A man died in Oshkosh who was over eighty years of age.  After the funeral the minister who conducted the services, said to the son of the deceased, “your father was an octogenarian.”  The young man colored up, doubled up his fist, and said to the minister that he would like to have him repeat that remark.  The minister said, “I say your father was an old octogenarian.”  He had not more than got the word out of his mouth before the young man struck him on the nose, knocked him down, kicked him in the ear, and when pulled off by a policeman, he said no holyghoster could call his dead father names, not around him.  The minister said he couldn’t have been more surprised if some one had paid a year’s pew rent, than he was when that young man’s fist hit him.

PECK’S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.

HE QUITS THE DRUG BUSINESS.

“What are you loafing around here for,” says the grocery man to the bad boy one day this week.  “It is after nine o’clock, and I should think you would want to be down to the drug store.  How do you know but there may be somebody dying for a dose of pills?”

“O, darn the drug store.  I have got sick of that business, and I have dissolved with the drugger.  I have resigned.  The policy of the store did not meet with my approval, and I have stepped out and am waiting for them to come and tender me a better position at an increased salary,” said the boy, as he threw a cigar stub into a barrel of prunes and lit a fresh one.

“Resigned, eh?” said the grocery man as he fished out the cigar stub and charged the boy’s father with two pounds of prunes, didn’t you and the boss agree?”

“Not exactly, I gave an old lady some gin when she asked for camphor and water, and she made a show of herself.  I thought I would fool her, but she knew mighty well what it was, and she drank about half a pint of gin, and got to tipping over bottles and kegs of paint, and when the drug man came in with his wife, the old woman threw her arms around his neck and called him her darling, and when he pushed her away, and told her she was drunk, she picked up a bottle of citrate of magnesia and pointed it at him, and the cork came out like a pistol, and he thought he was shot, and his wife fainted away, and the police came and took the old gin refrigerator away, and then the drug man told me to face the door, and, when I wasn’t looking he kicked me four times, and I landed in the street, and he said if I ever came in sight of the store again he would kill me dead.  That is the way I resigned.  I tell you, they will send for me again.  They never can run that store without me.

“I guess they will worry along without you,” said the grocery man.  “How does your Pa take your being fired out?  I should think it would brake him all up.”

“O, I think Pa rather likes it.  At first he thought he had a soft snap with me in the drug store, cause he has got to drinking again, like a fish, and he has gone back on the church entirely; but after I had put a few things in his brandy he concluded it was cheaper to buy it, and he is now patronizing a barrel house down by the river.