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.

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    -*1 A SINGLE HAIR.* ( Written for The St. Jacobs Oil Family Calendar, by George W. Peck, Editor “Peck's Sun.”) There is a man in Milwaukee whose life is made a burden by hairs on his coat. He is a man who never thought twice of any woman other than his wife. He is blind in one eye, has a long, red nose; his teeth are worn and decayed; he is bald, with a fringe of carrotty hair down by his ears, and alto¬ gether a man most unlikely to awake a responsive echo in the bosom of woman. But his wife has an idea that he is a terror, and faintly believes that every moment he is out of her sight he is in the society of other women, and he never comes home but she searches him for strange hairs. The boys in the shoe-shop, where he works, know about his wife’s jealousy, and it is a cold day when they don’t put a female hair or two on his coat to wear’ home. The man has had so much trouble that he has begun to look upon his persecution as a joke, and as his wife will not listen to explanation, he encourages her in her hair-hunting, and believes it is the only enjoy¬ ment she has. Her neighbors all know her peculi¬ arity, and when she goes to church, the congregation glance at the poor man to see if he has been picked. She will occasionally look at her husband in church, see a speck of lint or a whisker on his coat, and reach up to him and remove it, as though she were doing a great service, and he will meekly look away at the minister, as though it was a part of the ser¬ vice. Recently there was a party of seven sisters exhibited at a museum, in Milwaukee, who had the longest hair that ever was seen. One of the girls had hair seven feet long. She stood on a chair and the hair reached to the floor, and it was greatly admired. The husband of the hair-searching woman decided to secure one of those hairs, and after shadowing the museum for a week, on Saturday night he got one out of a comb the girl had been using, and he rolled it up and put it in his pocket-book. The next day he went to church with his wife, after concealing the hair in his vest, leaving about two inches of the end of it sticking out of his collar. He felt a sublime assurance that his wife would see that hair, and she did. The minister was praying, and the hair man was looking solemn, with his eyes closed, and the wife was looking around for the latest styles of bon¬ nets and stray hairs. Suddenly her eye fell upon the two-inch hair sticking out of her husband’s collar, and laying lovingly on his black vest; men- (Dv> _ _ _ _ _ tally she resolved that it should not recline on her husband’s vest—being of a different color from her own—and she reached up and took hold of it with her thumb and finger, and pulled on it, pulling it out about a foot. The husband remained uncon¬ scious, with his eyes half closed, but there could have been seen a twinkle in his eyes, and wrinkles all around them that resembled a coming laugh. The wife looked thunderstruck, and a lady in an ad¬ joining pew saw her, and punched another lady and called her attention to the panorama. The wife pulled another foot of the hair out of the vest, and yet there was no end to it, and she turned red in the face, and some more people began to look. The wife thought she might as well end it, as the hair was all over the man’s coat-sleeve, and down in her lap, so she pulled again and got another foot or eighteen inches of the hair, and yet there was no end! The thing was getting serious, and the woman looked as though she would have given largely to the heathen, if she had not touched that hair, and there were a dozen people looking, and the perspira¬ tion started out on her face. The minister had gof through praying and the people raised their heads, and the wife, thinking there must be an end to all things, pulled at the hair again, and got another foot of it—but no end! She had four feet of one hair in her lap, and she looked up in a helpless sort of man¬ ner as though she had got her foot in it. Her lap was full of that hair, and as she knew she would have to get up with the congregation to sing, she pulled again and got another foot of the hair, and then her heart sunk within her. She had five feet of it, and yet there was more! She thought her hus¬ band had been fooling her by putting a spool of black silk thread in his vest for her to pull on; but on examining it she found that it was an unmistakable hair, and she pulled again and got another foot, and no end, and she nearly fainted away. She looked as though she was afraid if she kept on pulling she would pull out a full-grown woman or a hair-store. She looked around and nearly every eye in the con¬ gregation was on her, and as the minister read the hymn he looked at her to see what all the people were looking at. Just as they were about to rise and sing, she gave one last, lingering, impassionate jerk, and got the end of the hair, and she rolled it up in her handkerchief and got up to sing; but her face was red,,and her voice trembled. Before they got out of church the Imsband had stolen her handker¬ chief out of the pocket of her cloak, taken out the hair and replaced the handkerchief, and when she asked him where on earth he had been to get a hair on his clothes as long as a clothes-line, he told her she was crazy on the subject of female hairs. She told him she would show him when she got home; but on arriving there the hair was gone, and the husband was so solicitous after her health—telling her he was going to have a council of doctors ex¬ amine her to see if she was insane—that she actually believed she had imagined all that she had expe¬ rienced in church with the long hair, and she be¬ lieved she was becoming a monomaniac on the subject of long hairs, and from that day she has never mentioned hairs to her husband. He might come home with a whole head of female hair on his coat, and the wife—who had such a narrow escape from hopeless insanity—would never notice the hair. But those who saw her pull in that hair, as though she was trolling for bass, will always remember how they thought her husband was raveling out inside. *[C°pyright. The Charles A. Vogeler Co.] Lights o’ London. “ My mother,” writes Mr. Reg. Whitney, 161 Odessa Road, Forest Gate, London, England, “had suffered with Rheumatism in the hands and found great re¬ lief from the use of St. Jacobs Oil. which has a world-wide reputation as a certain cure for all Rheu- matic complaints.” iTT it