The Project Gutenberg eBook of Peck's bad boy abroad
Title: Peck's bad boy abroad
Being a humorous description of the bad boy and his dad in their journeys through foreign lands
1904
Author: George W. Peck
Illustrator: Dan Sayre Groesbeck
R. W. Taylor
Release date: May 16, 2008 [eBook #25489]
Most recently updated: February 24, 2021
Language: English
Credits: Produced by David Widger
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PECK'S BAD BOY ABROAD
By Hon. Geo. W. Peck
Being a Humorous Description of the Bad Boy and His Dad in Their Journeys Through Foreign Lands, Their Visits to Crowned Heads, the Manners and Customs of the People, and the Bad Boy's Never Ending Efforts to Provide Fun No Matter Where He Is.
Profusely Illustrated by D. S. Groesbeck and R. W. Taylor
THOMPSON & THOMAS - 1904
Contents
List of Illustrations
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I.
The Bad Boy and His Chum Call on the Old Groceryman After Being Away at
School—The Bad Boy's Dad in a Bad Way
CHAPTER II.
The Bad Boy and His Dad Ready for Their Travels—The Bad Boy Labels the
Old Man's Suit Case—How the Cowboys Made Him Dance Once
CHAPTER III.
The Bad Boy Writes About the Fun They Had Going to Washington—He
and His Dad Call on President Roosevelt—The Bad Boy Meets One of the
Children and They Disagree
CHAPTER IV.
The Bad Boy and His Dad Visit Mount Vernon—Dad Weeps at the Grave of
the Father of Our Country
CHAPTER V.
The Bad Boy and His Dad Have Dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria—The Bad Boy
Orders Dinner—The Old Man Gets Stuck—Tries to Rescue a Countess in
Distress
CHAPTER VI.
The Bad Boy Writes the Old Groceryman About Ocean Voyages—His Dad Has
an Argument Over a Steamer Chair.
CHAPTER VII.
The Bad Boy and His Dad Eat Fog—Call on Astor—A Dynamite Outrage
CHAPTER VIII.
The Bad Boy Writes About the Craze for Gin in the White-chapel
District—He Gives His Dad a Scare in the Tower of London
CHAPTER IX.
The Bad Boy and His Dad Call on King Edward and Almost Settle the Irish
Question
CHAPTER X.
The Bad Boy Writes of Ancient and Modern Highwaymen—¦ They Get a Taste
of High Life in London and Dad Tells the Story of the Picklemaker's
Daughter
CHAPTER XI.
The Bad Boy Writes About Paris—Tells About the Trip Across the English
Channel—Dad Feeds a Dog and Gets Arrested
CHAPTER XII.
The Bad Boy's Second Letter from Paris—Dad Poses as a Mormon Bishop
and Has to Be Rescued—They Climb the Eiffel Tower and the Old Man Gets
Converted
CHAPTER XIII.
The Bad Boy's Dad and a Man from Dakota Frame Up a Scheme to Break the
Bank, But They Go Broke—The Party in Trouble
CHAPTER XIV.
The Bad Boy and His Dad Have an Automobile Ride—They Run Over a
Peasant—Climb “Glaziers”—Dad Falls Over a Precipice, But Is Rescued by
the Guides After a Hard Time of It
CHAPTER XV.
Dad Plays He Is an Anarchist—They Give Alms to the Beggars and the Bad
Boy Ducks a Gondolier and His Dad in the Grand Canal
CHAPTER XVI.
The Bad Boy Writes from Naples—Dad Sees Vesuvius and Calls the Servants
to Put Out the Fire—They Have Trouble with a “Dago” in Pompeii
CHAPTER XVII.
The Bad Boy and His Dad Climb Vesuvius—A Chicago Lady Joins the Party
and Causes Trouble
CHAPTER XVIII.
The Bad Boy Makes Friends with Some Italian Children—Dad is Chased by
Lions from the Coliseum—” Not Any More Rome for Papa,” says Dad
CHAPTER XIX.
The Bad Boy and His Dad Visit the Pope—They Bow to, the King of Italy
and His Nine Spots—Dad Finds That “The Catacombs” Is Not a Comic Opera
CHAPTER XX.
The Bad Boy Tells About the Land of the Czar and the Trouble They Had to
Get There—Dad Does a Stunt and Mixes It Up with the People and Soldiers
CHAPTER XXI.
Dad Sees a Russian Revolution and Faints—'The Bad Boy Arranges a Wolf
Hunt—Dad Threatens to Throw the Boy to the Wolves
CHAPTER XXII.
Dad Wears His Masonic Fez in Constantinople—They Find the Turks
Sensitive on the Dog Question—A College Yell for the Sultan Sends Him
Into a Fit
CHAPTER XXIII.
The Bad Boy and His Dad Meet the Cream of the Harem—“Little Egypt” Does
a Dancing Stunt—The Sultan Wants to Send Fifty Wives to the President
CHAPTER XXIV.
The Bad Boy and His Dad Arrive in Cairo—At the Hotel They Meet Some
Egyptian Princesses—Dad Rides a Camel to the Pyramids and Meets with
Difficulties
CHAPTER XXV.
The Bad Boy and His Dad Climb the Pyramids—The Bad Boy Lights a Cannon
Cracker in Rameses' Tomb—They Flee from Egypt in Disguise
CHAPTER XXVI.
The Bad Boy Writes About Gibraltar—The Irish-English Army—How He Would
Take the Fortress—Dad Wants to Buy the “Rock”
CHAPTER XXVII.
The Bad Boy Writes of Spain—They call On the King and the Bad Boy Is At
It Once More—They See a Bull Fight and Dad Does a Turn
CHAPTER XXVIII.
The Bad Boy and His Dad at Berlin—They Call On Emperor William and His
Family and the Bad Boy Plays a Joke on Them All
CHAPTER XXIX.
The Bad Boy Writes from Brussels—He and Dad See the Field of Waterloo
and Call on King Leopold, and Dad and the King Go in for a Swim—The Bad
Boy, a Dog and Some Goats Do the Rest
CHAPTER XXX.
The Bad Boy's Delayed Letter About Holland and Cuba—Dad and the Boy Go
for a Drive in a Dog-Cart—They Have a Great Time—Land in Cuba and See
the Island We Fought For
PECK'S BAD BOY ABROAD.
CHAPTER I.
Being Away at School—The Bad Boy's Dad in a Bad Way.
The bad boy had been away to school, but the illness of his father had called him home, and for some weeks he had been looking about the old town. He had found few of his old friends. His father had recovered somewhat from his illness, and one day he met his old chum, a boy of his own age. The bad boy and the chum got busy at once, talking over the old times that tried the souls of the neighbors and finally the bad boy asked about the old groceryman, and found that the old man still held out at the old stand, with the same old stock of groceries, and they decided to call upon him, and surprise him. So after it began to be dark they entered the store, and found the old groceryman sitting on a cracker box by the stove, stroking the back of an old maltese cat that had a yellow streak on the back, where it had been singed by crawling under the red-hot stove. As the boys entered the store the cat raised its back, its tail became as large as a rolling pin, and the cat began to spit, while the old groceryman held up both hands and said:
“Don't shoot, please, but one of you go behind the counter and take what there is in the cash drawer, while the other one can reach into my pistol pocket and release my pocketbook. This is the fifth time I have been held up this year, and I have got so if I am not held up about so often I can't sleep nights.”
“O, put down your hands and straighten out that cat's back,” said the bad boy, as he slapped the old groceryman on the back so hard his spine cracked like a frozen sidewalk. “Don't you know us, you old geezer? We are the only and original Peck's Bad Boy and his Chum, come to life, and ready for business,” and the two boys danced a jig on the floor, covered an inch thick with the spilled sugar of years ago, the molasses that had strayed from barrel, and the general refuse of the dirty place, which had become as hard as asphalt.
“O, dear, it is worse than I thought,” said the old groceryman as he laughed a hysterical laugh through the long whiskers, and he hugged the boys as though he had a liking for them, notwithstanding the suffering they had caused him. “By gosh, I thought you were nothing but common robbers, who just wanted my money. You are old friends, and can have the whole place,” and he poured some milk into a basin for the cat, but the animal only looked at the two boys as though she knew them, and watched them to see what was coming next.
The bad boy looked around the old grocery, which had not changed a particle during the time he had been away, the same old box of petrified prunes, the dried apples that could not be cut with a hatchet, the canned stuff on the shelves had become so old that the labels had curled up and fallen off, so it must have been a guess with the old groceryman whether he was selling a can of peas or tomatoes, and the old fellow standing there as though the world had gone off and left him, as his customers had.
“Well, wouldn't this skin you,” said the bad boy, as he took up a dried prune and tried to crack it with a hatchet on a two-pound weight, turning to his chum who was stroking the singed hair of the old cat the wrong way. “Say, old man, you ought to get a hustle on you. Why don't you clean out this shebang, and put in a new stock, of goods, and have clerks with white aprons on, and a girl bookkeeper, and goods that people will buy and eat and not get sick? There is a grocery down street that is as clean as a whistle, and I notice all your old customers go there. Why don't you keep up with the times?”
“O, I ain't running a dude place,” said the old man, as he took a piece of soft coal and put it in the old round stove, and wiped the black off his hands on his trousers. “I am trying to get rid of my customers. I have got money enough to live on, and I just stay here waiting for the old cat to die. I have only got six customers left, and one of them has got pneumonia, and is going to die, then there will be only five. When they are all gone I shall sit here by the stove until the end comes. There is nothing doing now to keep me awake, since you boys quit getting me mad. Say, boys, do you know, I haven't been real mad since you quit coming here. The only fun I have had is swearing at my customers when they stick up their noses at my groceries. It's the funniest thing, when I tell an old customer that if they don't like my goods they can go plum to thunder, they get mad and go somewhere else to trade. Times must be changing. Years ago, the more I abused customers the more they liked it, and I just charged the goods to them with a pencil on a piece of brown wrapping paper. I had four cracker boxes full of brown wrapping paper with things charged on the paper against customers, but when anybody wanted to pay their account it made my head ache to find it, and so one day I balanced my books by using the brown wrapping paper to kindle the fire. If you ever want to get even with the world, easy, just pour a little kerosene on your accounts, and put them in the stove. I have never been so free from worry as I have since I balanced my books in the stove. Well, I suppose you have come home on account of your dad's sickness,” said the old groceryman, turning to the bad boy, who had written a sign, 'The Morgue,' and pinned it on the window. “I understand your dad had an operation performed on him in a hospital. What did the doctors take out of him?”
“Dad had an operation all right,” said the bad boy, “but he is not as much interested in what they took out of him, as what he thinks they left in. They said they removed his appendix, and I guess they did, for dad showed me the bill the doctors rendered. The bill was big enough so they might have taken out a whole lot more. If I had been home I would never have let him be cut into, but ma insisted that he must have an operation. She said all the men on our street, and all that moved in our set, had had operations, and she was ashamed to go out in society and be forced to admit that dad never had an operation, She told dad that he could afford it better than half the people that had operations, and that a scar criss-cross on the stomach was a badge of honor. He never got a scar in the army, and she simply would not be able to look people in the face unless dad was operated on. Dad always was subject to stomach ache, but until appendicitis became fashionable he had always taken a mess of pills, and come out all right, but ma diagnosed the case the last time he was doubled up like a jack-knife, and dad was hustled off to the hospital, and they didn't do a thing to him.
“He told me about it since I came home, and now he lays the whole thing to ma, and I have to stand between them. He is going to get even with ma, though. The first time she complains of anything going on inside of her works, he is going to send her right to a hospital and have the doctors do their worst. Dad said to me, says he:
“'Hennery, if you ever feel anything like a caucus being held inside you, don't you ever go to a hospital, but just swallow a stick of dynamite and light the fuse, then there won't be anything left inside to bother you afterwards. When I got to the hospital they stripped me for a prize fight, put me on a table made of glass, and rolled me into the operating room, gave me chloroform and when they thought I was all in, they took an axe and chopped me. I could feel every blow, and it is a wonder they left enough of your old dad for you to hug when you came home.'
“Say, it is kind of pitiful to hear dad talk about the things they left in him.”
“What things does he think they left in him,” asked the old groceryman, as he looked frightened, and felt of his stomach, as though he mistrusted there might be something wrong with him, too.
“O, dad has been reading in the papers about doctors that perform operations leaving sponges, forceps, and things inside of patients, when they close up the place, and since dad has got pretty fussy since his operation he thinks they left something in him. Some days he thinks they left a roll of cotton batting, or a pillow, or a bale of hay, but when there is a sharp pain inside he thinks they left a carving knife, but for a week he has settled down to the belief that the doctors left a monkey wrench in him, and he is just daffy on that subject. Says he can feel it turning around, as though it was miscrewing machinery, and he wants to consult a new doctor every day as to what he can take to dissolve a monkey wrench, so it will pass off through the blood and pores of the skin. He has taken it into his head that nothing will save his life except to travel all over the country, and the world. I am to go with him to look after him.”
“By ginger, it's great! Just think of it. Traveling all over the world and nothing to do but nurse my old dad who thinks he is filled with hardware and carpenter's tools. Gee! but I wish you could go,” said the bad boy, as he put him arm around his chum. “Maybe we wouldn't make these foreigners sit up and take an interest in something besides Royalty and Riots.”
“Well,” said the groceryman, “they will have my sympathy with you alone over there.”
“But before you start on the road with your monkey-wrench show, you come in here and let me put up a package of those prunes to take along. They will keep in any climate, and there is nothing better for iron in the blood, such as your dad has, than prunes. Call again, bub, and we will arrange for you to write to your chum from all the places you go with your dad, and he can come in here and read the letters to me and the cat.”
“All right, old Father Time,” said the bad boy, as he drew a mug of cider out of the vinegar barrel, and took a swallow. “But what you want to do is to get a road scraper and drive a team through this grocery, and clean the floor,” and the boys went out just ahead of the old man's arctic overshoes, as he kicked at them, and then he went back and sat down by the stove and stroked the cat, which had got its back down level again, after its old enemies had gone down the street, throwing snowballs at the driver of a hearse.