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Peck's Sunshine, a fiction by George W. Peck |
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Changed Satchels |
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_ There was one of those old fashioned mistakes occurred on the train from Monroe to Janesville a week or so ago. A traveling man and a girl who was going to Milton College sat in adjoining seats, and their satchels were exactly alike, and the traveling man took the wrong satchel and got off at Janesville, and the girl went on to Milton. The drummer went down to Vankirk's grocery and put his satchel on the counter, and asked Van how his liver was getting along, while he picked a piece off a codfish and ate it, and then smelled of his fingers and said "Whew!" Van said his liver was "not very torpid, thank you; how are you fixed for tea?" The drummer said he wished he had as many dollars as he was fixed for tea, and began to open his sample case. Van cut off a piece of cheese and was eating it while he walked along towards the drummer. When the case was opened the drummer fell over against a barrel of brooms, and grasping a keg of maple syrup for support, turned pale and said he'd be dashed. Van looked in the sample case, and said, "Fixed for tea! I should think you was, but it wasn't that kind of tea I want." There was a long female night-shirt, clapboarded up in front with trimming and starch, and buttoned from Genesis to Revelations. Van took a butter tryer and lifted it out, and there was more than a peck measure full of stuff that never belonged in no grocery. Van said: "If you are traveling for a millinery house I will send a boy to direct you to a millinery store." The drummer wiped the perspiration from his face with a coffee sack and told Van he would give him a million dollars if he never would let the house in Milwaukee know about it, and he chucked the things back in. "What is this?" said Van, as he held up a pair of giddy looking affairs that no drummer ever wore on his own person. "Don't ask _me_" says the drummer, "I am not a married man." He took the satchel and went to Milton on the next train. The girl had opened the satchel which fell to her in the division to show her room-mate how to make a stitch in crochet, and when the brown sugar, coffee, tea, rice, bottles of syrup, maccaroni and a pack of cards came in sight, she fairly squealed. Along after dinner the drummer called and asked for an exchange, and they exchanged, and it was hard to tell which blushed the most. _ |
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