The Local Bad Boy.

Feilding Star, Volume XV, Issue 314, 15 May 1894, Page 3

The Local Bad Boy.

(By Old Grumble.) It was our local bad boy who went into a Feilding store and plumped himself down on an open bag of split peas. "Do you know they're split peas you are sitting on ?" asked the storekeeper, " Yes, father grows 'em," said the bad boy, taking out a handfull and strewing them on the floor to show how his father sowed them, " But T say, Old Grocery, do you whop your boys?" "I should if they were like you" returned the storekeeper. " Then don't do it. " Why ?" " Because it's too expensive. Miss Ivory came to our place a bit back, and I know'd she had false teeth, so I gave her some stick-jaw to eat, as pulled all of 'em out afore a room full of friends and made her go off like a Chinee cracker, calling me a young imp, and telling mother she didn't come there to be insulted. Then mother took me out into the back yard and pulled oft* my two back brace buttons, and her slipper. I stopped in the back yard after that and chewed my finger nails, I was that wild ; and when I thought of what I had suffered through Miss Ivory I got wilder still and eat my finger nails till I was full up, so when mother came out and said sorry like, • Go into supper, dear,' I said I didn't want none— but I didn't know they was 'aving oysters — I said I'd made a feed o' finger nails, and went off to bed." *• That was a saving " said the storekeeper. "No it wasn't, for I had a nightmare of Miss Ivory coming at me open-mouth, a looking awful without her teeth : so I screamed the house up. Father said I was delirious through the Wows mother give rue. She said, no sich thing, it was the indigestible vittals I'd been eating. Next day they kept me in bed and fetched the doctor, who ordered me all sorts of nice things. I did fine, and kept it up all the week till Sunday- Then I got well, co 3me and my mates was goin' for a scurcion down the river in a canoe : but I heard father tell mother I wasn't to be whopped no more cos it was too expensive."