Home > Authors Index > George W. Peck > Peck's Sunshine > This page
Peck's Sunshine, a fiction by George W. Peck |
||
Addicted To Limburg Cheese |
||
| < Previous |
Table of content |
Next > |
|
________________________________________________
_ During the investigation of Chief Kennedy one witness testified to something that ought to make it hot for the chief. When men stoop to do the things that Mr. Chapin testified to, an outraged public sentiment has got to step in. Mr. Chapin testified--and he is a man whose word is as good as our note--he said he met Kennedy in a street car, and his breath smelled of limburg cheese. That is enough. Carry his remains out. Any man who will appear in a public place, among folks, with his breath smelling of limburg cheese, has got his opinion of us. It is simply damnable. We can see how a man who likes limburg cheese is liable, though he may have sworn off, to return to the mustard cup, and after the first taste, fill his skin full of cheese, arguing that one may as well die for an old sheep as a lamb. It is a well known fact, agreed to by all scientists, that a single mouthful' will tarnish an otherwise virtuous breath as much as a whole cheese. One mouthful of cheese leads on to another, and we are prepared to believe that if the chief smelled of cheese at all, he was full of it. Men cannot be too careful of cheese. If a man feels that he is going to commit the dastardly act of eating limburg cheese, he has time to go out to a glue factory, or a slaughter house, or the house of correction, or some other place whose offense is rank. The desire to eat cheese does not come upon a man suddenly, like the desire to take a drink, or stand off a creditor, and he is not taken possession of by the demon of appetite and pulled to the nearest saloon by a forty horse power devil, as is the man who has the jim jams. The cheese does its work more quietly. It whispers to him about 11 o'clock a. m., and says there is nothing like cheese. He stands it off, and again in the afternoon the cheese takes possession of him and leads him on step by step, by green fields, and yet he does not fall. But about 9 o'clock p. m. the air seems full of cheese, and he smells it wherever he goes, and finally, after resisting for ten hours, he goes and orders a cheese sandwich. Now, when the feeling first comes on, and he shuts his eyes and imagines he sees limburg cheese, if the victim would go and buy a slice and go away out in the country, by the fertilizer factory, he could eat his cheese and no one but the workmen in the fertilizer factory could complain. That is what ought to be done when a man is addicted to cheese. But this chief of police has stood up in the face of public opinion, eaten limburg cheese with brazen effrontery that would do credit to a lawyer, and has gone into a public conveyance, breathing pestilence and cheese. There is no law on our statute books that is adequate to punish a man who will thus trample upon the usages of society. However, the conviction of Kennedy of eating limburg cheese will be the means of acquitting him of the other charge, that of conversing with a lewd woman. We doubt if there is a lewd woman, though she be terribly lewd, who would allow a man to come within several blocks of her who had been eating that deceased cheese. If we were in Kennedy's place we would admit the cheese, and then bring ten thousand women to swear whether they would remain in the same room with a man who had been eating that cheese. There are men who _do_ eat cheese, bad men, the wicked classes, who go into the presence of females, but that is one thing which causes so many suicides among the poor fallen girls. When we hear that another naughty but nice looking girl has been filling her skin full of paregoric and is standing off a doctor with a stomach pump, we instinctively feel as though some man with a smell of cheese about his garments had been paying attention to her, and she had become desperate. If they discharge the chief on that cheese testimony it will be a lesson to all men hereafter. _ |
||