“Well,” says the red haired minister, “those melons were green, anyway, but it was the fun of stealing them that we were after.”

At this point the door opened and the host entered, and, pushing the smoke away with his hands, he said:  “Well, gentlemen, you are enjoying yourselves?”

They threw their cigar stubs in the spittoon, the solemn man laid the brier wood pipe where he got it, and the fat man said: 

“Brother Drake, we have been discussing the evil effects of indulging in the weed, and we have come to the conclusion that while tobacco is always bound to be used to a certain extent by the thoughtless, it is a duty the clergy owe to the community to discountenance its use on all possible occasions.  Perhaps we had better adjourn to the parlor, and after asking divine guidance take our departure.”

PECK’S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.

HE BECOMES A DRUGGIST.

“Whew!  What is that smells so about this store?  It seems as though everything had turned frowy,” said the grocery man to his clerk in the presence of the bad boy, who was standing with his back to the stove, his coat-tails parted with his hands, and a cigarette in his mouth.

“May be it is me that smells frowy,” said the boy as he put his thumbs in the armholes of his vest, and spit at the keyhole in the door.  “I have gone into business.”

“By thunder, I believe it is you,” said the grocery man, as he went up to the boy and snuffed a couple of times and then held his hand to his nose.  “The board of health will kerosene you if they ever smell that smell, and send you to the glue factory.  What business have you gone into to make you smell so rank?”

“Well, you see Pa began to think it was time I learned a trade, or a profession, and he saw a sign in a drug store window ‘boy wanted,’ and as he had a boy he didn’t want, he went to the druggist and got a job for me.  This smell on me will go off in a few weeks.  You know I wanted to try all the perfumery in the store, and after I had got about forty different extracts on my clothes, another boy that worked there he fixed up a bottle of benzine and assafety and brimstone, and a whole lot of other horrid stuff, and labeled it ‘rose geranium,’ and I guess I just wallered in it.  It is awful, aint it?  It kerflummixed Ma when I went into the dining-room the first night that I got home from the store, and broke Pa all up.  He said I reminded him of the time they had a litter of skunks under the barn.  The air seemed fixed around where I am, and everybody seems to know who fixed it.  A girl came into the store yesterday to buy a satchet, and there wasn’t anybody there but me, and I didn’t know what it was, and I took down everything in the store pretty near before I found it, and then I wouldn’t have found it only the proprietor came in.  The girl asked the proprietor if there wasn’t a good deal of sewer gas in the store, and he told me to go out and shake myself.  I think the girl was mad at me because I got a nursing bottle out of the show case with a rubber muzzle, and asked her if that was what she wanted.  Well, she told me a sachet was something for the stummick, and I thought a nursing bottle was the nearest thing to it.”