The Loup City Northwestern

Dear Bunch:

In Paris, eh? Give my regards to the Moulin Rouge, won't you?

I notice what you say in your letter about buying a couple of French automobiles in Paris, one of the same being for me.

I'm glad to see you have such a sweet disposition, Bunch, but nix on the Bubble.

Not yours hastily.

I've caught all the diseases to date except the automobilious fever.

While walking around the city streets I have been making a deep study of whiz wagons, Bunch, but so close was the machinery to my outposts at the time and so eager was I to get out of the way that perhaps I am prejudiced.

The automobile is the rich man's wine and the poor man's chaser.

It keeps our streets full of red, white and blue streaks all the live long day, and if the weary pedestrian is not supplied with a ball-bearing neck his chance of getting home is null and void.

As far as I can figure it out, the safest part of the machine is the chauffeur, because he knows which way to jump.

Oh! how I admire those chauffeurs who point the machine at you and dare you to get out of the way.

We have no word in the English language which is brash enough to sit on a busy barouche and cut loose.

That's why we had to reach over to Paris and pull a word out of the French.

Chauffeur is the word we grabbed, and I think we ought to give it back at the first opportunity.

Did you ever notice one of those particular guys when they try to say chauffeur?

His mouth looks like a hot waffle.

The first careless cart we ever had in this country was called the "Coroner's Delight," because the only man that met it on the road went back home in sections, and, incidentally, on a shutter.

The motto of the automobile is: Bump others, or they will bump you!

And the automobile face! Can you tie it?

The automobile face is caused by the fact that faces can't ride as fast as machinery; consequently, the muscles between the lips and the mouth become overtrained and lose their cunning.

If you wish to buy an automobile for yourself and become a chauffeur, do so, Bunch, and Peaches and I will miss your boyish laughter about the house, and we will sit by the fireside in the twilight and talk about what you might have been if you hadn't gone out of our lives so abruptly.

I don't wish to discourage you, Bunch, but if you have a bundle of spare coin, why don't you invest it in a building lot in the suburbs?—a lot which runs not backwards or forwards, and which bites not like an adder nor stingeth like a serpent, and upon which no coroner can sit for any length of time without getting the lumbago.

Speaking of gasoline naturally brings us to kerosene.

We have been getting along nicely out here in the country, with the possible exception that Peaches has tried to assassinate all the mosquitoes in the neighborhood with almost fatal results to herself.

Peaches seems to have labored under the impression that the proper way to assassinate a mosquito is to throw a bomb at it and then cross the fingers and hope for the best.

At any rate, she read somewhere in a book that the kindest way to assassinate the mosquito is to coax a bunch of them up in the corner and throw vitriol in their faces, which generally causes them to be ashamed of themselves and makes them lead less bloodthirsty lives.

Well, Peaches tried this idea, but it so happened that my best pair of trousers were hanging in the same corner which she picked out to work her third degree on the skeets, with the result that my trousers departed this world in great haste, while the mosquitoes put their stingers up their sleeves and ran away, laughing wildly.

Then I took Peaches out in a vacant lot, far from the bosom of her family, and explained to her the scientific difference between mosquitoes and a pair of nine-dollar trousers, to all of which she listened with much patience, except when I swore too loud.

But she was not discouraged—nay!

The next day she read in a paper that kerosene oil was the only genuine and reliable way to overcome the mosquito, so she went after them by the oil route.

The article in the paper didn't give full instructions how to use the kerosene, so Peaches thought it all out for awhile, and then she poured about half a gallon of oil in the bathtub and waited.

I think she expected the mosquitoes to walk into the bath-room, undress, grab the soap and plunge into the kerosene oil, where they would perish miserably without even getting a chance to throw up the sponge.

But none of the mosquitoes in our house felt that it was necessary to take a bath, so that scheme failed, while worse and more ravenous and more pitiless grew the hunger of the pests which were using us for a meal ticket.

Then somebody told Peaches that the right way to apply kerosene oil was to put it in a sprinkling can, then dash up behind the enemy and sprinkle them on the lumbar region.

To see Peaches chasing a bevy of mosquitoes around the parlor with fire in her eyes, a carpet-sweeper in her left hand and a sprinkling can full of kerosene oil in her right hand was a sight such as these eyes of mine never before beheld.

If the fire from her eyes had ever reached the kerosene—holy smoke!

On the level, Bunch, if there was any place in our house which Peaches didn't sprinkle with kerosene it must have been a few of my collars and cuffs which hadn't come from the laundry yet.

For two days, Bunch, it rained kerosene in our household.

For breakfast the toast was scented with kerosene, and it floated like a rainbow on top of the coffee.

For luncheon the codfish cakes behaved like a leaky lamp, and the shredded onions lost all their courage and wanted to leave the room.

For dinner the corn beef looked like a roast on John D. Rockefeller, and the delicate blossoms of the sauerkraut were all shriveled up, and tasted like the Ohio river near Parkersburg.

In the meantime, Bunch, the mosquitoes are having the time of their lives.

They thought we were giving a Mardi Gras for their benefit, so they sent out invitations to all their friends, with the result that our little family lost more blood than is spilled in a South American revolution.

Peaches has abandoned the kerosene idea, and is now fumigating the house with something which falls on the insulted nose like a hard slap on the face, so I am writing this letter out in the barn.

My theory about the mosquito is that he has humanity stung, going and coming.

Yours done in oil,

JOHN.

(Copyright, 1908, by G. W. Dillingham Co.)