on't the
ministers murder somebody and make a dead sure thing of it?

PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.

HIS PA MORTIFIED.

"What was the health officer doing over to your house this morning?" said
the grocery man to the bad boy, as the youth was firing frozen potatoes at
the man who collects garbage in the alley.

"O, they are searching for sewer gas and such things, and they have got
plumbers and other society experts till you can't rest, and I came away
for fear they would find the sewer gas and warm my jacket. Say, do you
think it is right when anything smells awfully, to always lay it to a
boy?"

"Well, in nine cases out of ten they would hit it right, but what do you
think is the trouble over to your house, honest?"

"S-h-h! Now don't breathe a word of it to a living soul, or I am a dead
boy. You see I was over to the dairy fair at the Exposition building
Saturday night, and when they were breaking up me and my chum helped to
carry boxes of cheese and firkins of butter, and a cheese man gave each of
us a piece of limberger cheese, wrapped up in tin foil. Sunday morning I
opened my piece, and it made me tired. O, it was the offulest smell I ever
heard of, except the smell when they found a tramp who hung himself in the
woods on the Whitefish Bay road, and had been dead three weeks. It was
just like an old back number funeral. Pa and Ma were just getting ready to
go to church, and I cut off a piece of cheese and put it in the inside
pocket of Pa's vest, and I put another in the lining of Ma's muff, and
they went to church. I went down to church too, and sat on a back seat
with my chum, looking just as pious as though I was taking up a
collection. The church was pretty warm, and by the time they got up to
sing the first hymn Pa's cheese began to smell a match against
Ma's cheese. Pa held one side of the hymn book and Ma held the other, and
Pa he always sings for all that is out, and when he braced himself and
sang 'Just as I am,' Ma thought Pa's voice was tinctured a little with
biliousness, and she looked at him and hunched him, and told him to stop
singing and breathe through his nose, cause his breath was enough to stop
a clock. Pa stopped singing and turned around kind of cross towards Ma,
and then he smelled Ma's cheese and he turned his head the other way and
said, 'whew,' and they didn't sing any more, but they looked at each other
as though they smelled frowy. When they sat down they sat as far apart as
t