Look not upon the walking-stick when it is hollow, and pulls out, for at last it giveth thee away, young fellow.
The Sun is in receipt of an invitation to attend the opening of a new hotel in an Iowa city, but it will be impossible to attend. We remember one Iowa hotel which we visited in 1869, when the Wisconsin editors stopped there on the way back from Omaha,--the time when a couple of bed bugs took Uncle David Atwood up on the roof and were going to throw him off, and they would have done it, only a party of cockroaches took his part and killed the bed bugs.
Sam Ryan will remember how there was a crop of new potatoes growing on the billiard room floor in the dirt, that were all blossomed out; and Charley Seymour can tell how he had to argue for an hour to convince the colored cook that the peculiar smell of the scrambled eggs was owing to some of them being rotten. There were four waiters to a hundred guests, and it was a sight long to be remembered to see Mrs. Seymour and Mrs. Atwood carry their broiled chicken back to the kitchen and pick the feathers off, while good Uncle McBride, of Sparta, got into an altercation over his fried fish because the fish had not been scaled; where it was said the only thing that was not sour was the vinegar, and where the only thing that was not too small was the bill, and where every room smelled like a morgue, and the towels in the rooms had not taken a bath since 1827.
At this hotel the proprietor would take a guest's napkin to wipe his nose, and the barefooted, waiter girl would slip up on the rare-done fried egg spilled on the dining-room floor, and wipe the yolk off her dress on a guest's linen coat tail. That is all we want of a hotel in that place.
Not many months ago there was a meeting of ministers in Wisconsin, and after the holy work in which they were engaged had been done up to the satisfaction of all, a citizen of the place where the conference was held invited a large number of them to a collation at his house. After supper a dozen of them adjourned to a room up stairs to have a quiet smoke, as ministers sometimes do, when they got to talking about old times, when they attended school and were boys together, and _The Sun_ man, who was present, disguised as a preacher, came to the conclusion that ministers were rather human than otherwise when they are young.