St. Jacobs Oil family calendar and book of health and humor for the million : 1885 : containing original humorous articles & illustrations by the leading humorists of America / the Charles A. Vogeler Company.

  • Charles A. Vogeler Company
Date:
1884
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: St. Jacobs Oil family calendar and book of health and humor for the million : 1885 : containing original humorous articles & illustrations by the leading humorists of America / the Charles A. Vogeler Company. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    20/34
    C''C) St. Jacobs Oil Family Calendar for 1885, and B. ED.) A soft and tearful yawl, deepened into a regu¬ lar ring-tail-puler, splits the solemn night in twain. Nobody seemed to know where it came from. I rose softly and went to where the sound had seemed to well up from. It was not there. I stood on a piece of cracker in the dining¬ room a moment, waiting for it to come again. This time it came from the boudoir of our French artist in soup-bone symphonies and pie,— Mademoiselle Bridget O’Dooley. I went there and opened the door softly, so as to let the cat out without disturbing the giant mind that had worn itself out during the day in the kitchen bestowing a dry shampoo to the china. Then I changed my mind and came out. Sev¬ eral articles of vista, beside Bridget, followed me with some degree of vigor. The next time the tramp cat yawled he seemed to be in the recesses of the bath-room. I went down stairs and investigated. In doing so I drove my superior toe into my foot, out of sight, with a door that I encountered. My wife joined me in the search. She could not do much, but she aided me a thousand times by her counsel. If it had not been for her mature advice I might have lost much of the invigorating exercise of that memorable night. Towards morning we discovered that the cat was between the floor of the children’s play¬ room and the ceiling of the dining-room. We tried till daylight to persuade the cat to come out and get acquainted, but he would not. At last we decided that the quickest way to get the poor little thing out was to let him die in there, and then we could tear up that portion of the house and get him out. While he lived we couldn’t keep him still long enough to tear a hole in the house and get at him. It was a little unpleasant for a day or two waiting for death to come to his relief, for he seemed to die hard, but at last the unearthly midnight yawl was still. The plaintive little voice ceased to vibrate on the still and pulseless air. Later we found, however, that he was not dead. In a lucid interval he had discovered the hole in the store-room where he entered, and, as we found afterward a gallon of coal-oil spilled in a barrel of cut-loaf sugar, we concluded that he had escaped by that route. That was the only time that I ever kept a cat, and I didn’t do it then because I was suffering for something to fondle. I’ve got a good deal of surplus affection, I know, but I don’t have to spread it out over a stump-tail, orphan cat. * [Copyright. The Charles A. Vogeler Co.] Under the City. We will now suppose that a period of two days has passed. The wide halls and spacious facades of the Nye mansion are still. The lights in the banquet-hall are extinguished, and the ice-cream freezer is hushed to rest in the wood-shed. Mr. Johnson, 98 Cheapside, London, England, states, that Mrs. Jane Thompson, traveling on the Underground Railway, was thrown violently, owing to a sudden jerk, and received a severe sprain to the arm and wrist. St. JACOBS Oil was applied, and it immediately cured, the stiff¬ ness and pain, as it has done in thousands similar cases. BILL MYE’S CAT.* (Written for The St. Jacobs Oil Family Calendar, by Bill Nye, Hudson, Wisconsin.) I am not fond of cats, as a general rule. I never yearned to have one around the house. My idea always was, that I could have trouble enough in a legitimate way, without adding a cat to my woes. With a belligerent cook and a communistic laundress, it seems to me most anybody ought to be unhappy enough without a cat. I never owned one until a tramp cat came to our house one day, during the past October, and tearfully asked to be loved. He didn’t have anything in his make-up that was calcu¬ lated to win anybody’s love, but he seemed con¬ tented with a little affection, and one ear was gone and his tail was bald for six inches at the end, and he was otherwise well calculated to win confidence and sympathy. Though we could not be madly in love with him, we de¬ cided to be friends and give him a chance to win the general respect. Everything would have turned out all right if the bobtail waif had not been a little given to investigation. He wanted to know more about the great world in which he lived, so he began by inspecting my house. He got into the store-room closet, and found a place where the caroenter had not completed his job. This is a feature of the Laramie artisan’s style. He leaves little places in unobscured corners gener¬ ally, so that he can come back some day and finish it at an additional cost of fifty dollars. This cat observed that he could enter at this point and go all over the imposing structure between the flooring and the ceiling. He pro¬ ceeded to do so. OCTOBER. 6 M T W T F s i 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 18 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 21 28 29 SO 31