Well, old man, it is like having an operation for appendicitis, you feel
better when you come out from under the influence of the chloroform and
the doctor shows you what they took out of you, and you feel that you
are going to live, unless you grow another vermiform appendix. We were
driven into a sort of Central park, and up to a building that was big
as a lot of exposition buildings, and the servants took us in charge and
walked us through long rooms covered with pictures as big as side show
pictures at a circus, but instead of snake charmers and snakes and wild
men of Borneo and sword swallowers, the king's pictures were about war,
and women without much clothes on from the belt up. Gosh, but some of
those pictures made you think you could hear the roar of battle and
smell gun powder, and dad acted as though he wanted to git right down on
the marble floor and dig a rifle pit big enough to git into.

They walked us around like they do when you are being initiated into a
secret society, only they didn't sing, “Here comes the Lobster,” and hit
you with a dried bladder. The servants that were conducting us laffed.
I had never seen an Englishman laff before, and it was the most
interesting thing I saw in London. Most Englishmen look sorry about
something, as though some dear friend died every day, and their faces
seem to have grown that way. So when they laff it seems as though the
wrinkles would stay there, unless they treated their faces with massage.
They were laughing at dad's dislocated calf, and his scared appearance,
as though he was going to receive the thirty-second degree, and didn't
know whether they were going to throw him over a precipice or pull him
up to the roof by the hind legs. We passed a big hall clock, and it
struck just when we were near it, and of all the “Hark, from the tombs”
 sounds I ever heard, that clock took the cake. Dad thought it sounded
like a death knell, and he would have welcomed the turning in of a fire
alarm as a sound that meant life everlasting, beside that doleful sound.

After we had marched about three mile heats, and passed the chairs of
the noble grand and the senior warden, and the exalted ruler, we came to
a bronze door as big as the gate to a cemetery, and the grand conductor
gave us a few instructions about how to back out fifteen feet from the
presence of the king, when we were dismissed, and then he turned us over
to a little man who was a grand chambermaid, I understood the fellow
to say. The door opened, and we went in, and dad's misplaced calf was
wobbling as though he had locomotor attacks-ye.

Well, there were a dozen or so fellows standing around, and they all had
on some kind of uniforms, with gold badges on their breasts, and in the
midst of them was a little, sawed-off fat fellow, not taller than five
feet six, but a perfect picture of the cigar advertisements of America
for a cigar named after the king. I expected to see a king as big as
Long John Wentworth of Chicago, a great big fellow that could take a
small man by the collar and throw him over a house, and I felt hurt at
the small size of the king of Great Britain, but, gosh, he is just like
a Yankee, when you get the formality shook off.

We bowed and dad made a courtesy like an old woman, and the king came
forward with a smile that ought to be imitated by every Englishman. They
all imitate his clothes and his hats and his shoes, but he seems to be
the only Englishman that smiles. Maybe it is patented, and nobody has a
right to smile without paying a royalty, but the good-natured smile of
King Edward is worth more than stomach bitters, and the English ought
to be allowed to copy it. There is no more solemn thing than a party of
Englishmen together in America, unless it is a party of speculators
that are short on wheat, or a gathering of defeated politicians when the
election returns come in. But the king is as jolly as though he had not
a note coming due at the bank, and you would think he was a good, common
citizen, after working hours, at a round beer table, with two schooner
loads in the hold and another schooner on the way, frothing over the top
of the stein. That is the feeling I had for the king when he came up
to us and greeted dad as the father of the bad boy and patted me on the
shoulder and said: “And so you are the boy that has made more trouble
than any boy in the world, and had more fun than anybody, and made
them all stand around and wonder what was coming next. You're a wonder.
Strange the American people never thought of killing you.” I said
yessir, and tried to look innocent, and then the king told dad to sit
down, and for me to come and stand by his knee, and by ginger, when
he patted me on the cheek, and his soft hand squeezed my hand, and he
looked into my eyes with the most winning expression, I did not wonder
that all the women were in love with him, and that all Englishmen would
die for him.

He asked dad all about America, its institutions, the president, and
everything, and dad was just so flustered that he couldn't say much,
until the king said something about the war between the States, in which
the southern states achieved a victory. I don't know whether the king
said that just to wake dad up, 'cause dad had a grand army button on his
coat, but dad choked up a little, and then began to explode, a little at
a time, like a bunch of firecrackers, and finally he went off all in a
bunch. Dad said: “Look a here, Mr. King, some one has got you all balled
up about that war. I know, because I was in it, and now the north and
the south are United, and can whip any country that wants to fight a
champion, and will go out and get a reputation, by gosh!”

The king laughed at touching dad off, and asked dad what was the matter
of America and Great Britain getting together and making all nations
know when they had better keep their places, and quit talking about
fighting. Dad said he never would consent to America and Great Britain
getting together to fight any country until Ireland got justice and
was ready to come into camp on an equality, and the king said he would
answer for the Irishmen of Ireland if dad would pledge the Irishmen of
America, 'cause we had about as many Irishmen in America as he had in
Ireland, and dad said if the king would give Ireland what she asked for,
he would see that the Irishmen in America would sing God Save the King.

[Illustration: Settling the Irish question 115]

I guess dad and the king would have settled the Irish question in
about fifteen minutes, and signed a treaty, only a servant brought in a
two-quart bottle of champagne, and dad and the king hadn't drank a quart
apiece before dad started to sing “My Country Tis of Thee, Sweet Land
of Libertee,” and the king sang “God Save the King,” and, by thunder, it
was the same tune, and tears came into dad's eyes, and the king took out
his handkerchief and wiped his nose, and I bellered right out, and the
king rose and offered a toast to America and everybody in it, and they
swallered it, and dad said there was enough juice left in the bottle
for one more round, and he proposed a toast to all the people of Great
Britain, including the Irish and the king who loved them, and down she
went, and they were standing up. And I told dad it was time to go.

[Illustration: God save the king 119]

Say, it was great, Uncle Ezra, and I wish you could have been there, and
there had been another bottle. The only thing that happened to mar
the reunion of dad and the king was when we were going out backwards,
bowing. There was a little hassock back of me, and I kicked it back of
dad, and when dad's heels struck it he went over backwards and struck
on his golf pants, and dad said: “El, 'Ennery, I'ave broken my bloomink
back, but who cares,” and when the servants picked dad up and took him
out in the hall and marched us to the entrance, dad got in the cab, gave
the grand hailing sign of distress, started to sing God save something
or other, and went to sleep in the cab, and I took him to the hotel.

Yours,

Hennery.

[Illustration: He went over backwards 121]




CHAPTER X.

     The Bad Boy Writes of Ancient and Modern Highwaymen--They
     Get a Taste of High Life in London and Dad Tells the Story
     of the Picklemaker's Daughter.

London, England.--My Dear Old Skate: Well, if we are going to see any of
the other countries on this side of the water before our return ticket
expires, we have got to be getting a move on, and dad says in about
a week we will be doing stunts in Paris that will bring about a
revolution, and wind up the republic of France, and seat some nine-spot
on the throne that Napoleon used to wear out his buckskin pants on.

Dad asked me tother day what I cared most to see in London, and I told
him I wanted to visit Newgate prison, and the places made famous by the
bold highwaymen of a century or two ago. He thought I was daffy, but
when I told him how I had read “Claude Duval” and “Six-teen-String Jack”
 and all the highway literature, in the haymow, when dad thought I was
weeding the garden, he confessed that he used to hunt those yellow
covered books out of the manger when I was not reading them, and that
he had read them all himself, when I thought he was studying for his
campaign speeches, and so he said he would go with me. So we visited
Homestead Heath, where Claude Duval used to ride “Black Bess,” and hold
up people who traveled at night in post chaises, and we found splendid
spots where there had been more highway robbery going on than any place
east of Missouri, but I was disgusted when I thought what chumps those
old highway robbers were, compared to the American highway robbers and
hold up men of the present day.

In Claude Duval's time he had a brace of flintlock pistols, which he had
to examine the priming every time a victim showed up, and while he
was polite when he robbed a duchess, he used to kill people all right,
though if they had had cameras at that time the flash from the priming
pan would have taken a flash-light picture of the robber, so he could
have been identified when he rode off in the night to a roadside inn and
filled up on beer, while he counted the ten shillings he had taken from
the silk purse of the victim. Why, one of our American gangs that hold
up a train, and get an express safe full of greenbacks, and shoots up
a mess of railroad hands and passengers with Winchesters and automatic
pistols, and blows up cars with dynamite and gets away and has to have
a bookkeeper and a cashier to keep their bank accounts straight, could
give those old Claude Duvals and Sixteen-String Jacks cards and spades.

But civilization, dad says, has done much for the highway robbery
business, and he says we in America have arrived at absolute perfection.
However, I was much interested in looking over the ground where my first
heroes lived and died, and did business, and when we went to the prisons
where they were confined, and were shown where Tyburn Tree stood, that
so many of them were hung on, tears came to my eyes at the thought that
I was on the sacred ground where my heroes croaked, and went to their
deaths with smiles on their faces, and polite to the last. The guard who
showed us around thought that dad and I were relatives of the deceased
highwaymen, and when we went away he said to dad: “Call again, Mr.
Duval. Always glad to serve any of the descendants of the heroes. What
line of robbery are you in, Mr. Duval?” Dad was mad, but he told
the guard he was now on the stock exchange, and so we maintained the
reputation of the family.

[Illustration: Glad to serve any of the descendants of the heroes 126]

Then we hired horses and took a horse back ride through Rotten Row,
where everybody in London that has the price, rides a horse, and no
carriages are allowed. Dad was an old cavalry man forty years ago,
and he is stuck on his shape when he is on a horse, but he came near
breaking up the horse back parade the day we went for the ride. The
liveryman gave us two bob-tailed nags, a big one for dad and a small one
for me, but they didn't have any army saddle for dad, and he had to ride
on one of these little English saddles, such as jockeys ride races on,
and dad is so big where he sits on a saddle that you couldn't see the
saddle, and I guess they gave dad a hurdle jumper, because when we got
right amongst the riders, men and women, his horse began to act up, and
some one yelled, “Tally-ho,” and that is something about fox hunting,
not a coach, and the horse jumped a fence and dad rolled off over the
bowsprit and went into a ditch of dirty water.

[Illustration: Dad rolled off over the bowsprit 128]

The horse went off across a field, and the policeman fished dad out of
the ditch, and run him through a clothes wringer or something, and got
him dried out, and sent him to the hotel in an express wagon, and I rode
my horse back to the liveryman and told him what happened to dad, and
they locked me up in a box stall until somebody found the horse, 'cause
they thought dad was a horse thief, and they held me for ransom. But dad
came around before night and paid my ransom, and we were released. Dad
says Rotten Row is rotten, all right enough, and by ginger it is, 'cause
he has not got the smell of that ditch off his clothes yet.

Now he has got a new idea, and that is to go to some country where there
are bandits, different from the bandits here in London, and be captured
and taken to the mountain fastnesses, and held for ransom until our
government makes a fuss about it, and sends warships after-us. I tell
dad it would be just our luck to have our government fail to try to get
us, and the bandits might cut our heads off and stick them on a pole
as a warning to people not to travel unless they had a ransom concealed
about their clothes. But dad says he is out to see all the sights, and
he is going to be ransomed before he gets home, if it takes every dollar
our government has got. I think he is going to work the bandit racket
when we get to Turkey, but, by ginger, he can leave me at a convent,
because I don't want one of those crooked sabers run into me and turned
around like a corkscrew. Dad says I can stay in a harem while he goes to
the mountains with the bandits, and I don't know as I care, as they say
a harem is the most interesting place in Turkey. You know the pictures
we have studied in the old grocery, where a whole bunch of beautiful
women are practicing using soap in a marble bath.

Well, don't you say anything to ma about it, but dad has got his foot
in it clear up to the top button. It isn't anything scandalous, though
there is a woman at the bottom of it. You see, we used to know a girl
that left home to go out into the world and earn her own living. She
elocuted some at private parties and sanitariums, to entertain people
that were daffy, and were on the verge of getting permanent bats in
their belfry, and after a few years she got on the stage, and made
a bunch of money, and went abroad. And then she had married a titled
person, and everybody supposed she was a duchess, or a countess, and ma
wanted us to inquire about her when we got over here. Ma didn't want us
to go and hunt her up to board with her, or anything, but just to get
a glimpse of high life, and see if our poor little friend was doing
herself proud in her new station in life.

[Illustration: Isn't money enough in the whole family to wad a gun 131]

Gee, but dad found her, and she ain't any more of a duchess than I am.
Her husband is a younger son of a titled person, but there isn't money
enough in the whole family to wad a gun, and our poor girl is working in
a shop, or store, selling corsets to support a lazy, drunken husband and
a whole mess of children, and while she is seven removes from a duchess,
she does not rank with the woman who washes her mother's clothes at
home. Gosh, but dad was hot when he found her, and after she told him
about her situation in life he gave her a yellow-backed fifty-dollar
bill, and came back to the hotel mad, and wanted to pack up and go
somewhere else, where he didn't know any titled-persons.

That night a couple of dukes came around to the hotel to sell dad some
stock in a diamond mine in South Africa, and they got to talking about
how English society held over our crude American society, until dad got
an addition to the mad he had when he called on our girl, and when one
of the dukes said America was being helped socially by the marriage
of American women to titled persons, dad got a hot box, like a stalled
freight train.

Says dad, says he: “You Johnnies are a lot of confidence men, who live
only to rope in rich American girls, so you can marry them and have
their dads lift the mortgages on your ancestral estates, and put on tin
roofs in place of the mortgages, 'cause a mortgage will not shed rain,
and you get their money and spend it on other women.” One of the dukes
turned red like a lobster, and I think he is a lobster, anyway, and he
was going to make dad stop talking, but the duke didn't know dad, and he
continued. Says dad, says he: “I know a rich old man in the States, who
made ten million dollars on pickles, or breakfast food, and he had a
daughter that was so homely they couldn't keep a clock going in the
house.

“She came over here and got exposed to a duke, and she had never been
vaccinated, and the first her father knew she caught the duke, and came;
home, and he followed her. Say, he didn't know enough to pound sand, and
the old man got several doctors for her, but they couldn't break up the
duke fever, and finally the old pickle citizen asked him how much the
mortgage was, and how much they could live on, and he bought her the
duke, and sent them off, and the duke covered his castle with building
paper, so it would hold water, and they set up housekeeping with a
hundred servants. Then the duke wanted a racing stable, after the baby
came, and the old pickle man went over to see the baby, and it looked
so much like the old man that he invested in a racing stable, and the
servants bowed low to the old man and called him 'Your 'ighness,'
and that settled the old pickle person, and he fell into the trap of
building a townhouse in London.

“Then he went home and made some more pickles, and the daughter cabled
him to come right over, as they had been invited to entertain the king
and a lot of other face cards in the pack. And the old man thought it
would be great to get in the king row himself, so he shoveled a lot of
big bills into some packing trunks and went over to fix up for the king.
The castle had to be redecorated for about six miles, up one corridor
and down the other, but Old Pickles stood the raise, because he thought
it would be worth the money to be on terms of intimacy with a king.

“Then when it was all ready, and the old man was going to stand at the
front door and welcome the king, they made him go to his room, back
about a half a mile in the rear of the castle, and for two weeks old
Pickles had his meals brought to his room, and when it was over, and
his sentence had expired, he was let out, and all he saw of the grand
entertainment to the crowned heads was a ravine full of empty wine
bottles, a case of jimjams for a son-in-law, a case of nervous
prostration for a daughter, and hydrophobia for himself. My old pickle
friend has got, at this date, three million good pickle dollars invested
in your d--d island, and all he has to show for it is a sick daughter,
neglected by a featherhead of a husband, who will only speak to old
pickles when he wants more money, and a grandchild that may die teething
at any time. You are a nice lot of ducks to talk to me about your
English society being better than our American civilization. You get,”
 and dad drove the dukes out.

[Illustration: Dad drove the dukes out 135]

I think they are going to have dad arrested for treason. But don't tell
ma, 'cause she may think treason serious.

Yours,

Hennery.




CHAPTER XI.

     The Bay Boy Writes About Paris--Tells About the Trip Across
     the English Channel--Dad Feeds a Dog and Gets Arrested.

Paris, France.--My Dear Uncle Ezra: Dad is in an awful state here, and I
do not know what to do with him. We struck this town all in a heap, and
the people seemed to be paralyzed so they couldn't speak, except to make
motions and make noises that we could not interpret. This is the
first time dad and I have been in a place where nobody understood our
language. Ordinarily we would take pleasure in teaching people to speak
the English language, but in coming across the English channel dad and
I both got something we never got on the water before. Ordinary
seasickness is only an incident, that makes you wish you were dead--just
temporary, but when it wears off you can enjoy your religion and
victuals as well as ever, but the seasickness that the English channel
gives you is a permanent investment, like government bonds that you cut
coupons off of. I 'spect we shall be sick always now, and worse every
other day, like chills and fever.

Say, a boat on the English channel does not roll, or pitch, at
intervals, like a boat on ordinary water, but it does stunts like a
broncho that has been poisoned by eating loco-weeds, and goes into the
air and dives down under, and shakes itself like a black bass with a
hook in its mouth, and rolls over like a trained dog, and sits up on its
hind legs and begs, and then walks on its fore paws, and seems to jump
through hoops, and dig for woodchucks, and all the time the water boils
like 'pollinarius, full of bubbles, and it gives you the hiccups to look
at it, and it flows every way at the same time, and the wind comes from
the fourteen quarters at once, and blows hot if you are too hot and want
a cool breeze, and if you are too cold, and want a warm breeze to keep
you alive, it comes right from the north pole, and you just perish in
your tracks.

Gee, but it is awful. When you get seasick on an ordinary ocean, you
know where to locate the disease, and you know where to go for relief,
and when you have got relieved you know that you are alive, but an
English channel seasickness is as different from any other as an
alcohol jag is different from a champagne drunk. This English channel
seasickness begins on your toes, and you feel as though the toenails
were being pulled out with pincers, and the veins in your legs seem to
explode, your arms wilt like lettuce in front of a cheap grocery, your
head seems to be struck with a pile-driver and telescoped down into your
spine, and your stomach feels as though you had swallowed a telephone
pole with all of the cross arms and wires and glass insulators, and you
wish lightning would strike you. Gosh, but dad was hot when he found
that he was sick that way, and when we got ashore he wanted to kill the
first man he met.

He thinks that it is a crime for a man not to understand the English
language, and when he tells what he wants, and the man he is talking to
shrugs his shoulders and laughs, and brings him something else, he wants
to pull his gun and begin to shoot up the town, and only for me he would
have killed people before this, but now he takes it out in scowling at
people who do not understand him. Dad seems to think that if he cannot
make a man understand what he says, all he has to do is to swear at the
man, but there is no universal language of profanity, so the more dad
swears the more the nervous Frenchman smiles, and acts polite.

I think the French people are the politest folks I ever knew. If a
Frenchman had to kick a person out of doors, he would wear a felt
slipper, and after he had kicked you he would place his hand on his
heart, and bow, and look so sorry, and hurt, that you would want to give
him a tip.

O, but this tipping business is what is breaking dad's heart. I think
if the servants would arrange a syndicate to rob dad of two or three dol
lars a day, by pocket picking, or sneak thieving, he would overlook
it, and say that as long as it was one of the customs of the country
we should have to submit to it, but when he has paid his bill, with
everything charged extra, and the servants line up and look appealingly,
or mad, as the case may be, dad is the hardest man to loosen that ever
was, but if they seem to look the other way, and not, apparently, care
whether they get a cent or not, dad would go and hunt them up, and
divide his roll with them. Dad is not what you would call a “tight wad,”
 if you let him shed his money normally, when he feels the loosening
coming on, but you try to work him by bowing and cringing, and his
American spirit gets the better of him, and he looks upon the servant as
pretty low down. I have told him that the tipping habit is just as bad
in America as in France, but he says in America the servant acts as
though he never had such a thought as getting a tip, and when you give
him a quarter or other tip he looks puzzled, as though he did not just
recall what he had done to merit such treatment, but finally puts the
money in his pocket with an air as though he would accept it in trust,
to be given to some deserving person at the first opportunity, and then
he smiles, and gets away, and blows in the tip for something wet and
strong.

I told dad if he would just ignore the servants, as though he did not
understand that they expected a tip, that he would be all right, so when
we got ready to move from the hotel to private rooms dad never gave any
servant a tip. Well, I don't know what the servants did to our baggage,
but they must have marked it with a smallpox sign, or something, for
nobody would touch it for several hours, but finally a baggage man took
it and started for our apartments, and got lost and didn't show up for
two days, and when it was finally landed on the sidewalk nobody would
carry it upstairs, and dad and I had to lug it up two flights, and I
thought dad would have apoplexy.

[Illustration: Coughs up a tip every time 143]

We found a guide who could talk New Orleans English and he said it would
cost three dollars to square it with the servants at the hotel, and have
the boycott removed from our baggage, and dad paid it, and now he coughs
up a tip every time he sees a servant look at him. He pays when he goes
in a restaurant and when he comes out, and says he is cured of trying to
reform the customs of anybody else's country.

We have engaged a guide to stay with us day and night. The guide took
us out for a bat last night, and dad had the time of his life. Dad has
drank a good deal of spiritous and malt liquors in his time, but I don't
think he ever indulged much in champagne at three or four dollars a
bottle at home. Maybe he has been saving himself up till he got over
here, where champagne is cheap and it takes several quarts to make you
see angels. The guide took us to one of these bullyvards, where there
are tables out on the sidewalk, and you can eat and drink and look at
the dukes and counts and dutchesses and things promenading up and down,
flirting like sin, and we sat down to a table and ordered things to eat
and drink, and dad looked like Uncle Sam, and felt his oats.

[Illustration: A tone of voice that meant trouble 138]

When he had drank a few thimblefuls of absinthe, and some champagne, and
eat a plateful of frogs, he was just ripe for trouble. A woman and a man
at an adjoining table had one of these white dogs that is sheared like
a hedge fence, with spots of long hair left on in places, and dad coaxed
the dog over to our table and began to feed him frogs' legs, and the
woman began to talk French out loud, and look cross at dad, and the
count that was with her came over to our table and looked at dad in
a tone of voice that meant trouble, and said something sassy, and the
guide said the man wanted to fight a duel because dad had contaminated
the woman's dog, and dad got mad and offered to wipe out the whole
place, and he got up with a champagne bottle and looked defiance at the
count, and the waiters began to scatter, when the woman came up to dad
and begged him not to hurt the count, and as she spoke broken English
dad could understand her, and she looked so beautiful, and her eyes were
filled with tears, and dad relented and said: “Don't cry, dear, I won't
hurt the little runt.” She was so glad dad was not going to kill the
count that she threw herself into his arms and thanked dear America
for producing such a grand citizen, such a brave man as dad, who could
forego the pleasure of killing a poor, weak man who had insulted him,
particularly as dad's wild Indian ancestry made it hard for him to
refrain from blood.

[Illustration: I won't hurt the little runt 145]

Well, dad's face was a study, as he braced up and held that 150 pounds
of white meat in his arms, with all the people looking on, and he seemed
proud and heroic, and he stroked her hair and told her not to worry, and
finally she hied herself away from dad and the count took her away,
and they went up the bullyvard, and after all was quiet again dad said:
“Hennery, let this be a lesson to you. When you are tempted to commit a
rash act and avenge an insult in blood, stop and think of the sorrow and
shame that will come to you if you draw your gun too quick, and have a
widow on your hands as the result. Suppose I had killed that shrimp, the
face of his widow would have haunted me always, and I would have wanted
to die. Don't ever kill anybody, my boy, if you can settle a dispute by
shaking the dice.”

Well, dad ordered some more wine, and as he drank it, he allowed
the populace to admire him and say things about the great American
millionaire, who spent money like water and was too brave to fight. Then
dad called for his check to pay his bill, and when he felt in his pocket
for his roll of bills, he hadn't a nickel and the woman, when she was in
his arms, weeding with one hand, had gone through dad's pockets with the
other. Dad felt for his watch, to see what time it was, and his watch
was gone, and the waiter was waiting for the money and dad tried to
explain that he had been buncoed, and the head waiter came and begun to
act sassy, and then they called a policeman to stay by us till the money
was produced, and everybody at the other tables laughed, and dad turned
blue, and I thought he would have a fit. Finally, the guide began to
talk, and the result was that a policeman went home with us, and dad
found money enough to pay the bill, but he talked language that caused
the landlady to ask us to find a new place.

[Illustration: Tried to explain that he had been buncoed 148]

The next morning the guide showed up with an officer who had a warrant
for dad for hugging a woman in a public cafe, and it seemed as though we
were in for it, but the guide said he could settle the whole business
by paying the officer $20, and dad paid it and I think the guide and the
officer divided the money. Say, this is the greatest town we have struck
yet for excitement, and I guess dad will not have a chance to think of
his sickness.

This morning we went into a big department store, and, by gosh! we
found the count that dad was going to fight was a floor-walker, and
the countess was behind a counter selling soap. When dad saw the count
leering at him, he put his hand on his pistol pocket and yelled a
regular cowboy yell, and the count rushed down into the basement, the
soap countess fainted, and the police took dad to the police station,
and all day the guide and I have been trying to get him out on bail.
If we get dad out of this we are going to put a muzzle on him. Well, if
anyone asks you if I am having much of a time abroad, you can tell them
the particulars.

P. S.--We got dad out for $20 and costs, and he says he will blow Paris
up before night. We are going up to the top of the Eiffel tower this
afternoon, to count our money, as dad dasscnt take out his pocketbook
anywhere on the ground for fear of being robbed.

Yours full of frogs.

Hennery.




CHAPTER XII.

     The Bad Boy's Second Letter from Paris--Dad Poses as a
     Mormon Bishop and Has to Be Rescued--They Climb the Eiffel
     Tower and the Old Man Gets Converted.

Paris, France.--Old Pardner in Crime: I got your letter, telling me
about the political campaign that is raging at home, and when I read it
to dad he wanted to go right out and fill up on campaign whisky and yell
for his presidential candidate, but he couldn't find any whisky, so he
has not tried to carry any precincts of Paris for our standard-bearer.

There is something queer about the liquor here. There is no regular
campaign beverage. At home you can select a drink that is appropriate
for any stage of a campaign. When the nominations are first made you are
not excited and beer and cheese sandwiches seem to fit the case A little
later, when the orators begin to come out into the open and shake their
hair, you take cocktails and your eyes begin to resemble those of a
caged rat, and you are ready to quarrel with an opponent. The next stage
in the campaign is the whisky stage, and when you have got plenty of it
the campaign may be said to be open, and you wear black eyes and lose
your teeth, and you swear strange oaths and smell of kerosene, and only
sleep in the morning. Then election comes and if your side wins you
drink all kinds of things at once for a week, shout hoarsely and then
go to the Keeley cure, but if your party loses you stay home and take a
course of treatment for nervous prostration and say you will never mix
up in another campaign.

Here in France it is different. The people have nervous prostration to
start on, start a campaign on champagne, wind up on absinthe, and after
the votes are counted go to an insane asylum. I do not know what first
got dad to drink absinthe and I don't know what it is, but it looks like
soap suds, tastes like seed cookies and smells like vermifuge. But it
gets there just the same and the result of drinking it is about the same
as the result of drinking anything in France--it makes you want to hug
somebody.

At home when a man gets full of whisky, he wants to hug the man he
drinks with and weep on his collar, and then hit him on the head with
a bottle; but here every kind of drink puts the drinker in condition to
want to hug. Dad says he never knew he had a brain until he learned to
drink absinthe, but now he can close his eyes and see things worse than
any mince pie nightmare, and when we go out among people he never sees
a man at all, but when a woman passes along, dad's eyes begin to take
turns winking at them and it is all I can do to keep him from proposing
marriage to every woman he sees.

[Illustration: Badge on dad's breast, with the word “Bishop” 153]

I thought I would break him of this woman foolishness, so I told
everybody dad was a Mormon bishop, and had a grand palace at Salt Lake
City, and owned millions of gold mines and tabernacles and wanted to
marry a thousand women and take them to Utah and place them at the head
of homes of their own, and he would just call once or twice a week and
leave bags of gold for his wives to spend. A newspaper reporter, that
could talk English, wrote a piece for a paper about dad wanting to marry
a whole lot and he said life in Utah was better than a Turkish harem,
cause the wives of a Mormon bishop did not have to be locked up and
watched by unix, but could flirt and blow in money and go out to dances
and have just as much fun as though they lived in Newport, and had got
divorces from millionaires, and he said any woman who wanted to marry a
Mormon bishop could meet dad on the bullyvard near a certain monument,
on a certain day. I was on to it, with the reporter, and we hired a
carriage and went to the bullyvard, just at the time the newspaper said
and I put a big red badge on dad's breast, with the word “Bishop” on it,
and dad had been drinking absinthe and he thought the badge was a kind
of sign of nobility. Well, you'd adide to see the bunch of women that
were there to meet dad. “What's the matter here?” said dad, as he
saw the crowd of women, looking like they were there in answer to an
advertisement for nurses. I told dad to stand up in the carriage, like
Dowie does in Chicago, and hold out his hands and say: “Bless you, my
children,” and when dad got up to bless them, the reporter and I got out
of the carriage, and the reporter, which could talk French, said for all
the women who wanted to be Mormon wives to get into the carriage with
the bishop and be sealed for life.

Well, sir, you'd a thought it was a remnant sale! More than a dozen got
into the carriage with dad, and about 400 couldn't get in, but when the
scared driver started up the horses, they all followed the carriage, and
then the mounted police surrounded the whole bunch and moved them off
towards the police station, and dad under the wagonload of females, each
one trying to get the nearest to him, so as to be his favorite wife.

It got noised around that a foreign potent-ate had been arrested with
his whole harem for conduct unbecoming to a potent-ate, and so when
we got to the jail dad had to be rescued from his wives, and they were
driven into a side street by the police, and dad was locked up to save
his life. The reporter and I went to the jail to get him out, but we had
to buy a new suit of clothes for him, as everything was torn off him in
the Mormon rush.

[Illustration: Dad was a sight when we found him in jail 155]

Dad was a sight when we found him in jail, and he thought his bones
were broken, and he wanted to know what was the cause of his sudden
popularity with the fair sex, and I told him it all came from his
looking so confounded distinguished, and his flirting with women. He
said he would swear he never looked at one of those women in a tone of
voice that would deceive a Sunday school teacher, and he felt as though
he was being misunderstood in France. We told him the only way to get
out of jail was to say he was a crowned head from Oshkosh, traveling
incog, and when he began to stand on his dignity and demand that a
messenger be sent for the president of France, to apologize for the
treatment he had received, the jailer and police begged his pardon and
we dressed him up in his new clothes and got him out, and we went to the
Eiffel tower to get some fresh air.

I suppose you have seen pictures of the Eiffel tower, on the
advertisements of breakfast food in your grocery, but you can form
no idea of the height and magnificence of the tower by studying
advertisements. You may think that the pictures you see of world events
on your cans of baked beans and maple syrup and soap, give you the
benefit of foreign travel, but it does not. You have got to see the
real thing or you are not fit to even talk about what you think you have
seen. You remember that Ferris wheel at the Chicago world's fair, and
how we thought it was the greatest thing ever made of steel, so high
that it made us dizzy to look to the top of it, and when we went up
on the wheel we thought we could see the world, from Alaska to South
Africa, and we marveled at the work of man and prayed that we be
permitted to get down off that wheel alive, and not be spilled down
through the rarified Chicago atmosphere and flattened on the pavement so
thin we would have to be scraped up off the pavement with a case knife,
like a buckwheat cake that sticks to the griddle.

You remember, old man, how you cried when our sentence to ride in the
Ferris wheel expired, and the jailer of the wheel opened the cell and
let us out, and you said no one would ever get you to ride again on
anything that you couldn't jump out of if it balked, or you got wheels
in your head and chunks of things came up to your Adam's apple and
choked you. Well, cross my heart, if that Ferris wheel, that looked so
big to us, would make a main spring for the Eiffel tower. The tower is
higher than a kite, and when you get near it and try to look up to the
top, you think it is a joke, and that really no one actually goes up to
the top of it. You see some flies up around the top of it, and when the
guide tells you the flies crawling around there are men and women, you
think the guide has been drinking.

[Illustration: Flies crawling around there are men and women 157]

But dad and I and the guide paid our money, got into an elevator and
began to go up. After the thing had been going up awhile dad said he
wouldn't go up more than a mile or so at first, and asked the man to let
him off at the 3,000-foot level, but the elevator man said dad had got
to take all the degrees and dad said: “Let her went,” and after an hour
or so we got to the top.

Gee! but I thought dad would fall dead right there, when he looked off
at Paris and the world beyond. The flies we had seen at the top before
starting had changed to human beings, all looking pale and scared, and
the human beings on the ground had changed into flies and bugs, for all
you could see of a man on the ground was his feet with a flattened plug
hat someway fastened on the ankles, and a woman looked like a spoonful
of raspberry jam dropped on the pavement, or a splash of current jelly
moving on the ground in a mysterious way. I do not know as the Eiffel
tower was intended to act as a Keeley cure, but of the 50 people
who went up with us, half of them were so full their back teeth were
floating, including dad and the guide, but when we got to the top and
they got a view of the awful height to which we had come, it seemed as
though every man got sober at once, and their tongues seemed to cleave
to the roof of their mouths. All they could do was to look off at the
city and the view in the distance, and choke up, and look sorry about
something.

I couldn't help thinking of what sort of a pulp a man would be if he
fell off the top of the tower and struck a fat woman on the pavement,
cause it seemed to me you couldn't tell which was fat woman and which
was man. I never saw such a change in a man as there was in dad, after
he got his second wind and got his voice working. He looked like a man
who had made up his mind to lead a different life and begin right there.

[Illustration: He took out a five-dollar bill 159]

There was a Salvation Army man and woman in the crowd and dad went up to
them. He took out a five-dollar bill and put it in the tambourine of the
lassie, and said to the man and woman: “Now, look a here, I want to
join your church, and if you have got the facilities for giving me the
degrees, you can sign me as a Christian right now. I have been a bad
man, and never thought I needed the benefits of religious training, but
since I got up here, so near Heaven, in an elevator which I will bet $10
will break and kill us all before we get down to Paris, I want you to
prepare me for the hereafter quick.”

Some of the other fellows laughed at dad, and the Salvation Army people
looked as though dad was drunk, but he continued: “You can laugh and be
jammed, but I'll never leave this place until I am a pious man, and
you Salvation Army people have got to enlist me in your army, for I
am scared plum to death. Go ahead and convert me, while we wait.” The
Salvation Army captain put his hand on dad's head, the girl held out
the tambourine for another contribution, and dad felt a sweet peace come
over him, and we went down in the elevator and took a hack to the hotel,
and dad's lips worked as though in pain.

H.




CHAPTER XIII.

     The Bad Boy's Dad and a Man from Dakota Frame Up a Scheme to
     Break the Bank, But They Go Broke--The Party in Trouble.

Monte Carlo.--Dear Uncle: I blush to write the name, Monte Carlo, at
the head of a letter to anyone that is a Christian, or who believes in
honesty and decency, and earning a living by the sweat of one's brow,
for this place is the limit. If I should write anybody a letter from
South Clark street, Chicago, the recipient would know I had gone wrong,
and was located in the midst of a bad element, and the inference would
be that I was the worst fakir, robber, hold-up man or assassin in the
bunch.

The inference you must draw from the heading of this letter is that dad
and I have taken all the degree of badness and are now winding up
our career by taking the last degree, before passing in our chips and
committing suicide. Do you know what this place is, old man? Monaco is
a principality, about six miles square, ruled by a prince, and the whole
business of the country, for it is a “country” the same as though it had
a king, is gambling. They have all the different kinds of gambling, from
chuck-a-luck at two bits to roulette at a million dollars a minute. What
started dad to come to Monte Carlo is more than I know, unless it was
a new American he has got acquainted with, a fellow from North Dakota,
that dad met at a sort of dance that he did not take me to. It seems
there is a place in Paris where they go to see men and women dance--one
of those dances where they kick so high that their feet hit the gas
fixtures.

Well, all I know about it is that one Wednesday night dad said he felt
as though it was his duty to go to prayer meeting, so he could say when
he got home that in all the frivolities of a trip abroad, even in wicked
Paris, he never neglected his church duties. I never was stuck on going
to prayer meeting, so dad let me stay at the hotel and play pool with
the cash register boy in the barroom, and dad took a hymn book and went
out, looking pious as I ever saw him.

[Illustration: Dance, like they had seen the people dance at the show
164]

My, what a difference there was in dad in the morning. I woke up about
daylight, and dad came into the room with a strange man, with spinach on
his chin, and they began to dance, like they had seen the people dance
at the show where they had passed the evening. They were undressed,
except their underclothes, which wore these combination suits, so when
a man gets into them he is sealed up like a bologna, and he has to have
help when he wants to get out to take a bath, and he has to have an
outsider button him in with a button hook. Gee, I would rather be a
sausage and done with it! Well, dad and this man from Dakota kicked high
until dad caught by the ankle on a gas bracket, and the strange man got
me up out of bed to help unloosen dad and get him down before he was
black in the face. Finally we got dad down and then the two old codgers
began to discuss a proposition to go to Monte Carlo to break the bank.

[Illustration: A system of gambling 162]

The Dakota man agreed that Americans had no right to be spending their
own money doing Europe, when their genius was equal to the task of
acquiring the money of the less intelligent foreigners. He said they
could go to Monte Carlo and by a system of gambling which he had used
successfully in the Black Hills they could carry away all the money
they could pile into sacks. The man said he would guarantee to break
the bank if dad would put his money against the Dakota man's experience
as a gambler, and they would divide the proceeds equally. Dad bit like a
bass. He said he had always had an element of adventure in his make-up,
and had always liked to take chances, and from what he had heard of
the fabulous sums won and lost at Monte Carlo he could see that if a
syndicate could be formed that would win most of the time, he could see
that there was more money in it than in any manufacturing enterprise,
and he was willing to finance the scheme.

The Dakota man fairly hugged dad, and he told dad in confidence that
they two could divide up money enough to make them richer than they ever
dreamed of, and all the morning they discussed the plan, and made a
list of things they would need to get away with the money. They provided
themselves with canvas sacks to carry away the gold, and dad drew all
his money out of the bank, and that evening we took a train for Monte
Carlo. All the way here dad and his new friend chuckled over the
sensation they would make among the gamblers, and I became real
interested in the scheme. There was to be some fun besides the winning
of the money, because they talked of going out in the park and on the
terraces when they were tired of winning money, and seeing the poor
devils who had gone broke commit suicide, as that is said to be one of
the features of the place.

[Illustration: Seeing the poor devils who had gone broke 166]

Well, we got a suite of rooms and the first day we looked over the
place, and ate free banquets and saw how the people dressed, and just
looked prosperous and showed money on the slightest provocation, and
got the hang of things. Dad was to go in the big gambling room in the
afternoon with his pockets fairly dropsical with money, and the Dakota
man was to do the betting, and dad was to hold one of the canvas bags,
and when it was full we were to take it to our room, and quit gambling
for awhile, to give the bank a chance to raise more money. Dad insisted
that his partner should lose a small bet once in awhile, so the bank
should not get on to the fact that we had a cinch.

After luncheon we entered the big gambling room, in full-dress suits,
and, by gosh! it was like a king's reception. There were hundreds of
men and women, dressed for a party, and it did not seem like a gambling
hell, except that there were, piles of gold as big as stoves, on all
the tables, and the guests were provided with silver rakes, with long
handles, to rake in the money. Dad said in a whisper to the Dakota man:
“What is the use of taking the trouble to run a gold mine, and get all
dirtied up digging dirty nuggets, when you can get nice, clean gold, all
coined, ready to spend, by betting right?” And then dad turned to me
and he said; “Hennery, don't let the sight of this wealth make you
avaricious. Don't be purse-proud when you find that your poor father,
after years of struggle against adversity, and the machinations of
designing men, has got next to the Pierpont Morgan class and has money
to buy railroads. Don't get excited when we begin to bag the money, but
just act as though it was a regular thing with us to salt down our gold
for winter, the same as we do our pork.”

A count, or a duke, gave us nice seats, and rakes to haul in the money;
a countess, with a low-necked dress, winked at dad when he reached into
his pistol pocket and brought out a roll of bills and handed them to the
Dakota man, who bought $500 worth of red chips, and when the man looked
the roulette table over and put about a pint of chips on the red, dad
choked up so he was almost black in the face, and began to perspire so
I had to wipe my face with a handkerchief; the gambler rolled the wheel
and when the ball stopped on the red, and dad did the raking and raked
in a quart of chips, and dad shook hands with the Dakota man and said:
“Pard, we have got 'em on the run,” and reached for his sack to put in
the first installment of acquired wealth, and the low-necked countess
smiled a ravishing smile on dad, and dad looked as though he owned a
brewery, and the Dakota man twisted his chin whiskers and acted like he
was sorry for the Monte Carlo bank, I just got so faint with joy that I
almost cried.

To think we had skinned along as economically as possible all our lives,
and never made much money, and now, through this Dakota genius, and this
Monte Carlo opportunity, we had wealth raking in by the bushel, made
me feel great, and I wondered why more people had not found out this
faraway place, where people could become rich and prosperous in a day,
if they had the nerve. I tell you, old man, it was great, and I was
going to cable you to sell out your grocery for what you could get
at forced sale and come here with the money, gamble and become a
millionaire.

[Illustration: Reach into another pocket and dig up another roll 171]


*****


Monte Carlo (the next day).--My Dear Uncle Ezra: I do not know how to
write you the sequel to this tragedy. After our Dakota partner, with the
Black Hills system of beating a roulette game, had won the first bet,
he never guessed the right color again, and dad had no more use for the
rake. Every time he bet and lost, he would reach out to dad for more
money, and dad would reach into another pocket and dig up another roll,
and the countess would laugh and dad had to act as though he enjoyed
losing money.

It was about dark when dad had fished up the last hundred dollars and it
was gone before dad could wink back to the countess, then the Dakota man
looked at dad for more, and dad shook his head and said it was all off,
and they looked it each other a minute, and then we all three got up
and went out in the park to see the people who had gone broke commit
suicide, but there was not a revolver shot and dad and the Dakota man
sat down on a seat and I looked at the moon.

He would reach out to Dad for more money, and Dad would reach into
another pocket and dig up another roll.

Dad looked at the Dakota man and said: “You started me in all right.
What happened to your system?” The Dakota man was silent for a moment,
and then he pointed to me and said: “That imp of yours crossed his
fingers every time I bet, except the first time.” Dad called me to him,
and he said: “Hennery, let this be a lesson to you. Never to cross your
fingers. You have ruined your dad,” and he turned his pockets inside
out, and hadn't change for a dollar note, and he gave me the empty sack
to carry, and we went to our suite of rooms, knowing we would be fired
out into the cold world.

It will take a week to get money from the states, and we may be sent
to the work house, as we are broke, and haven't got the means even to
commit suicide. Don't tell ma.

Yours,

Hennery.




CHAPTER XIV.

     The Bad Boy and His Dad Have an Automobile Ride--They Run
     Over a Peasant--Climb “Glaziers”--Dad Falls Over a
     Precipice, But Is Rescued by the Guides After a Hard Time
     of It.

Geneva, Switzerland.--My Dear Old Man: By ginger, but I would like to be
home now. I have had enough of foreign travel; I don't see what is the
use of traveling, to see people of foreign countries, when you can go to
any large city in America, and find more people belonging to any
foreign country than you can find by going to that country, and they
know a confounded sight more. Take the Russians in New York, the
Norwegians of Minnesota, the Italians of Chicago, and the Germans of
Milwaukee, and they can talk English, and you can find out all about
their own countries by talking with them, but you go to their countries
and the natives don't know that there is such a language as the United
States language, and they laugh at you when you ask questions. I am sick
of the whole business, and would give all I ever expect to be worth, to
be home right now, with my skates sharp.

I would like to open the door of your old grocery, and take one long
breath and die right there on the doorstep, rather than to live in
luxury in any foreign country. Do you know, I sometimes go into a
grocery store abroad, and smell around, in order to get my thoughts on
dear old America, but nothing abroad smells as the same thing does in
our country. If I could get one more smell of that keg of sauerkraut
back of your counter, when it is ripe enough to pick, I think I would
break right down and cry for joy. Of course I have smelled sauerkraut
over here, but it all seems new and tame compared to yours. It may be
the kraut here is not aged enough to be good, but yours is aged enough
to vote and sticks to your clothes. Gee, but I just ache to get into
your grocery and eat things, and smell smells, and then lay down on the
counter with the cat with my head on a pile of wrapping paper and go to
sleep and wake up in America, an American citizen, that no king or queen
can tell to “hush up” and take off my hat when I want my hat on.

You may wonder how we got out of Monte Carlo, when we had lost every
cent we had gambling. Well, we wondered about it all night, and had our
breakfast sent up to our room, and had it charged, expecting that when
the bill came in we would have to jump into the ocean, as we had no gun
to kill ourselves with. Just after breakfast a duke, or something, came
to our room, and dad said it was all off, and he called upon the Dakota
man to make a speech on politics, while dad and I skipped out. We
thought the duke, who was the manager of the hotel, would not understand
the speech, and would think we were great people, who had got stranded.

[Illustration: Started in on a democratic speech 175]

The Dakota man started in on a democratic speech that he used to deliver
in the campaign of '96, and in half an hour the duke held up his hands,
and the Dakota man let up on the speech. Then the duke took out a roll
of bills and said: “Ze shentlemen is what you call bust. Is it not so?”
 Dad said he could bet his life it was so. Then the duke handed the roll
of bills to dad, and said it was a tribute from the prince of
Monaco, and that we were his guests, and when our stay was at an end,
automobiles would be furnished for us to go to Nice, where we could
cable home for funds, and be happy.

Well, when the duke left us, dad said: “Wouldn't that skin you?” and he
gave the Dakota man one of the bills to try on the bartender, and when
he found the money was good we ordered an automobile and skipped out for
Nice. The chauffeur could not understand English, so we talked over the
situation and decided that the only way to be looked upon as genuine
automobilists would be to wear goggles and look prosperous and mad at
everybody. We took turns looking mad at everybody we passed on the road,
and got it down so fine that people picked up rocks after we had-passed,
and threw them at us, and then we knew that we were succeeding in being
considered genuine, rich automobile tourists.

After we had succeeded for an hour or two in convincing the people that
we were properly heartless and purse proud, dad said the only thing
we needed to make the trip a success was to run over somebody. He
said nearly all the American automobile tourists in Europe had killed
somebody and had been obliged to settle and support a family or two in
France or Italy, and they were prouder of it than they would be if they
endowed a university, or built a church, and he said he trusted our
chauffeur would not be too careful in running through the country, but
would at least cripple some one.

Well, just before we got to Nice, and darkness was settling down on the
road, the chauffeur blew his horn, there was a scream that would raise
hair on Horace Greeley's head, the automobile stopped, and there was a
bundle of dusty old clothes, with an old woman done up in them, and we
jumped out and lifted her up, and there we were, the woman in a faint,
the peasants gathering around us with scythes and rakes and clubs,
demanding our lives. The bloody-faced woman was taken into a home, the
crowd held us, until finally a doctor came, and after examining the
woman said she might live, but it would be a tight squeeze. We wanted
to go on, but we didn't want to be cut open with a scythe, so finally a
man, who said he was the husband of the woman, came out with a gun, dad
got down on his knees and tried to say a prayer, the Dakota man held up
both hands like it was a stage being held up, and I cried.

[Illustration: Dad got down on his knees and tried to say a prayer 178]

Finally the chauffeur said, in broken English, that the husband would
settle for $400, because he could pay the funeral expenses, get
another wife for half the money and have some thing left to lay up for
Christmas. As the man's gun was pointed at dad, he quit praying and
gave up the money and agreed to send $50 a month for 11 years, until the
oldest child was of age.

Well, we got away alive, got into Nice, and the chauffeur started back
and we cabled home for money to be sent to Geneva, Switzerland. But,
say; you have not heard the sequel. A story that has a sequel is always
the best, and I hope to die if the police of Nice didn't tell us that we
were buncoed by that old woman and that the chauffeur was in the scheme
and got part of dad's money. The way they do it is to wait till dark,
and then roll the woman in the dust and put some red ink on her face,
and she pretends to be run over, and the doctor is hired by the month,
and they average $500 a night, playing that game on automobile tourists
from America. After the woman is run over every night, and the money
is collected, and the victims have been allowed to go on their way, the
whole community gathers at the house of the injured woman and they have
a celebration and a dance, and probably our chauffeur got back to the
house that night in time to enjoy the celebration. I suppose thousands
of Americans are paying money for killing people that never got a
scratch.

Say, we think in America that we have plenty of ways to rob the
tenderfoot, but they give us cards and spades and little casino and beat
us every time. Dad wanted to hire a hack and go back and finish that old
woman with an ax, because he said he had a corpse coming to him, but the
police told him he could be arrested for thinking murder, and that he
was a dangerous man, and that they would give him 12 hours to get out
of France, and so we bought tickets for Switzerland, though what we came
here for I don't know, only dad said it was a republic like America
and he wanted to breathe the free air of mountains in the home of the
Switzerkase.

Well, anybody can have Switzerland if they want it. I will sell my
interest cheap. The first three days we were here everybody wanted us to
go out on the lake, said to be the most beautiful lake in the world, and
we sailed on it, and rowed on it, and looked down into the clear water
where it is said you can see a corpse on the bottom of the lake 100 feet
down. We hadn't lost any corpse, except the corpse of that old woman
we run over at Nice, but we wanted to get the worth of our money, so we
kept looking for days, but the search for a corpse becomes tame after
awhile, and we gave it up. All we saw in the bottom of the lake was a
cow, but no man can weep properly over the remains of a cow, and dad
said they could go to the deuce with their corpses, and we just camped
at the hotel till our money came. Say, that lake they talk so much about
is no better than lakes all over Wisconsin, and there are no black bass
or muskellunges in it.

The tourists here are just daffy about climbing mountains and glaziers,
and they talk about it all the time, and I could see dad's finish.
They told him that no American that ever visited Switzerland would be
recognized when he got home if he had not climbed the glaziers, so dad
arranged for a trip up into the sky. We went 100 miles or so on the
cars, passing along valleys where all the cows wear tea bells, and it
sounds like chimes in the distance. It is beautiful in Switzerland,
but the cheese is something awful. A piece of native Swiss cheese would
break up a family.

At night we arrived at a station where we hired guides and clothes, and
things, and the next morning we started. Dad wanted me to stay at the
station a couple of days, while he was gone, and play with the goats,
but I told him if there were any places in the mountains or glaziers any
more dangerous than Paris or Monte Carlo, I wanted to visit them, so he
let me go. Well, we were rigged up for discovering the north pole, and
had alpenstocks to push ourselves up with, and the guides had ropes to
pull us up when we got to places where we couldn't climb. I could get
along all right, but they had dad on a rope most of the time pulling him
until his tongue run out and his face turned blue. But dad was game, and
don't you forget it.

Before noon we got on top of a glazier, which is the ice of a frozen
river, that moves all the time, sliding towards the sea.

[Illustration: Dad slipped down a crevice about 100 feet 181]

There was nothing but a hard winter, in summer, to the experience, and
we would have gone back the same night, only dad slipped down a crevice
about 100 feet with the rope on him, and the two guides couldn't pull
him up, and we had to send a lunch down to him on the rope and one of
the guides had to go back to the village for help to get dad up. Well,
sir, I think dad was nearer dead than he ever was before, but they sent
down a bottle of brandy, and when he drank some of it the snow began to
melt and he was warm enough to use bad language.

He yelled to me that this was the limit and wanted to know how long
they were going to keep him there. I yelled to him that one of the
guides had gone for help to pull him out, and he said for them to order
a yoke of oxen. I told him that probably he would have to remain there
until spring opened and that I was going back to America and leave him
there, and he better pray.

[Illustration: Have to remain there until spring opened 183]

I don't know whether dad prayed, down there in the bowels of the
mountains, but he didn't pray when help came, and they finally hauled
him up. His breath was gone, but he gave those guides some language
that would set them to thinking if they could have understood him, and
finally we started down the mountain. They kept the rope on dad and
every little while he would slip and slide 100 feet or so down the
mountain on his pants, and the snow would go up his trousers legs clear
to his collar, and the exercise made him so hot that the steam came out
of his clothes, and he looked like a locomotive wrecked in a snow bank
blowing off steam.

It became dark and I expected we would be killed, but before midnight we
got to the station and changed our clothes and paid off the guides and
took a train back. Dad said to me, as we got on the cars: “Now, Hennery,
I have done this glazier stunt, just to show you that a brave man,
whatever his age, is equal to anything they can propose in Europe,
but by ginger, this settles it, and now I want to go where things come
easier. I am now going to Turkey and see how the Turks worry along. Are
you with me?” “You bet your life,” says I.

Yours truly,

Hennery.




CHAPTER XV.

     Dad Plays He Is an Anarchist--They Give Alms to the Beggars
     and the Bad Boy Ducks a Gondolier and His Dad in the Grand
     Canal.

Venice, Italy.--My Dear Old Chumireno: Dad couldn't get out of
Switzerland quick enough after he got thawed out the day after we
climbed the glaziers. We found that almost all the tourists in Geneva
were there because they did not want to go home and say they had not
visited Switzerland, so they just jumped from one place to another. The
people who stay there any length of time are like the foreign residents
of Mexico, who are wanted for something they have done at home, that is
against the law. There are more anarchists in Geneva than anything else,
and they look hairy and wild eyed, and they plot to kill kings and drink
beer out of two quart jars.

When we found that more attention was paid to men suspected of crime
in their own countries, and men who were believed to be plotting to
assassinate kings, dad said it would be a good joke if a story should
get out that he was suspected of being connected with a syndicate that
wanted to assassinate some one, so I told a fellow that I got acquainted
with that the fussy old man that tried to ride a glazier without any
saddle or stirrup was wanted for attempting to blow up the president
of the United States by selling him baled hay soaked in a solution of
dynamite and nitro-glycerine.

[Illustration: Dad and the anarchists reveled till morning 188]

Say, they will believe anything in Switzerland. It wasn't two hours
before long-haired people were inviting dad to dinners, and the same
night he was taken to a den where a lot of anarchists were reveling, and
dad reveled till almost morning. When he came back to the hotel he said
his hosts got all the money he had with him, through some game he didn't
understand, but he under stood it was to go into a fund to support
deserving anarchists and dynamiters. He said when they found out he was
a suspected assassin nothing was too good for him. He said they wanted
to know how he expected to kill a president by soaking baled hay in
explosives, and dad said it came to him suddenly to tell them that the
president rode on horseback a good deal, and he thought if a horse was
filled with baled hay, and nitro-glycerine and the president spurred
the horse and the horse jumped in the air and came down kerchunk on an
asphalt pavement, the horse would explode, and when the rider came down
covered with sausage covers and horse meat, he would be dead, or would
want to be. Dad said the anarchists went into executive session and took
up a collection to send a man to Berlin to fill the emperor's saddle
horse with cut feed like dad suggested.

Well, the anarchist story was too much for Switzerland, and the next
morning dad was told by a policeman that he had to get out of the
country quick, and it didn't take us 15 minutes to pack up, and here we
are in Venice.

Well, say, old friend, this is the place where you ought to be, because
nobody works here, that is, nobody but gondoliers. We have been here
several days, and I have not seen a soul doing anything except begging,
or selling things that nobody seems to want. If anybody buys anything
but onions, it is for curiosity, or for souvenirs, and yet the whole
population sits around in the sun and watches the strangers from other
lands price things and go away without buying, and then everybody looks
mad, as though they would like to jab a knife into the stranger. The
plazas and the places near the canal are filled with hucksters and
beggars, and you never saw beggars so mutilated and sore and disgusting.
I never supposed human beings could be so deformed, without taking an ax
to them, and it is so pitiful to see them that you can't help shedding
your money.

[Illustration: Coughed up over $40 the first day, just giving to beggars
191]

As hard hearted as dad is, he coughed up over $40 the first day, just
giving to beggars, and he thought he had got them all bought up, and
that they would let him alone, but the next day when he showed up there
were ten beggars where there was one the day before, and they followed
him everywhere, and all the loafers in the plazas laughed and acted as
if they would catch the cripples when dad got out of sight and rob the
beggars. Dad thinks the way the people live is by dividing with beggars.
A man who has a deformity, or a sore that you can see half a block away,
seems to be considered rich here, like a man in America who owns stock
in great corporations. These beggars pay more taxes than the dukes and
things who live in style.

I suppose dad never studied geography, so he didn't know how Venice was
situated, so he told me to go out and order a hack the first morning we
were here, and we would go and see the town. When I told dad there were
no hacks, no horses and no roads in Venice, he said I was crazy in my
head and wanted me to take some medicine and stay in bed for a few days,
but I convinced him, when we got outdoors, that everything run by water,
and when I showed him the canal and the gondolas, he remembered all
about Venice, and picked out a gondalier that looked like one dad saw
at the world's fair, and we hired him because he talked English. All the
English the gondolier could use were the words “you bet your life,” and
“you're dam right,” but dad took him because it seemed so homelike, and
we have been riding in gondolas every day.

On the water you can get away from the beggars. This is an ideal
existence. You just get in the gondola, under a canopy, and the
gondolier does the work, and you glide along between build ings and
wonder who lives there, and when they wake up, as all day long the
blinds are closed, and everybody seems to be dead. But at night, when
the canals are lighted, and the moon shines, the people put on their
dress clothes and sit on verandas, or eat and drink, and talk Eyetalian,
and ride in gondolas, and play guitars, and smoke cigarettes, and talk
love. It is so warm you can wear your summer pants, and the water smells
of clams that died long ago. It is just as though Chicago was flooded
by the bursting of the sewers, and people had to go around State street,
and all the cross streets, and Michigan avenue, in fishing boats, with
three feet of water on top of the pavements. Imagine the people of
Chicago taking gondolas and riding along the streets, landing at the
stores and hotels, just as they do now from carriages.

We had been riding in gondolas for two days, getting around in the mud
when the tide was out, and going to sleep and waiting for the tide to
come in, when it seemed to me that dad needed some excitement, and last
night I gave it to him.

We were out in our gondola, and the moon was shining, and the electric
lights made the canal near the Rialto bridge as light as day. The Rialto
bridge crosses the Grand canal, and has been the meeting place for
lovers for thousands of years. It is a grand structure, of carved
marble, but it wouldn't hold up a threshing machine engine half as
well as an iron bridge. Well, the canal was filled with thousands of
gondolas, loaded with the flower of Venetian society, and the music just
made you want to fall in love. Dad said if he didn't fall in love, or
something, before morning, he would quit the place. I made up my mind he
should fall into something, so I began by telling dad it seemed strange
to me that nobody but Eyetalians could run a gondola. Dad said he could
run a gondola as well as any foreigner, and I told him he couldn't run
a gondola for shucks, and he said he would show me, so he got out of the
hen house where we were seated, and went back on to the pointed end
of the gondola, and grabbed the pole or paddle from the gondolier, and
said: “Now, Garibaldi, you go inside the pup tent with Hennery, and let
me punt this ark around awhile.”

Garibaldi thought dad was crazy, but he gave up the pole, and just then,
when they were both on the extreme point of the gondola, and she was
wabbling some, I peeked out through the curtains and thought the fruit
was about ripe enough to pick, so I threw myself over to one side of
the gondola, and, by gosh, if dad and Garibaldi didn't both go overboard
with a splash, and one yell in the English language, and one in
Eye-talian, and I rushed out of the cabin and such a sight you never
saw.

[Illustration: Overboard, one yell in the English language, one in
Eye-talian 193]

Dad retained the paddle, and had his head out of water, but nothing
showed above the water, where Garibaldi was except a red patch on his
black pants. Dad was yelling for help, and finally the gondolier got his
head out of the water, and said something that sounded like grinding a
butcher knife on a grindstone, and I yelled, too, and the gondolas began
to gather around us, and the two men were rescued. The gondolier had
been gondoling all his life and he had never been in the water before,
and they thought it would strike in and kill him, so they wrapped him up
in blankets and put him aboard his canoe, and he looked at me as though
I was to blame. They got a boat hook fastened in dad's pants and landed
him in the gondola, and he dripped all the way to our hotel, and he
smelled like a fish market.

I asked Garibaldi, on the way to the hotel, if he was counting his beads
when he was down under the water with nothing but his pants out of the
water, and he said: “You're dam right,” but I don't think he knew the
meaning of the words, because he probably wouldn't swear in the presence
of death. Dad just sat and shivered all the way to the hotel, but when
we got to our room I asked him what his idea was in jumping overboard
right there before folks, with his best clothes on, and he said it was
all Garibaldi's fault, that just as dad was getting a good grip on the
paddle, the gondolier heaved a long sigh, and the onions in his breath
paralyzed dad so he fell overboard.

[Illustration: Then you don't blame your little boy, do you 197]

“Then you don't blame your little boy, do you?” says I, and dad looked
at me as he was hanging his wet shirt on a chair. “Course not; you
were asleep in the cabin. But say, if I ever hear that you did tip that
gondola, it will go hard with you,” but I just looked innocent, and dad
went on drying his shirt by a charcoal brazier and never suspected me.
But I am getting the worst of it, for dad and his clothes smell so much
like a clam bake that it makes me sick.

Well, old friend, you ought to close up your grocery and come over here
and go to Vesuvius and Pompeii with us, where we can dry our clothes
by the volcano, and dig in the city that was buried in hot ashes 2,000
years ago. They say you can dig up mummies there that are dead ringers
for you, old man.

O, come on, and have fun with us.

Your friend,

Hennery.




CHAPTER XVI.

     The Bad Boy Writes from Naples--Dad Sees Vesuvius and Calls
     the Servants to Put Out the Fire--They Have Trouble with a
     “Dago” in Pompeii.

Naples, Italy.--Dear Old Partner in Crime: Well, sir, we have struck a
place that reminds us of home, and your old grocery store. The day we
got here dad and I took a walk into the poorer districts, where they
throw all the slops and refuse in the streets, and where nobody ever
seems to clean up anything and burn it. The odor was something that you
cannot describe without a demonstration, and after we had turned pale
and started to go away, dad said the smell reminded him of something
at home, and finally he remembered your old grocery in the sauerkraut
season, early in the morning, before you had aired out the place. Your
ears must have burned when we were talking about you.

If you want to get an idea of Naples, at its worst, go down into your
cellar and round up all the codfish, onions, kraut, limburger cheese,
kerosene, rotten potatoes, and everything that is dead, put it all in
a bushel basket, and just before the Health officers come to pull your
place, get down on your knees and put your head down in the basket, and
let some one sit on your head all the forenoon, and you will have just
such a half day as dad and I had in the poor quarter of Naples, and
it will not cost you half as much as it did us, unless, after you have
enjoyed yourself in your cellar with your head in the basket, you decide
to have a run of sickness and hire a doctor who will charge you the
price of a trip to Europe.

Well, sir, Naples is a dandy, in its clean part. The bay of Naples is a
dead ringer for Milwaukee bay, in shape and beauty, but Milwaukee
lacks Vesuvius and Pompeii, for suburbs, and she lacks the customary
highwaymen to hold you up. Every man, woman and child we have met makes
a living out of the tourists, and nobody that I have seen works at any
other business.

[Illustration: Wanted to turn in a fire alarm 201]

We woke up the first morning and dad looked out the window and saw
Vesuvius belching forth flame and lava and stone fences, and wanted to
turn in a fire alarm, but I told him that that fire had been raging
ever since the Christian era, and was not one of these incendiary barn
burnings, but he opened the window and yelled fire, and the porters and
chambermaids came running to our room, with buckets of water, and
wanted to know where the fire was. Dad pointed out of the window towards
Vesuvius and said: “Some hired girl has been starting a fire with
kerosene, in that shanty on the knoll out there, and the whole ranch
will burn if you don't turn out the fire department, you gosh blasted
lazy devils. Get a move on and help carry out the furniture.”

Well, they calmed dad, and then I had to go to work and post dad up
on the geography he had forgotten, and finally he remembered seeing a
picture of a volcano or burning mountain in his geography 50 years ago,
but he told me he never believed there was a volcano in the world, but
that he always thought they put those pictures in geographies to make
them sell. How a man can attain the prominence and position in the
business world that dad has, and not know any more than he does, is what
beats me.

Of course, you know, having kept a grocery since the war, and having had
opportunities to study history, by the pictures on the soap boxes and
insurance calendars, that Nero, the Roman tyrant, after Rome was burned,
while he fiddled for a dance in a barn, got so accustomed to fire and
brimstone that he retired to Naples and touched off Vesuvius, just so
he could look at it. But Vesuvius, about 2,000 years ago, got to burning
way down in its bowels, and the fire got beyond control, and I suppose
now the fire is away down in the center of the earth, and you know when
you get down in the earth below the crust, on which we live and raise
potatoes, everything is melted, like iron in a foundry, and Vesuvius is
the spigot through which the fluid comes to the surface. You see, don't
you?

Just imagine that this earth is a barrel of beer, which you can
understand better than anything else, and it is being shaken up by being
hauled around on wagons and cars, and is straining to get out, then a
bartender drives a spigot into the bung, turns the thumb piece, and the
pent-up beer comes out foaming and squirting, and there you are.

Instead of beer, Vesuvius is loaded with lava, that runs like molasses,
and when it is cold it is indigestible as a cold buckwheat cake, and you
can make it up into jewelry, that looks like maple sugar and smells like
a fire in a garbage crematory. Besides the lava there are stones as big
as a house that are thrown up by the sea-sickness of the earth, as it
heaves and pants, and then the ashes that come out of the crater at
times would make you think that what they need there is to have a
chimney sweep go down and brush out the flues.

[Illustration: Threw a pail of ashes over the fence 204]

To get an idea of what a nuisance the ashes from the crater are to the
cities on the plain below, you remember the time you were out in your
back yard splitting boxes for kindling wood and my chum and I threw a
pail of ashes over the fence, and accidentally it went all over you,
about four inches thick. That time you got mad and threw cucumbers
at us, when we ran down the alley. Keep that in your mind and you can
understand the destruction of Pompeii, when Vesuvius, thousands of years
ago, coughed up hot ashes and covered the town 40 feet deep with hot
stuff, and killed every living thing, and petrified and preserved the
whole business, and made a prairie on top of a town, and everybody
eventually forgot that there had ever been a town there, for about 2,000
years. If my chum and I had not run out of ashes we would have buried
you so deep in your back yard that you would have been petrified with
your hatchet, and when they excavated the premises a thousand years
later they would have found your remains and put you in a museum.

Well, a couple of hundred years ago a peasant was sinking a well down in
the ashes, and he struck a petrified barroom, with a bartender standing
behind the bar in the act of serving some whisky 2,000 years old, and
the peasant located a claim there, and the authorities took possession
of the prairie and have been digging the town out ever since, looking
for more of that 2,000-year-old whisky.

When I told dad about what they were finding at the ruins of Pompeii,
and how you were liable to find gold and diamonds and petrified women,
he wanted to go and dig in the ashes, as he said it would be more
exciting than raking over the dumping grounds in Chicago for tin cans
and lumps of coal, and so we hired a hack and went to the buried town,
but dad insisted on carrying an umbrella, so if Vesuvius belched any
more ashes he could protect himself. Gee, but from what I have seen at
that old ruin, a man would need an umbrella made of corrugated iron to
keep from being buried.

[Illustration: Dad insisted on carrying an umbrella 207]

Well, when we got to Pompeii dad was for going right where they were
digging, but I got him to look over the streets and houses that had
been uncovered first, and he was paralyzed to think that a town could be
covered with ashes all these thousands of years, and then be uncovered
and find a town that would compare, in many respects, with cities of the
present day, with residences complete with sculpture, paintings and cut
marble that would skin Chicago to a finish.

We went through residences that looked as rich as the Vanderbilt houses
in New York, baths that you could take a plunge and a swim in, if they
had the water, paintings that would take a premium at any horse show
to-day, pavements that would shame the pavements of London and Paris,
and petrified women that you couldn't tell from a low-necked party in
Washington, except that the ashes had eaten the clothes off. I guess
most of the people in Pompeii got away when the ashes began to rain
down, for they must have seen that it wasn't going to be a light shower,
but a deluge, 'cause they never have found many corpses. They must have
run to Naples, and maybe they are running yet, and you may see some
of them at your grocery, and if you do see anybody covered with ashes,
looking for a job, give them some crackers and cheese and charge it to
dad, for they must be hungry by this time.

Say, do you know that some of those refugees from Pompeii went off in
such a hurry that they left bread baking in the ovens, and meat cooking
in the pots? It seems the most wonderful thing to me of anything I ever
saw. We went all through the streets and houses and saw ballrooms
that beat anything in San Francisco, and when we went into a building
occupied by the officers in charge of the excavations, and dad saw a
telephone and an electric light, he thought those things had been dug
up, too, and he claimed that the men who were receiving millions of
dollars in royalties on telephones and electric lights were frauds who
were infringing on Pompeii patents 2,000 years old, and he wouldn't
believe me when I told him that telephones and electric lights were not
dug up; he said then he wouldn't believe anything was dug up, but that
the whole thing was a put-up job to rob tourists. But when we got to a
locality where the dagoes were digging the ashes away from a house and
were uncovering a parlor, where rich things were being discovered, he
saw that it was all right.

I suppose I never ought to have played such a thing on dad, but I told
him that anybody who saw a thing first when it came out of the ashes
could grab it and keep it, and just as I told him a workman threw out a
shovel full of ashes, just as you would throw out dirt digging for angle
worms, and there was a little silver urn with a lot of coins in it, and
you could not hold dad. He grabbed for it, the workman grabbed for it,
and they went down together in the ashes, and the man rolled dad over
and he was a sight, but the workman got the silver urn, and dad wanted
to fight.

[Illustration: The man rolled dad over and he was a sight 210]

Finally a man with a uniform on came along and was going to arrest dad,
but they finally compromised by the man offering to sell the silver urn
and the gold coins to dad for a hundred dollars, if he would promise
not to open it up until he got out of Italy, and dad paid the money and
wrapped the urn up in a Chicago paper, and we took our hack and went
back to Naples on a gallop.

Dad could hardly wait till we got to the hotel before opening up his
prize, but he held out until we got to our room, when he unwrapped the
urn to count his ancient gold coins. Well, you'd a-died to see dad's
face when he opened that can. It was an old tomato can that had been
wrought out with a hammer so it looked like hammered silver, and when
he emptied the gold coins out on the table there was a lot of brass tags
that looked like dog license tags, and baggage checks and brass buttons.
I had to throw water on dad to bring him to, and then he swore he would
kill the dago that sold him the treasure from the ruins of Pompeii.
It was a great blow to dad, and he has bought a dirk knife to kill the
dago. To-morrow we take in Vesuvius, and when we come down from the
crater we go to Pompeii and kill the dago in his tracks. Dad may cause
Vesuvius to belch again with hot ashes, and cover the ruins of Pompeii,
but if he can't turn on the ashes, the knife will do the business.

Yours,

Hennery.




CHAPTER XVII.

     The Bad Boy and His Dad Climb Vesuvius--A Chicago Lady Joins
     the Party and Causes Trouble.

Naples, Italy.--Siegnor ze Grocerino: I guess that will make you stand
without hitching for a little while. Say, I am getting so full of dead
languages, and foreign palaver, that I shall have to have an operation
on my tongue when I get home before I can speel the United States
language again so you can make head or tail of it. You see, I don't stay
long enough in a country to acquire its language, but I get a few words
into my system, so now my English is so mixed with French words, Italian
garlic and German throat trouble that I cannot understand myself unless
I look in a glass and watch the motions of my lips. Dad has not picked
up a word of any foreign language, and says he should consider himself a
traitor to his country if he tried to talk anything but English. He
did get so he could order a glass of beer by holding up his finger and
saying “ein,” but he found later that just holding up his finger
without saying “ein” would bring the beer all the same so he cut out the
language entirely and works his finger until it needs a rest.

When I used to study my geography at the little red schoolhouse, and
look at the picture of the volcano Vesuvius, and read about how it would
throw up red-hot lava, and ashes, and rocks as big as a house, and wipe
out cities, it looked so terrible to me that I was glad when we got
through with the volcano lesson, and got to Greenland's icy mountains,
where there was no danger except being frozen to death, or made sick by
eating blubber sliced off of whales.

Then I never expected to be right on the very top of that volcano,
throwing stones down in the lava, and sailing chips down the streams of
hot stuff, just as I sailed chips on ice water at home-when the streets
were flooded by spring rains. Say, there is no more danger on Vesuvius
than there is in a toboggan slide, or shooting the chutes at home. I
thought we would have to hire dagoes to carry us up to the top, and be
robbed and held up, and may be murdered, but it is just as easy as going
up in the elevator of a skyscraper, and no more terrifying than
sitting on a 50-cent seat in a baseball park at home and witnessing the
“Destruction of Pompeii” by a fireworks display

The crater looks sort of creepy, like a big cauldron kettle boiling soap
on a farm, only it is bigger, and down in the earth's bowels you can
well believe there is trouble, and if you believe in a hell, you can get
it, illustrated proper, but the rivulets of lava that flow out of the
wrinkles around the mouth of the crater are no more appalling than
making fudges over a gas stove. When the lava cools you would swear it
was fudges, only you can't eat the lava and get indigestion as you can
eating fudges.

It was hard work to get dad to go up on the volcano, because he said he
knew he would fall into it, and get his clothes burned, and he said he
couldn't climb clear to the top, on account of his breath being short,
but when I told him he could ride up on a trolley car, and have the
volcano brought right to him, he weakened, and one morning we left
Naples early and before two hours had passed we were on a little
cogwheel railroad going up, and dad was looking down on the scenery,
expecting every minute the cogs would slip and we would cut loose and go
down all in a heap and be plastered all over the vineyards and big trees
and be killed.

I don't know what makes dad so nervous, but he wanted a woman from
Chicago, who was on the car with us, to hold his hand all the way up,
but she said she was no nurse in a home for the aged, and she said she
would cuff dad if he didn't let go of her. I told her she better not
get dad mad if she knew what was good for her, for he was a regular
Bluebeard, and wouldn't take no slack from no Chicago female, 'cause
he had buried nine wives already. So she held his hand, and I guess she
thinks she will be my stepmother, but I bet she don't.

Well, after we got almost to the top the car stopped, and we had to walk
the rest of the way, several hundred feet, and we had to have a pusher
and a putter for dad, a dago to go ahead and pull him up, and another
to put his shoulder against dad's pants and shove. Gee, but it was a
picture to see dad “go up old baldhead,” with the dagoes perspiring and
swearing at dad for being so heavy, and the Chicago woman laughing, and
me pushing her up.

[Illustration: It was a picture to see dad go up old baldhead 214]

One thing that scared dad was that every little way there was a shrine,
where the guides left dad lying on the ground, blocked with a piece of
cold lava, so he wouldn't roll down, like you would block a wagon wheel,
and they would go to the shrine and kneel and say some prayers.

Dad was afraid they were going to charge the prayers in the bill for
pushing him up, but I told dad that these people expected every time
they, went up to the top that it would be their last trip, as they knew
that some day the volcano would open in a new place and swallow them
whole, with all the tourists. Then he gave them a dollar apiece to pray
for him, and wanted to go back down the mountain and let Vesuvius run
its own fireworks, but the Chicago lady told dad to brace up and she
would protect him, and so the guides gave a few more pushes, and we were
on top of the volcano, and dad collapsed and had to be brought to with
smelling salts and whisky that the woman carried in her pistol pocket.

Gee, but it was worth all the trouble to get up the mountain, to see the
sight that opened up. The hole in the mountain filled with boiling stuff
was worth the price of admission, and the roaring of the boiling stuff,
and the explosions way down cellar, and the flying stones, the smoke
going into the air for a mile, like the burning of an oil well, the
red-hot lava finding crevices to leak through, and flowing down the
side of the mountain in streams like hot maple sirup, made a scene thai
caused us to take off our hats and thank the good Lord that the thing
hadn't overflowed enough to hurt us. But I could see dad was scared,
'cause when I wanted him to go around the edge of the crater with me,
and see the hell-roaring free show from other points of view, and
see where the hot ashes years ago rolled down and covered Pompeii and
Herculaneum, he balked and said he had seen all he wanted to, and if he
could stay alive until the next car went down the mountain, they could
all have his interest in Vesuvius, and be darned to them, but he said if
I wanted to go around looking for trouble, he would stay there under a
big rock, with the Chicago lady, and wait for me to come back. She said
she knew dad was all tired out, and needed rest, and she would stay with
him, and keep him cheered up; so I left them and went off with one
of the dagoes, to slide down hill on some flowing lava, and pick up
specimens.

Well, sir, I wish I could get along some way without telling the rest of
this sad story, but if I am going to be a historian I have got to tell
the whole blame thing.

[Illustration: And she was stroking his hair 217]

When I left dad and the Chicago woman she had produced a lunch from
somewhere about her person, and a small bottle, and they were eating and
drinking, and dad was laughing more natural than I had seen him laugh
since we run over the old woman with the automobile at Nice, and she was
smiling on dad just as though she was his sweetheart. (As I went around
the crater, a couple of blocks away, I looked back and dad had laid his
head in her lap, and she was stroking his hair. )

Well, I picked up specimens, burned the soles off my shoes wading in the
lava, and took in the volcano from all sides, and after an hour I went
back to where dad and the woman were lunching, but the woman was gone,
and dad acted as though he had been hit by an express train, his eyes
were wild, his collar was gone, his pocketbook was on the ground, empty,
his coat was gone, his scarf-pin had disappeared and the $11 watch he
bought when he was robbed the other time was missing, and dad's tongue
was run out, and he was yelling for water. I thought he had been trying
to drink some lava.

[Illustration: He was yelling for water 223]

“Dad, what in the world has happened to you?” said I, as I rushed up to
him.

“That woman has happened to me, that is all,” said dad, as he took a
swallow of water out of a canteen one of the dagoes had.

“Tell me about it, dad,” said I, trying to keep from laughing, when I
saw that he was not hurt.

“Say, let this be a lesson to you,” said dad, “and don't you steer
another woman to me on this trip. Do you know you hadn't more than got
around that big rock when she said she was tired and was going to faint,
for the altitude was too high for her, and I tried to soothe her, and
she did look pale, and, by gosh, I thought she was going to die on my
hands, and I would have to carry her corpse down the mountain. I heard
a scuffling on the rocks, and she looked up and saw a man not ten feet
away, and she said: 'Me husband!' and then she fainted and grabbed me
around the neck, and I couldn't get her loose. She just froze to me
like a person drowning, and that husband of hers, who had come up on the
last car, hunting for his wife, who had eloped, pulled a long blue gun
and told me he would give me five minutes to pray, and then he would
kill me and throw my body down in the creater, to sizzle.”

[Illustration: Pulled a long blue gun 220]

“I told him I could pay up enough ahead in three minutes, and he could
take all I had if he would loosen up his wife, and bring her to, and
take her away, and let me die all alone, and let the buzards eat me,
uncooked. He took the bet, pulled her arms away from my throat, took my
money and coat, brought her to, and said he was going to throw her into
the crater, but I told him she had certainly been good to me, and if he
would spare her life, and take her away in the cars, he could have my
watch and scarfpin, and he took them, and they went to the cars.

“She looked back at me with the saddest face I ever saw, and said:
'O, sir, it is all a terrible dream, and I will see you in Naples, and
explain all,' and now, by Christmas, I want to go back to town and find
her, and rescue her from that jealous husband,” and dad got up and we
started for the car.

The man and his wife went down on the car ahead of us, and dad wouldn't
believe they were regular bunko people, who play that game everyday on
some old sucker, but the man that runs the car told me so.

I can be responsible for dad in everything except the women he meets.
When it comes to women, your little Hennery don't know the game at all.

Yours,

Hennery.




CHAPTER XVIII.

     The Bad Boy Makes Friends with Some Italian Children--Dad Is
     Chased by Lions from the Coliseum--“Not Any More Rome for
     Papa,” Says Dad.

Rome, Italy.--My Dear Old “Pard:” Well, sir, if you could see me now,
you wouldn't know me, because foreign travel has broadened me out so
I can talk on any subject, and people of my age look upon me as an
authority, and they surround me everywhere I go and urge me to talk.
The fact that the boys and girls do not understand a word I say makes
no difference. They do not wear many clothes here, and there is no style
about them, and when they see me with a whole suit of clothes on, and
a hat and shoes and socks, and a scarf-pin on my necktie, they think
I must be an Americano that is too rich for any use, or something that
ranks with a prince at least, and the boys delight to be with me and do
errands for me, and the girls seem to be in love with me.

There is no way you can tell if a girl is in love with you, except that
she looks at you with eyes that are as black as coal, and they seem to
burn a hole right into your insides, and when they take hold of your
hand they hang on and squeeze like alamand-left in a dance at home, and
they snug up to you and are as warm and cheerful as a gas stove.

[Illustration: It brought on a revolution 227]

Say, I sat on a bench in a plaza with a girl about my age, for an hour,
while the other girls and boys sat on the ground and looked at us in
admiration, and when I put my arm around her and kissed her on her
pouting lips, it brought on a revolution. An Italian soldier policeman
took me by the neck and threw me across the street, the girl scratched
me with her finger nails and bit me, and yelled some grand hailing sign
of distress, her brother and a ragged boy that was in love with the girl
and was jealous, drew daggers, and the whole crowd yelled murder, and I
started for our hotel on a run, and the whole population of Rome seemed
to follow me, and I might as well have been a negro accused of crime in
the states. I thought they would burn me at the stake, but dad came out
of the hotel and threw a handful of small change into the crowd, and it
was all off.

After they picked up the coin they beckoned me to come out and play some
more, but not any more for little Hennery. I have been in love in all
cou

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