The Project Gutenberg EBook of Bill Nye's Chestnuts Old and New, by Bill Nye This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Title: Bill Nye's Chestnuts Old and New Author: Bill Nye Illustrator: Williams, Opper, and Hopkins Release Date: May 2, 2016 [EBook #51961] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BILL NYE'S CHESTNUTS OLD AND NEW *** Produced by David Widger from page images generously provided by the Internet Archive
CONTENTS
CHESTNUT-BURR. I.—THE
SHAKESPEARE-BACON PUZZLE WRESTLED WITH CONSCIENTIOUSLY.
CHESTNUT-BURR II—HOW THE
GLORIOUS FOURTH WAS CELEBRATED AT WHALEN'S GROVE LAST YEAR.
CHESTNUT-BURR III—BILL NYE
FINDS COLOROW FULL OF ODD TRAITS.
AWKWARDNESS OF CARRYING WHISKY ABOUT.
CHESTNUT-BURR IV—BILL NYE PAYS
A BRIEF VISIT TO A PROFESSIONAL STAR READER.
INGRATITUDE OF THE HUMAN HEART.
CHESTNUT-BURR V—CONCERNING THE
FRENCH MASTERPIECES AT THE ACADEMY OF DESIGN.
CHESTNUT-BURR VI—BILL NYE
DIAGNOSTICATES THE PLAINT OF A COUNTRY COUSIN.
CHESTNUT-BURR VII—BILL NYE IN
THE ROLE OF AN UTE INDIAN JENKINS.
CHESTNUT-BURR VIII—IN AN
UNGUARDED MOMENT BILL NYE IS CAPTURED BY A POLITICAL SIREN.
CHESTNUT-BURR IX—BILL NYE
DESCANTS UPON YOUNG IVES'S IDEAS IN FINANCE.
THE ANTI-CLINKER BASE-BURNER BEE.
CHESTNUT-BURR X—A FEW REMARKS
ON OUR HOSTELRY SYSTEM AS IT NOW PREVAILS.
CHESTNUT-BURR XI—WILLIAM NYE
VISITS ROYALTY FROM THE HOME OF THE HAM SANDWICH.
CHESTNUT-BURR—THE HUMORIST
INTERVIEWS HIS GRACE THE DUKE IN THE IMPROVED STYLE.
CHESTNUT-BURR—XII "THE OLD MAN
ELOQUENT."
CHESTNUT-BURR XIV—THE AMENDE
HONORABLE.
SWEET INFLUENCES OF CHANGING SEASONS.
CHESTNUT-BURR. XV—A BIG CORNER
ON PORK.
CHESTNUT-BURR XVI-PATRICK OLESON.
CHESTNUT-BURR. XVII—LONGING
FOR HOME.
CHESTNUT-BURR XVIII—THE TRUE
HISTORY OF DAMON AND PYTHIAS.
CHESTNUT-BURR XIX—A STORY OF
SPOTTED TAIL.
CHESTNUT-BURR XX—THE ROMANCE
OF HORSE-SHOEING.
CHESTNUT-BURR XXI—EXPERIENCE
ON THE FEVERISH HORNET.
CHESTNUT-BURR XXII—ANCIENT
BRIC-A-BRAC
CHESTNUT-BURR XIII—THE
TWO-HEADED GIRL.
CHESTNUT-BURR XIV—A PATHETIC
EPISODE IN NORTHERN WISCONSIN.
CHESTNUT-BURR XXV—BILL NYE
ESSAYS A NOVELETTE.
CHESTNUT-BURR XXVI—THE
DAUGHTER OF BOB TAIL FLUSH.
CHESTNUT-BURR XXVII—OUR GREAT
NATIONAL MOTTO.
CHESTNUT-BURR XVIII—BILL NYE
AT A TOURNAMENT.
CHESTNUT-BURR XXIX—A SOCIAL
CURSE—THE MAN WHO INTERRUPTS.
CHESTNUT-BURR XXX—A DISCOURSE
ON CATS.
CHESTNUT-BURR XXXI—THE GREAT
ORATION OF SPARTACUS.
CHESTNUT-BURR—WOMAN'S SUFFRAGE
IN WYOMING.
CHESTNUT-BURR—CONCERNING THE
SWALLOW.
CHESTNUT-BURR XXXIV—A NOVEL
WAY OF MARKING CLOTHES.
CHESTNUT-BURR XXXV—THE UNHAPPY
HUMORIST.
CHESTNUT-BURR XXXVI—THE SODA
LAKES OF WYOMING.
CHESTNUT-BURR XXXVII—VIEWS OF
CHICAGO.
CHESTNUT-BURR XXXVIII—A SCHOOL
OF JOURNALISM.
CHESTNUT-BURR XXXIX—SOME FACTS
OF SCIENCE.
CHESTNUT-BURR XL—SORROWS OF A
ONE-LEGGED MAN.
THE TRUE POET LOVES SECLUSION.
CHESTNUT-BURR XLI—REVELATION
IN UTAH.
CHESTNUT-BURR XLII—THE
TONGUE-DESTROYING FRENCH LANGUAGE.
CHESTNUT-BURR XLIV—ONE TOUCH
OF NATURE.
HOW TO DEAL WITH THE REVOLVER DIFFICULTY.
CHESTNUT-BURR XLV—FUN OF BEING
A PUBLISHER.
CHESTNUT-BURR XLVI—PERFORMANCE
OF THE PHOENIX.
CHESTNUT-BURR NYE AS A CRITIC AND
NYE AS A POET.
APOSTROPHE TO AN ORPHAN MULE.=
FANTASIA FOR THE BASS DRUM; ADAPTED FROM THE GERMAN BY WILLIAM VON NYE.=
APOSTROPHE ADDRESSED TO O. WILDE.=
THE TRUE TALE OF WILLIAM TELL.
BANKRUPT SALE OF LITERARY GEMS.
Why Bill favors the Claims of Bill Shakespeare—His Handwriting skillfully touched upon—Its Likeness to Horace Greeley's—Difference between Shakespeare and Bacon—A kind Lift for the Yeomanry.
Trusting that it will not in any way impair the sale of Mr. Donnelly's book, I desire to offer here a few words in favor of the theory that William Shakespeare wrote his own works and thought his own thinks. The time has fully arrived when we humorists ought to stand by each other.
I do not undertake to stand up for the personal character of Shakespeare, but I say that he wrote good pieces, and I don't care who knows it. It is doubtless true that at the age of eighteen he married a woman eight years his senior, and that children began to cluster about their hearthstone in a way that would have made a man in a New York flat commit suicide. Three little children within fourteen months, including twins, came to the humble home of the great Bard, and he began to go out and climb upon the haymow to do his writing. Sometimes he would stay away from home for two or three weeks at a time, fearing that when he entered the house some one would tell him that he was again a parent.
Yet William Shakespeare knew all the time that he was a great man, and that some day he would write pieces to speak. He left Stratford at the age of twenty-one and went to London, where he attracted very little attention, for he belonged to the Yeomanry, being a kind of dramatic Horace Greeley, both in the matter of clothes and penmanship. Thus it would seem that while Sir Francis Bacon was attending a business college and getting himself familiar with the whole-arm movement, so as to be able to write a free, cryptogamous hand, poor W. Shakespeare was slowly thinking the hair off his head, while ever and anon he would bring out his writing materials and his bright ready tongue, and write a sonnet on an empty stomach.
Prior to leaving Stratford he is said to have dabbled in the poaching business in a humble way on the estates of Sir Thomas Lucy, since deceased, and that he wrote the following encomium or odelet in a free, running hand, and pinned it on the knight's gate:
O, deer Thomas Lucy,
Your venison's juicy,
Juicy is your venison;
Hence I append my benison.
The rose is red; the violet's blue;
The keeper is a chump and so are you,
Which is why I remark and my language is plain,
Yours truly,
High Low Jack
And the Game.
Let me now once more refer to the matter of the signature. Much has been said of Mr. Shakespeare's coarse, irregular and vulgar penmanship, which, it is claimed, shows the ignorance of its owner, and hence his inability to write the immortal plays. Let us compare the signature of Shakespeare with that of Mr. Greeley, and we notice a wonderful similarity. There is the same weird effort in both cases to out-cryptogam Old Cryptogamous himself, and enshrine immortal thought and heaven-born genius in a burglar-proof panoply of worm fences, and a chirography that reminds the careful student of the general direction taken in returning to Round Knob, N. C., by a correspondent who visited the home of a moonshiner, with a view toward ascertaining the general tendency of homebrewed whisky to fly to the head.
If we judge Shakespeare by his signature, not one of us will be safe. Death will wipe out our fame with a wet sponge. John Hancock in one hundred years from now will be regarded as the author of the Declaration of Independence, and Compendium Gaskell as the author of the Hew York Tribune.
I have every reason to believe that while William Shakespeare was going about the streets of London, poor but brainy, erratic but smart, baldheaded but filled with a nameless yearning to write a play with real water and a topical song in it, Francis Bacon was practicing on his signature, getting used to the full-arm movement, spoiling sheet after sheet of paper, trying to make a violet swan on a red woven wire mattress of shaded loops without taking his pen off the paper, and running the rebus column of a business college paper.
Poets are born, not made, and many of them are born with odd and even disagreeable characteristics. Some men are born poets, while it is true that some acquire poetry while others have poetry thrust upon them. Poetry is like the faculty, if I may so denominate it, of being able to voluntarily move the ears. It is a gift. It cannot be taught to others.
So Shakespeare, with all his poor penmanship, with his proneness to poach, with his poverty and his neglect of his wife and his children, could write a play wherein the leading man and the man who played the bass drum in the orchestra did not claim to have made the principal part.
Shakespeare did not want his plays published. He wanted to keep them out of the press in order to prevent their use at spelling schools in the hands of unskilled artists, and so there was a long period of time during which the papers could not get hold of them for publication.
During this time Francis Bacon was in public life. He and Shakespeare had nothing in common. Both were great men, but Bacon's sphere was different from Shakespeare's, While Bacon was in the Senate, living high and courting investigation, Shakespeare had to stuff three large pillows into his pantaloons and play Falstaff at a one-night stand.
Is it likely that Bacon, breathing the perfumed air of the capitol and chucking the treasury girls under the chin ever and anon, hungered for the false joys of the under-paid and underscored dramatist? Scarcely!
That is one reason win I prefer to take the side of Shakespeare rather than the side of Bacon.
Mr. Donnelly's book shows keen research, and preserves the interest all the way through, for the reader is impressed all along with the idea that there is a hen on, if I may be permitted to coin a phrase; but so far my sympathies and kind regards go with Shakespeare. He was one of the Yeoman of Stratford, and his early record was against him; but where do poets usually come from? Do they first breathe in the immortal sentiments which, in after years, enable their names to defy the front teeth of oblivion while stopping at one of our leading hotels? Did Burns soak his system with the flavor and the fragrance of the Scotch heather while riding on an elevated train? Did any poet ever succeed in getting up close to Nature's great North American heart by studying her habits at a twenty-five dollar german? I trow not. Moreover, every one who studies the history of our great poets and orators will trow likewise. Lord Tennyson wrote better things before he tried to divide his attention between writing poetry and being a Lord. So I say that from our yeomanry frequently spring the boys whose rare old rural memories float in upon and chasten and refine their after-lives even when fame comes, and fills them full of themselves and swells their aching heads as they swoop gayly across the country in a special ear.
I do not go so far as some of the friends of Shakespeare, and say that while he was a lovely character and a great actor, that Bacon was a ham. I do not say that, for Bacon had his good points.
The thing that has done more to injure Shakespeare in the eyes of the historian than aught else, perhaps, was his seeming neglect of his wife. But we should consider both sides of the question before we pass judgment. The Hathaways were queer people, and Anne was unusually so. Her father snubbed her in his will just as her husband did, which shows that Mrs. Shakespeare was not highly esteemed even by her parents. The brief notice which Anne received in these two wills means a good deal, for there is nothing quite so thoroughly unanswerable as a probate snub.
Shakespeare in his own will gave to his wife his second-best bed, and that was all. When we remember that it was a bed that sagged in the middle, and that it operated by means of a bed-cord which had to be tightened and tuned up twice a week, and that the auger-holes in the bedstead seemed ever to mutely appeal for more powder from Persia's great powder magazine, we will be forced to admit that William did not passionately love his wife.
I know that Shakespeare has been severely criticised by the press for leaving his family at Stratford while he himself lived in London, only visiting home occasionally; but I am convinced that he found they could live cheaper in that way. Help in the house was very high at that time in London, and the intelligence offices were doing a very large business without giving very much intelligence. Friends of his told him that it was not only impossible to get enough help in the homes of London, but that there was hardly enough servants to prevent a panic in the Employment Bureaus. Seven, offices were in fact compelled to shut down for a half day at a time, one using the limited stock in the forenoon and the other in the afternoon.
Shakespeare was a perfect gentleman, having been made so by the Herald's College, which invested his father with coat armor. This coat armor made a gentleman of the elder Shakespeare, and as William's mother was already a gentleman under the code, William became one also both on his father's and on his mother's side. Of course all this is mere detail and is dull and uninteresting; but I refer to it to show that those who have read things in Shakespeare's works that they did not like, and who, therefore, say that he was no gentleman, do the great Bard an injustice.
I think I like Shakespeare's expurgated poems best, and I often wish that he had confined himself entirely to that kind. If I had a son who seemed to lean toward poesy and felt like twanging his lyre now and then, I would advise him to write expurgated poems exclusively.
I do not say that Shakespeare was the author of his own works, and it would not look well in me to set up my opinion in opposition to that of scholars, experts and savants who have had more advantages than I have, for I would never take advantage of any one; but I say that somehow the impression has crept into the papers that he was a pretty good little play-writer, and I am glad that Mr. Childs has had a testimonial made and sent over to England that will show an appreciation, at least, of his ability to keep before the people.
It will be noticed by the alert and keen-scented littérateur that I have carefully avoided treading on the tail of Mr. Donnelly's cipher. Being rather a poor mathematician anyway, I will not introduce the cipher at this time, but I will say that although the whole thing happened about three hundred years ago, and has now nearly passed out of my mind, to the best of my recollection Shakespeare, though he was the son of a buckwheater, and though he married his wife with a poetic license, and though he left his family at Stratford rather than take them to live in a London flat, wrote the most of his plays with the assistance of an expurgator who was out of the city most all of the time.
I cannot show Shakespeare's ready wit better at this time than by telling of his first appearance on the stage as I remember it. He came quietly before the footlights with a roll of carpet under one arm and a tack hammer under the other. In those days it was customtomary to nail down stage carpets, and while doing so "Shake," as we all called him then, knocked the nail off his left thumb, whereupon he received an ovation from the audience. Some men would have been rattled and would have "called up," as we say, but Shakespeare was always ready to please his friends or respond to an encore; so putting his right thumb up against a large painted rock in a mountain scene, he obliged by knocking off the other thumb-nail.
Shakespeare wrote the poem called "Venus and Adonis," during the absence of his expurgator, and sent it to the editor of the Stratford Appeal, who deadheaded the paper to him for a year and told him that he wished he would write up any other gossip that might come to his knowledge in that part of the country, especially if it promised to be spicy.
Shakespeare was one of the few Englishmen who never visited this country for two weeks, for the purpose of writing an eight pound book on his impressions of America.
An Oration by a Self-Made Man which had Bones in it—Suggestions of Deep Interest to Taxpayers—Freedom as it Suggests Itself to a Hickory Township Man—Our Duties to a Common Country.
There were patriotic remarks and greased-pig exercises at Whalen's Grove last year on the Fourth, all of which, according to the Sandy Mush Record-Statesman, passed off with marked success. From the opening prayer to the base-ball contest and greased-pole doings, everything was harmonious, and the receipts were satisfactory. Col. L. Forsyth Heeley acted as marshal of the day, wearing a maroon sash, and mounted on his well-known horse, Mambrino King. A serious accident in the early morning was happily averted by Col. Heeley's coolness and self-possession. A lady from Lower Hominy, whose name could not be ascertained, while actively engaged in listening to the band, and holding her young child so that it could get a good view of the sun, became entangled in her train, which had worked around in front, and while recovering herself Col. L. Forsyth Heeley came down the street in advance of the fire laddies. The horse was rearing high in the air, and going sideways with a squeaking sound, which seemed to be caused by the friction between his second and third stomach. His mouth was wide open, and his fiery-red gums could be seen as far as the eye could reach. Almost every one thought there would be a holocaust; but at that trying instant, as if by magic, Col. Heeley decided to go down the other street.
Our fire ladies made a fine appearance, in their new, hot uniforms, and were not full during the parade, as was stated by the Hickory township World.
Everybody seemed to feel an interest in patriotism, with the exception of an old party from a distance, who opened the exercises by cutting a large watermelon and distributing it with a lavish hand among himself. He then went to sleep in the corner of a fence, where he would have been greatly pestered by flies if he had found out about it in time.
After a pleasant and courteous prayer by rev. Mr. Meeks, in which he laid before the Lord a national policy which he felt certain would make a great hit, our Glee Club sang
Oh, say can you see, etc.
Judge Larraby read the Declaration of Independence in a rich dark red voice, and a self-made man from Hickory township delivered the following impromptu address, the manuscript of which he kindly furnished to the Record-Statesman:
"Fellow Citizens: This is the anniversary of the day when freedom towards all and malice towards none first got a foothold in this country. And we are now to celebrate that day. I say that on that day Tireny and uzurpation got a set-back that they will never recover from. We then paved the way for the poor, oppressed foreigner, so that he could come to our shores and take liberties with our form of government. To be a foreigner here in America to-day is one of the sweetest boons. If I could be just what I would like to be, I would be an oppressed foreigner, landing on pur shores, free from the taxation and responsibility of government, with no social demands made on me, with nothing in my possession but a hearty Godspeed from both political parties, and a strong yearning for freedom. Oh, why was I not born an alien, that both parties wouldn't dast to reproach; an alien that can come here and find a government already established, with no flies on to it; a government of the people, by the people and for the people? (Fire-crackers and applause.)
"On the day that Button Gwinnett put his name to the statement that all men was created more or less equal, the spot on which we now stand was a howling wilderness. Where yonder lemonade-stand now stands and realizes a clean profit of forty-seven dollars and thirty-five cents on an investment of six dollars and fifty cents, the rank thistle nodded in the wynd, and the wild fox dag his hole unscared. If you do not believe this I refer you to the principal of our public school, who is to-day assisting in the band, and who is now in the act of up-ending his alto horn to pour out about a teacupful of liquid melody that he had left over from the last tune.
"And why is this? Why are we to-day a free people, with a surplus in the treasury that nobody can get at? (Loud applause and squeal from a grass-fed horse tied to a tree who is being kicked by a red two-year-old, owned by the Pathmaster of Road District 3.)
"Why are our resources so great that they almost equal our liabilities? Why is everything done to make it pleasant for the rich man and every inducement held ont for the poor man to accumulate more and more poverty? Why is it that so much is said about the tariff by men who do not support their families? Why is it that when we vote for a president of the United States, we have to take our choice between a statesmanlike candidate with great ability and proclivities for grand larceny—why is it that we are given our choice between this kind of a man and what Virgil refers to in his 'Childe Harold' as a chump? (Cheers and cries of 'That's so' from a man who is riveted to the spot by means of a new pitch-plank on which he is sitting and which will not permit him to move out of the sun.)
"One hundred years ago the tastes of our people were simple. Now it takes so much simplicity to keep Congress going that the people don't get a chance at it. A century ago common, home-made rum was the only relaxation known to a plain but abstemious people. Now it takes a man with a mighty good memory to recall the names of some of the things he has drunk when his wife asks him about it on the following morning. I claim to have a good memory of names and things generally, but if you want to get me mixed up and have fun with me, you can do it that way.
"But, fellow-citizens, how can we best preserve the blessing of freedom and fork it over unimpaired to our children? How can we enchance the blood-bought right, which is inherent in every human being, of the people, for the people and by the people, where tyrant foot hath never trod nor bigot forged a chain, for to look back from our country's glorious natal day or forward to a glorious, a happy and a prosperous future with regard to purity of the ballot and free speech. I say for one we cannot do otherwise. (Prolonged applause.)
"I would rather have my right hand cleave to the roof of my mouth than to utter a sentiment that I would regret; but I say that as a people, as a nation or as an inalienable right which no man can gainsay or successfully controvert, not for political purposes, and yet I am often led to inquire whither are we drifting, not only as a people and as a nation, but as a country and as a joint school district, No. 6, where we now stand, and when we are paying a school teacher this summer twenty-two dollars a month to teach the children, little prattling children, during the hot summer weather, how many feet of intestines there are in the human body and what is best to do for it? Last winter we paid thirty-four dollars per month to a man who opened the school with prayer and then made a picture of the digestive organs on the blackboard. And still we wonder that politics is corrupt.
"I tell you that the seeds of vice and wickedness is often sowed at school in the minds of the young by teachers who are paid a large salary to do far different. What do you think of a man who would open a school with prayer and then converse freely about the alimentary canal? Such a man would lead a life of the deepest infamy if he had the least encouragement.
"So I say, fellow-citizens, that we must guard against the influences of the public schools as a nation, for the people, of the people, and by the people. Education is often a blessing in disguise, but we should not pry into things that the finite mind has no business with. How much was Galileo ahead in the long run for going out of his sphere? He was boycotted from morning till night and died poor. Look at Demosthenes. Look at Diogenes. They pried into science, and both of them was poor providers and have since died. Of course their names are frequently used in debating schools, and some claim that this is big pay for what they went through; but I say give me a high-stepping horse, the bright smile of dear ones who are not related to me in any way, the approval of the admiring throng, a large woolly dog that will do as I tell him, a modest little home and unlimited credit at the store, and I do not care how much B. will have to use off from the diameter of a given grindstone, for which he paid an undivided one-fifteenth.
"I know that this is regarded as a queer doctrine by what is called our more Advanced Thinkers but I say let every man who pants for fame select his own style of pant and go ahead. I bid him a most hearty godspeed and hope he will do well.
"But what makes me mad is for a man to come to me and dictate what I shall pant for. This is called intolerance by people who can afford to use words of that size. Intolerance is a thing that makes me tired. Whether it's religious, political or social intolerance, I dislike it very much. People that think I will enjoy voting for a yaller dog that had been picked out for me, or that I will be tickled to death to indorse the religious dogmas of an effete monicky with my eyes shot, don't know me. I say, let every man rely solely on his own thinker, and damned be he who first cries hold, enough! I am not a profane man, but I quote from a poem in using the above quotation.
"But again. In closing, let me say that we owe it to our common country to be peaceable citizens and pay our taxes without murmuring. The time to get in our fine work is on the valuation, and it is too late to kick after that. Let us cultivate a spirit of lofty patriotism, but believe nothing just to oblige others. I used to be a great believer in anything that was submitted for my approval. That was what kept me back. Now, if a man like Jay Gould says he is not feeling so well as he did, I make him show me his tongue.
"We are here to-day to celebrate the birthday of American freedom, as I understand it, and I am here to say that whatever may be said against our refinement and our pork, our style of freedom is sought for everywhere. It is a freedom that will stand any climate and I hear it very highly spoken of wherever I go.
"I am here to state that, as boy and man, I have been a constant user of American freedom for over fifty years, and I can truly say that I feel no desire to turn back; also that there will be a grand, free-for-all scuffle for a greased pig on the vacant lot south of the church at seven o'clock, after which fireworks will be served to those who desire to remain."
And thus did the Fourth of July pass with all its glories in Whalen's Grove in the year of our independence the 110th.
I want to encourage green jokes, that have never trotted in harness before, and, besides, I must insist on using my scanty fund of laugh on jokes of the nineteenth century. I have got to draw the line somewhere.
A Copper-complexioned Gentleman of Few Words—A Generous Offer of "Two Sleeps" that was Promptly Accepted—A Speech from Colorow that Proved Fatal to Ills Hapless Stenographer.
The recent ruction on the part of William H. Colorow, Duke of Rawhide Buttes and heir presumptive to the throne of Yellow Jacket Park, brings the Indian once more to our notice and teaches us that eternal vigilance is the price of government land on the frontier.
Sig. Colorow is of Indian parentage and his lineage, such as it is, is very long. His ancestors run back as far as the earliest dawn of the Christian era. They claimed the land extending in a southerly direction from the North Pole, and seemed to ignore the fact that it had been sold for taxes. The Indian has always been in favor of representation without taxation, and Colorow has believed in a community of grub, allowing the white man to retain a controlling interest in common, wet-browed toil. He has always been willing to divide his bread with the pale face. He has offered, time and again, to give the white man the bread that was sweetened with honest sweat, while he took his plain. He says that to prefer bread that tastes of perspiration shows a depraved taste.
Colorow has for years been a terror to the people of northwestern Colorado, eastern Utah and southern Wyoming. Every spring it used to be his custom to stroll into North Park and prospect for prospectors. Once he came to call on me. He had been there longer than I had and so, of course, it was nothing more than etiquette that he should call on me.
He seemed to enjoy his call very much. I could not think of anything to say, though generally I am of a bright and happy disposition. After I had asked him how his mother was, I could not think of anything else to interest him. Finally I thought of Capt. John Smith and how he amused a hostile band by showing them his compass and new suspenders. I had no compass, but I had a new watch which I carried in a buckskin watch-pocket, and I thought I would show him the sweep-second and fly-back and let him see the wheels go round.
When Colorow is captured, if the United States of America has no use for that watch, I would be glad to have it returned to me at No. 32, Park Row, New York.
Colorow is a man of few words. I will never forget what he said to me when he went away. He held up two fingers and said in a voice that did not seem to waver:
"Meboe so, two sleeps more, you get out."
I sometimes think that when a man says very little we are more apt to take an interest in what he says. It was so in his case. I got to thinking over his remark after he had gone and I decided to accept of his generous offer.
He had given me two sleeps; but I do not require much sleep anyway, and when I got to thinking about Colorow and his restless manner while he was my ghost I could not sleep so well as I had formerly, and so I have been doing the most of my sleeping since that in a more thickly settled country. I remember I was so restless that last night that I walked feverishly about. I walked feverishly about twenty-five miles, I judge, in a northerly direction.
I left a small but growing mine there at that time in charge of the Utes, and I hope they used it judiciously.
The Ute nation is divided into two sections—viz., the Southern Utes, who have been pretty generally friendly, and the Northern or White River Utes, who break out into fits of emotional insanity whenever their ponies got their bellies full of grass.
My policy—one which, I regret to say, has never been adopted by the government—is to hire a sufficient number of armed herders to take the entire grand remnant sale of Indian tribes out on the plains and watch them all summer, rounding them up and counting them every morning and evening to see that they are all there. Through the day they might be kept busy pulling up the "pizen-weed" which grows all over the grazing grounds of the West, and thus they would get plenty of fresh air and at the same time do good in a modest way. But this scheme for "Utelizing" the Utes is a hundred years ahead of the age, and so I do not expect that it will meet with the indorsement of a sluggish administration.
There are, however, two sides to the Indian question, viz., a right and a wrong side. That is why the Indian question wears so well.
One of the great wrongs incident to the matter is the great delay in officially reaching the War Department in such a way as to attract the eye of the speaker. By the time a courier can get in to a telegraph station and wire the governor of a state, who notifies the Adjutant-General to write a dictated letter with his trenchent typewriter, apprising the commander of the department, who is at Coney Island or Carlsbad, with no typewriter nearer than fifteen miles, who wires the governor to make active inquiries about the matter, and by the time the governor has sent a committee, who go to within fifty miles of the scene of hostilities, and return at the end of six weeks to report that they do not know whether there has been an outbreak or not, and then when a ranchman is really killed, and reputable eye-witnesses, who were personally acquainted with deceased, and will swear that they have no interest in the result of the outbreak, come in and make a written and grammatical request for troops, and the War Department gets thoroughly rested, the Indians have gone home, washed the gore off their hands, and resumed their quiet humdrum life. Like trying to treat a man in Liverpool for softening of the brain by applying the mind cure per cable from New York, the remedy is too remote from the disease.
Indians are quick and impulsive in the matter of homicide. They are slow to grapple with anything of a humorous nature, and all the humorous lecturers who have been on the Ute lecture course have lost money, but in the holocaust line, or general arson, torture and massacre business, they act with astonishing rapidity. As a race, they regard this entire land as their own, just as the mosquitoes claim New Jersey, simply because they were there first.
The Indians see that the property is improving, and so they feel more and more wealthy and arrogant. They claim that they will never give up their rights unless they get hard up, and even then it will not count. They always have a mental reservation in these matters, which they prefer to the reservation provided by the government.
Indians naturally dislike to see these lands in the possession of wealthy men whose sons earn a precarious livelihood by playing lawn tennis.
Colorow once made a short speech to his troops, which was taken down at the time by a gentleman who was present and who was collecting material for a new third reader for our common schools.
Colorow claimed that it was incorrect, and the notes were found afterward on the stenographer's body. It is about as ticklish business to report an Indian speech as it is to poultice a boil on the person of the Ameer of Cabul.
In closing Colorow said: "Warriors, our sun is set. We are most of us out on third base, and we have no influence with the umpire.
"Once I could stand on the high ground and one shout would fill the forest with warriors. Now the wailing wind catches up my cry and bears it away like the echo of our former greatness, and I hear a low voice murmur, 'Rats.'
"Whisky and refinement have filled our land with sorrow. The white man crossed the dark waters in his large canoe and filled the forest with churches and railroad accidents.
"The Indian loves not to make money and own aldermen for which he has no use. He loves his wives and his children and intrusts them with the responsibility of doing all his work. The white man comes to us with honeyed words and says if we will divide our lands with him he will give us a present; and when we give him a county and a half he gives us a red collar-button and a blue book, in which he has written in his strange and silent language, 'When this you see, remember me.' Our warriors are weak and have the hearts of women. They care not for the war-path or the chase. Most of them want to go on the stage. Once my warriors went with me at a moment's warning to clean out the foe. They slept in the swamps with the rattlesnakes at night and fought like wolves in the daytime. Now my warriors will not go on the warpath without a valise, and some of them want to carry their dinner.
"Some day, like the fall of a mighty oak in the forest, Colorow will fall to the earth and he will rise no more. You will be scattered to the four winds of heaven, and you will go no more to battle. Some of you will starve to death, while others will go to New York and wear a long linen duster, with the price of cut-rate tickets down the back. Some of you will die with snakes in your moccasins, and others will go to Jerusalem to help rob the Dead wood coach.
"Warriors, I thank you for your kind attention and appreciation. The regular outbreak will begin to-morrow evening at early candle-light. The massacre will open with a song and dance."
Colorow dresses plainly in a coat of paint and a gun.
Whisky is more bulky and annoying to carry about, in the coat-tail pocket than a plug of tobacco; but there have been cases where it was successfully done. I was shown yesterday a little corner that would hold six or eight bushels. It was in the wash-room of a hotel, and was about half full. So were the men who came there, for before night the entire place was filled with empty whisky bottles of every size, shape and smell.
I am always sorry to see a youth get irritated and pack up his clothes in the heat of debate, and leave the home nest. His future is a little doubtful, and it is hard to prognosticate whether he will fracture limestone for the streets of a great city, or become President of the United States; but there is a beautiful and luminous life ahead of him in comparison with that of the boy who obstinately refuses to leave the home nest. The boy who cannot summon the moral courage some day to uncoil the tendrils of his heart from the clustering idols of the household, to grapple with outrageous fortune, ought to be taken by the ear and led away out into the great untried realm of space.
How His Past Was Raked Up and His Future Predicted—Interesting Information for One Dollar—He is Warned to Beware of Certain Bad Men—A Delicate Point of Etiquette—Are Astrologists Deteriorating?
Ring the bell and the door will open," is the remark made by a small label over a bell handle in Third avenue, near Eighteenth street, where Mme. La Foy reads the past, present and future at so much per read. Love, marriage, divorce, business, speculation and sickness are there handled with the utmost impunity by "Mme. La Foy, the famous scientific astrologist," who has monkeyed with the planets for twenty years, and if she wanted any information has "read it in the stars." I rang the bell the other day to see if the door would open. It did so after considerable delay, and a pimply boy in knee pants showed me upstairs into the waiting room. After a while I was removed to the consultation room, where Mme. La Foy, seated behind a small oilcloth-covered table, rakes up old personalities and pries into the future at cut rates.
Skirmishing about among the planets for twenty years involves a great deal of fatigue and exposure, to say nothing of the night work, and so Mme. La Foy has the air of one who has put in a very busy life. She is as familiar with planets, though, as you or I might be with our own family, and calls them by their first names. She would know Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, Adonis or any of the other fixed stars the darkest night that ever blew.
"Mme. La Foy De Graw," said I, bowing with the easy grace of a gentleman of the old school, "would you mind peering into the future for me about a half dollar's worth, not necessarily for publication, et cetera."
"Certainly not. What would you like to know?"
"Why, I want to know all I can for the money,"
I said, in a bantering tone. "Of course I do not wish to know what I already know. It is what I do not know now that I desire to know. Tell me what I do not know, Madam. I will detain you but a moment."
She gave me back my large, round half dollar and told me that she was already weary. She asked me to excuse her. She was willing to unveil the future to me in her poor, weak way, but she could not guarantee to let a large flood of light into the darkened basement of a benighted mind for half a dollar.
"You can tell me what year and on what day of what month you were born," said Mme. La Foy, "and I will outline your life to you. I generally require a lock of the hair, but in your case we will dispense with it."
I told her when I was born and the circumstances, as well as I could recall them.
"This brings you under Venus, Mercury and Mars. These three planets were in conjunction at the time of your birth. You were born when the sign was wrong, and you have had more or less trouble ever since. Had you been born when the sign was in the head or the heart, instead of the feet, you would not have spread out over the ground so much.
"Your health is very good, as is the health of those generally who are born under the same auspices that you were. People who are born under the reign of the crab are apt to be cancerous. You, however, have great lung power and wonderful gastric possibilities. Yet, at times, you would be very easily upset. A strong cyclone that would unroof a courthouse or tip over a through train would also upset you, in spite of your broad firm feet, if the wind got behind one of your ears.
"You will be married early and you will be very happy, though your wife will not enjoy herself very much. Your wife will be much happier during her second marriage.
"You will prosper better in business matters without forming any partnerships. Do not go into partnership with a small, dark man, who has neuralgia and a fine yacht. He has abundant means, but he will go through you like an electric shock.
"Tuesdays and Saturdays will be your most fortunate days on which to borrow money of men with light hair. Mondays and Thursdays will be your best days for approaching dark men.
"Look out for a low-sot man accompanied by an office cat, both of whom are engaged in the newspaper business. He is crafty and bald-headed on his father's side. He prints the only paper that contains the full text of his speeches at testimonials and dinners given to other people. Do not loan him money on any account.
"You would succeed well as a musician or an inventor, but you would not do well as a poet. You have all the keen sensibility and strong passion of a poet, but you haven't the hair. Do not try poesy.
"In the future I see you very prosperous You are on the lecture platform speaking. Large crowds of people are jostling each other at the box-office and trying to get their money back.
"Then I see you riding behind a flexible horse that must have cost a large sum of money. You are smoking a cigar that has never been in use before. Then Venus bisects the orbit of Mars, and I see you going home with your head tied up in the lap-robe, you and your spirited horse in the same ambulance."
"But do you see anything for me in the future, Mme. La Foy?" I asked, taking my feet off the table, the better to watch her features; "anything that would seem to indicate political preferment, a reward for past services to my country, as it were?"
"No, not clearly. But wait a moment. Your horoscope begins to get a little more intelligent. I see you at the door of the Senate Chamber. You are counting over your money and looking sadly at a schedule of prices. Then you turn sorrowfully away, and decide to buy a seat in the House instead. Many years after I see you in the Senate. You are there day after day attending to your duties. You are there early, before any one else, and I see you pacing back and forth, up and down the aisles, sweeping out the Senate Chamber and dusting off the seats and rejuvenating the cuspidors."
"Does this horoscope which you are using this season give you any idea as to whether money matters will be scarce with me next week or otherwise, and if so, what I had better do about it?"
"Towards the last of the week you will experience considerable monetary prostration; but just as you have become despondent, at the very tail end of the week, the horizon will clear up and a slight, dark gentleman, with wide trousers, who is a total stranger to you, will loan you quite a sum of money, with the understanding that it is to be repaid on Monday."
"Then you would not advise me to go to Coney Island until the week after next?"
"Certainly not."
"Would it be etiquette in dancing a quadrille to swing a young person of the opposite sex twice round at a select party when you are but slightly acquainted, but feel quite confident that her partner is unarmed?"
"Yes."
"Does your horoscope tell a person what to do with raspberry jelly that will not jell?"
"No, not at the present prices."
"So you predict an early marriage, with threatening weather and strong prevailing easterly winds along the Gulf States?"
"Yes, sir."
"And is there no way that this early marriage may be evaded?"
"No, not unless you put it off till later in life."
"Thank you," I said, rising and looking out the window over a broad sweep of undulating alley and wind-swept roofing; "and now, how much are you out on this?"
"Sir!"
"What's the damage?"
"Oh, one dollar."
"But don't you advertise to read the past, present and future for fifty cents?"
"Well, that is where a person has had other information before in his life and has some knowledge to begin with; but where I fill up a vacant mind entirely, and store it with facts of all kinds, and stock it up so that it can do business for itself, I charge a dollar. I cannot thoroughly relit and refurnish a mental tenement from the ground up for fifty cents."
I do not think we have as good "Astrologists" now as we used to have. Astrologists cannot crawl under the tent and pry into the future as they could three or four thousand years ago.
When I was a child I was different from other boys in many respects. I was always looking about to see what good I could do. I am that way yet. If my little brother wanted to go in swimming contrary to orders, I was not strong enough to prevent him, but I would go in with him and save him from a watery grave. I went in the water thousands of times that way, and as a result he is alive to-day. But he is ungrateful. He hardly ever mentions it now, but he remembers the Gordian knots that I tied in his shirts. He speaks of them frequently.
A Connoisseur with Original Ideas Who Grasps at Once the Spirit of the Canvas and discovers Various Latent Beauties Unknown Even to the Artist Himself—Diana Surprised, and Attired in an Atmosphere that Defies Fashion's Edict.
Taking The World artist with me in order to know fully what I was talking about, I visited the Academy of Design a day or two ago for the purpose of witnessing some of the pictures from Paris which are now on exhibition there. Many of these pictures are large and beautiful, while others are small and ornery. At the head of the stairs is a smallish picture, with a good, heavy frame and greenish foreground. It is not on the catalogue, so I will try to describe it briefly. About half way between the foreground and middle distance there is a cream-colored perspective, while above this there is a rag-carpet sky, with lumps on it.
"And is there no way of removing these large lumps of paint, so as to give the picture an even appearance?" I asked Mr. McDougall.
"Oh, no; they don't want to do that," he said; "that is the impasto method of putting on the colors, which brings out the salient features of the painting."
So this imposture method, it seems, is really gaining ground, and this picture, with the soldier-overcoat sky and green chenille grass and gargetty distance, would no doubt be worth in Paris thirteen or fourteen dollars.
No. 84 is a picture by Charles Durand, entitled "A Country Woman in Champagne." I was bitterly disappointed in this picture, for though the woman seems to be in good spirits the artist has utterly failed to grapple fully with his subject, and without the catalogue in his hand I would defy the most brilliant connoisseur to say definitely whether or not she is under the influence of liquor.
We next walk around to No. 168, a picture by Camille Pissaro.
M. Pissaro has ten pictures in the Academy, but this one is the best. It is made by the squirt system of painting, graining and kalsomining, which is now becoming so a la mode and rouge et noir. The artist tells me that the colors are carefully arranged in a tin pail and applied to the canvas by means of a squirt gun or Rembrandt stomach pump. This gives the painting a beautiful yet dappled appearance, which could not be obtained with a brush.
This picture is worth three dollars of any man's money for the frame is worth two dollars, and there is at least a dollar's worth of paint on the picture that is just as good as ever. The artist has handled the feet in a masterly manner, bringing them out so that they hang over the frame like a thing of life. If I could paint feet as M. Pissaro does I would not spend my life striping buggies in a close room among coarse men with putty on their pantaloons, but I would burst forth from my humble surroundings, and I would attract the attention of the whole great world of art with my massive and heroic feet. Then from this I would gradually get so that I could make pictures that would resemble people. There is no reason why M. Pissaro should not do well in that way, for he has painted No. 171, "A woman at a Well," in which the most unkempt and uncultivated peasant can at once distinguish which is the woman and which is the well. He is also the author of "Spring," a squirt study with a blue rash, which has broken out where the sky ought to be.
No. 136 is the "Execution of Maximilian," by Edouard Manet, a foreign artist. The scene is laid at the base of an old Mexican slaughter-house. In the foreground may be seen the rear of the Mexican army with its wealth of tournure and cute little gored panties. All Mexican troops have their trousers gored at the hips. Sometimes they also have them gored at the bull-fights which take place there. In the contiguous distance Maximilian maybe seen, wearing the hat which has evidently infuriated the Mexican populace. The artist says that Maximilian objects to being shot, but I pretend not to hear him, and he repeats the remark, so I have to say "Very good, very good," and then we pass on to No. 60, which is entitled "Dreams," by Prévis de Chavannes.
In this picture a weary man, who has worn himself out sleeping in haystacks and trying to solve the labor problem, so that the great curse of industry may be wiped out and the wealthy man made to pay the taxes while the poor man assists in sharing the burden of dividends, is lying on the ground with a pleasant smile on his face. He is asleep, with his mouth slightly ajar, showing how his teeth are fastened in their places. He is smiling in his slumber, and there is hay in his whiskers. Three decalcomanie angels are seen fastened to the sky in the form of a tableau. One is scattering cookies in his pathway, while the second has a laurel wreath which is offered at a great reduction, as the owner is about to leave the city for the summer. These are the new style of wingless angels recently introduced into art and now becoming very popular.
M. Chavannes is also the mechanic who constructed a picture numbered 61 and called the "Poor Fisherman." The history of this little picture is full of pathos. The scene is laid in Newark Bay, N. J. A poor fisherman and his children go out to spend the day, taking their lunch with them.
"O papa, let us take two or three cucumbers with our lunch," says one of the children, in glee.
"Very well, my child," exclaims the father, with ill-concealed delight, "Go down to the market and get one for each of us."
The artist has chosen to make his study of the fisherman a short time after lunch. The father is engaged in regretting something which it is now too late to recall. Cholera infantum has overtaken the younger child and the other is gathering lobelia for her father. The picture is wonderful in its conception ana execution. One can see that he is a poor fisherman, for he has not caught any fish, and the great agony he feels is depicted in his face and the altitude of his hair. The picture might have been called a battle piece or a French interior, with equal propriety.
Manet has several bright and cheery bits of color, among them No. 147, "Spring at Giverny," which might be called Fourth of July in a Roman candle factory without misleading the thoughtful art-student.
No. 150, "Meadows at Giverny," by the same man, is a study in connecting the foreground and background of an oil painting by means of purple hay and dark-blue bunches of boneset in such a way as to deceive the eye.
I have always bitterly regretted that while I was abroad I did not go to Giverny and see the purple hay and navy-blue tansy and water cress which grow there in such great abundance. How often we go hurrying through a country, seeing the old and well-worn features shown us by the professional guides and tourists, forgetting or overlooking more important matters, like a scene in France, No. 142, entitled "Women Bathing." I presume I was within three-quarters of a mile of this view and yet came home without knowing anything about it.
No. 123, "Diana Surprised," is no doubt the best picture in the whole collection. The tall and beautiful figure of Diana in the middle distance in the act of being surprised, is well calculated to appeal to any one with a tender heart or a few extra clothes. Diana has just been in swimming with her entire corps de ballet, and on coming out of the water is surprised to find that someone has stolen her clothes. The artist has very happily caught the attitude and expression at the moment when she is about to offer a reward for them. The picture is so true to life that I instinctively stammered "Excuse me," and got behind the artist who was with me. The figures are life size and the attitudes are easy and graceful in the extreme. One very beautiful young woman in the middle foreground, about seven and one-half inches north of the frame of the picture, with her back to the spectator, crouches at Diana's feet. She has done her beautiful and abundant hair up in a graceful coil at the back of her head, but has gone no further with her toilet when the surprise takes place. The idea is lofty and the treatment beneficial. I do not know that I am using these terms as I should, but I am doing the best I can.
We often hear our friends regret that their portraits, dressed in clothing that has long since become obsolete, are still in existence, and though the features are correctly reproduced, the costume is now so ridiculous as to impair the de trop of the picture and mar its aplomb.
Jules Lefebvre has overcome this great obstacle in a marvelous manner, and gives us Diana and her entire staff surrounded by an atmosphere that time cannot cloud with contumely or obscure with ridicule. Had the artist seen fit to paint Diana wearing a Garibaldi waist and very full skirt with large hoops, and her hair wrapped around two or three large "rats," he might have been true to the customs and costumes of a certain period in the history of art, but it would not have stood the test of time. As it is he has wisely chosen to throw about her a certain air of hauteur which will look just as well in a hundred years as it does now.
The picture has a massive frame and would brighten up one end of a dining-room very much. I was deeply mortified and disappointed to learn that it was not for sale. Actéon is the party who surprised Diana.
Nice Points of Seasonable Etiquette—-City Relatives Whose Friendship Grows Warm with the Summer, but Who Regard a Chalk Meerschaum Pipe at Christmas as an Offset for a Season's Board.
I hold that I violate no particular amount of confidence when I lay the following private letter before the heated public:
Shirley-on-the-Piscataquis River,
State of Maine, June 20, 1887.
Mr. William Nye, World Office, New York.
Sir: I have been a reader of The World for some time and have frequently noticed the alacrity with which you have come forward and explained things through its columns. You must be indeed a kind-hearted man, or you would not try to throw light on things just to oblige other people, when you do not, as a matter of fact, know what you are talking about. Few men would so far forget their own comfort as to do this in order to please others. Most men are selfish and hang back when asked a difficult question, preferring to wait till they know how to answer it; but you, sir, you seem to be so free always to come forward and explain things, and yet are so buoyant and hopeful that you will escape the authorities, that I have ventured to write you in regard to a matter that I feel somewhat of an interest in. It is now getting along into the shank of the summer and people from the great cities of our land are beginning to care less and less for the allurements of sewer gas, and to sigh for a home in the country and to hanker for the "spare room" in a quiet neighborhood at $2 a week with board.
I have seen a great many rules of etiquette for the guidance of country people who go to the city, but I have never run up against a large, blue-book telling city people how to conduct themselves as to avoid adverse criticism while in the country. Every little while some person writes a piece regarding the queer pranks of a countryman in town and acts it out on the stage and makes a whole pile of money on it, but we do not seem to get the other side of this matter at all. What I desire is that you will give us a few hints in regard to the conduct of city people who visit in the rural districts during the heated term. I am not a professional summer-resort tender or anything of that kind, but I am a plain man, that works and slaves in the lumber woods all winter and then blows it in, if you will allow the term, on some New York friends of my wife's who come down, as they state, for the purpose of relaxation, but really to spread themselves out over our new white coverlids with their clothes on, and murmur in a dreamy voice: "Oh, how restful!"
They also kick because we have no elevated trains that will take them down to the depot, whereas I am not able and cannot get enough ahead or forehanded sufficiently to do so, as heaven is my judge.
They bring with them a small son, who is a pale, emaciated little cuss, with a quiet way of catching my three-year-old heifer by the tail and scaring the life out of her that is far beyond his years. His mother thinks he will not live, mayhap, to grow up, and I hope she may not be disappointed. Still he has a good appetite, and one day last summer, besides his meals, he ate:
One pocketful green apples (pippins),
One pocketful green apples (Ben Davis),
Three large steins rhubarb,
One hatful green gooseberries,
Two ginger cookies, without holes,
Three ginger cookies, with holes,
One adult cucumber, with salt on same,
One glass new milk,
Two uncooked hen eggs, on half-shell.
I laid off all that day from haying in order to follow the little rascal around with a lead pencil and a piece of paper and see how much he would eat. That evening I thought what a beautiful night he had selected for his death. The moon was slipping in and out through the frothy, fleece-lined clouds, and I could imagine the angels just behind the battlements putting the celestial bric-a-brac high enough up so that Henry couldn't get hold of it when he came. I had a slow horse concealed behind the barn, with which I intended going for the doctor. It was a horse with which I had failed to get the doctor in time on a similar occasion, and I felt that he could be relied on now.
Night settled down on the riproaring Piscataquis and deepened the shadows at the base of Russell Mountain. The spruce gum tree of the Moosehead Lake region laid aside its work for the day and the common warty toad of the Pine Tree State began to overestimate himself and inflate his person with the bugs of the evening, now and then lighting up his interior with a lightning bug. It was a glorious evening that little Henry had selected and set aside for his death. But he was really the only one in our house who slept well that night, and seemed to wake up thoroughly refreshed. He is still alive as I write and is coming down here in July emptier than ever.
Oh, sir, can you help me? Will you print this poor petition of mine, with the tear-stains on it, and your reply to it in The World and send me a copy of the paper that I can show to Henry's father, who is a cousin of my wife's but otherwise has nothing to which he can point with pride? Yours sincerely,
Eben L. Tewey.
P. S.—I have presumed some on your good nature, because I have been told that you was born here. I am sorry to say that Shirley has never overcome this entirely. It has hurt her with other towns in the State, but you can see yourself that there was no way we could provide against it. My wife sends love, and hopes you will print this letter without giving my name, or if so, with a fictitious name, as they call it, and perhaps it will fall into the hands of those people who come down here every summer with nothing in them but sincere friendship and go home full of victuals. I wish you would put into it some way a piece that says I do not regard a Christmas present of a chalk meershum pipe, with a red celluloid stem, as an offset against a summer's board of a family that has more malaria than good manners. Slap that in, in your genial way, so as not to give offense, and whenever you visit your old birthplace, and want to just let go all holts and have a good time, come right to our house. I have lathed and plastered the cook-room and fitted it up as a kind of Inebriates' Home, and I would feel tickled to death to have you come and see what you think of it.
P. S. Again. If you print this letter, Slocum would be a good fictitious name to sign to it, and I would want an extra copy of the paper also.
T.
Reply.
Sir: Will you allow me to say that I think it is such letters as the above that create ill-feeling between the people of the country and the people of the city, and cause the relations to be strained, especially those relations that live in the country. Although you are not altogether in the wrong, Eben, and although country people, who live near to nature's heart, have certain inalienable rights which should be respected, yet there is no work on etiquette which covers the case you allude to.
It would be very difficult for me to write out a code of ethics for the government of your relative while in the country, and from the description you give of him I judge that we could not enforce it anyway without calling out the State troops.
I take him to belong to that class of New York business men who are so active doing nothing every day, that in order to impress people with their importance, they are in the habit of pushing a woman or two off the Brooklyn bridge in their wild struggle to get over into the City Hall park and sit down. I presume that he is that kind of a man here, and so we think you ought to get along with him through July and August if we take him for the rest of the year.
He is the kind that would knock down an old woman in the morning, in his efforts to get the first possible elevated train, and then do nothing else all day but try to recover from the shock. I wouldn't be surprised if he ultimately wrote a book on etiquette, which will inform a countryman how to conduct himself while he is in town. Maybe he is writing it now.
I can imagine, Eben, what sad havoc the son of such a man would create in your quiet Piscataquis home. In my mind's eye I can see him trying to carry out his father's lofty notions of refinement and courtesy. I can see his bright smile as he lands at your door and begins to insert himself into your home life, to breathe resinous air of the piney woods, and to pour kerosene into the sugar bowl, to chase the gaudy decalcomanie butterfly, and put angle worms in the churn.
In this man's book on etiquette he will, doubtless, say that should you have occasion while at table to use a toothpick, you should hold a napkin before your mouth while doing so, in order to avoid giving offense to those who are at table. It is not necessary for you to crawl under the table to pick your teeth, or to go out behind the barn, for by throwing a large napkin over your head you can pick your teeth with impunity though you should not use a fork, as it does not look well and it might put out your eye.
Nothing is more disgusting to a refined mind than to see a man at table holding one of his eyes on a fork and scrutinizing it with the other.
In calling on a lady who is away from home leave your card. If the visit is intended for two or three ladies at the house, leave two or three cards, but do not turn down the corner of the card as that custom is now exploded except in three card monte circles and even then it is regarded with suspicion.
All these things, however, are for the guidance of people who come to town, and those who go into the country are left practically without any suitable book to guide them.
I do not know of any better way for you to do, Eben, than to write a polite note to your relatives asking them if they contemplate paying you a visit this summer, and if so at what time, and whether they will bring Henry or not. Use plain white unruled note paper and write only on one side, unless you are a Mugwump in which case you might write on both sides.
Then if they write that they do so contemplate paying you a visit without paying anything else, I do not know of anything for you to do but to go away somewhere for the summer, leaving your house fully insured and in the hands of a reliable incendiary.
Write again, Eben, and feel perfectly free to come and lean on me in all matters of etiquette. Do not come to town without hunting me up. You will find me at the Post-Office forenoons and in the pest-house during the afternoon. Yours, with kind regards.
They may be rough on the exterior but they can love Oh, so earnestly, so warmly, so truly, so deeply, so intensely, so yearningly, so fondly, and so universally!
Personal Gossip Designed to Interest the Indian Society People—Remarkable Toilets Seen on the Reservation—A Novel Aboriginal Dinner Menu—Points for Society Reporters—Eager to Make Their Mark.
The following Ute society gossip is full of interest to those who have personal acquaintances and friends, among that set. I have only just received them, and hasten to give them as early as possible, knowing that the readers of The World will all feel an interest in what is going on in and about the reservation:
The season at White River will be unusually gay this winter, and soon there will be one continuous round of hilarity, indigestion, mirth, colic and social hatred, Red Horse, the smoke-tanned horse-fiddle maestro, will play and call off again this winter for germans, grub dances and jack-rabbit gorges as usual.
The Ouray War Club will give a series of hops in November under its own auspices, and in December it will hold two Germans. In going through these Germans no favors will be shown by the club.
Mr. and Mrs. Mexican-Hairless-Dog-upon-whom-there-are-no-Flies have been spending the summer at their delightful hostile home near White River. They have just returned for the winter, beautifully bronzed by the elements, and report one of the most exhilarating outbreaks they ever were to.
Lop-Ear-Son-of-the-Cyclone received a cablegram last week, on his return from the war-path, offering him a princely salary to come to London, and assist in robbing the Deadwood coach. He says the legitimate drama is certainly making wonderful strides. He has heard the American Opera Company in "Hero," and says that no one who has lived on the reservation all his life can have any idea of the strides that are being made on the stage. He has not decided whether to accept the offer or not, but says that if the stage they are going to rob is the operatic stage he will not assist at any price. He says he knows what it is to suffer for clothes himself.
The members of the Chipeta Canoeing Club have just returned from a summer jaunt, and are in good spirits. They report that a good time was had and health greatly improved. The club will give a sociable and gastric recital at its grounds next week. The proceeds will go toward beautifying the grounds of the club and promoting a general good feeling. Each member is permitted to bring one cash friend.
Tail-Man-Who-Toys with-the-Thunderbolts will start to-morrow for the home of the Great White Father, at Washington. He goes to make a treaty or two and be awed by the surplus in the treasury. He will make as many treaties as possible, after which he will invite the Great White Father to visit our young and growing reservation, enjoy our crude hospitality and cultivate the Ute vote.
A select scalp-dance and rum sociable will take place at the foot of the gulch, at the middle of the present moon, after which there will be a presentation speech and resolutions of respect tendered to the Board of Outbreaks and the Sub-Committee on Hostility.
The following will be the menu:
Reservation soup, strengthened with rain-water; condemned sardines, codfish balls, fish plates, railroad frogs' legs, sage hen ŕ la Colorow, jerked jack-rabbits, roasting ears ŕ la massacre, hot-house clams, rattlesnakes' tongues ŕ la fire-water, prickly pears, fruit of the loom, dried apples and whisky. Dancing will be kept up till a late hour.
The approaching nuptials of Fly-by-Night, a partial widower of Snippeta, daughter of Wipe-Up-the-Ground-with-His-Enemies, will be the occasion of quite a tout ensemble and blow-out. He will marry the surviving members of the family of Warnpo-the-Wailer-that-Wakes-Up-in-the-Night. He will on this occasion lead to the altar Mrs. Wampo-the-Wailer, etc., her two daughters and the hired girl. The wedding will take place at the residence of the bride. Invitations are already out and parties who have not yet received any, but who would like to be present and swap a tin napkin ring for a square meal, will be invited if they will leave their address with the groom.
Crash-of-the-Tempest, a prominent man of the tribe, laid a large tumor on our table last week, weighing four pounds, from which he was removed on Wednesday. So far, this is the largest tumor that has been brought in this summer to apply on subscription. Call again, Crash.
Soiled Charley and Peek-a-Boo, delegates of the Ute notion sent to the Great White Father at Washington, returned yesterday from Red Top, the great tepee of the Pale Chief. They made a great many treaties and both are utterly exhausted. Peek-a-Boo is confined to his wigwam by the hallucination that the air is full of bright red bumble bees with blue tails. He says that he does not mind the hostility of the white man, but it is his hospitality that makes him tired.
A full-dress reception and consommé was tendered to the friends of labor at the home of Past Worthy Chief Fly-up-the-Creek, of White River, by his own neighbors and Uncompaghre admirers on Tuesday evening. At an early hour guests began to arrive and crawl under the tent into the reception-room.
A fine band, consisting of a man who had deserted from the regular military band, played Boulanger's March on the bass drum with deep feeling.
The widow of Wampo-the-Wailer and affianced of old Fly-by-Night, wore a dark coiffure, held in place by the wish-bone of a sage hen, and looked first rate.
Miss Wampo, the elder, wore a négligé costume, consisting of a red California blanket, caught back with real burdock burrs and held in place by means of a hame strap.
The younger Miss Wampo wore a Smyrna rug, with bunch grass at the throat.
Mrs. D. W. Peek-a-Boo wore a cavalry saddle blanket, with Turkish overalls and bone ornaments.
Miss Peek-a-Boo wore a straw-colored jardiniere, cut V-shape, looped back with a russet shawl strap and trimmed with rick-rack around the arm-holes. Her eyes danced with merriment, and she danced with most anybody in the wigwam.
Little Casino, the daughter of Fly-Up-the-Creek, of the Uncompaghres, wore the gable end of an "A" tent, trimmed with red flannel rosettes. It had veneered panels, and the new and extremely swell sleeves, blown up above the elbow and tight the rest of the way, in which, as she said in her naive way, they resembled her father, who was tight half of the time and blown up the rest of the time. Little Casino was the life of the party, and it would be hard to opine of anything more charming than her bright and cheery way of telling a funny story, which convulsed her audience, while she quietly completed a fractional flush and took home the long-delayed jack pot to her needy father. She is an intellectual exotic of which the Uncompaghres may well be proud, and is also one of those rare productions of nature never at a loss for something to write in an autograph album. In the album of a young warrior of the Third Ute Infantry she has written: "In friendship's great fruitage, please regard me as your huckleberry, Little Casino."
Our genial townsman, William H. Colorow, is home again after a prolonged hunting and camping trip, during which he was attacked and cordially shot at by a group of gentlemen who came to serve a writ of replevin on him. Col. Colorow does not know exactly what the writ of replevin is for, unless it be for the purpose of accumulating mileage for the sheriff. Few were killed during the engagement, except a small pappoose belonging to Mr. and Mrs. Roll-on-Silver-Moon, who returned last evening with the remains of their child. A late copy of a New York paper alludes to this as "a furious engagement, after which the Indians carried off their dead according to their custom." Mr. and Mrs. Roll-on-Silver-Moon were warned against taking the baby with them on an extended camping trip, but they seemed to think that it would be perfectly safe, as the child was only seven weeks old, and could not have incurred the hostility of the War Department. This was not improbable at all, for, according to the records, it takes from nine to eleven weeks to officially irritate the War Department. The little one now lies at the wigwam of its afflicted parents, on Cavyo street, and certainly does not look as though it could have stood out so long against the sheriff and his posse.
Mrs. Roll-on-Silver-Moon has a painful bullet wound in the shoulder, but feels so grieved about the loss of little Cholera Infantum that she does not make much fuss over her injury. The funeral of the little one will take place this evening, from its late residence, and friends of the parents are cordially invited to come and participate. Wailing will begin promptly at sundown.
Mr. and Mrs. P. P. C. Shinny-on-Your-Own-Ground are just back from a summer jaunt in the Little Big Horn Mountains, whither they went in search of health. They returned laden with golden rod and a large catch of landlocked grasshoppers. As soon as they get thoroughly rested they will announce a select locust, grasshopper and cricket feed at their home, during which a celebrated band from the Staten Island ferry will oblige with a new selection, known as "The Cricket on the Hearth."
Major Santee, who is now at home repairing the roof of his gothic tepee, which was so damaged by the recent storms that it allowed hail, rain and horned cattle to penetrate his apartments at all times of the day or night, says that in the late great Ute war everybody wanted to fight except the Indians and the War Department. He believes that no Indian outbreak can be regarded as a success without the hearty co-operation and godspeed of the government, and a quorum of Indians who are willing to break out into open hostility. Major Santee lost a niece during the recent encounter. She was not hostile to any one, but was respected by all, and will now cast a gloom. She had no hard feelings toward the sheriff or any one of his posse, and had never met them before. She was very plain in appearance, and this was her first engagement. The sheriff now claims that he thought she was reaching for her gun, whereas it appears that she was making a wild grab for her Indian trail.
Major Santee says that he hopes it will be many a long day before the sheriff organizes another Ute outbreak and compels the Utes to come and bring their families. He lays that human life here is now so cheap? especially the red style of human life, that sometimes he is almost tempted to steal two hundred thousand dollars and go to New York, where he will be safe.
Whenever I get bilious and need exercise, I go over to the south end of town and vicariously hoe radishes for an hour or two till the pores are open, and I feel that delightful languor and the chastened sense of hunger and honesty which comes to the man who is not afraid to toil.
Decoyed by Honeyed Words He Essays to Purify Politics—The Inevitable Delegation from Irving Hall—An Unreserved Statement of Campaign Expenses—Some Items of a Momentous Canvass Disclosed.
I have only just returned from the new-made grave of a little boomlet of my own. Yesterday I dug a little hole in the back yard and buried in it my little boom, where the pie-plant will cast its cooling shadows over it and the pinch-bug can come and carol above it at eventide.
A few weeks ago a plain man came to me and asked me my name. Refreshing my memory by looking at the mark on my linen, I told him promptly who I was. He said he had resided in New York for a long time and felt the hour had now arrived for politics in this city to be purified. Would I assist him in this great work? If so, would I appoint a trysting place where we could meet and tryst? I suggested the holy hush and quiet of lower Broadway or the New York end of the East River bridge at 6 o'clock; but he said no, we might be discovered. So we agreed to meet at my house. There he told me that his idea was to run me for the State Senate this fall, not because he had any political axe to grind, but because he wanted to see old methods wiped out and the will of the people find true and unfettered expression.
"And, sir," I asked, "what party do you represent?"
"I represent those who wish for purity, those who sigh for the results of unbought suffrages, these who despise old methods and yearn to hear the unsmothered voice of the people."
"Then you are Mr. Vox Populi himself, perhaps?"
"No, my name is Kargill, and I am in dead earnest. I represent the party of purity in New York."
"And why did you not bring the party with you? Then you and I and my wife and this party you speak of could have had a game of whist together," said I with an air of inimitable drollery.
But he seemed to be shocked by my trifling manner, and again asked me to be his standard-bearer. Finally I said reluctantly that I would do so, for I have always said that I would never shrink from my duty in case I should become the victim of political preferment.
In Wyoming I had several times accepted the portfolio of justice of the peace, and so I knew what it was to be called forth by the wild and clamorous appeals of my constituents and asked to stand up for principle, to buckle on the armor of true patriotism and with drawn sword and overdrawn salary to battle for the right.
In running for office in Wyoming our greatest expense and annoyance arose from the immense distances we had to travel in order to go over one county. Many a day I have traveled during an exciting canvass from daylight till dark without meeting a voter. But here was a Senatorial district not larger than a joint school district, and I thought that the expense of making a canvass would be comparatively small.
That was where I made a mistake. On the day after Mr. Lucifer Kargill had entered my home and with honeyed words made me believe that New York had been, figuratively speaking, sitting back on her haunches for fifty years waiting for me to come along and be a standard-bearer, a man came to my house who said he had heard that I was looking toward the Senate, and that he had come to see me as the representative of Irving Hall. I said that I did not care a continental for Irving Hall, so far as my own campaign was concerned, as I intended to do all my speaking in the school-houses.
He said that I did not understand him. What he wanted to know was, what percentage of my gross earnings at Albany would go into the Irving Hall sinking fund, provided that organization indorsed me? I said that I was going into this campaign to purify politics, and that I would do what was right toward Irving Hall, in order to be placed in a position where I could get in my work as a purifier.
We then had a long talk upon what he called the needs of the hour. He said that I would make a good candidate, as I had no past. I was unknown and safe. Besides, he could see that I had the elements of success, for I had never expressed any opinion about anything, and had never antagonized any of the different wings of the party by saying anything that people had paid any attention to. He said also that he learned I had belonged to all the different parties, and so would be familiar with the methods of each. He then asked me to sign a pledge and after I had done so he shook hands with me and went away.
The next day I was waited upon by the treasurers of eleven chowder clubs, the financial secretary of the Shanty Sharpshooters and Goat Hill Volunteers. A man also came to obtain means for burying a dead friend. I afterward saw him doing so to some extent. He was burying his friend beneath the solemn shadow of a heavy mahogany-colored mustache, of which he was the sole proprieter.
I was waited upon by delegations from Tammany, the County Democracy and the Jeffersonian Simplicity Chub. Everybody seemed to have dropped his own business in order to wait upon me, I became pledged to every one on condition that I should be elected. It makes me shudder now to think what I may have signed. I paid forty odd dollars for the privilege of voting for a beautiful child, and thus lost all influence with every other parent in the contest. I voted for the most popular young lady and heard afterward that she regarded me only as a friend. I had a biography and portrait of myself printed in an obscure paper that claimed a large circulation, and the first time the forms went into the press a loose screw fell out on the machinery, caught in the forehead of my portrait and peeled back the scalp so that it dropped over the eye like a prayer rag hanging out of the window.
I had paid a boy three dollars to scatter these papers among the neighbors, but I met him as he came out of the office and made it five dollars if he would put them in the bosom of the moaning tide.
I give below a rough draft of expenses, not including; some of the items referred to above:
Yesterday I tried to find the red-nosed man who first asked me to go into the standard-bearer business, in order to withdraw my name, but I could not find him in the directory. I therefore take this means of saying, as I said to my assignee last evening, that if a public office be a public bust, I might just as well bust now and have it over.
To-morrow I will sell out my residence, a cane voted to me as the most popular man in the State; also an assortment of political pulls, a little loose in the handles, but otherwise all right. I will close out at the same time five hundred torches, three hundred tin helmets, nine transparencies and one double-leaded editorial, entitled "Dinna Ye Hear the Slogan?"
A noble, generous-hearted man in Cheyenne lost $250, and an honest chambermaid found it in his room. The warm heart of the man swelled with gratitude, and seemed to reach out after all mankind, that he might in some way assist them with the $250 which was lost, and was found again. So he fell on the neck of the chambermaid, and while his tears took the starch out of her linen collar, he put his hand in his pocket and found her a counterfeit twenty-five cent scrip. "Take this," he said, between his sobs, "Virtue is its own reward. Do not use it unwisely, put it into Laramie County bonds, where thieves cannot corrupt, nor moths break through and gnaw the corners off."
I have seen a very spirited painting somewhere; I think it was at the Louvre, or the Vatican, or Fort Collins, by either Michael Angelo, or Raphael, or Eli Perkins, which represented Joseph presenting a portion of his ulster overcoat to Potiphar's wife, and lighting out for the Cairo and Palestine 11 o'clock train, with a great deal of earnestness. This would be a good painting to hang on the walls of the Capitol.
Mr. Ives's Earnest Desire Not to Tell a Lie or Anything Else—Blighted Powers of Recalling the Past Put Him Alongside the Gentle Gould Himself—Touching Letter Received from a Patron of His Road.
The present age may be regarded as the age of investigation. This morbid curiosity on the part of the American people to know how large fortunes are acquired is a healthy sign, and the desire of the press, as well as the people, to investigate the parlor magic and funny business by which a man can buy two millions of dollars' worth of stock in the Aurora Borealis without paying for it, stick a quill in it and inflate the stock to twenty millions, then borrow thirty-five millions on the new stock by booming it, make an assignment, bust and slide a fifty-pound ledger up his sleeve, is most gratifying.
For the benefit and entertainment of those who still believe that the Sunday paper is not an engine of destruction, and for the consideration of those who may have been kept away from church on this summer Sabbath morning by sickness or insomnia, let us turn for a moment to the thoughtful scrutiny of Mr. Henry S. Ives, the young Napoleon of Wall street.
In the first place, Mr. Ives has done nothing new. Starting out, no doubt, with Mr. Gould as his model, he has kept up the imitation even to the loss of memory and blighted powers of recalling the past during an investigation. (I use Mr. Gould's name simply as an illustration—for I have no special antipathy toward Mr. Gould.) Personally we are friendly. He made his money by means of his comatose memory and flabby integrity, while I made mine by means of earnest, honest toil, and a lurid imagination.
But in the case of Mr. Ives, the gentle, polite failure to remember, the earnest desire not to tell a lie or anything else, the courteous and unobtrusive effort to avoid being too positive about anything that would assist anybody in ascertaining anything—all, all remind the close student of Mr. Jay Gould. The conversation during the investigation for one day ran something like this:
"Mr. Ives, did you in making your assignment turn over all the books connected with your business?"
"Do you mean my library?"
"No; the books of account, the daybook, cash book, ledger, etc., etc."
"Oh!"
"I ask if you turned over all such books on the date of your assignment?"
"I could hardly tell that. At least, I would only swear on information and belief."
"Well, to the best of your knowledge and belief, did you turn over those books at that time?"
"I think I did, but I am not positive as to the date?"
"What makes you think you did?"
"Because I did frequently turn the books over, in order to see how they looked on the other side."
"Mr. Ives, we find that several of the more important books connected with your office and the firm of Henry S. Ives & Co. are missing. Do you know where they are?"
"No, I do not,"
"Were they in your office prior to your assignment?"
"Yes, they were there, according to the best of my knowledge and belief, up to the time that they were not there."
"Have you any idea, Mr. Ives, where those books are now?"
"No sir; only in a general way?"
"How do you mean in a general way?"
"Well, I mean that I know only in what might be called a general way."
"Well, Mr. Ives, will you state then, in a general way, where those books are now?"
"Yes, sir; they are elsewhere."
"What makes you say they are elsewhere, Mr. Ives?"
"Because they are not there."
"Well, now, will you tell us whether you removed those books from the office of IH. S. Ives & Co. or not?"
"Do you ask me to answer that question personally?"
"Yes."
"Do you wish a verbal answer or would you rather have it in writing?"
"Answer orally."
"Well, then, I did not, to my knowledge."
"Would you have been apt to know of it if you had taken them away yourself?"
"Well, only in a general way."
"Would you have known about it if any one else had taken them away?"
"I think I would but I might not. There was a great deal of passing along our street, and they may have been taken while I was looking out of the window, waiting till the crowds rolled by."
And so Mr. Ives continued to shed information upon the inquiring mind in a courteous and opaque manner that must have endeared him to all.
Mr. Ives has in no transaction shown himself so thoroughly shrewd as he did when he swapped a doubtful reputation for a large sum of money. The only wonder is that there were so many men who wanted to invest in that kind of goods. He did a shrewd thing, but he will not be able to profit by it.
Success, however, should only be measured by the content it brings with it. While Henry S. Ives was lighting his mighty financial battles and winning for himself the title of the Young Napoleon of Wall street, dwelling in a little palace lined with ivory and gold, but cursed by the consuming desire to be rich, and forgetful, like Mr. Gould, how full of calm and soothing content is the following simple letter, written by a man who undertook last year to inaugurate a Shakesperian revival in southern Ohio:
Cincinnati, O., Aug. 3, 1886.
Mr. Henry S. Ives, New York, N. Y.
Dear Sir: I have just arrived in this city after a long and debilitating but rather enjoyable trip over your line, and I now take pen in hand to thank you for the use of your roadbed from Indianapolis to this place. It is a good road, and I was surprised to find it well ballasted and furnished with cool retreats and shady culverts every few miles wherein a man could rest.
It is a good route for the poor but pampered tragedian to take, and water-melons grow close to the fence. I have traveled over many other roads since the new and pernicious law, but nowhere have I found watermelons more succulent or less coy and secretive than on your justly celebrated line. I also notice with pleasure that green corn is still susceptible, and wild paw paws are growing in the summer sun.
I thought I saw you go by in your special car just north of the first trestle outside of town, but you went by so fast that I could not tell definitely till too late. Please excuse me for not speaking to you as you passed by. Success on the stage has not taught me to forget or ignore my friends whenever I am thrown in contact with them.
People write me that New York State is rapidly settling up, and that property is advancing rapidly in every direction. Is this so? Advancing rapidly in every direction is, I suppose, one of the most difficult feats known to calisthenics. I have tried it myself, years ago, but now I do not practice it, having quit drinking altogether.
I hope you will let me know any time that I can be of use to you, either in mowing weeds or gathering nuts that have ripened and fallen off your track. I enjoy, especially in the autumn when the hectic of the dying year has flooded the forests with its multiplied glories, and the cricket sings his sleepy song to the tired heart, and the locust lifts its lawn-mower voice in the boughs of the poplar, to go nutting along a prolific railroad track.
I would be glad, also, if you have not secured anyone else, to assist you in herding your stock on Wall street. Railroad stock frequently runs down and gets the hollow horn for lack of care during the winter months.
Always feel free to call on me at any time that I can be of service to you.
Yours truly,
A——-B———.
The moral to be drawn from the career of Napoleon Bonaparte Ives is that they who make haste to be rich may not be innocent. As Gen. McClellan once said, there can be no better incentive to integrity than the generous approval accorded to honesty by those who are honest. All other kinds of approval are not worth struggling for. Money will buy a certain kind of applause, but it is the kind that turns to scorn when justice begins to get in her fine work.
And life itself is brief. Storied urn and animated bust may succeed well in society, but they cannot soothe the dull cold ear of death. Freckled granite and prevaricating marble may perpetuate the fraud of a lifetime, but they do not always indicate success.
For myself I would rather have more sincere and honest friends through life, and afterwards content myself with a plainer tomb.
Not many miles from the costly mausoleum of a great millionaire a sign-board by the roadside reads:
This way to Foley's Grove!
Enjoy life while you live, for
You'll be along time dead.
While I do not fully indorse this sentiment, there is food in it for earnest thought.
I have noticed bees very closely indeed, during my life. In fact I have several times been thrown into immediate juxtaposition with them, and have had a great many opportunities to observe their ways, and I am free to say that I have not been so forcibly struck with the difference in their size as the noticeable difference in their temperature. I remember at one time sitting by a hive watching the habits of the bees, and thinking how industrious they were, and what a wide difference there is between the toilsome life of the little insect, and the enervating, aimless, idle and luxurious life of the newspaper man, when an impulsive little bee lit in my hair. He seemed to be feverish. Wherever he settled down he seemed to leave a hot place. I learned afterward that it was a new kind of bee called the anti-clinker base-burner bee.
Why a man in a Soft Hat is not always Welcome—The Hotel Clerk and his Frigidity Apparatus—The Hotel Hog and his Habits—how he may be Headed Off—Drolleries of Shrewd Bonifaces.
America has made many gigantic strides, aside from those made at the battle of Bull Run, and her people spend much of their time pointing with pride to her remarkable progress; but we are prone to dwell too much upon our advantages as a summer resort, and our adroit methods of declining the Presidency before we are asked, while we forget some of our more important improvements, like the Elevated Railway and the American Hotel.
Let us, for a moment, look at the great changes that have been wrought in hotels during the past century. How marked has been the improvement and how wonderful the advancement. Everything has been changed. Even the towels have been changed.
Electric bells, consisting of a long and alert wire with an overcoat button at one end and a reticent boy at the other, have taken the place of the human voice and a low-browed red-elm club. Where once we were compelled to fall down a dark, narrow staircase, now we can go down the elevator or wander down the wrong stairway and ourselves in the laundry.
Where once we were mortified by being compelled to rise at table, reach nine feet and stab a porous pancake with our fork, meantime wiping the milk gravy out of a large yellow bowl with our coat-tails, now we can hire a tall, lithe gentleman in a full-dress suit to pass us the pancakes.
Even the bar-rooms of American hotels are changed. Once the bartender waited till his customer ran all his remarks into one long, hoarse word, with a hiccough on the end, and then he took him by the collar and threw him out into the cold and chaotic night. Now the bartender gradually rises on the price of drinks till his customer is frozen out, and while he is gone to the reading-room to borrow some more money the chemist moves the bar somewhere else, and when the guest returns he finds a barber-shop where he thought he left a bar-room.
One hundred years, on their swift pinions, have borne away the big and earnest dinner bell, and the sway-backed hair trunk that surprised a man so when he sat down upon it to consider what clothes he would put on first.
All these evidences of our crude, embryotic existence are gone, and in their places we have electric bells, and Saratoga trunks wherein we may conceal our hotel room and still have space left for our clothes.
It is very rare now that we see a United States senator snaking a two-year old Mambrino hair trunk up three flights of stairs to his room in order to secure the labor vote. Men, as well as hotels and hotel soap, have changed. Where once a cake of soap would only last a few weeks, science has come in and perfected a style of pink soap, flavored with vanilla, that will last for years, and a new slippery-elm towel that is absolutely impervious to moisture. Hand in hand, this soap and towel go gaily down the corridors of time, welcoming the coming and speeding the parting guest, jumping deftly out of the hands of the aristocracy into the hands of a receiver, but always calm, smooth and latherless.
Nature did not fit me to be the successful guest at a hotel. I can see why it is so. I do not know how to impress a hotel. I think all the way up from the depot, as I change hands with my hot-handled and heavy bag, how I will stride up to the counter and ask for the room that is generally given to Mr. Blaine; but when I get there I fall up against a cold wave, step back into a large india-rubber cuspidor, and my overtaxed valise bursts open. While the porter and I gather up my collars and gently press them in with our feet, the clerk decides that he hasn't got such a room as I would want.
I then go to another hotel and succeed in getting a room, which commands a view of a large red fire-escape, a long sweep of undulating eaves-trough and a lightning rod—usually No. 7 5/8s, near the laundry chimney and adjoining the baggage elevator.
After I have remained at the hotel several days and paid my bill whenever I have been asked to do so, and shown that I did not eat much and that I was willing to carry up my own coal, the proprietor relents and puts me in a room that is below timber line, and though it is a better room, I feel all the time as though I had driven out the night-watchman, for the bed is still warm, and knowing that he must be sleeping out in the cold hall all night as he patiently watches the hotel, I cannot sleep until three or four o'clock in the morning, and then I have to get up while the chambermaid makes my bed for the day.
I try hard when I enter a hotel to assume an air of arrogance and defiance, but I am all the time afraid that there is some one present who is acquainted with me.
Another thing that works against me is my apparel. In a strange hotel a man will do better, if he has fifty dollars only, and desires to remain two weeks, to go and buy a fifty-dollar suit of clothes with his money, taking his chances with the clerk, than to dress like a plain American citizen, and expect to be loved, on the grounds that he will pay his board.
But there is now a prospect for reform in this line, a scheme by which a man's name and record as a guest will be his credentials. When this plan becomes thoroughly understood and adopted, a modest man with money, who prefers to wear a soft hat, will not have to sleep in the Union depot, solely on the ground that the night clerk is opposed to a soft hat.
This scheme, to be brief, consists of a system of regular reports from tables and rooms, which reports are epitomized at the office and interchangeable with other hotels, on the principle of the R. G, Dun Commercial Agency. The guest is required to sign his order at the table or give the number of his room, whether the hotel is run on the European plan or not, and these orders in the aggregate, coming from head waiters, porters, chambermaids and bell-boys, make up a man's standing on a scale of from A to Z.
For instance, we will say a five-dollar-per-day house can afford to feed a man for a dollar a meal. The guest orders two dollars' worth, sticks his mustache into just enough of it to spoil it for stew or giblet purposes, and then goes to his room. Here he puts up the fire-escape rope for a clothes-line, does a week's washing, and hanging it out upon the improvised clothesline, he lights a strong pipe, puts his feet on the pillow-shams, and reads "As in a Looking Glass" while his wash is drying. When that man goes away he leaves a record at the hotel which confronts him at every hotel wherever he goes. As soon as he writes his name, the clerk, who has read it wrong side up just a little before he got it down, tells him that he is very sorry, but that the house is full, and people are sleeping on cots in the hall, and the proprietor himself has to sleep on the sideboard. The large white Suffolk hog, who has been in the habit of inaugurating a rain of terror and gravy in the dining-room and stealing the soap from the wash-room, just simply because he could out trump the clerk on diamonds, will thus have to go to the pound, where he belongs, and quiet, every day people, who rely on their integrity more than they do on their squeal, will get a chance.
A great many droll characters and bright, shrewd men are met with among hotel proprietors wherever you go. "The Fat Contributor" was lecturing once in the State of Kentucky, and had occasion to take dinner at a six-bit hotel. After the meal Mr. Griswold stepped up to the counter, took out a bale of bank notes, which he had received for his lecture the evening before, and asked what might be the damage.
"Three dollars," said the blue grass gentleman, who had buttoned his collar with a tenpenny nail, while he looked at "Gris" with a pained expression.
"Yes, but a man ought to be able to board here a week for three dollars. The whole house didn't cost more than forty or forty-five dollars. What's your idea in charging me three dollars for a wad of hominy and a piece of parched pork?"
"Well, sir," said the urbane landlord, as he put out the fire at a. distance of twenty feet by emptying his salivary surplus on it, "I need the money?"
The frankness and open, candid manner of the man won Mr. Griswold, and he asked him if he thought three dollars would be enough. The landlord said he could get along with that. Then Griswold opened his valise and took out a large brunette bottle of liniment marked "for external use." He passed it over to the landlord, and told him that he would find this stuff worked as well on the inside as it did on the outside. In a few moments the liniment of the "Fat Contributor" and the lineaments of the landlord had merged into each other, and a friendly feeling sprang up between the two men which time has never effaced. I have often thought of this, and wondered why it is that hotel men are not more open and cordial with their guests. Many a time I have paid a large bill grudgingly when I would have done it cheerfully if the landlord had told me he was in need.
I had intended to speak at some length on the new rope law, by which every man is made his own vigilance committee; but I feel that I am already encroaching on the advertising space, and so will have to omit it. In conclusion, I will say that the American hotels are far preferable to those we have in Paris in many ways, and not only outstrip those of England and the Continent, even as a corps de ballet outstrips a toboggan club, but they seem to excel and everlastingly knock the ancient hotels of Carthage, Rome and Tie Siding silly.
If women would spend their evenings at home with their husbands, they would see a marked change in the brightness of their homes. Too many sad-eyed men are wearing away their lives at home alone. Would that I had a pen of fire to write in letters of living light the ignominy and contumely and—some more things like that, the names of which have escaped my memory—that are to-day being visited upon my sex.
Marriage is, to a man, at once the happiest and saddest event of his life. He quits all the companions and associations of his youth, and becomes the chief attraction of a new home. Every former tie is loosened, the spring of every hope and action is to be changed, and yet he flees with joy to the untrodden paths before him. Then woe to the woman who can blight such joyful anticipations, and wreck the bright hopes of the trusting, faithful, fragrant, masculine blossom, and bang his head against the sink, and throw him under the cooking range, and kick him into a three-cornered mass, and then sit down on him.
Queen Kapiolani Receives the Distinguished Littérateur in State—A Robust, Healthful Queen—Sandwich Business and Court Matters—The Swallow-tail Coat in the Sandwich Islands.
The sun was just slipping out the back door of the West and hunting for the timber of New Jersey as Queen Kapiolani, at her rooms in the Victoria Hotel, received a plain, rectangular card, printed in two kinds of ink at the owner's steam job office, containing the following brief but logical statement:
Wilhelm Von Nyj,
Littérateur and Danseuse.
On the back of the card the Von Nyj arms had been emblazoned with a rubber stamp. Down-stairs, near the dais of the night clerk, stood a gayly caparisoned yet cultivated cuss, pouring over a late volume of the city directory. He was the author of these lines.
Scarcely an hour had elapsed when a tinted octavo page who waits on the Queen, slid down the stair-rail and told me that her royal Highness would receive me in state as soon as she could change her dress.
Later on I was ushered into the presence of Queen Kapiolani, who was at the time accompanied by her suite and another gentleman whose name I did not learn.
She is a distinguished-looking woman of middle age, but in apparent good health, and with a constitution which I think would easily endure the fatigue of reigning over a much larger country than her own.
As I entered the room and made a low, groveling obeisance, an act that is wholly foreign to my nature, the Queen made a rapid movement towards the bell, but I held her back and assured her that I did not drink.
We then chatted gayly for some time in relation to the Sandwich business and court matters, including the Sharp trial.
For a long time the Queen seemed constrained, and evidently could not think of anything to say; but she soon saw that I was not haughty or reserved, and when at last she reluctantly showed me out and locked the door, I felt amply repaid for the annoyance that one naturally feels on visiting a perfect stranger.
From what she said regarding her dynasty I gather that it consists of a covey of half-grown islands in the Pacific, inhabited by people who were once benighted and carnivorous, but happy. Now they are well-informed and bilious, while they revel in suspenders and rum, with all the blessings of late hours, civilization and suicide.
The better classes of the Sandwich Islands have the same customs which prevail here, and the swallow-tail coat is quite prevalent there. The low-neck and short-sleeve costume is even carried to a greater excess, perhaps, and all opera tickets read:
Admit the Bearer and Barer.
In answer to a question of my own, the Queen said that crops in the Sandwich Islands were looking well, and that garden truck was far in advance of what she saw here.
She said that they had pie-plant in her garden big enough to eat before she came away, and new potatoes were as big as walnuts. Still, she is enjoying herself here first-rate, and says she sees many pleasing features about New York which will ever decorate the tablets of her memory.
I thanked her for this neat little compliment, and told her I should always regard her in the same manner.
I then wrote a little Impromptu stanza in her autograph album, wrung Her Majesty's hand, and retired with another suppliant and crouching bow, which indicated a contrite spirit, but was calculated to deceive.
I took the liberty of extending to Her Majesty the freedom of the city, and asked her to visit our pressrooms and see us squat our burning thoughts into a quarter of a million copies of the paper, and all for two cents.
I also asked her to come up any time and read our Hawaii exchanges, for I know how lonely anybody can be in a great city sometimes, and how one yearns for a glimpse of his country paper.
The Queen is well paid while she reigns; and even while away as she is now, with her scepter standing idly in the umbrella rack at home, and a large pink mosquito net thrown over the throne, her pay is still going on night and dav.
The above is substantially all that I said during the interview, though the Queen said something as I came out of the room, escorted by the janitor, which I did not quite catch.
I did say, however, just before leaving the room, that I regretted sincerely the unfortunate time of the year at which Her Majesty had decided to visit us, it being rather between hay and grass, as it were, for as there was no r in the month it was a little too late for missionaries and a little too early for watermelons.
It was-only an instant later that I joined the janitor at the foot of the stairs.
This evening the Queen will visit the Casino and see Mr. Wilson try for the three hundred and eighty-second time to restrain the flowing leg of his green plush pantaloons.
For the benefit of my readers, many of whom are not what might be called practical newspaper men and women, I will say that if your time is very precious, and life is too short for you to fool away your evenings reading local advertisements, and you are at times in grave doubt as to what is advertisement and what is news, just cast your eye to the bottom of the article, and if there is a foot-note which lays "tylfritu3dp" or something of that stripe, you may safely say that no matter how much confidence you may have had in the editor up to that date, the article with a foot-note of that kind is published from a purely mercenary motive, and the editor may or may not indorse the sentiments therein enunciated.
Marlborough's Seeming Lack of Appreciation of a Joke—Likewise his Lack of Loquacity—A Cordial Invitation to the Duke to Visit the Metropolis—Nye's Naive and Graceful Conservation on Society Gossip.
Newport, Sept. 8.
I have just terminated a pleasant call upon the Duke of Marbro at his lodgings. I write his name Marbro because that is the way we pronounce it here at Newport. In the language of my ostensibly colored friend, Mr. Rankin, the amateur pronouncer would call it Marl-bor-ough, with three grunts, while in fact Marbro, the correct pronunciation of the name, is executed with but one grunt.
I found the Duke seated on a low ottoman, clad in a loosely fitting costume of pajamas. It was so loose and negligé that it was on the tip of my tongue to ask him if his mother made it for him out of his father's old pajamas; but I suddenly remembered that I was in Newport, and not in Tombstone, Arizona, and I restrained myself.
The Duke is suffering from a slight cold, which he contracted for during the early part of the week. It resulted from his ignorance of our changeable and freckle-minded climate. On Tuesday he took a long stroll, and while several miles from his lodgings and wearing his light summer cane, he was overtaken by a severe and sudden change in the temperature. The Marbros are not a strong race, and I am told that one of the Duke's second cousins died of pneumonia from exposing himself to the severity of a Christmas-day frolic clad in an autumn cane.
The Duke rose languidly as I entered, and, taking a reef in his pajamas clothes, looked at me in an inquiring way which betokened that, though of lineage high, he was not entirely at his ease in my presence.
"Duke," said I, standing my umbrella up in the corner to show my childlike confidence in him, "how's your conduct?"
In five minutes afterwards I would have given worlds if I could have recalled my rash words. I did not mean anything more than to utter a piece of pleasantry, for I am passionately fond of pleasantry even in society; but Marbro seemed to take it to heart and to feel distressed. He made a low, guttural sound, but his reply seemed to die away in the mansard roof of his mouth. He stammered out something which sounded like the wail of a damned soul. At least it struck me to be like that, although my lot has not been cast among that class of souls since I got out of politics, and I may have forgotten their style of wail.
To hide his embarrassment, Marbro "rosined" his eye and put a large glass paper weight in it. He then regarded me with some amazement through this piece of brick-a-brac, while I poured out a grown person's dose of Rectified Ruin which stood on the escritoire and drank it with a keen relish, which showed that I trusted him implicitly. Everything I did was done to make Marbro forget himself and feel at his ease.
I told him I had known the Marbros in Maine ever since I was a boy; that we didn't feel above them then, and it would be a poor time to begin now at my time of life to look down on people just because I now wrote pieces for the paper, many of which were afterwards printed. We always thought that the Marbros, or Marlboroughs, of Maine, got their name from burrowing in the marl along the Piscataquis, I said.
Thus I chatted on with him for an hour or two without seeming to chirk him up at all. "Duke," said I at last, "I know what the matter must be with you—you are socially ostracized. I knew it as soon as I came into the room. You cannot disguise it from me. You are suffering from social ostracism, and it is breaking you down. The social demands made by America upon an imported social wreck do not give said wreck time to eat his meals and obtain a necessary amount of rest. I suppose there is nowhere in the world a climate that is so trying on a person suffering from social ostracism as that of my native land. In other climes they give a social outcast rest, but here he gets absolutely no rest whatever."
I then drifted into society chat in a graceful and naďve way which, with others, has never failed to melt the stoniest heart. I told him that I had understood, since I came to Newport, that the demands of society here were so unrelenting that they had kept Mr. and Mrs. Mayonnaise dressing all the time.
A long pause ensued here, during which I could hear Marbro's reason tottering on its throne. After waiting three-quarters of an hour, by my watch, and failing to see that my remark had shed even a ray of sunshine, where erstwhile all was gloom and chaos, I gave him my address and told him that if, in the future, he ever derived any beneficial effects from the above joke, I would be glad to have him communicate with me. And even if I were to die before he could truly say that he had been benefited by this joke and grapple with its keen, incisive nub, my grandchildren would be tickled almost to death to know that he had taken it to pieces and put it together again and found out how it was built and laugh at its ingenious mechanism.
I conversed with the Duke some time about the way his visit to Newport had depressed the price of real estate, and offered him the freedom of New York, hoping that he could depress the price of real estate there so that I could buy some.
"But," said I, assuming an air of perfect repose, as I flung myself on a low couch in such a way as to give a faint view of my new red socks, "you will find it different in New York. Social ostracism there will not materially affect the price of real estate in the neighborhood of the postoffice. In fact, Marbro," said I, regarding him earnestly for a moment through the bottom of a cut-glass tumbler, "there is not enough English social ostracism in New York to supply the demand. Come to our young and thriving town, a town that is rich in resources and liabilities; a town that threatens to rival Omaha as a railroad center; a town where a B. and O. deal has been a common occurrence every day for over a year; a town where you can ride on the elevated trains and get yourself pinched in the iron gate by the guard or go down to Wall street and get pinched by the directors; a town where a man like Henry S. Ives can buy about seven million dollars' worth of stuff that he can't pay for, while a poor man who goes into a general store to buy a pair of ear muffs is followed up by a private detective for fear he may run his finger into the molasses barrel and then lick it syruptitiously. Come on, Duke," said I, growing more talkative as the fumes of his fifty-two dollar liquor rose to my surprised and delighted brains; "come on to New York and mix up with us, and get on to our ways."
"See Fulton market by midnight, bite off a piece of atmosphere from Castle Garden, and come with me to see Guiteau's head in the museum. Guiteau was the last of a long line of assassins. He prophesied that everyone connected with his trial would come to a bad end. Quite a number of those connected with this celebrated trial are already dead, and more especially Mr. Guiteau himself, whose skeleton is in the Smithsonian Institution, his viscera in the Potomac, and his head in a jar of alcohol. If you will come to New York, Marbro, you will have a good time, and the rose geraniums will come back to your pallid and durable cheek.
"If you will give us a whirl, Duke," said I, selecting an umbrella from the decorated crock in the hall and coming back to where he still sat, "you will be pleased and gratified with us; and if you can spare time to come over and see me personally I would try to be as cordial and chatty as you have been with me. No man ever entertained me as you have, or sat and examined me through the bottom of an old microscope for two hours, to be forgotten again by me. Marbro, if you will come to New York, we will go and visit anybody's tomb that you may designate."
I then let myself out of the house with an adjustable pass-key and hastened away. Shortly after I got back to my own lodgings, sometimes called a room, a lackey from the Duke, wearing a livery-colored lively, handed me a note from Marbro, in which he said he hoped that in case I used this interview for publication I would be careful to give his exact language.
In my poor, weak way, I think I have done so.
The Chinese compositor cannot sit at his case as our printers do, but must walk from one case to another constantly, as the characters needed cover such a large number, that they cannot be put into anything like the space used in the English newspaper office. In setting up an ordinary piece of manuscript, the Chinese printer will waltz up and down the room for a few moments, and then go down stairs for a line of lower case. Then he takes the elevator and goes up into the third story after some caps, and then goes out into the woodshed for a handful of astonishers. The successful Chinese compositor doesn't need to be so very intelligent, but he must be a good pedestrian.
The true American would rather work himself into luxury or the lunatic asylum than to hang like a great wart upon the face of nature.
Sitting Bull before the Council of the Sioux Nation—An Impressive Speech—Civilization and the Paleface Doing their Deadly Work—The Moccasins of a Mighty Nation.
The following speech of Sitting Bull has been specially translated and reported by our Indian editor, who is also wholesale and retail dealer in deceased languages, and general agent for home-made Sioux rhetoric and smoke-tanned Indian eloquence. New laid Indian laments with bead trimmings. Compiler of novel and desirable styles of war dances. Indian eloquence furnished to debating clubs and publishers of school readers:
"Warriors and war-scarred veterans of the frontier; Once more the warpath is overgrown with bunch grass, and the tomahawk slumbers in the wigwam of the red man. Grim-visaged war has given place to the piping times of peace. The cold and cruel winter is upon lus. It has been upon us for some time.
"The wail of departed spirits is on the night wind, and the wail of the man with the chilblain answers back from the warrior's wigwam.
"Children of the forest, we are few. Where once the shrill war-whoop of the chieftain collected our tribe like the leaves of the forest, I might now yell till the cows come home without bringing out a quorum.
"We are fading away before the march of the paleface, and sinking into oblivion like the snowflake on the bosom of the Stinking Water.
"Warriors, I am the last of a mighty race. We were a race of chieftains. Alas! we will soon begone. The Bull family will soon pass from the face of the earth. Ole is gone, and John is failing, and I don't feel very well myself. We are the victims of the paleface, and our lands are taken away.
"A few more suns, and the civilization, and valley tan, and hand made sour mash, and horse liniment of the paleface will have done their deadly work.
"Our squaws and pappooses are scattered to the four winds of heaven; and we are left desolate.
"Where is The-Daughter-of-the-Tempest? Where is The-Wall-Eyed-Maiden-With-the-Peeled-Nose?
"Where is Victoria Regina Dei Gracia Sitting Bull? Where is Knock-Kneed Chemiloon? Where are Sway-Back Sue and Meek-Eyed Government Socks?
"They have sunk beneath the fire-waters of the goggle-eyed Caucasian. They have succumbed to the delirum triangles, and when I call them they come not. They do not hear my voice. Their moans are heard upon the still night air, and they cry for revenge. Look at the sad remnant of the family of Sitting Bull, your chief. One sore-eyed squaw is left alone. Her face is furrowed o'er with the famine of many winters, and her nose is only the ruin of its former greatness. Her moccasins are worn out, and the soldier pants she wears are too long for her. She is drunk also. She is not as drunk as she can get, but she is hopeful and persevering. She has also learned to lie like the white man. She is now an easy, extemporaneous liar. When we gather around the campfire and enact our untutored lies in the gloaming, Lucretia Borgia Skowhegan Sitting Bull, with the inspiration of six fingers of agency coffin varnish, proceeds to tell the prize prevarication, and then the house adjourns, and nothing can be heard but the muffled tread of the agency corn beef, going out to get some fresh air. Lucretia Borgia is also becoming slovenly. It is evening, and yet she has not donned her evening dress. Her back hair is unkempt, and her front hair is unbung. Pretty soon I will take a tomahawk and bang it for her. She seems despondent and hopeless. As she leans against the trunk of a mighty oak and scratches her back, you can see that her thoughts are far away. Her other suspender is gone, but she don't care a cold, smooth clam. She is thinking of her childhood days by the banks of Minnehaha.
"Warriors, we stand in the moccasins of a mighty nation. We represent the starving remnant of the once powerful Sioux. Our pirogue stands idly on the shore. I don't know what a pirogue is, but it stands idly on the shore.
"When the spring flowers bloom again, and the grass is green upon the plains, we will once more go upon the warpath. We will avenge the wrongs of our nation. I have not fully glutted my vengeance. I have seven or eight more gluts on hand, and we will shout our war-cry once more, and mutilate some more Anglo-Saxons. We will silence the avenging cries of our people. We will spatter the green grass and gray greasewood with the gore of the paleface, and feed the white-livered emigrant to the coyote. We will spread death and desolation everywhere, and fill the air with gum overshoes and remains. Let us yield up our lives clearly while we mash the paleface beyond recognition, and shoot his hired man so full of holes that he will look like a suspension bridge.
"Warriors, there is our hunting ground. The buffalo, the antelope, the sage hen and the jackass rabbit are ours. Ours to enjoy, ours to perpetuate, ours to transmit. The Great Spirit created these animals for the red man, and not for the bilious tourists, between whose legs the chestnut sunlight penetrates clear up to his collar bone."
"Then we will ride down on the regular army, when he is thinking of something else, and we will scare him into convulsions, and our medicine men will attend to the convulsions while we sample the supplies.
"Then we will take some cold sliced Indian agent and some bay rum, and go on a picnic.
"Warriors, farewell. Be virtuous and you will be happy; but you will be lonesome, sometimes. Think of what I have said to you about the council fire, and govern yourselves accordingly, We will not murmur at the celluloid cracker and cast iron codfish ball, but in the spring we will have veal cutlets for breakfast, and peace commissioner on toast for dinner. The squaw of Sitting Bull shall have a new plug hat, and if the weather is severe, she shall have two of them.
"Warriors, farewell. I am done. I have spoken. I have nothing more to say. Sic semper domino. Plumbago erysipelas, in hock eureka, sciataca, usufruct, lim-burger, gobraugh."
Lingering Traditions—The Molder of Public Opinion—No Mirth in making the Amende Honorable—Four Minutes to Decide.
It is rather interesting to watch the manner which old customs have been slightly changed and handed down from age to age. Peculiarities of old traditions still linger among us, and are forked over to posterity like a wappy-jawed teapot or a long-time mortgage. No one can explain it, but the fact still remains patent that some of the oddities of our ancestors continue to appear, from time to time, clothed in the changing costumes of the prevailing fashion.
Along with these choice antiquities, and carrying the nut-brown flavor of the dead and relentless years, comes the amende honorable. From the original amende in which the offender appeared in public clothed only in a cotton-flannel shirt, and with a rope about his neck as an evidence of a formal recantation, down to this day when (sometimes) the pale editor, in a stickful of type, admits that "his informant was in error," the amende honorable has marched along with the easy tread of time. The blue-eyed molder of public opinion, with one suspender hanging down at his side, and writing on a sheet of news-copy paper, has a more extensive costume, perhaps, than the old-time offender who bowed in the dust in the midst of the great populace, and with a halter under his ear admitted his offense, but he does not feel any more cheerful over it.
I have been called upon several times to make the amende honorable, and I admit that it is not an occasion of mirth and merriment. People who come into the editorial office to invest in a retraction are generally very healthy, and have a stiff, reserved manner that no cheerfulness of hospitality can soften.
I remember of an accident of this kind which occurred last summer in my office, while I was writing something scathing. A large man with an air of profound perspiration about him, and plaid flannel shirt, stepped into the middle of the room, and breathed in the air that I was not using. He said he would give me four minutes in which to retract, and pulled out a watch by which to ascertain the exact time. I asked him if he would not allow me a moment or two to go over to the telegraph office and to wire my parents of my awful death. He said I could walk out of that door when I walked over his dead body. Then I waited a long time, until he told me my time was up, and asked what I was waiting for. I told him I was waiting for him to die, so that I could walk over his dead body. How could I walk over a corpse until life was extinct?
He stood and looked at me first in astonishment, afterward in pity. Finally tears welled up in his eyes, and plowed their way down his brown and grimy face. Then he said that I need not fear him. "You are safe," said he. "A youth who is so patient and so cheerful as you are—who would wait for a healthy man to die so that you could meander over his pulseless remnants, ought not to die a violent death. A soft-eyed seraph like you, who is no more conversant with the ways of this world than that, ought to be put in a glass vial of alcohol and preserved. I came up here to kill you and throw you in the rainwater barrel, but now that I know what a patient disposition you have, I shudder to think of the crime I was about to commit."
It is strange that the human heart is so easily influenced by the change of seasons; and although spring succeeds winter, and summer follows upon the heels of spring, just as it did centuries ago, yet the transition from one to the other is ever new and pleasing, and the bosom is gladdened with the cheering assurance of spring, or the promise of the coming summer time, with its wealth of golden days, its cucumbers and vinegar, its green corn, its string beans, its base-ball, its mammoth circus, its fragrant flowers, and its soda water flavored with syrup from a long-necked, wicker-covered bottle, just as it was in the days of Pharoah, and Hannibal, and Andrew Jackson.
Spokane Ike," the Indian who killed a doctor last summer for failing to cure his child, has been hanged. This shows the onward march of civilization, and vouchsafes to us the time when a doctor's life will be in less danger than that of his patient.
Independent Order of Forty Liars—Brother Jedediah Holcomb—The Muffled Tread of Many Feet—Leader of the Trusty Phalanx—The most noble Prevaricator.
At a regular round-up of the Rocky Mountain division of the Independent Order of Forty Liars, on Saturday evening, the most noble prevaricator having directed the breath-tester to examine all present to see that they were in possession of the annual password, explanations and signals, and to report to the most noble promoter of twenty-seven karat falsehoods whether all were so qualified to remain, and the report having been satisfactory, the most noble prevaricator announced that after the report of the custodian of campaign lies for the past year and the annual statements of the division bartender and most noble beer-yanker had been handed in and passed upon, the next business to come before the division would be the nominations and the election of most noble prevaricator to serve during the year 1887.
"Under the rules of our order," said the M. P., "ten minutes will be given each aspirant for the office named in which to address the meeting. It is understood that the time shall be devoted to short anecdotes, personal reminiscences, etc., and the brethren will be given ample scope to enlarge upon any details which the subject may suggest. Our usual custom is to devote at least one hour to this highly entertaining exercise, and I call to mind now some of the most enjoyable moments of my life spent in listening to others or in constructing for the amusement of others a few of the most entertaining and instructive falsehoods that the history of our most noble order has known.
"We have several prominent visiting members here from other parts of the country, among whom I am gratified to name Brother Eli Perkins, Brother O'Keefe, of Pike's Peak, and Brothers Morey and Barnum, from the East, who will address the meeting, perhaps, for a few moments after other business has been disposed of."
After singing the opening ode, accompanied by the lyre, the usual order of business having been attended to, the addresses of aspirants for the office of M. N. P. of the Rocky Mountain division were called for.
The last speaker was Brother Jedediah Holcomb, who thus addressed the assemblage:
"Most noble prevaricator of the Rocky Mountain division of Forty Liars, and brethren of the order: Many years ago, when I was a mere stripling, as it were, and just upon the verge of manhood, so to speak, I was sitting on the green grass south of Chicago, near where Drexel boulevard comes into South Park, thinking of my hard luck and wishing that my future might be more prosperous than my past.
"That locality was then a howling wilderness compared with what it is now, and where to-day the beautiful drives and walks are so inviting there was nothing then but prairie and swamp, with here and there a scrub oak tree.
"Chicago was a stirring western city then, but she was young and small. She had not then accumulated the fabulous wealth of new and peculiar metropolitan odors which she now enjoys, and in place of the rich, fructifying fragrance of the stock yards, there was nothing but the wild honeysuckle and the dead horse.
"Out where some of the most beautiful residences now stand there was nothing then but the dank thistle nodding in the wind, or the timid picnic bumble bee, hanging on the autumn bough and yearning to be gathered in by the small boy.
"As I sat there long ago, ana, shrouded in the September haze, was dreaming of a fortunate future for myself, I heard the muilled tread of innumerable feet drawing nearer and nearer. The sound was like the footfall of a regiment of infantry approaching, and I arose to see what it was.
"I had not long to wait, for soon there hove in sight a very singular spectacle. First came a large Illinois hog at the head of a long column of Illinois hogs, all marching in Indian fashion, and grunting with that placid, gentle grunt which the hog carries with him. On closer examination into this singular phenomenon, I saw that all the hogs, except the leader, were blind, each animal having his predecessor's tail in his mouth throughout the long line, consisting of 13,521 unfortunate, sightless hogs, cheerfully following their leader toward water.
"I was never so struck with the wonderful instinct of the brute creation in my life, and my eyes filled with tears when I saw the child-like faith and confidence of each blind animal following with implicit trust the more fortunate guide.
"Soon, however, a great dazzling three-cornered idea worked its way into my intellect. Dashing away my idle tears, I drew my revolver and shot off the leader's tail, leaving the long line of disconcerted and aimless hogs in the middle of a broad prairie, with no guide but the dephlogisticated tail of a hog who was then three-quarters of a mile away.
"Then I stole up, and taking the gory tail in my hand, I led the trusting phalanx down to the stock yards and sold the outfit at eight cents, live weight.
"This was the start of my dazzling career as a capitalist, a career to which I now point with pride. Thus from a poor boy with one suspender and a sore toe, I have risen to be one of our loading business men, known and respected by all, and by industry and economy, and borrowing my chewing tobacco, I have come to be one of our solid men."
When Brother Holcomb ceased to speak, there was a painful silence of perhaps five moments, and then Brother Woodtick Williams moved that the rules be suspended, and Brother Holcomb declared the unanimous choice of the order for the most noble prevaricator, to serve sine die.
Passed.
Then the quartette sang the closing ode, and each member, after hanging up his regalia in the ante room, walked thoughtfully home in the crisp winter starlight.
The Banks of the Pulgarlic River—Patrick Fireman on 259—The Goal Was Reached—The Story only Partially True.
Many years ago, on the banks of the Pulgarlic river, lived a poor boy named Patrick Oleson. When Patrick was only a year old, his father and mother got into a little difficulty, in which the mother was killed. The father, as soon as he regained his composure, saw that he had gone too far, and when the sheriff came and marched him off to jail, he frankly confessed that he had been perhaps too hasty.
Still, public opinion seemed turned against him; and in the following spring Patrick's father was unanimously chosen by a convention of six property-holders of the county to jump from a new pine platform into the sweet subsequently.
The affair was a success, and Patrick was left an orphan at the tender age of one and one-half years to wrestle for himself. His first impulse was to write humorous letters to the press, and thus become affluent; but the papers that were solvent returned his letters, and the papers that accepted them busted the subsequent autumn. So Patrick decided that as soon as he could complete a college course that would fit him for the position, he would either enter the ministry or become a railroad man.
While at college he read the story of an engineer who had saved the life of a little child by grabbing it from the cow-catcher while the train was going at lightning speed, and, as a result, was promoted to general passenger agent of the road.
So Patrick decided to be a railroad man and save some children from being squashed by the train, so that he could be promoted and get a big salary. He therefore studied to fit himself for the position to which he aspired, and after five years' hard study he graduated with high honors and a torpid liver.
He then sought out a good paying road that he thought he would eventually like to be president of, and applied for a position on it.
By waiting till the following spring he got a job braking extra, averaging $13 per month, till one day he screwed up a brake too tight and wore out a wheel on the caboose. After that he was called into the office of the superintendent, as Patrick supposed, to take the superintendent's place, perhaps; but the superintendent swore at him, and called him Flatwheel Oleson, and told him he had better hoe corn and smash potato-bugs for a livelihood.
Patrick felt hurt and grieved, and, more in sorrow than in anger, he got the oriental grand bounce, and had to rustle for another job. This time he tried to secure the position of master mechanic; but when the road to which he applied found out that he didn't know the difference between the cow-catcher and the automatic air brake, Patrick was appointed as assistant polisher and wiper extraordinary at the roundhouse.
All this time he never drank a drop or uttered a profane word. No matter how much he was imposed upon, he never got mad or quarreled with the other men. He sometimes felt sorely tried, but he saw that other railroad men did not swear, so he did not.
After nine years of mental strain in the round-house, he was put on the road as a fireman on 259; he was now, after sixteen years' hard study and perseverance, on the road to promotion.
Just as soon as he could find a child on the track, some day, and snatch the innocent little thing from the jaws of death, he felt that he would be solid. Sometimes he would allow his mind to dwell on this subject so long that his fire would go out and the engineer would report him, and the old man would lay him off to give him a chance to think it over.
Three years Patrick fired on 259, and there wasn't a child that got within 1,300 feet of the track when his engine came by. They seemed to know that Patrick was perishing to save a child from being flattened out by the train.
He began to get discouraged. He said he would try it another year, and if he failed he would have to give up railroading and go to Congress.
One day he had just fired up the 259 in good shape and looked out of the window ahead, when he saw a little child toddling along toward them and only a few yards away, while the engine shrieked like a demon, and the little chubby baby came on toward the rushing monster, whose hot breath, with short, sharp hisses, rushed through the June morning.
Patrick felt that the joy or sorrow of a whole lifetime was in store for him. It was not only life or death to the joyous parents, but it was the culmination of the hopes and fears, the agony, the self-denial and disappointments of his whole life, and the opening up of a new future to him, or it was another lost opportunity and the continuation of along, dreary, uneventful journey to the grave.
He was out on the pilot in an instant. He did not breathe. The rushing engine trembled beneath him, and like a flash the still laughing child was in his strong-arms.
He had triumphed. The goal was reached. The great struggle was over, and in a few days he would be president of the road. He got home, and a man came toward him with a document of some kind. His breath came short and hard. It was probably his credentials as president of the road. He took it and read it over in a sort of dream. It was only a notice that his board bill had been garnisheed, and the superintendent told him that he must pay it or the company would have to squeeze along without his services.
In the morning the papers had a short account of Patrick's bravery, but it was spoken of simply as "an almost fatal accident," and Patrick's name appeared as Ole Fitzpatrick. He began to feel that he wasn't getting a fair shake. His promotion to the presidency of the road seemed to lag. There was a hitch in the senate probably about his confirmation or something of that kind. The acting president of the corporation selfishly retained his position, and looked so healthy, and seemed so pleased with himself that Patrick lost all patience.
One day a man with a wart on his nose met Patrick on the street and asked him if he was the gallant fireman of 259 who saved a little child a week or two ago.
Patrick said he was.
The man grasped his hand and said:
"That was my child. It was almost the only child I had. I only had nine others, and would have been almost childless if little James Abraham Garfield had been busted. You have done a brave, noble act, and the Lord will reward you. I am a poor man, as you would readily guess by my clothing and the fact that we have ten children. I cannot reward you with wealth or position, but I don't want to seem ungrateful or close or contiguous. Come with me my benefactor, and I will shake you for the drinks."
Then Patrick Oleson went away where he could be alone with his surging thoughts. He is now running a hurdy-gurdy in the San Juan country.
This story is only partially true. The main fact, however, viz.; that a child wasn't run over by a train, is true. It is different from most stories about saving children; but the spring style of story is a little different from that of former seasons, anyway.
In the spring style of prevarication, the engineer will either fail to grab the child in time and there will be nothing left on the track but a gingham apron and a grease spot, or, if he succeeds in saving the child, he will not get the position of sergeant-at-arms and a gold-headed cane, as was formerly the style.
Spring is the most joyful season of the year. The little brooklets are released from their icy fetters, and go laughing and rippling along their winding way. The birds begin to sing in the budding branches, and the soft south wind calls forth the green grass. The husbandman then goes forth to dig the horseradish for his frugal meal. He also jabs his finger into the rosebud mouth of the wild-eyed calf, and proceeds to wean him from the gentle cow. The cow-boy goes forth humming a jocund lay. So does the hen. Boys should not go near the hen while she is occupied with her tuneful lay. She might seize them by the off ear, and bear them away to her den, and feed them to her young. The hen rises early in the morning so as to catch the swift-footed angleworm as he flits from flower to flower. The angleworm cannot bite.
H. P. Willis once said: "The sweetest thing in life is the unclouded welcome of a wife." This is true, indeed, but when her welcome is clouded with an atmosphere of angry words and coal scuttles, there is something about it that makes a man want to go out in the woodshed and sleep on the ice-chest.
Old Chief Pocotello, now at the Fort Hall agency, in answer to an inquiry relative to the true Christian character of a former Indian agent at that place, gave in very terse language the most accurate description of a hypocrite that was ever given to the public. "Ugh! Too much God and no flour."
Tom Fagan's Wild Horse—His Peculiar Taste in Lunches—Not an Arabian Steed, but of Wyoming Descent—He Yearns for his old Home.
Tom Fagan, of this city, has a wild horse that don't seem to take to the rush and hurry and turmoil of a metropolis. He has been so accustomed to the glad, free air of the plains and mountains that the hampered and false life of a throbbing city, with its myriad industries, makes him nervous and unhappy. He sighs for the boundless prairie and the pure breath of the lifegiving mountain atmosphere. So taciturn is he in fact, and so cursed by homesickness and weariness of an artificial and unnatural horse society here in Laramie, that he refuses to eat anything and is gradually pining away. Sometimes he takes a light lunch out of Mr. Fagan's arm, but for days and days he utterly loathes food. He also loathes those who try to go into the stable and fondle him. He isn't apparently very much on the fondle. He don't yearn for human society, but seems to want to be by himself and think it over.
The wild horse in stories soon learns to love his master and stay by him and carry him through flood or fire, and generally knows more than the Cyclopedia Brittanica; but this horse is not the historical horse that they put into wild Arabian falsehoods. He is just a plain, unassuming wild horse of Wyoming descent, whose pedigree is slightly clouded, and who is sensitive on the question of his ancestry. All he wants is just to be let alone, and most everybody has decided that he is right. They came to that conclusion after they had soaked their persons in arnica and glued themselves together with poultices.
Perhaps, after a while, he will conclude to eat hay and grow up with the country, but now he sighs for his native bunch-grass and the buffalo wallow wherein he has heretofore made his lair. We don't wonder much, though, that a horse who has lived in the country should be a little rattled here when he finds the electric light, and bicycles, and lawn mowers, and Uncle Tom's Cabin troupes, and baled hay at $20 per ton. It makes him as wild and skittish as it does an eighteen-year-old girl the first time she comes into town, and for the first time is met by the blare of trumpets, and the oriental wealth of the circus with its deformed camels and uniformed tramps driving its miles of cages with no animals in them. The great natural world and the giddy maelstrom of seething, perspiring humanity, peculiar to the city world, are two separate and distinct existences.
Dignity does not draw. It answers in place of intellectual tone for twenty minutes, but after awhile it fails to get there. Dignity works all right in a wooden Indian or a drum major, but the man who desires to draw a salary through life and to be sure of a visible means of support, will do well to make some other provision than a haughty look and the air of patronage.
Dionysius the Elder—Paris Green in the Pie—Damon and Pythias—Pythias about to Be Sacrificed—The Solitary Horseman Puts in an Appearance.
The romantic story of Damon and Pythias, which has been celebrated in verse and song for over two thousand years, is supposed to have originated during the reign of Dionysius I, or Dionysius the Elder as he was also called, who resigned about 350 years b. c. He must have been called "The Elder," more for a joke than anything else, as he was by inclination a Unitarian, although he was never a member of any church whatever, and was, in fact, the wickedest man in all Syracuse.
Dionysius arose to the throne from the ranks, and used to call himself a self made man. He was tyrannical, severe and selfish, as all self-made men are. Selfmade men are very prone to usurp the prerogative of the Almighty and overwork themselves. They are not satisfied with the position of division superintendent of creation, but they want to be most worthy high grand muck-a-muck of the entire ranch, or their lives are gloomy fizzles.
Dionysius was indeed so odious and so overbearing toward his subjects that he lived in constant fear of assassination at their hands. This fear robbed him of his rest and rendered life a dreary waste to the tyrannical king. He lived in constant dread that each previous moment would be followed by the succeeding one. He would eat a hearty supper and retire to rest, but the night would be cursed with horrid dreams of the Scythians and White River Utes peeling off his epidermis and throwing him into a boiling cauldron with red pepper and other counter-irritants, while they danced the Highland fling around this royal barbecue.
Even his own wife and children were forbidden to enter his presence for fear that they would put "barn arsenic" in the blanc-mange or "Cosgrove arsenic" in the pancakes, or Paris green in the pie.
During his reign he had constructed an immense subterranean cavernous arrangement, called the Ear of Dionysius, because it resembled in shape and general telephonic power, the human ear. It was the largest ear on record. One day a workman expressed the desire to erect a similar ear of tin or galvanized iron on old Di. himself. Some one "blowed on him," and the next morning his head was thumping about in the waste paper basket at the General Office. When one of the king's subjects, who thought he was solid with the administration, would say: "Beyond the possibility of a doubt, your Most Serene Highness is the kind and loving guardian of his people, and the idol of his subjects," His Royal Tallness would say, "What ye givin' us Do you wish to play the Most Sublime Overseer of the Universe and General Ticket Agent Plenipotentiary for a Chinaman? Ha!!! You cannot fill up the King of Syracuse with taffy." Then he would order the chief executioner to run the man through the royal sausage grinder, ana throw him into the Mediterranean. In this way the sausage-grinder was kept running night and day, and the chief engineer who ran the machine made double time every month.
I will now bring in Damon and Pythias.
Damon and Pythias were named after a popular secret organization because they were so solid on each other. They thought more of one another than anybody. They borrowed chewing tobacco, and were always sociable and pleasant. They slept together, and unitedly "stood off" the landlady from month to month in the most cheerful and harmonious manner. If Pythias snored in the night like the blast of a fog horn, Damon did not get mad and kick him in the stomach as some would. He gently but firmly took him by the nose and lifted him up and down to the merry rythm of "The Babies in Our Block."
They loved one another in season and out of season. Their affection was like the soft bloom on the nose of a Wyoming legislator. It never grew pale or wilted. It was always there. If Damon were at the bat, Pythias was on deck. If Damon went to a church fair and invited starvation, Pythias would go, too, and vote on the handsomest baby till the First National Bank of Syracuse would refuse to honor his checks.
But one day Damon got too much budge and told the venerable and colossal old royal bummer of Syracuse what he thought of him. Then Dionysius told the chief engineer of the sausage grinder to turn on steam and prepare for business. But Damon thought of Pythias, and how Pythias hadn't so much to live for as he had, and he made a compromise by offering to put Pythias in soak while the only genuine Damon went to see his girl, who lived at Albany. Three days were given him to get around and redeem Pythias, and if he failed his friend would go to protest.
We will now suppose three days to have elapsed since the preceding chapter. A large party of enthusiastic citizens of Syracuse are gathered around the grand stand, and Pythias is on the platform cheerfully taking off his coat. Near by stands a man with a broad-axe. The Syracuse silver cornet band has just played "It's funny when you feel that way," and the chaplain has made a long prayer, Pythias sliding a trade dollar into his hand and whispering to him to give him his money's worth. The Declaration of Independence has been read, and the man on the left is running his thumb playfully over the edge of his meat axe. Pythias takes off his collar and tie, swearing softly to himself at his miserable luck.
It is now the proper time to throw in the solitary horseman. The horizontal bars of golden light from the setting sun gleam and glitter from the dome of the court-house and bathe the green plains of Syracuse with mellow splendor. The billowy piles of fleecy bronze in the eastern sky look soft and yielding, like a Sarah Bernhardt. The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea, and all nature seems oppressed with the solemn hush and stillness of the surrounding and engulfing horror.
The solitary horseman is seen coming along the Albany and Syracuse toll road. He jabs the Mexican spurs into the foamy flank of his noble cay use plug, and the lash of the quirt as it moves through the air is singing a merry song. Damon has been, delayed by road agents and wash-outs, and he is a little behind time. Besides, he fooled a little too long and dallied in Albany with his fair gazelle. But he is making up time now and he sails into the jail yard just in time to take his part. He and Pythias fall into each other's arms, borrow a chew of fine-cut from each other and weep to slow music. Dionysius comes before the curtain, bows and says the exercises will be postponed. He orders the band to play something soothing, gives Damon the appointment of superintendent of public instruction, and Pythias the Syracuse post-office, and everything is lovely. Orchestra plays something touchful. Curtain comes down. Keno. In hoc usufruct nux vomica est.
There are a great many things in life which go to atone for the disappointments and sorrows which one meets, but when a young man's rival takes the fair Matilda to see the base-ball game, and sits under an umbrella beside her, and is at the height of enjoyment, and gets the benefit of a "hot ball" in the pit of his stomach, there is a nameless joy settles down in the heart of the lonesome young man, such as the world can neither give nor take away.
Trifling Incidents Make Men Great.—Chief Big Mouth.—A Quarrel between Big Mouth and Spotted Tail.—The Tragic End.
The popularity of the above-named chieftain dates from a very trifling little incident, as did that of many other men who are now great.
Spotted Tail had never won much distinction up to that time, except as the owner of an appetite, in the presence of which his tribe stood in dumb and terrible awe.
During the early days of what is now the great throbbing and ambitious West, the tribe camped near Fort Sedgwick, and Big Mouth, a chief of some importance, used to go over to the post regularly for the purpose of filling his brindle hide full of Fort Sedgwick Bloom of Youth.
As a consequence of Big Mouth's fatal yearning for liquid damnation, he generally got impudent, and openly announced on the parade ground that he could lick the entire regular army. This used to offend some of the blood-scarred heroes who had just arrived from West Point, and in the heat of the debate they would warm the venerable warrior about two feet below the back of his neck with the flat of their sabers.
This was a gross insult to Big Mouth, and he went back to the camp, where he found Spotted Tail eating a mule that had died of inflammatory rheumatism. Big Mouth tearfully told the wild epicure of the way he had been treated, and asked for a council of war. Spot picked his teeth with a tent pin, and then told the defeated relic of a mighty race that if he would quit strong drink, he would be subjected to fewer insults.
Big Mouth then got irritated, and told S. Tail that his remarks showed that he was standing in with the aggressor, and was no friend to his people.
Spotted Tail said that Mr. B. Mouth was a liar, by yon high heaven, and before there was time to think it over, he took a butcher knife, about four feet long, from its scabbard and cut Mr. Big Mouth plumb in two just between the umbilicus and the watch pocket.
As the reader who is familiar with anatomy has already surmised, Big Mouth died from the effects of this wound, and Spotted Tail was at once looked upon as the Moses of his tribe. He readily rose to prominence, and by his strict attention to the duties of his office, made for himself a name as a warrior and a pie biter, at which the world turned pale.
This should teach us the importance of taking the tide at its flood, which leads on to fortune, and to lay low when there is a hen on, as Benjamin Franklin has so truly said.
Recreation with a Bronco—Careful Preparations—The Bronco humps Himself Like a Camel—The Bronco in a Sling—The Bronco Full of Spirit.
Recently I have taken a little recreation when I felt despondent, by witnessing the difficult and dangerous feat of shoeing a bronco.
Whenever I get low-spirited and feel that a critical public don't appreciate my wonderful genius as a spring poet, I go around to Brown & Boole's blacksmith shop on A street, and watch them shoe a vicious bronco. I always go back to the office cheered and soothed, and better prepared to light the battle of life.
They have a new rig now for this purpose. It consists of two broad sinches, which together cover the thorax and abdomen of the bronco, to the ends of which—the sinches, I mean—are attached ropes, four in number, which each pass over a pulley above the animal, and then are wrapped about a windlass. The bronco is led to the proper position, like a young man who is going to have a photograph taken, the sinches slipped under his body and attached to the ropes.
Then the man at the wheel makes two or three turns in rapid succession.
The bronco is seen to hump himself, like the boss camel of the grand aggregation of living wonders. He grunts a good deal and switches his tail, while the ropes continue to work in the pulleys, and the man at the capstan spits on his hands and rolls up on the wheel. After a while the bronco hangs from the ceiling like a discouraged dish rag, and after trying for two or three hundred times unsuccessfully to kick a hole in the starry firmament, he yields, and hangs at half mast while the blacksmith shoes him.
Yesterday I felt as though I must see something cheerful, and so I went over to watch a bronco getting his shoes on for the round-up. I was fortunate. They led up a quiet, gentlemanly appearing plug with all the weary, despondent air of a disappointed bronco who has had aspirations for being a circus horse, and has "got left." When they put the sinches around him he sighed as though his heart would break, and his great, soulful eyes were wet with tears. One man said it was a shame to put a gentle pony into a sling like that in order to shoe him, and the general feeling seemed to be that a great wrong was being perpetrated.
Gradually the ropes tightened on him and his abdomen began to disappear. He rose till he looked like a dead dog that had been fished out of the river with a grappling iron. Then he gave a grunt that shook the walls of the firmament, and he reached out about five yards till his hind feet felt of a greaser's eye, and with an athletic movement he jumped through the sling and lit on the blacksmith's forge with his head about three feet up the chimney. He proceeded then to do some extra ground and lofty tumbling and kicking. A large anvil was held up for him to kick till he tired himself out, and then the blacksmith put a fire and burglar-proof safe over his head and shod him.
The bronco is full of spirit, and, although docile under ordinary circumstances, he will at times get enthusiastic, and do things which he afterward, in his sober moments, bitterly regrets.
Some broncos have formed the habit of bucking. They do not all buck. Only those that are alive do so. When they are dead they are-more subdued and gentle.
A bronco often becomes so attached to his master that he will lay down his life if necessary. His master's life, I mean.
When a bronco comes up to me and lays his head over my shoulder, and asks me to scratch his chilblain for him, I always excuse myself on the ground that I have a family dependent on mo, and furthermore, that I am a United States Commissioner, and to a certain extent the government hinges on me.
Think what a ghastly hole there would be in the official staff of the republic if I were launched into eternity now, when good men are so scarce.
Some days I worry a good deal over this question. Suppose that some In principled political enemy who wanted to be United States Commissioner or Notary Public in my place should assassinate me!!!
Lots of people never see this. They see how smoothly the machinery of government moves along, and they do not dream of possible harm. They do not know how quick she might slip a cog, or the eccentric get jammed through the indicator, if, some evening when I am at the opera house, or the minstrel show, the assassin should steal up on me, and shoot a large, irregular aperture into my cerebellum.
This may not happen, of course; but I suggest it, so that the public will, as it were, throw its protecting arms about me, and not neglect me while I am alive.
During a big thunder shower a while ago little Willie, who slept up stairs alone, got scared and called his mother, who came up and asked him what he was frightened about. Willie frankly admitted that the thunder was a little too much for a little boy who slept alone.
"Well, if you are afraid," said his mother, pushing back the curls from his forehead, "you should pray for courage."
"All right, ma," said Willie, an idea coming into his head; "suppose you stay up here and pray while I go down stairs and sleep with paw."
I find," said an old man to a Boomerang reporter, yesterday, "that there is absolutely no limit to the durability of the teeth, if they are properly taken care of. I never drink hot drinks, always brush my teeth morning and evening, avoid all acids whatever, and although I am sixty-five years old, my teeth are as good as ever they were."
"And that is all you do to preserve your teeth, is it?"
"Yes, sir; that's all—barring, perhaps, the fact that I put them in a glass of soft water nights."
Every Profession Has Its Style—Not much Difference in Folks—Timber line and Katooter—Katooter Was a Very Smart Man.
Yes, that's so," said Woodtick Williams thoughtfully, as he looked out across the divide and beyond the foothills, toward the top of the range where the eternal snow was glittering in the summer sun.
"You are eminently correct. The gentleman from Buckskin has stated the exact opinion of the subscriber, sure as death and semi-annual assessments.
"Every profession has its style of lead and its peculiar dip toward the horizon. From the towering congressman, down to the neglected advance agent of the everlasting gospel, every profession, I allow, has its peculiar lingo. Every pork-and-beans pilgrim from the States that's been in my camp for twenty-seven years has said that the miner slings more unnecessary professional racket than anybody else; but that ain't so. Take folks as they assay, from blossom rock to lower level, there ain't much difference.
"Nine years ago, I and Timberline Monroe and Katooter Lemons, from Zion, struck the Feverish Hornet up on Slippery Ellum. First we knew the prospecting season had closed up on us and, as the lay-out for surface had pinched out, we decided to sink on the Hornet, just for luck.
"So Timberline, Katooter and me went over to Huckleberry Oleson's store at at the lower camp and soaked our physiognomy for chuck, and valley-tan, and a blastin' outfit for the job.
"Down five foot she showed 150 colors to a hunk of rock no bigger'n a plug of tobacker, with wall rocks well defined both sides and foot wall slick as a confidence game in 'Frisco.
"The quartz, with a light coat of gouge, looked as if she'd been jammed through the formation like a Sabbath-school scholar's elbow through a custard pie, and it had crushed the prehistoric stuffin' and pre-adamite sawdust out of the geological crust in good shape.
"'Katooter,' says I, 'if she shows up this way all the way down, I be teetotally dodbuttered if I don't think we've cornered the sugar at last. We'll run her down to ten foot and see how she looks to the naked eye.'
"Ten foot down she'd widen to three foot between walls, with solid gray quartz as pretty as a bank book. Then we made a mill run of five pounds in a half-gallon mortar and cleared up a dollar's worth of dust on the blade of a long-handled shovel.
"The prospectus of the Feverish Hornet was very cheering indeed.
"I sat down on a candle-box and sang something. I always twitter a few notes when I feel tickled about anything.
"Katooter listened to my singing a little while, and then he went down the gulch murmuring, something about my music and intimating that prosperity always had its little drawbacks after all.
"He slid down to the Frescoed Hell and jammed his old freckled hide so full of horse liniment of the vintage of '49 that he got entirely off the lead, and drifted so far into poverty rock that he didn't know Timberline nor me from a stomach pump.
"That's generally the way with men that turn up their noses at vocal music.
"Well, he got no better so rapidly that next day he was occupying a front seat at the biggest delirium triangle matinee you ever heard of, and was the sole proprietor of the biggest aggregation of seal-brown tarantulas and variegated caterpillars and imported centipedes that ever exhibited in Columbia's fair domain.
"Every little while he'd nail some diabolical insect crawling up his sleeve or gently walking through his hair, and then he'd yell like a maniac and pray and swear like a hired man.
"The atmosphere seemed to be level-full of bumblebees as big as a cook-stove, and every time they'd cuddle up to him of sink on him with their sultry little gimlets, Katooter would jump up and whoop like a Piute medicine man trying to assuage a wide waste of turbulent cucumber.
"At these times Katooter would lay aside his wardrobe, and, throwing me into the fire-place and Timberline under the bed, he would wander forth into the starlight, with the thermometer down to 37 degrees, and wrapped in nothing but his surging thoughts.
"By the time Timberline and me would get up and swab the cobwebs and cinders out of our eyes, Katooter would be half way up the gulch and lighting out like a freckled Greek slave hunting for a clothing store.
"First along we used to run after him and try to tire him out and corral him, but he was most too skipful, and apparently so all-fired anxious to put all the intervening distance he could between himself and the fuzzy tarantulas and fall style of centipede, that he made some pretty tall time, considering the poor trail and the light mountain air.
"Then another thing; when we got to him he was so pesky mean to hang on to.
"You've probably tried before now, when you was small, to catch the boy who tied your shirt to the top limb of a dead tree, and you have thrown all your energy into the effort, but you decided after awhile to wait till he got his clothes on before you punished him.
"That's the way it was with Katooter. He was the smartest man I ever tried to gather into the fold. We'd think we had him, and all at once he'd glide between our legs like a yaller dog and laugh a wild kind of laugh that would run the thermometer down 13 degrees, and away he'd glimmer up the trail like a red-headed right of way.
"So I got mad at last, and used to chase him with a lariat and Yellow Fever.
"Yellow Fever was a sorrel mule that belonged to the firm. We called him Yellow Fever because he was so fatal.
"Well, when Yellow Fever and me got after Katooter with the lariat, we most always gathered him in.—[Bless my soul, how I'm stringing this yarn out.]
"Well, to make a long story short, Katooter rallied after a while, and during the spell his chilblains was convalescing, and some more new skin growing on his system where he had barked it off running through the sage-brush, and falling into old deserted prospect holes. I had an offer of $50,000 for my third in the Feverish Hornet, and sold.
"Then I went down to Truckee and bought a little house of an old railroad man down there, and grubstaked myself for the winter, and allowed I'd lay off till the snow left the range in the spring.
"One night, about half after 12, I judge, I heard somebody step along to the window of my boudoir. Hearing it at that time of night, I reckoned that something crooked was going on, so I slid out of bed and got my Great Blood Searcher and Liver Purifier, with the new style of center fire and cartridge ejector, and slid up to the window, calculating to shove a tonic into whoever it might be that was picnicking around my claim.
"I looked out so as to get a good idea of where I wanted to sink on him, and then I thought before I mangled him I'd ask him if he had any choice about which part of his vitals he wanted to preserve, so I sang out to him:
"Look out below there, pard, for I'm going to call the meeting to order in a minute! Just throw up your hands, if you please, and make the grand hailing sign of distress, or I'll have to mutilate you! Just show me about where you'd have the fatal wound, and be spry about it, too, because I've got my brief costume on, and the evening air is chill!"
"He didn't understand me, apparently, for a gurgling laugh welled up from below, and the party sings back:
"Hullo, Fatty, is that you? Just lookin' to see if you'd fired up yet. You know I was to come round and flag you if second seven was out Well, I've been down to the old man's to see what's on the board. Three is two hours late and four is on time. There's two sevens out and two sections of nine. Skinney'll take out first seven and Shorty'll pull her with 102. It's you and me for second seven, with Limber Jim on front end and French to hold down the caboose. First fire is wrong side up in a washout this side of Ogallalla, and old Whatshisname that runs 258 got his crown sheet caved in and telescoped his headlight into the middle of the New Jerusalem. You know the little Swede that used to run extra for Old Hotbox on the emigrant awhile? Well, he was firing on 258 and he's under three flats and a coal-oil tank, with a brake beam across his coupler, and his system more or less relaxed. He's gone to the sweet subsequently, too. Rest of the boys are more or less demoralized, and side-tracked for repairs. Now you don't want to monkey around much, for if you don't loom up like six bits and go out on the tick, the old man'll give you a time cheek and the oriental grand bounce. You hear the mellow trill of my bazoo?"
"Then I slowly uncorked the Great Blood Purifier, and moving to the footlights where the silvery moonbeams could touch up my dazzling outlines, I said: 'Partner, I am pleased and gratified to have met you. I don't know the first ding busted thing you have said to me, but that is my misfortune. I am a plain miner, and my home is in the digestive apparatus of the earth, but for professional melody of the chin, you certainly take the cake. You also take the cake basket and what cold pie there is in on the dump. My name is Wood-tick Williams. I discovered the Feverish Hornet up on Slippery Elm. I am proud, you know. Keep right on getting more and more familiar with your profession, and by and by, when nobody can understand you, you will be promoted and respected, and you will at last be a sleeping-car conductor, and revel in the biggest mental calm, and wide shoreless sea of intellectual stagnation that the world ever saw. You will——
"But he was gone.
"Then I took a pillow sham and wiped some pulverized crackers off the soles of my feet, and went to bed, enveloped in a large gob of gloom."
The picnic plant will soon lift its little head to the sunshine, and the picnic manager will go out and survey the country, to find where the most God-forsaken places are, and then he will get up an excursion to some of these picturesque mud-holes and sand-piles; and the man who swore last year that he would never go to another picnic, will pack up some mustard, and bay rum, and pickles, and glycerine, and a lap-robe, and some camphor, and a spy-glass, and some court-plaster; and he will heave a sigh and go out to the glens and rural retreats, and fill his skin full of Tolu, Rock and Rye, and hatred toward all mankind and womankind; and he will skin his hands, and try to rub the downy fluff and bloom from a cactus by sitting down on it.
A Mound in Medicine Bow Range—I Started to Dig Into the Vast Sarcophagus—A Glad Shout from, the Scene of Operations—A Large Queen Anne Tear Jug.
During my rambles through the Medicine Bow range of the Rocky mountains recently, I was shown by an old frontiersman a mound which, although worn down somewhat and torn to pieces by the buffalo, the antelope and the coyote, still bore the appearance of having been at one time very large and high.
This, I was told, had, no doubt, been the burial place of some ancient tribe or race of men, the cemetery, perhaps, of a nation now unknown.
Here in the heart of a new world, where men who had known the region for fifteen or twenty years, are now called "old timers," where "new discoveries" had been made within my own recollection, we found the sepulcher of a nation that was old when the Pilgrims landed on the shores of Columbia.
I am something of an antiquarian, with all my numerous charms, and I resolved to excavate at this spot and learn the hidden secrets of those people who lived when our earth was young.
I started to dig into the vast sarcophagus. The ground was very hard. The more I worked the more I felt that I was desecrating the burial place of a mighty race of men, now powerless to defend themselves against the vandal hands that sought to mar their eternal slumber.
I resolved to continue my researches according to the vicarious plan. I secured the services of a hardened, soulless hireling, who did not wot of the solemn surroundings and who could dig faster than I could. He proceeded with the excavation business, while I sought a shady dell where I could weep alone.
It was a solemn thought, indeed. I murmured softly to myself—
The knights are dust,
Their swords are rust;
Their souls are with
The saints, we trust.
Just then a wood-tick ran up one of my alabaster limbs about nine feet, made a location and began to do some work on it under the United States mining laws.
I removed him by force and submitted him to the dry crushing process between a piece of micaceous slate and a fragment of deoderized, copper-stained manganese.
But we were speaking of the Aztecs, not the wood-ticks.
Nothing on earth is old save by comparison. The air we breathe, and which we are pleased to call fresh air, is only so comparatively. It is the same old air. As a recent air it is not so fresh as "Silver Threads Among the Gold."
It has been in one form and another through the ever-shifting ages all along the steady march of tireless time, but it is the same old union of various gaseous elements floating through space, only remodeled for the spring trade.
All we see or hear or feel, is old. Truth itself is old. Old and falling into disuse, too. Outside of what I am using in my business, perhaps not over two or three bales are now on the market.
Here in the primeval solitude, undisturbed by the foot of man, I had found the crumbling remnants of those who once walked the earth in their might and vaunted their strength among the powers of their world.
No doubt they had experienced the first wild thrill of all-powerful love, and thought that it was a new thing. They had known, with mingled pain and pleasure, when they struggled feebly against the omnipotent sway of consuming passion, that they were mashed, and they flattered themselves that they were the first in all the illimitable range of relentless years who had been fortunate enough to get hold of the genuine thing. All others had been base imitations.
Here, perhaps, on this very spot, the Aztec youth with a bright-eyed maiden on his arm had pledged lifelong fidelity to her shrine, and in the midnight silence had stolen away from her with a pang of vigorous regret, followed by the sobs of his soul's idol and the demoralizing, leaden rain of buckshot, with the compliments and best wishes of the old man.
While I was meditating upon these things, a glad shout from the scene of operations attracted my attention. I rose and went to the scene of excavation and found, to my unspeakable astonishment and pleasure, that the man had unearthed a large Queen Anne tear jug, with Etruscan work upon the exterior. It was simply one of the old-fashioned single-barreled tear jugs, made for a one eyed man to cry into. The vessel was about eighteen inches in height by five or six inches in diameter.
The graceful, yet perhaps severe pottery of the Aztecs, convinces me that they were fully abreast of the present century in their knowledge of the arts and sciences.
Space will not admit of an extended description of this ancient tear cooler, but I am still continuing the antiquarian researches,—vicariously, of course—and will give this subject more attention during the summer.
It don't do to fool with joint powder. It's powerful stuff. I had a $10,000 mine over in the Queen of Shelby district in '51 called the Goshallhemlock claim. I was offered $10,000 for it, with $5,000 in sagebrush placer stock besides, if she opened up as well ten foot further down.
We put in a blast of joint powder, and when we went to make an examination, we couldn't find the Goshallhemlock with an assessor and a search warrant. The hole was there, but there wasn't quartz enough to throw at a yaller dog.
My idea is to sell a mine just before you put in the joint powder, and then if the buyer wants to blow the property into the middle of next Christmas let him do it.
The Power of a Two-headed Girl to Cheer the Sad—She Is not Beautiful, but her Color Is Distinct—As a Show She Draws Better than a Scientific Lecture.
The cultivated two-headed girl has visited the West. It is very rare that a town the size of Laramie experiences the rare treat of witnessing anything so enjoyable. In addition to the mental feast which such a thing affords, one goes away feeling better—feeling that life has more in it to live for, and is not after all such a vale of tears as he had at times believed it.
Through the trials and disappointments of this earthly pilgrimage, the soul is at times cast down and discouraged. Man struggles against ill-fortune and unlooked-for woes, year after year, until he becomes misanthropical and soured, but when a two-headed girl comes along and he sees her it cheers him up. She speaks to his better nature in two different languages at one and the same time, and at one price.
When I went to the show I felt gloomy and apprehensive. The eighteenth ballot had been taken and the bulletins seemed to have a tiresome sameness. The future of the republic was not encouraging. I felt as though, if I could get first cost for the blasted thing, I would sell it.
I had also been breaking in a pair of new boots that day, and spectators had been betting wildly on the boots, while I had no backers at three o'clock in the afternoon, and had nearly decided to withdraw on the last ballot. I went to the entertainment feeling as though I should criticise it severely.
The two-headed girl is not beautiful. Neither one of her, in fact, is handsome. There is quite a similarity between the two, probably because they have been in each other's society a great deal and have adopted the same ways.
She is an Ethiopian by descent and natural choice being about the same complexion as Frank Miller's oil blacking, price ten cents.
She was at one time a poor slave, but by her winning ways and genuine integrity and genius, she has won her way to the hearts of the American people. She has thoroughly demonstrated the fact that two heads are better than one.
A good sized audience welcomed this popular favorites. When she came forward to the foot-lights and made her two-ply bow she was greeted by round after round of applause from the elite of the city.
I felt pleased and gratified. The fact that a recent course of scientific lectures here was attended by from fifteen to thirty people, and the present brilliant success of the two-headed girl proved to me, beyond a doubt, that we live in an age of thought and philosophical progress.
Science may be all right in its place, but does it make the world better? Does it make a permanent improvement on the minds and thoughts of the listener? Do we go away from such a lecture feeling that we have made a grand stride toward a glad emancipation from the mental thraldom of ignorance and superstition? Do people want to be assailed, year after year, with a nebular theory, and the Professor Huxley theory of natural selections and things of that nature?
No! 1,000 time no!
They need to be led on quietly by an appeal to their better natures. They need to witness a first-class bureau of monstrosities, such as men with heads as big as a band wagon, women with two heads, Cardiff giants, men with limbs bristling out all over them like the velvety bloom on a prickly pear.
When I get a little leisure, and can attend to it, I am going to organize a grand constellation of living wonders of this kind, and make thirteen or fourteen hundred farewell tours with it, not so much to make money, but to meet a long-felt want of the American people, for something which will give a higher mental tone to the tastes of those who never lag in their tireless march toward perfection.
We have nothing more to say of the editor of the Sweetwater Gazette. Aside from the fact that he is a squint-eyed, consumptive liar, with a breath like a buzzard and a record like a convict, we don't know anything against him. He means well enough, and if he can evade the penitentiary and the vigilance committee for a few more years, there is a chance for him to end his life in a natural way. If he don't tell the truth a little more plentifully, however, the Green River people will rise as one man and churn him up till there won't be anything left of him but a pair of suspenders and a wart.
A Trip to Northern Wisconsin—How Foreign Lumber Is manufactured—Iron Dogs—A Sad Accident—? The Funeral Procession—A Solemn Moral.
I have just returned from a trip up the North Wisconsin railway, where I went to catch a string of codfish, and anything else that might be contagious. The trip was a pleasant one, and productive of great good in many ways. I am hardening myself to railway traveling, like Timberline Jones' man, so that I can stand the return journey to Laramie in July.
Northern Wisconsin is the place where the "foreign lumber" comes from which we use in Laramie in the erection of our palatial residences. I visited the mill last week that furnished the lumber used in the Oasis hotel at Greeley. They yank a big wet log into that mill and turn it into cash as quick as a railroad man can draw his salary out of the pay car. The log is held on a carriage by means of iron dogs while it is being worked into lumber. These iron dogs are not like those we see on the front steps of a brown-stone house occasionally. They are another breed of dogs.
The managing editor of the mill lays out the log in his mind, and works it into dimension stuff, shingle bolts, slabs, edgings, two by fours, two by eights, two by sixes, etc., so as to use the goods to the best advantage, just as a woman takes a dress pattern and cuts it so she won't have to piece the front breadths, and will still have enough left to make a polonaise for the last-summer gown.
I stood there for a long time watching the various saws and listening to their monotonous growl, and wishing that I had been born a successful timber thief instead of a poor boy without a rag to my back.
At one of these mills, not long ago, a man backed up to get away from the carriage, and thoughtlessly backed against a large saw that was revolving at the rate of about 200 times a minute. The saw took a large chew of tobacco from the plug he had in his pistol pocket, and then began on him.
But there's no use going into details. Such things are not cheerful. They gathered him up out of the sawdust and put him in a nail keg and carried him away, but he did not speak again. Life was quite extinct. Whether it was the nervous shock that killed him, or the concussion of the cold saw against his liver that killed him, no one ever knew.
The mill shut down a couple of hours so that the head sawyer could file his saw, and then work was resumed once more.
We should learn from this never to lean on the buzz saw when it moveth itself aright.
Health journals are now asserting, that to maintain a sound constitution you should lie only on the right side. The health journals may mean well enough; but what are you going to do if you are editing a Democratic paper?
Harry Bevans—Fanny Buttonhook—True Love Takes its Usual Course—A Letter to Fanny—A Sweet, Short, Summer—A Happy Marriage—Little Birdie.
I never wrote a novel, because I always thought it required more of a mashed raspberry imagination than I could muster, but I was the business manager, once, for a year and a half, of a little two-bit novelette that has never been published.
I now propose to publish it, because I cannot keep it to myself any longer.
Allow me, therefore, to reminisce.
Harry Bevans was an old schoolmate of mine in the days of ([x-y]/2)3, and although Bevans was not his sure-enough name, it will answer for the purposes herein set forth. At the time of which I now speak he was more bashful than a book agent, and was trying to promote a cream-colored mustache and buff "Done-gals" on the side.
Suffice it to say that he was madly in love with Fanny Buttonhook, and too bashful to say so by telephone.
Her name wasn't Buttonhook, but I will admit it for the sake of argument. Harry lived over at Kalamazoo, we will say, and Fanny at Oshkosh. These were not the exact names of the towns, but I desire to bewilder the public, in order to avoid any harrassing disclosures in the future. It is always well enough, I find, to deal gently with those who are alive and moderately muscular.
Young Bevans was not specially afraid of old man Buttonhook, or his wife. He didn't dread the enraged parent worth a cent. He wasn't afraid of anybody under the cerulean dome, in fact, except Miss Buttonhook, but when she sailed down the main street, Harry lowered his colors and dodged into the first place he found open, whether it was a millinery store or a livery stable.
Once, in an unguarded moment, he passed so near her that the gentle south wind caught up the cherry ribbon that Miss Buttonhook wore at her throat, and slapped Mr. Bevans across the cheek with it before he knew what ailed him. There was a little vision of straw hat, brown hair, and pink-and-white cuticle, as it were, a delicate odor of violets, the "swish" of a summer silk, and my friend, Mr. Bevans, put his hand to his head, like a man who has a sun-stroke, and fell into a drug store and a state of wild mash, ruin and hopeless chaos.
His bashfulness was not seated nor chronic. It was the varioloid, and didn't hurt him only when Miss Buttonhook was present, or in sight. He was polite and chatty with other girls, and even dared to be blithe and gay sometimes, too, but when Frances loomed up in the distance, he would climb a rail fence nine feet high to evade her.
He told me once that he wished I would erect the frame-work of a letter to Fanny, in which he desired to ask that he might open up a correspondence with her.
He would copy and mail it, he said, and he was sure that I. being a disinterested party, would be perfectly calm.
I wrote a letter for him of which I was moderately proud. It would melt the point on a lightning rod, it seemed to me, for it was just as full of gentleness and poetic soothe as it could be, and Tupper. Webster's Dictionary and my scrap book had to give down first rate. Still it was manly and square-toed. It was another man's confession, and I made it bulge out with frankness and candor.
As luck would have it, I went over to Oshkosh about the time Harry's prize epistle reached that metropolis, and having been a confidant of Miss B.'s from early childhood. I had the pleasure of reading Bev's letter, and advising the young lady about the correspondence.
Finally a bright thought struck her. She went over to an easy chair, and sat down on her foot, coolly proposing that I should outline a letter replying to Harry's, in a reserved and rather frigid manner, yet bidding him dare to hope that if his orthography and punctuation continued correct, he might write occasionally, though it must be considered entirely sub rosa and abnormally entre-nous on account of "Pa."
By the way. "Pa" was a druggist, and one of the salts of the earth—Epsom salts of course.
I agreed to write the letter, swore never to reveal the secret workings of the order, the grips, explanations, passwords and signals, and then wrote her a nice, demure, startled-fawn letter, as brief as the collar to a party dress, and as solemn as the Declaration of Independence.
Then I said good-by, and returned to my own home, which was neither in Kalamazoo nor Oshkosh. There I received a flat letter from William Henry Bevans, inclosing one from Fanny, and asking for suggestions as to a reply. Her letter was in Miss Buttonhook's best vein. I remember having written it myself.
Well, to cut a long story short, every other week I wrote a letter for Fanny, and on intervening weeks I wrote one for the lover at Kalamazoo. By keeping copies of all letters written, I had a record showing where I was, and avoided saying the same pleasant things twice.
Thus the short, sweet summer scooted past. The weeks were filled with gladness, and their memory even now comes back to me, like a wood-violet-scented vision. A wood-violet-scented vision comes high, but it is necessary in this place.
Toward winter the correspondence grew a little tedious, owing to the fact that I had a large and tropical boil on the back of my neck, which refused to declare its intentions or come to a focus, for three weeks. In looking over the letters of both lovers yesterday, I could tell by the tone of each just where this boil began to grow up, as it were, between two fond hearts.
This feeling grew till the middle of December, when there was a red-hot quarrel. It was exciting and spirited, and after I had alternately flattered myself first from Kalamazoo and then from Oshkosh, it was a genuine luxury to have a row with myself through the medium of the United States mails.
Then I made up and got reconciled. I thought it would be best to secure harmony before the holidays, so that Harry could go over to Oshkosh and spend Christmas. I therefore wrote a letter for Harry in which he said he had, no doubt, been hasty, and he was sorry. It should not occur again. The days had been like weary ages since their quarrel, he said—vicariously, of course—and the light had been shut out of his erstwhile joyous life. Death would be a luxury unless she forgave him, and Hades would be one long, sweet picnic and lawn festival unless she blessed him with her smile.
You can judge how an old newspaper reporter, with a scarlet imagination, would naturally dash the color into another man's picture of humility and woe.
She replied—by proxy—that he was not to blame. It was her waspish temper and cruel thoughtlessness. She wished he would come over and take dinner with them on Christmas day and she would tell him how sorry she was. When the man admits that he's a brute and the woman says she's sorry, it behooves the eagle eye of the casual spectator to look up into the blue sky for a quarter of an hour, till the reconciliation has had a chance and the brute has been given time to wipe a damp sob from his coat-collar.
I was invited to the Christmas dinner. As a successful reversible amanuensis I thought I deserved it. I was proud and happy. I had passed through a lover's quarrel and sailed in with white-winged peace on time, and now I reckoned that the second joint, with an irregular fragment of cranberry jelly, and some of the dressing, and a little of the white meat please, was nothing more than right.
Mr. Bevans forgot to be bashful twice during the day, and even smiled once also. He began to get acquainted with Fanny after dinner, and praised her beautiful letters. She blushed clear up under her "wave," and returned the compliment.
That was natural. When he praised her letters I did not wonder, and when she praised his I admitted that she was eminently correct. I never witnessed better taste on the part of two young and trusting hearts.
After Christmas I thought they would both feel like buying a manual and doing their own writing, but they did not dare to do so evidently. They seemed to be afraid the change would be detected, so I piloted them into the middle of the succeeding fall, and then introduced the crisis into both their lives.
It was a success.
I felt about as well as though I were to be cut down myself and married off in the very prime of life. Fanny wore the usual clothing adopted by young ladies who are about to be sacrificed to a great horrid man. I cannot give the exact description of her trousseau, but she looked like a hazel-eyed angel, with a freckle on the bridge of her nose. The groom looked a little scared, and moved his gloved hands as though they weighed twenty-one pounds apiece.
However, it's all over now. I was up there recently to see them. They are quite happy. Not too happy, but just happy enough. They call their oldest son Birdie. I wanted them to call him William, but they were headstrong and named him Birdie. That wounded my pride, and so I called him Earlie Birdie.
The Dusky Bride of Old Fly Up-the-Creek is a Lover of the Beautiful—The Indian Maiden in-Her Wild Simplicity—How She Appears to the Man of Sentiment—No Ruthless Hand Shall Tear the Cloak from the True Indian Maiden.
One of the attractions of life at the Cheyenne Indian agency, is the reserved seat ticket to the regular slaughter-house matinee. The agency butchers kill at the rate of ten bullocks per hour while at work, and so great was the rush to the slaughter-pens for the internal economy of the slaughtered animals, that Major Love found it necessary to erect a box office and gate, where none but those holding tickets could enter and provide themselves with these delicacies.
This is not a sensation, it is the plain truth, and we desire to call the attention of those who love and admire the Indian at a distance of 2,000 miles, and to the ćsthetic love for the beautiful which prompts the crooked-fanged and dusky bride of old Fly-up-the-Creek to rob the soap-grease man and the glue factory, that she may make a Cheyenne holiday. As a matter of fact, common decency will not permit us to enter into a discussion of this matter. Firstly, it would not be fit for the high order of readers who peruse these pages, and secondly, the Indian maiden at the present moment stands on a lofty crag of the Rocky mountains, beautiful in her wild simplicity, wearing the fringed garments of her tribe. To the sentimentalist she appears outlined against the glorious sky of the new West, wearing a coronet of eagle's feathers, and a health-corset trimmed with fantastic bead-work and wonderful and impossible designs in savage art.
Shall we then rush in and with ruthless hand shatter this beautiful picture? Shall we portray her as she appears on her return from the great slaughter-house benefit and moral aggregation of digestive mementos? Shall we draw a picture of her clothed in a horse-blanket, with a necklace of the false teeth of the paleface, and her coarse, unkempt hair hanging over her smoky features and clinging to her warty, bony neck? No, no. Far be it from us to destroy the lovely vision of copper-colored grace and smoke-tanned beauty, which the freckled student of the effete East has erected in the rose-hued chambers of fancy. Let her dwell there as the plump-limbed princess of a brave people. Let her adorn the hat-rack of his imagination—proud, beautiful, grand, gloomy and peculiar—while as a matter of fact, she is at that moment leaving the vestibule of the slaughter-house, conveying in the soiled laprobe—which is her sole adornment—the mangled lungs of a Texas steer.
No man shall ever say that we have busted the beau-ful Cigar Sign Vision that he has erected in his memory. Let the graceful Indian queen that has lived on in his heart ever since he studied history and saw the graphic picture of the landing of Columbus, in which Columbus is just unsheathing his bread knife, and the stage Indians are fleeing to the tall brush; let her, we say, still live on. The ruthless hand that writes nothing but everlasting truth, and the stub pencil that yanks the cloak of the false and artificial from cold and perhaps unpalatable fact, will spare this little imaginary Indian maiden with a back-comb and gold garters. Let her withstand the onward march of centuries, while the true Indian maiden eats the fricasseed locust of the plains, and wears the cavalry pants of progress. We may be rough and thoughtless many times, but we cannot come forward and ruthlessly shatter the red goddess at whose shrine the far-away student of Blackhawk, and other fourth-reader warriors, worship.
As we said, we decline to pull the cloak from the true Indian maiden of to-day and show her as she is. That cloak may be all she has on, and no gentleman will be rude even to the daughter of Old Bob-Tail-Flush, the Cheyenne brave.
While other young men put on their seal-brown overalls and wrench the laurel wreath and other vegetables from cruel fate, the youth who dangles near the old nest, and eats the hard-earned groceries of his father, shivers on the brink of life's great current and sheds the scalding tear.
The ostrich is chiefly valuable for the plumage which he wears, and which, when introduced into the world of commerce, makes the husband almost wish that he were dead.
Young man, what are you living for? Have you an object dear to you as life, and without the attainment of which you feel that your life will have been a wide, shoreless waste of shadow, peopled by the specters of dead ambitions? Is it your consuming ambition to paddle quietly but firmly up the stream of time with manly strokes, against the current of public opinion, or to linger along the seductive banks, going in swimming, or, careless of the future, gathering shells and tadpoles along the shore?
Have you a distinct idea of a certain position in life which you wish to attain? Have you decided whether you will be a great man, and die in the poor-house, and have a nice comfortable monument after you are dead, for your destitute family to look at, or will you content yourself to plug along through life as a bank president?
These, young men, are questions of moment. They are questions of two moments. They come home to our hearts to-day with terrible earnestness.
You can take your choice in the great battle of life, whether you will bristle up and win a deathless name, and owe almost everybody, or be satisfied with scads and mediocrity.
Why do you linger and fritter away the heyday of life, when you might skirmish around and win some laurels? Many of those who now stand at the head of the nation as statesmen and logicians, were once unknown, unhonored and unsung. Now they saw the air in the halls of Congress, and their names are plastered on the temple of fame.
They were not born great. Some of them only weighed six pounds to start with. But they have rustled. They have peeled their coats and made rome howl.
You can do the same. You can win some laurels, too, if you will brace up and secure them when they are ripe.
Daniel Webster and President Garfield and Dr. Tanner and George Eliot were all, at one time, poor boys. They had to start at the foot of the ladder and toil upward.
They struggled against poverty and public opinion bravely, till they won a name in the annals of history, and secured to their loved ones palatial homes with lightning rods and mortgages on them.
So may you, if you will make the effort. All these things are within your reach. Live temperately on $9 per month. That's the way we got our start. Burn the midnight oil if necessary. Get some true, noble-minded young lady of your acquaintance to assist you. Tell her of your troubles and she will tell you what to do. She will gladly advise you.
Then you can marry her, and she will advise you some more. After that she will lay aside her work any time to advise you. You needn't be out of advice at all unless you want to. She, too, will tell you when you have made a mistake. She will come to you frankly and acknowledge that you have make a jackass of yourself.
Billy Root Has an Enquiring Mind—Mr. Root Delighted with His Son's Ambition—A new Translation of Our National Motto.
When Billy Root was a little boy he was of a philosophical and investigating turn of mind, and wanted to know almost everything. He also desired to know it immediately. He could not wait for time to develop his intellect, but he crowded things and wore out the patience of his father, a learned savant, who was president of a livery stable in Chicago.
One day Billy ran across the grand hailing sign, which is generally represented as a tape-worm in the beak of the American eagle, on which is inscribed "E Pluribus Unum." Billy, of course, asked his father what "E Pluribus Unum" meant. He wanted to gather in all the knowledge he could, so that when he came out West he could associate with some of our best men.
"I admire your strong appetite for knowledge, Billy," said Mr. Root; "you have a morbid craving for cold hunks of ancient history and cyclopedia that does my soul good; I am glad, too, that you write to your father to get accurate data for your collection. That is right. Your father will always lay aside his work at any time and gorge your young mind with knowledge that will be as useful to you as a farrow cow. 'E Pluribus Unum' is an old Greek inscription that has been handed down from generation to generation, preserved in brine, and signifies that 'the tail goes with the hide.'"
What becomes of our bodies?" asks a soft-eyed scientist, and we answer in stentorian tones, that they get inside of a red flannel undershirt as the maple turns to crimson and the sassafras to gold. Ask us something difficult, ethereal being.
It seems that quince seeds are now largely used by the girls in convincing their bangs to stay bung. That is, the quince seed is manufactured into a mucilage that holds a little flat curl in place a week. In consequence of this, quince seeds have increased in price and decreased in quantity till the girls pay seven prices for them or go without.
If they would adopt our style of bang, much trouble and expense would be avoided. We bang our hair with a damp towel, and it don't bother us again for two weeks. Being the proprietor, in the first place, of a style of hair of the delicate color peculiar to a streak of moonlight, it didn't at any time make much difference whether we did it up in tin foil every night or not, and now that cares like a wild deluge have come upon us thick and fast, we have enlarged our intellectual skating rink and we find, with unalloyed pleasure, that the time we once devoted to parting our pale, consumptive tresses can be entirely devoted to excessive mental effort, and pleasant memories of a well spent life.
A Tournament with Gloves—Dumb-bells—Horizontal Bars—Analysis of the Boxing-glove—A Clerical Error—My Young Brother's Beauty Preserved.
I have just returned from a little two-handed tournament with the gloves. I have filled my nose with cotton waste so that I shall not soak this sketch in gore as I write.
I needed a little healthful exercise and was looking for something that would be full of vigorous enthusiasm, and at the same time promote the healthful flow of blood to the muscles. This was rather difficult. I tried most everything, but failed. Being a sociable being (joke) I wanted other people to help me exercise or go along with me when I exercised. Some men can go away to a desert isle and have fun with dumb-bells and a horizontal bar, but to me it would seem dull and commonplace after a while, and I would yearn for more humanity.
Two of us finally concluded to play billiards; but we were only amateurs and the owner intimated that he would want the table for Fourth of July, so we broke off in the middle of the first game and I paid for it.
Then a younger brother said he had a set of boxing-gloves in his room, and although I was the taller and had longer arms, he would hold up as long as he could, and I might hammer him until I gained strength and finally got well.
I accepted this offer because I had often regretted that I had not made myself familiar with this art, and also because I knew it would create a thrill of interest and fire me with ambition, and that's what a holloweyed invalid needs to put him on the road to recovery.
The boxing-glove is a large fat mitten, with an abnormal thumb and a string at the wrist by which you tie it on, so that when you feed it to your adversary he cannot swallow it and choke himself. I had never seen any boxing-gloves before, but my brother said they were soft and wouldn't hurt anybody. So we took off some of our raiment and put them on. Then we shook hands. I can remember distinctly yet that we shook hands. That was to show that we were friendly and would not slay each other.
My brother is a great deal younger than I am and so I warned him not to get excited and come for me with anything that would look like wild and ungovernable fury, because I might, in the heat of debate, pile his jaw upon his forehead and fill his ear full of sore thumb. He said that was all right and he would try to be cool and collected.
Then we put our right toes together and I told him to be on his guard. At that moment I dealt him a terrific blow aimed at his nose, but through a clerical error of mine it went over his shoulder and spent itself in the wall of the room, shattering a small holly-wood bracket, for which I paid him $3.75 afterward. I did not wish to buy the bracket because I had two at home, but he was arbitrary about it and I bought it.
We then took another athletic posture, and in two seconds the air was full of poulticed thumb and buckskin mitten. I soon detected a chance to put one in where my brother could smell of it, but I never knew just where it struck, for at that moment I ran up against something with the pit of my stomach that made me throw up the sponge, along with some other groceries, the names of which I cannot now recall.
My brother then proposed that we take off the gloves, but I thought I had not sufficiently punished him, and that another round would complete the conquest, which was then almost within my grasp. I took a bismuth powder and squared myself, but in warding off a left-hander, I forgot about my adversary's right, and ran my nose into the middle of his boxing-glove. Fearing that I had injured him, I retreated rapidly on my elbows and shoulder-blades to the corner of the room, thus giving him ample time to recover. By this means my younger brother's features were saved, and are to-day as symmetrical as my own.
I can still cough up pieces of boxing-gloves, and when I close my eyes I can see calcium lights and blue phosphorescent gleams across the horizon; but I am thoroughly convinced that there is no physical exercise which yields the same amount of health and elastic vigor to the puncher that the manly art does. To the punchee, also, it affords a large wad of glad surprises and nose bleed, which cannot be hurtful to those who hanker for the pleasing nervous shock, the spinal jar, and the pyrotechnic concussion.
That is why I shall continue the exercises after I have practiced with a mule or a cow-catcher two or three weeks, and feel a little more confidence in myself.
The Spirit of the "Red Vigilanter"—The Common Plug Who Thinks Aloud—The Man and his Wife Who Finish Your Story—Common Decency Ought to Rule Conversation.
I do not, as a rule, thirst for the blood of my fellow-man. I am willing that the law should in all ordinary cases take its course, but when we begin to discuss the man who breaks into a conversation and ruins it with his own irrelevant ideas, regardless of the feelings of humanity, I am not a law and order man. The spirit of the "Red Vigilanter" is roused in my breast and I hunger for the blood of that man.
Interrupters are of two classes: First the common plug who thinks aloud, and whose conversation wanders with his so-called mind. He breaks into the saddest and sweetest of sentiment, and the choicest and most tearful of pathos, with the remorseless ignorance that marks a stump-tail cow in a dahlia bed. He is the bull in my china shop, the wormwood in my wine, and the kerosene in my maple syrup. I am shy in conversation, and my unfettered flights of poesy and sentiment are rare, but this man is always near to mar it all with a remark, or a marginal note, or a story, or a bit of politics, ready to bust my beautiful dream and make me wish that his name might be carved on a marble slab in some quiet cemetery, far away.
Dear reader, did you ever meet this man—or his wife? Did you ever strike some beautiful thought and begin to reel if off to your friends, only to be shut off in the middle of a sentence by this choice and banner idiot of conversation? If so, come and sit by me, and you may pour your woes into my ear, and I in turn will pour a few gallons into your listening ear.
I do not care to talk more than my share of the time, but I would be glad to arrive at a conclusion just to see how it would seem. I would be so pleased and so joyous to follow up an anecdote till I had reached the "nub," as it were, to chase argument home to conviction, and to clinch assertion with authority and evidence.
The second class of interrupters is even worse. It consists of the man—and, lam pained to state, his wife also—who see the general drift of your remarks and finish out your story, your gem of thought or your argument. It is very seldom that they do this as you would do it yourself, but they are kind and thoughtful and their services are always at hand. No matter how busy they may be, they will leave their own work and fly to your aid. With the light of sympathy in their eyes, they rush into the conversation, and, partaking of your own zeal, they take the words from your mouth, and cheerfully suck the juice out of your joke, handing back the rind and hoping for reward. That is where they get left, so far as I am concerned. I am almost always ready to repay rudeness with rudeness, and cold preserved gall with such acrid sarcasm as I may be able to secure at the moment. No one will ever know how I yearn for the blood of the interrupter. At night I camp on his trail, and all the day I thirst for his warm life's current. In my dreams I am cutting his scalp loose with a case-knife, while my fingers are twined in his clustering hair. I walk over him and promenade across his abdomen as I slumber. I hear his ribs crack, and I see his tongue hand over his shoulder as he smiles death's mirthful smile.
I do not interrupt a man no more than I would tell him he lied. I give him a chance to win applause or decomposed eggs from the audience, according to what he has to say, and according to the profundity of his profound. All I want is a similar chance and room according to my strength. Common decency ought to govern conversation without its being necessary to hire an umpire armed with a four-foot club, to announce who is at the bat and who is on deck.
It is only once in a week or two that the angel troubles the waters and stirs up the depths of my conversational powers, and then the chances are that some leprous old nasty toad who has been hanging on the brink of decent society for two weeks, slides in with a low kerplunk, and my fair blossom of thought that has been trying for weeks to bloom, withers and goes to seed, while the man with the chilled steel and copper-riveted brow, and a wad of self-esteem on his intellectual balcony as big as an inkstand, walks slowly away to think of some other dazzling gem, and thus be ready to bust my beautiful phantom, and tear out my high-priced bulbs of fancy the next time I open my mouth.
Anybody Ought to Be Unhappy Enough Without a Cat-A Tramp Cat—he Only Wanted to be Loved a Little—He Was Too Much Given to Investigation—Mademoiselle Bridget O'Dooley—The Plaintive Voice Ceases.
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 present autumn, and tearfully asked to be loved. He didn't have anything in his make-up that was calculated to win anybody's love, but he seemed contented with a little affection,—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 decided 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 carpenter had not completed his job. This is a feature of the Laramie artisan's style. He leaves little places in unobserved corners generally, 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 proceeded to do so.
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. A soft and tearful yowl, deepened into a regular ring-tail-peeler, 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. Several articles of vertu, beside Bridget, followed me with some degree of vigor.
The next time the tramp cat yowled 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.
Toward 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 yowl 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.
Adapted from the Original—Triumph in Capua—The Oration Begun—Spartacus Tells the Story of His Life—Scenes in the Arena.
It had been a day of triumph in Capua. Lentulus returning with victorious eagles, had aroused the populace with the sports of the amphitheater, to an extent hitherto unknown even in that luxurious city. A large number of people from the rural districts had been in town to watch the conflict in the arena, and to listen with awe and veneration to the infirm and decrepit ring jokes.
The shouts of revelry had died away. The last loiterer had retired from the free-lunch counter, and the lights in the palace of the victor were extinguished. The moon piercing the tissue of fleecy clouds, tipped the dark waters of the Tiber with a wavy, tremulous light. The dark-browed Roman soldier moved on his homeward way, the sidewalk occasionally flying up and hitting him in the back.
No sound was heard save the low sob of some retiring wave, as it told its story to the smooth pebbles of the beach, or the unrelenting boot-jack struck the high board fence in the back yard, just missing the Roman Tom cat in its mad flight, and then all was still as the breast when the spirit has departed. Anon the Roman snore would steal in upon the deathly silence, and then die away like the sough of a summer breeze. In the green-room of the amphitheater a little band of gladiators were assembled. The foam of conflict yet lingered on their lips, the scowl of battle yet hang upon their brows, and the large knobs on their classic profiles indicated that it had been a busy day with them.
There was an embarassing silence of about five minutes, when Spartacus, borrowing a chew of tobacco from Aurelius, stepped forth and thus addressed them:
"Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen: Ye call me chief, and ye do well to call him chief who for twelve long years has met in the arena every shape of man or beast that the broad empire of Rome could furnish, and yet has never lowered his arm. I do not say this to brag, however, but simply to show that I am the star thumper of the entire outfit.
"If there be one among you who can say that ever in public fight or private brawl my actions did belie my words, let him stand forth and say it, and I will spread him around over the arena till the coroner will have to gather him up with blotting paper. If there be three in all your company dare face me on the bloody sands, let them come, and I will construct upon their physiogomy such cupolas, and royal cornices, and Corinthian capitols, and entablatures, that their own mothers would pass them by in the broad light of high noon, unrecognized.
"And yet I was not always thus—a hired butcher—the savage chief of still more savage men.
"My ancestors came from old Sparta, the county seat of Marcus Aurelius county, and settled among the vine-clad hills and cotton groves of Syrsilla. My early life ran quiet as the clear brook by which I sported. Aside from the gentle patter of the maternal slipper on my overalls, everything moved along with me like the silent oleaginous flow of the ordinary goose grease. My boyhood was one long, happy summer day. We stole the Roman muskmelon, and put split sticks on the tail of the Roman dog, and life was one continuous hallelujah.
"When at noon I led the sheep beneath the shade and played the Sweet Bye-and-Bye on my shepherd's flute, there was another Spartan youth, the son of a neighbor, to join me in the pastime. We led our flocks to the same pasture, and together picked the large red ants out of our indestructible sandwiches.
"One evening, after the sheep had been driven into the corral and we were all seated beneath the persimmon tree that shaded our humble cottage, my grand-sire, an old man, was telling of Marathon, and Leuctra, and George Francis Train, and Dr. Mary Walker and other great men, and how a little band of Spartans, under Sitting Bull, had withstood the entire regular army. I did not then know what war was, but my cheek burned, I knew not why, and I thought what a glorious thing it would be to leave the reservation and go on the warpath. But my mother kissed my throbbing temples and bade me go soak my head and think no more of those old tales and savage wars. That very night the Romans landed on our coasts. They pillaged the whole country, burned the agency buildings, demolished the ranch, rode off the stock, tore down the smoke-house, and rode their war horses over the cucumber vines.
"To-day I killed a man in the arena, and when I broke his helmet-clasps and looked upon him, behold! he was my friend. The same sweet smile was on his face that I had known when in adventurous boyhood we bathed in the glassy lake by our Spartan home and he had tied my shirt into 1,752 dangerous and difficult knots.
"He knew me, smiled some more, said 'Ta, ta,' and ascended the golden stair. I begged of the Prćtor that I might be allowed to bear away the body and have it packed in ice and shipped to his friends near Syrsilla, but he couldn't see it.
"Ay, upon my bended knees, amidst the dust and blood of the arena, I begged this poor boon, and the Prćtor answered: 'Let the carrion rot. There are no noble men but Romans and Ohio men. Let the show go on. Bring in the bobtail lion from Abyssinia.' And the assembled maids and matrons and the rabble shouted in derision and told me to 'brace up' and 'have some style about my clothes' and 'to give it to us easy,' with other Roman flings which I do not now call to mind.
"And so must you, fellow gladiators, and so must I, die like dogs.
"To-morrow we are billed to appear at the Coliseum at Rome, and reserved seats are being sold at the corner of Third and Corse streets for our moral and instructive performance while I am speaking to you.
"Ye stand here like giants as ye are, but to-morrow some Roman Adonis with a sealskin cap will pat your red brawn and bet his sesterces upon your blood.
"O Rome! Rome! Thou hast been indeed a tender nurse to me. Thou hast given to that gentle, timid shepherd lad who never knew a harsher tone than a flute note, muscles of iron, and a heart like the adamantine lemon pie of the railroad lunch-room. Thou hast taught him to drive his sword-through plated mail and links of rugged brass, and warm it in the palpitating gizzard of his foe, and to gaze into the glaring eyeballs of the fierce Numidian lion even as the smooth-cheeked Roman Senator looks into the laughing eyes of the girls in the treasury department.
"And he shall pay thee back till thy rushing Tiber is red as frothing wine; and in its deepest ooze thy lifeblood lies curdled. You doubtless hear the gentle murmur of my bazoo.
"Hark! Hear ye yon lion roaring in his den? 'Tis three days since he tasted flesh, but to-morrow he will have gladiator on toast, and don't you forget it; and he will fling your vertebrć about his cage like the star pitcher of a champion nine.
"If ye are brutes, then stand here like fat oxen waiting for the butcher's knife. If ye are men, arise and follow me. Strike down the warden and the turnkey, overpower the police, and cut for the tall timber. We will break through the city gate, capture the war-horse of the drunken Roman, flee away to the lava beds, and there do bloody work, as did our sires at old Thermopylae, scalp the western-bound emigrant, and make the hen-roosts around Capua look sick.
"O, comrades! warriors! gladiators!!
"If we be men, let us die like men, beneath the blue sky, and by the still waters, and be buried according to Gunter, instead of having our shin bones polished off by Numidian lions, amid the groans and hisses of a snide Roman populace."
Some Pertinent Questions Asked—Answers Attempted—Valuable Testimonials.
The managing editor of a Boston paper is getting material together relative to the practical workings of Woman's suffrage, and as Wyoming is at present working a scheme of that kind, he wants an answer to the following questions:
1. —Has it been of real benefit to the territory?
2. —If so, what has it accomplished?
3. —how does it affect education, morals, courts, etc.?
4. —What proportion of the women vote?
Answers.
1. —Yes, it has indeed been of real benefit to the territory in many ways. Until woman's suffrage came among us, life was a drag—a monotonous sameness, and simultaneous continuousness. How it is not that way. Woman comes forward with her ballot, and puts new life into the flagging energies of the great political circles. She purifies the political atmosphere, and comes to the polls with her suffrage done up in a little wad, and rammed down into her glove, and redeems the country.
2. —It has accomplished more than the great outside world wots of. Philosophers and statesmen may think that they wot; but they don't. Not a wot.
To others outside of Wyoming, woman's suffrage is a mellow dream; but here it is a continuous, mellow, yielding reality. We know what we are talking about. We are acquainted with a lady who came here with the light of immortality shining in her eye, and the music of the spheres was singing in her ears. She was apparently on her last limbs, if we may be allowed that expression. But woman's suffrage came to her with healing on its wings, and the rose of health again bloomed on her cheek, and her appetite came back like the famine in Ireland. Now she wrestles with the cast-iron majolica ware of the kitchen during the day, and in the evening works a cross-eyed elephant on a burlap tidy, and talks about the remonetization of the currency.
Without attempting to answer the last two questions in a short article like this, we will simply give a few certificates and testimonials of those who have tried it:
Prairie-Dog Ranche, Jan. 3, 1888.
"Dear Sir: I take great pleasure in bearing testimony to the efficacy of woman's suffrage. It is indeed a boon to thousands. I was troubled in the East beyond measure with an ingrowing nail on the most extensive toe. It caused me great pain and annoyance. I was compelled to do my work wearing an old gum overshoe of my husband's. Since using woman's suffrage only a few months, my toe is entirely well, and I now wear my husband's fine boots with perfect ease. As a remedy for ingrowing nails I can safely recommend the woman's suffrage.
"Sassafras Oleson."
Miner's Delight, Jan. 23, 1888.
"Deer Sur: Two year ago mi waife fell down into a nold sellar and droav her varyloid through the Sarah helium. I thot she was a Gonner. I woz then livin' in the sou west potion of Injeanny. I moved to where i now am leaving sevral onsettled accounts where i lived. Bat i wood do almost anything to recover mi waifs helth. She tried Woman's Suffrins and can now lick me with I hand tied behind hur back, everything to the free yuse of the femail ballot. So good bi at Present Union Forever McGilligin."
Rawhide, Feb. 2, 1888.
Dear Sir: I came to Wyoming one year ago today At that time I only weighed 153 pounds and felt all the time as though I might die. I was a walking skeleton. Coyotes followed me when I went away from the house.
"My husband told me to try Woman's Suffrage. I did so. I have now run up to my old weight of 213 pounds, and I feel that with the proper care and rest, and rich wholesome diet, I may be spared to my husband and family till next spring.
"I am now joyful and happy. I go about my work all day singing Old Zip Coon and other plaintive melodies. After using Woman's Suffrage two days I sat up in a rocking chair and ate one and three-fourths mince pies. Then I worried down a sugar-cured ham and have been gaining ever since.
"Ah! it is a pleasant thing to come back to life and its joys again.
"Yours truly,
"Ethel Lillian Kersikes."
But stay! Let us catch a rapid outline of the solitary horseman, for he is the affianced lover and soft-eyed gazelle of Luella Frowzletop, the queen of the Skimmilk ranch. He is evidently a man of say twenty summers, with a sinister expression to the large, ambitious, imported, Italian mouth. A broad-brimmed white hat with a scarlet flannel band protects his gothic features from the burning sun, and a pale-brown ducking suit envelops his little form. A horsehair lariat hangs at his saddle bow, and the faint suspicion of a downy mustache on his chiselled upper lip is just beginning to ooze out into the air, as if ashamed of itself. It is one of those sickly mustaches, a kind of cross between blonde and brindle, which mean well enough, but never amount to anything. His eyes are fierce and restless, with short, expressive, white eyelashes, and his nose is short but wide out, gradually melting away into his bronzed and stalwart cheeks, like a dish of ice cream before a Sabbath school picnic. Such is the rough sketch of Pigeon-toed Pete, the swain who had stolen away the heart of Luella Frowzletop, the queen of the Skimmilk ranch.
Discoveries in Ornithology—The Soft South Wind Blows—The Swallows Draw Near—"When Sparrows Build "—What the Swallows Bring.
Lately I have made some valuable discoveries relative to ornithology, and I will give some of them to the public, for I love to shed information right and left like a normal school.
When the soft south wind began to kiss our cheeks, and the horse-radish and North Park prospector began to start, the swift-winged swallows drew near to my picturesque home on East Fifth street, and I hoped with a great, anxious, throbbing hope, that they would build beneath the Gothic eaves of my $200 ranche.
I would take my guitar at the sunset hour, and sit at my door in a camp-chair, with the fading glory of the dying day bathing me in a flood of golden light, and touching up my chubby form, and I would warble, "When Sparrows Build," an old solo in J, which seems to fit my voice, and the swallows would flit around me on tireless wing, and squeak, and sling mud over me till the cows came home.
This thing had gone on for several days, and the little mud houses under the eaves were pretty near ready, and in the mean time the spring bed-bug had come with his fragrant breath, and turpentine, and quicksilver, and lime, and aquafortis, and giant-powder, and a feather, has made my home a howling wilderness, that smelled like a city drug store.
But it didn't kill the bugs. It pleased them. They called a meeting and tendered me a vote of thanks for the kind attentions with which they had been received. They ate all these diabolical drugs, not only on regular days, but right along through Lent.
I got mad and resolved to Insure the house and burn it down. One evening I felt sad and worn, and was trying to solace myself by trilling a few snatches from Mendelssohn's "Wail," written in the key of G for a baritone voice. A neighbor came along and stopped to lean over the gate, and drink in the flood of melody which I was spilling out on the evening air. When I got through and stopped to tune my guitar anew, and scratch a warm place on my arm, he asked if I were not afraid that those swallows would bring bed-bugs to the house.
I had heard that before, but I thought it was a campaign lie. I acted on the suggestion, however, and taking a long pole from behind the door, where I keep it for pictorial Bible men, I knocked down a 'dobe cottage and proceeded to examine it.
It was level full of imported Merino and Cotswold and Southdown and Early Bose and Duchess of Oldenburg and twenty-ounce Pippins and Seek-no-further bedbugs. There were bed-bugs in modest gray ulsters and bed-bugs in dregs of wine and old gold, bed-bugs in ashes of roses and bed-bugs in elephants' breath, bedbugs with their night-clothes on and in morning wrappers, bed-bugs that were just going on the night-shift, and bed-bugs that had been at work all day and were just going to bed.
I killed all I could and then drove the rest into a pan of coal oil. When one undertook to get out of the pan I shot him. This conflict lasted several days. I neglected my other business and omitted morning prayers until there was a great calm and the swift-winged swallows homeward flew. When these feathered songsters come around my humble cot another spring they will meet with a cold, unwelcome reception. I shall not even ask them to take off their things.
I have formed the idea somehow from watching the eccentric, nervous flight of the swallow, that when he makes one of those swift flank movements with the speed of chain lightning, he must be acting from the impulse of a large, earnest, triangular bed-bug of the boarding-house variety. I may be wrong, but I have given this matter a good deal of attention, and whether this theory be correct or not I do not care. It is good enough for me.
A distinguished scientist informs us that "the cod subsists largely on the sea cherry." Those who have not had the pleasure of seeing the codfish climb the sea cherry tree in search of food, or clubbing the fruit from the heavily-laden branches with chunks of coral have missed a very fine sight. The codfish, when at home rambling through the submarine forests, does not wear his vest unbuttoned, as he does while loafing around the grocery stores of the United States.
An Unobtrusive Taciturn Man—The Importance of Marking Clothes—A Sad End for the Taciturn Alan—A Crude Autopsy.
The most quiet, unobtrusive man I ever knew," said Buck Bramel, "was a young fellow who went into North Park in an early day from the Salmon river. He was also reserved and taciturn among the miners, and never made any suggestions if he could avoid it. He was also the most thoughtful man about other people's comfort I ever knew.
"I went into the cabin one day where he was lying on the bed, and told him I had decided to go into Laramie for a couple of weeks to do some trading. I put my valise down on the floor and was going out, when he asked me if my clothes were marked. I told him that I never marked my clothes. If the washerwoman wanted to mix up my wardrobe with that of a female seminary, I would have to stand it, I supposed.
"He thought I ought to mark my clothes before I went away, and said he would attend to it for me. So he took down his revolver and put three shots through the valise.
"After that a coolness sprang up between us, and the warm friendship that had existed so long was more or less busted. After that he marked a man's clothes over in Leadville in the same way, only the man had them on at the time. He seemed to have a mania on that subject, and as they had no insanity experts at Leadville in those days, they thought the most economical way to examine his brain would be to hang him, and then send the brain to New York in a baking powder can.
"So they hung him one night to the bough of a sighing mountain pine.
"The autopsy was, of course, crude; but they sawed open his head and scooped out the brain with a long handled spoon and sent it on to New York. By some mistake or other it got mixed up with some sample specimens of ore from 'The Brindle Tom Cat' discovery, and was sent to the assayer in New York instead of the insanity smelter and refiner, as was intended.
"The result was that the assayer wrote a very touching and grieved letter to the boys, saying that he was an old man anyway, and he wished they would consider his gray hairs and not try to palm off their old groceries on him. He might have made errors in his assays, perhaps—all men were more or less liable to mistakes—but he flattered himself that he could still distinguish between a piece of blossom rock and a can of decomposed lobster salad, even if it was in a baking-powder can. He hoped they would not try to be facetious at his expense any more, but use him as they would like to be treated themselves when they got old and began to totter down toward the silent tomb.
"This is why we never knew to a dead moral certainty, whether he was O. K. in the upper story, or not."
A Blasted Life—Regarded as a Professional—No Jog in Being "The Life of the Party"—Parents Should Discourage the First Signs of Humor in Their Children.
You are an youmorist, are you not?" queried a long-billed pelican addressing a thoughtful, mental athlete, on the Milwaukee & St. Paul road the other day.
"Yes, sir," said the sorrowful man, brushing away a tear. "I am an youmorist. I am not very much so, but still I can see that I am drifting that way. And yet I was once joyous and happy as you are. Only a few years ago, before I was exposed to this malady, I was as blithe as a speckled yearling, and recked not of aught—nor anything else, either. Now my whole life is blasted. I do not dare to eat pie or preserves, and no one tells funny stories when I am near They regard me as a professional, and when I get in sight the 'scrub nine' close up and wait for me to entertain the crowd and waddle around the ring."
"What do you mean by that?" murmured the pur-pie-nosed interrogation point.
"Mean? Why, I mean that whether I'm drawing a salary or not, I'm expected to be the 'life of the party.' I don't want to be the life of the party I want to let some one else be the life of the party. I want to get up the reputation of being as cross as a bear with a sore head. I want people to watch their children for fear I'll swallow them. I want to take my low-cut-evening-dress smile and put it in the bureau drawer, and tell the world I've got a cancer in my stomach, and the heaves and hypochondria, and a malignant case of leprosy."
"Do you mean to say that you do not feel facetious all the time, and that you get weary of being an youmorist?"
"Yes, hungry interlocutor. Yes, low-browed student, yes. I am not always tickled. Did you ever have a large, angry, and abnormally protuberent boil somewhere on your person where it seemed to be in the way? Did you ever have such a boil as a traveling companion, and then get introduced to people as an youmorist? You have not? Well, then, you do not know all there is of suffering in this sorrow-streaked world. When wealthy people die why don't they endow a cast-iron castle with a draw-bridge to it and call it the youmorists' retreat? Why don't they do some good with their money instead of fooling it away on those who are comparatively happy?"
"But how did you come to git to be an youmorist?"
"Well, I don't know. I blame my parents some. They might have prevented it if they'd taken it in time, but they didn't. They let it run on till it got established, and now it's no use to go to the Hot Springs or to the mountains, or have an operation performed. You let a man get the name of being an youmorist and he doesn't dare to register at the hotels, and he has to travel anonymously, and mark his clothes with his wife's name, or the public will lynch him if he doesn't say something youmorist.
"Where is your boy to-night?" continued the gloomy humorist. "Do you know where he is? Is he at home under your watchful eye, or is he away somewhere jailing the handles on his first little joke? Parent, beware. Teach your boy to beware. Watch him night and day, or all at once, when he is beyond your jurisdiction, he will grow pale. He will have a far-away look in his eye, and the bright, rosy lad will have become the flat-chested, joyless youmorist.
"It's hard to speak unkindly of our parents, but mingled with my own remorse I shall always murmur to myself, and ask over and over, why did not my parents rescue me while they could? Why did they allow my chubby little feet to waddle down to the dangerous ground on which the sad-eyed youmorist must forever stand?
"Partner, do not forget what I have said to-day. Whether your child be a son or daughter, it matters not. Discourage the first sign of approaching humor. It is easier to bust the backbone of the first little tender jokelet that sticks its head through the virgin soil, than it is to allow the slimy folds of your son's youmorous lecture to be wrapped about you, and to bring your gray hairs with sorrow to the grave."
Laramie has the champion mean man. He has a Sunday handkerchief made to order with scarlet spots on it, which he sticks up to his nose just before the plate starts round, and leaves the church like a house on fire.
The Lakes near Sheep Mountain—Three Tons of Soda at the Centennial—A Yield of 104,544 Tons of Soda per Annum—Should Provide an Income of $1,062,864,000 per Annum.
Some days ago, in company with several other eminent men of this place, I paid a visit to the soda lakes of Wyoming, and will give a short, truthful and concise description of their general appearance.
The lake or soda beds are situated about twelve miles southwest of Laramie, in a direct line according to official survey, but the road makes a slight variation from a direct line and therefore makes the distance about fourteen miles.
In a kind of basin toward Sheep Mountain, the finest of a series of hills intervening between the broad Laramie Plains and the Snowy Range, lie these lakes, four in number, with no outlet whatever.
Just as you get plumb discouraged and have ceased to look for the lakes, they all at once lie at your feet in all their glistening, dazzling, snowy whiteness.
One of these lakes, to all appearances, is the source of water supply for the balance, and from the exterior the water is constantly crystallizing in the sun and forming a thick crust of sulphate of soda.
When we went out, it was one of those dry, clear, bracing days in the month of July, in Wyoming, when the crisp air fans your cheek and fills every vein, artery and capillary and pore with a glad exhilarating sense that you are freezing to death.
Well, the day we went out to the lakes it was that way only not so much so.
It was not, therefore, difficult to imagine the broad, white crust over those lakes to be ice and snow. They are of the purest snowy white, and when cut into, the crust has that deep sea blue of ice when cut in like manner.
This crust of sulphate of soda is nearly three feet in depth and is perfectly firm, so that the heaviest loads drive over it with safety.
The water which oozes up through the crust at intervals is quite warm, being at the surface on a cool day about blood temperature, and of course at a considerable depth much higher.
In 1876—the year which the gentle reader will call to mind as the centennial—a slight fragment of this lode, weighing over three tons, was cut in the form of a cube and sent to the Centennial, where it attracted very much attention.
Six weeks afterward the unsightly hole in the deposit at the lake was entirely filled up with a new formation.
This goes to show how inexhaustible is the mighty reservoir, and the gentle reader may give it his earnest thought as a mathematical question, what amount of this formation might be secured to the enterprising manufacturer who might see fit to purchase and develop it.
Suppose there are sixty-four tons to every 400 superficial feet, and suppose there are four lakes averaging forty acres, which is a low estimate, then we have at present on hand 17,424 tons, with a capacity to reproduce itself every two months, we will say, or at the rate of 104,544 tons per annum.
Suppose, then, we take a ten years' working test of the lakes, and we have 1,002,864 tons of soda.
This soda is not adulterated with alum or other injurious substances, and would therefore sell very rapidly.
It might be put in half-pound and pound cans which would sell at, we will say, twenty-five and fifty cents per can.
Taking the very low estimate made above, as a basis we have the neat little income of $1,062,864,000.
This is more than I am now clearing, I find, over and above expenses, and I am thinking seriously of opening up this vast avenue to wealth myself.
I would have done so long ere this, were it not that I am now developing the Boomerang mine.
This mine is named after my favorite mule, and I am very anxious that it should succeed.
I have already sunk $10 in this mine, and I cannot therefore abandon it, as the casual observer will notice, without great loss to me.
Once a bonanza man took out his check book and asked the market man how much he wanted for meat, and when he was told he burst into tears, and said he would have to deny himself the pleasure of a watermelon or put off going to Europe till next year.
Chicago the Rival of Laramie—The Wonderful Parks—A Chicago Funeral Procession—In Search of Watermelons—Changes Amongst Old Friends—The Vitality Restoring Revolver.
Chicago, June 20, 1887.
I arrived here from the North on Tuesday evening. The demonstration was on a larger scale than I had even looked for. It was gratifying, indeed, to one who loves the spontaneous approval of his fellow-citizens. I do. The procession was very fine, consisting of 'busses, hacks, carriages, express wagons and the police, followed up by promiscuous citizens. There was a little misunderstanding about who should deliver the address of welcome. So about two hundred healthy orators, of the Denis Kearney decoction, all started in at one and the same time to give me the freedom of the city, at twenty-five cents per freedom. There is a good deal of this class of freedom now on the Chicago market.
Chicago is a thriving, enterprising town on the Lake Michigan coast. It is the county seat of Cook county, so that all the county officers live here.
If a young man with the recuisite degree of pluck and determination were to start a paper here, and could get the county printing and go without a hired girl, he could do first-rate.
Chicago is a rival of Laramie as the most desirable outfitting point for North Park. It also does some outfitting for South Park and several other parks.
Yesterday I went to South Park to drive along the boulevards and see the fountains squirt. The boulevards are now in good shape. They are about the bouliest boulevards I have seen for five years. Some days when I feel frolicsome, it seems to me as though if I couldn't have a nice large park of my own, with velvet lawns and cool retreats in it, where I could be alone and roll around over the green sward, and kick up my heels in the chastened sunlight, I would certainly bust.
South Park has an antelope, a bison, an elk and several other ferocious animals. They seem lonely, and time hangs heavy on their hands, so to speak.
Going out to the park we met a funeral procession headed by a remains. When we were coming out of the driveway on our return, we met the same procession. It had transplanted the deceased in good shape, and was racing horses on its way home through the park. The minister belonged to the same family with the United Grand Junction Ebeneezer Temperance Association, and although he was ostensibly holding on to his horse with all the reserve forces on hand, he seemed to keep the rest of the procession at a respectful distance all the way.
It was about the most cheerful funeral I ever saw, with the officiating minister leading down the homestretch and the hearse at a Maud S. gait rattling along at his heels, followed by the bereaved family coming down the quarter-stretch in '45. It reconciled me a great deal to death to see this. If I could be positively certain that my friends and acquaintances would take it that easy I could die happy, but I know they won't. I have seemed to work my way into the affections of those who come in contact with me from day to day, so that when I die I know just how it will be. There will be one of the wildest panics ever known in the history of civilized nations. Groceries and all kinds of provisions will depreciate in value fifty per cent, and watermelons will be almost a drug on the market.
Allow me to digress for a moment. Watermelons are very high at Laramie, and there is the standing joke that for three years I haven't had sufficient decision of character and spinal column to make up my mind whether I would build or buy a watermelon. Here watermelons are more plentiful. They grow low down on the branches of the melon trees, so that on a still evening one can easily knock them off with a club. So easy in fact is that feat that I could hardly restrain myself from taking a little stroll one pleasant evening to pick one or two luscious specimens from the heavy laden boughs. So strong was this feeling at least that I could not overcome it without an unusual strain, and my physicians tell me not to do anything that will overtax my moral nature. They are afraid that something would break and tear the whole vast fabric of integrity from its foundation.
So I went out with a brother of mine who could be depended upon. I took along my old pocket-knife that I have had for fifteen years, and which has received the silver medal, sweepstakes prize and handicap silver service in a score of go-as-you-please melon-plugging matches for the championship of the known world.
But we were not very fortunate. The world is growing cynical and fast losing faith in mankind, I fear. People have quit putting their money into savings banks and are beginning to plant their watermelons in new and obscure places. Just as the casual observer learns the position of an eligible melon patch the proprietor changes the combination on him.
I found multitudinous changes among old friends and associates when I got home, and was struck with the ceaseless work of time's effacing fingers, but nowhere did I find such cause for sorrow and regret as in the falling off and change of base which I found in the matter of melon cultivation.
We were exposed to the night air until past 1 o'clock, coming home tired and disappointed with three small ones apiece, which we hid in the hay-mow, according to a time-honored custom in the family, and retired.
The next day we both made a noble resolution to discard this unfortunate habit which we had contracted, partly because we were old enough to know better, and partly because we had in the hurry and precipitation of the evening previous, stolen and carried four miles a half dozen melons of the citron variety, that tasted like a premature pumpkin and smelled like cod liver oil and convalescent glue.
I had also lost my revolver. When I go out nights I always go armed, and for that reason I have gained the unenviable reputation of being a bold, bad man. Many people think that I am thirsting for the lives of my fellow-men and feel low-spirited and wretched unless I am shooting large, irregular holes through the human family, but this is not true.
I never killed any one in my life, unless death was richly merited. I have never taken a human life that society was not made better and safer by the act.
This revolver was the same one that I used four years ago when I shot at a burglar in Laramie. He was endeavoring, at the dead hour of midnight, to get into the window, and I feared that his intentions were not honorable. He knew that I was alone in the house, my wife having gone away on a visit, and so taking advantage of her absence and my timidity, he was endeavoring to force an entrance into the house. I don't know what ever nerved me to such an act of lofty heroism, but I marched softly out of the front door with noiseless tread and shot him.
Then I went back to bed and wondered what action the authorities would take with me. Whether it would be considered justifiable homicide and I exonorated, or whether I would be held without bail to answer at the next term of court for murder. Then I wondered what I had better do with the corpse. At first I thought I would run down and notify the coroner; then I concluded to go and see the victim, and see if life were extinct. Finally I compromised the matter by falling into a troubled sleep, from which I awoke on the following morning. I went out to the place where the burglar had been shot, but he was not there. With a superhuman will-power he had dragged himself away somewhere to die. He had also destroyed all traces of blood before getting away.
This was the last of the matter till the following September, when I received this letter:
Omaha.
Dear Sir:—You doubtless think that I harbor ill-will and bitterness toward you because you shot me last summer, but such is not the case. I write to express my gratitude and everlasting friendship.
For years I had been an invalid, and last summer owing to my weak and helpless condition and consequent loss of employment, I became deranged. That accounts for my wild and insane idea that your residence was the abode of wealth and affluence.
It was the delirium that precedes death. Ah, my benefactor, my noble deliverer from death, how shall I tell you of my never-ending gratitude?
How like an angel of mercy you stood up before me that night in your robe de nuit and shot me!
How like a blessed seraph you looked at me, with your polished joints glittering in the flash and dazzle of your peerless beauty!
I have been rapidly gaining ever since in weight and strength. I am now married and happy, and I cheerfully point you out to my friends as the one who, by your health-promoting markmanship and vitality-restoring revolver, brought me back from death to hope, health and happiness.
Yours truly,
The-Man-You-Shot.
Since then I have called that revolver my Great Health Invigorator and Blood Purifier.
An Important Movement.—The Requirements of a True Journalist.—Hold He Should be Educated.—The Journalist at the Age of 95.
A number of friends having personally asked me to express an opinion upon the matter of an established school of journalism, as spoken of by ex-Mayor Henry C. Robinson, of Hartford, Conn., and many more through the West, who are strangers to me personally, having written me to give my views upon the subject. I have consented in so far that I will undertake a simple synopsis of what the course should embrace.
I most heartily indorse the movement, if it may be called such at this early stage. Knowing a little of the intricacies of this branch of the profession, I am going to state fully my belief as to its importance, and the necessity for a thorough training upon it. We meet almost everywhere newspaper men who are totally unfitted for the high office of public educators through the all-powerful press. The woods is full of them. We know that not one out of a thousand of those who are to-day classed as journalists is fit for that position.
I know that to be the case, because people tell me so. I cannot call to mind to-day, in all my wide journalistic acquaintance, a solitary man who has not been pronounced an ass by one or more of my fellow-men. This is indeed a terrible state of affairs.
In many instances these harsh criticisms are made by those who do not know, without submitting themselves to a tremendous mental strain, the difference between a "lower case" q and the old Calvinistic doctrine of unanimous damnation, but that makes no difference; the true journalist should strive to please the masses. He should make his whole life a study of human nature and an earnest effort to serve the great reading world collectively and individually.
This requires a man, of course, with similar characteristics and the same general information possessed by the Almighty, but who would be willing to work at a much more moderate salary.
The reader will instantly see how difficult it is to obtain this class of men. Outside of the mental giant who writes these lines and two or three others, perhaps——
But never mind. I leave a grateful world to say that, while I map out a plan for the ambitious young journalist who might be entering upon the broad arena of newspaperdom, and preparing himself at a regularly established school for that purpose.
Let the first two years be devoted to meditation and prayer. This will prepare the young editor for the surprise and consequent profanity which in a few years he may experience when he finds in his boss editorial that God is spelled with a little g, and the peroration of the article has been taken out and carefully locked up between a death notice and the announcement of the birth of a cross-eyed infant.
The ensuing five years should be spent in becoming familiar with the surprising and mirth-provoking orthography of the English language.
Then would follow three years devoted to practice with dumb bells, sand bags and slung shots, in order to become an athlete. I have found in my own journalistic history more cause for regret over my neglect of this branch than any other. I am a pretty good runner, but aside from that I regret to say that as an athlete I am not a dazzling success.
The above course of intermediate training would fit the student to enter upon the regular curriculum.
Then set aside ten years for learning the typographical art perfectly, so that when visitors wish to look at the composing room, and ask the editor to explain the use of the "hell box," he will not have to blush and tell a gauzy lie about its being a composing-stick. Let the young journalist study the mysteries of type setting, distributing, press work, galleys, italic, shooting-sticks, type lice and other mechanical implements of the printer's department.
Five years should be spent in learning to properly read and correct proof, as well as how to mark it on the margin like a Chinese map of the Gunnison country.
At least fifteen years should then be devoted to the study of American politics and the whole civil service. This time could be extended five years with great profit to the careful student who wishes, of course, to know thoroughly the names and records of all public men, together with the relative political strength of each party.
He should then take a medical course and learn how to bind up contusions, apply arnica, court plaster or bandages, plug up bullet holes and prospect through the human system for buck shot. The reason of this course, which should embrace five years of close study, is apparent to the thinking mind.
Ten years should then be devoted to the study of law. No thorough metropolitan editor wants to enter upon his profession without knowing the difference between a writ of mandamus and other styles of profanity. He should thoroughly understand the entire system of American jurisprudence.
The student will by this time begin to see what is required of him and will enter with greater zeal upon his adopted profession.
He will now enter upon a theological course of ten years. He can then write a telling editorial on the great question of What We Shall Do To Be Saved without mixing up Calvin and Tom Paine with Judas Iscariot and Ben Butler.
The closing ten years of the regular course might be profitably used in learning a practical knowledge of cutting cord wood, baking beans, making shirts, lecturing, turning double handsprings, preaching the gospel, learning how to make a good adhesive paste that will not sour in hot weather, learning the art of scissors grinding, punctuation, capitalization, prosody, plain sewing, music, dancing, sculping, etiquette, how to win the affections of the opposite sex, the ten commandments, every man his own teacher on the violin, croquet, rules of the prize ring, parlor magic, civil engineering, decorative art, calsomining, bicycling, baseball, hydraulics, botany, poker, calisthenics, high-low-jack, international law, faro, rhetoric, fifteen-ball pool, drawing and painting, mule skinning, vocal music, horsemanship, plastering, bull whacking, etc., etc., etc.
At the age of 95 the student will have lost that wild, reckless and impulsive style so common among younger and less experienced journalists. He will emerge from the school with a light heart and a knowledge-box loaded up to the muzzle with the most useful information.
The heyday and spring-time of life will, of course, be past, but the graduate will have nothing to worry him any more, except the horrible question which is ever rising up before the journalist, as to whether he shall put his money into government four per cents or purchase real estate in some growing town.
Modern fiction has reached that pass where the twentieth chapter may wind up with a funeral of twins. Death or dyspepsia may befall the hero at any moment, and the old-time schedule has been abandoned. It is as delightfully surprising as prospecting for a quartz lead. You may discover a bonanza or sit down on a tarantula at any moment. You may tumble out of an ore bucket and reach the foot of the shaft with your shoulder blade in your pistol pocket, or you may sit down on an ostensibly extinct blast to think over your past life and the next moment go crashing through the milky way without clothes enough to keep off the night air.
An Interesting Diary—Corn and Small Fruits Suffer—A Fourth of July Dinner—A Good Ice Cream Country—The Diary Abruptly Ends.
A reporter sent out to find the North Pole some years ago, has just been heard from. An exploring party recently found portions of his remains in latitude 4-11-14, longitude sou'west by sou' from the pole, and near the remains the following fragment of a diary: July 1, 1884.—Have just been out searching for a sunstroke and signs of a thaw. Saw nothing but ice floe and snow as far as the eye could reach. Think we will have snow this evening unless the wind changes.
July 2.—Spent the forenoon exploring to the northwest for right of way for a new equatorial and North Pole railroad that I think would be of immense value to commerce. The grade is easy and the expense would be slight. Ate my last dog to-day. Had intended him for the 4th, but got too hungry, and ate him raw with vinegar. I wish I was at home eating pie.
July 3.—We had quite a frost last night, and it looks this morning as though the corn and small fruits must have suffered. It is now two weeks since the last of the crew died and left me alone. Ate the leather ends of my suspenders to-day for dinner. I did not need the suspenders, anyway, for by tightening up my pants I find they will stay on all right, and I don't look for any ladies to call, so that even if my pants came off by some oversight or other, nobody would be shocked.
July 4.—Saved up some tar roofing and a bottle of mucilage for my Fourth of July dinner, and gorged myself to day. The exercises were very poorly attended and the celebration rather a failure. It is clouding up in the west, and I'm afraid we're going to have snow. Seems to me we're having an all-fired late spring here this year.
July 5.—Didn't drink a drop yesterday. It was the quietest Fourth I ever put in. I never felt so little remorse over the way I celebrated as I do to-day. I didn't do a thing yesterday that I was ashamed of except to eat the remainder of a box of shoe blacking for supper. To-day I ate my last boot-heel, stewed. Looks as though we might have a hard winter.
July 6.—Feel a little apprehension about something to eat. My credit is all right here, but there is no competition, and prices are therefore very high. Ice, however, is still firm. This would be a good ice-cream country if there were any demand, but the country is so sparsely settled that a man feels as lonesome here as a greenbacker at a presidential election. Ate a pound of cotton waste soaked in machine oil, to-day. There is nothing left for to-morrow but ice-water and an old pocket-book for dinner. Looks as though we might have snow.
July 7.—This is a good, cool place to spend the summer if provisions were more plenty. I am wearing a seal-skin undershirt, with three woolen overshirts and two bear-skin vests, to-day, and when the dew begins to fall I have to put on my buffalo ulster to keep off the night air. I wish I was home. It seems pretty lonesome here since the other boys died. I do not know what I will get for dinner to-morrow, unless the neighbors bring in something. A big bear is coming down the hatchway as I write. I wish I could eat him. It would be the first square meal for two months. It is, however, a little mixed whether I will eat him or he eat me. It will be a cold day for me if he——
Here the diary breaks off abruptly, and from the chewed-up appearance of the book, we are led to entertain a horrible fear as to his safety.
An old hunter was out among the Black Hills, east of town, last summer, hunting for cotton-tails and sage hens, and he ran across a little gulch where the abrupt rocks closed together and formed a little atmospheric eddy, so to speak. There in that lonely reservoir he found what he at first considered a petrified hat store. It was a genuine deposit of escaped straw hats and plug hats that the frolicsome zephyrs had caught up and carried for ten miles, until this natural hat-rack had secured them. Of course there were other articles of apparel, and some debilitated umbrellas, but the deposit seemed to assay mostly hats.
The Man with a Cork Leg and a Chastened Air—Remarks on Home Government—A Happy Time in Contemplation—A Wife's Prerogatives—What is to Become of the One-Legged Minority?
Yesterday morning, while the main guy of the sanctum was putting some carbolic acid in the paste pot, and unlimbering his genius, and turning his lyre preparatory to yanking loose a few stanzas on the midsummer cucumber, a man with a cork leg, and the chastened air of one who is second lieutenant in the home circle under the able and efficient command of his wife, came softly in and sat down on a volume containing the complete poems of Noah webster.
He waited patiently till he could catch the eye of the speaker, humming softly to himself—
"Green grows the grave by the wild, dashing river
Where sleeps the brave with his arrow and quiver."
When the time had arrived for the lodge to open up unfinished business, communications and new business, he ran his wooden leg through the rounds of a chair and said:
"I desire to make a few remarks on the subject of home government, and the rights a husband may have which his wife is bound to respect."
"Yes; but we don't enter the family circle with our all-pervading influence. We simply attack evils of a public or general nature. You should pour your tale of woe into the ears of an attorney. He will dish out the required balm to you at so much per balm."
"I know, but this is not strictly a case for the courts. It's a case which raises the question of the husband's priority, and agitates the whole social fabric.
"Last week I celebrated my 43d birthday, or I started to celebrate it, and circumstances over which I had no control arose and busted the programme, as mapped out by the committee of arrangements.
"It was the intention of the party, consisting of myself and several others of our most eminent men, to go over to Sabille canyon with a mountain wagon and a pair of pinto plugs for a little wholesome recreation. We had some weapons for slaying the frolicsome jack rabbit and the timid sage hen, and had provided ourselves against every possible rattlesnake contingency also. We had taken more precautions in this direction, perhaps, than in any other, and were in shape to enjoy the wild grandeur of the eternal hills without fear from the poisonous reptile of the rugged gulches and alkali bottoms of this picturesque western country.
"We were all loaded up in good shape for the trip and drove around to my house to get a camp kettle and some lemons. I went into the pantry to get a couple of pounds of sugar and a nutmeg.
"My wife met me in the pantry and roughly and brutally smelled of my breath.
"This was not the prerogative of a true wife, but she weighs 200 and is middling resolute, so I allowed her to do so, although every man's breath is his own property, and if he allows his wife to take advantage of her marital vows to smell his breath on the most unlooked-for occasions, what is to become of our boasted freedom?
"I then went upstairs into a closet after a lap robe and a pillow to use in case any of us got sunstruck.
"My wife came in just then, and as I started away with the pillow, she tripped me up so I fell inside the closet, and before I could recover from my surprise, she sat down on me in such a solemn and impressive manner that my eyes hung out on my cheeks like the bronze door knobs on a Pullman car.
"There I was in the impenetrable gloom of a closet, with the trusting companion of my home life flattening out my stomach till I could feel my watch chain against my spinal column. She then unscrewed my cork leg in a mechanical kind of a way and locked it up in the bureau drawer, putting the key in her pocket.
"After that she fastened the closet door on the outside, and told the party that I would be unable, owing to the inclemency of the weather, to take part in the exercises at Sabille canyon.
"All through that long, long, weary day, I stood around on one leg and looked out of the window, thinking what a potent spell is exerted over the wooden-legged man by an able-bodied wife.
"It is a question, sir, which is of vital interest to us all. Must the one-legged minority continue thus to subserve the interests of the two-legged majority? I ask you, as the representative of the all civilizing, all leveling, all powerful and all jewhillikin press, how long the cork-limbed, taxation-without-representation masses must limp around the house and sew carpet rags, writhing in the death-like grip of a two-legged oligarchy?"
He did not wait for an answer. He simply gathered up a few of our freshest exchanges and stole softly down the stairs.
We decline to make any comment one way or the other, because we do not know that the country is ripe for the discussion of this question, but it deserves cold, calm, candid thought on the part of all thinking men, to say the least.
The true poet loves seclusion and soothing rest. That is the secret of his even numbers and smooth cadences. Look at Dryden, and Walt Whitman, and Milton, and Burns, and the Sweet Singer of Michigan. What could any of them have done with the house full of children of the forest who were hankering for a fresh pail of gore for lunch?
A handsome competence is in store for the man who will invent a neat, durable and portable pie opener that will successfully reach the true inwardness of the average, box-toed, Bessemer steel, gooseberry pie which the hired girl casts in her kitchen foundry.
A Vacancy Amongst the Twelve Apostles—The Place Filled by Revelation—How Would this System Work in Politics—There are Drawbacks in this System.
An esteemed and extremely connubial contemporary, says in a recent editorial: "The Latter Day Saints will rejoice to learn that the vacancies which have existed in the quorums ol the twelve apostles and the first seven presidents of seventies are now filled. During the conference recently held, Elder Abram II. Cannon was unanimously chosen to be one of the first seven presidents of seventies, and he was ordained to that office on Monday, October 9. Subsequently! the Lord, by revelation through His servant, President John Taylor, designated by name Brothers George Teasdale and Heber J. Grant, to be ordained to the apostleship, and Brother Seymour B. Young to fill the remaining vacancy in the presidency of the seventies. These brethren were ordained on Monday, October 16, the two apostles, under the hands of the first presidency and twelve, and the other under the hands of the twelve and the presidency of the seventies."
Now, that's a convenient system of politics and civil service. When there is a vacancy, the president, John Taylor, goes into his closet and has a revelation, which settles it all right. If the man appointed vicariously by the Lord is not in every way satisfactory, he may be discharged by the same process. Instead, therefore, of being required to rally a large force of his friends to aid him in getting an appointment, the aspirant arranges solely with the party who runs the revelation business. It will be seen at a glance, therefore, that the man who can get the job of revelating in Zion, has it pretty much his own way. We would not care who made the laws of Utah if we could do its revelating at so much per revelate.
Think of the power it gives a man in a community of blind believers. Imagine, if you please, the glorious possibilities in store for the man who can successfully reveal the word of the Lord in an easy, extemporaneous manner on five minutes' notice.
This prerogative does not confine itself to politics alone. The Impromptu revelator of the Jordan has revelations when he wants to evade the payment of a bill. He gets a divine order also if he desires to marry a beautiful maid or seal the new school ma'am to himself. He has a leverage which he can bring to bear upon the people of his diocese at all times, even more potent than the press, and it does not possess the drawbacks that a newspaper does. You can run an aggressive paper if you want to in this country, and up to the time of the funeral you have a pretty active and enjoyable time, but after the grave has been filled up with the clods of the valley and your widow has drawn her insurance, you naturally ask, "What is the advantage to be gained by this fearless style of journalism?"
Still, even the inspired racket has its drawbacks. Last year a little incident occurred in a Mormon family down in southern Utah, which weighed about nine pounds, and when the ex officio husband, who had been absent two years, returned, he acted kind of wild and surprised, somehow, and as he went through the daily round of his work he could be seen counting his fingers back and forth and looking at the almanac, and adding up little amounts on the side of the barn with a piece of red chalk.
Finally, one of the inspired mob of that part of the vineyard thought it was about time to get a revelation and go down there, so he did so. He sailed up to the de facto husband and quasi parent and solemnly straight ened up some little irregularities as to dates, but the revelation was received with disdain, and the revelator was sent home in an old ore sack and buried in a peach basket.
Sometimes there is, even in Utah, a manifestation of such irreverence and open hostility to the church that it makes us shudder.
One of these days they will invent a sleeper with a quart of pure air for each person, instead of only a mouthful. If there could be more pure air, and less mahogany corners on which to bump the system, and the porter received a regular salary instead of mobbing the train with a whisk broom, and garroting the passengers for $1 each, life would be more desirable.
The Rue de la Sitting Bull Difficulty in Getting the Drink, You Want—Paris an Old Town—The Exposition Not Very Enjoyable.
I am going to rest myself by writing a few pages in the language spoken in the United States, for I am tired of the infernal lingo of this God-forsaken country and feel like talking in my own mother tongue and on some other subject than the Exposition. I have very foolishly tried to talk a little of this tongue-destroying French, but my teeth are so loose now that I am going to let them tighten up again before I try it any more.
Day before yesterday it was very warm, and I asked two or three friends to step into a big drug store on the Rue de la Sitting Bull, to get a glass of soda. (I don't remember the names of these streets, so in some cases I give them Wyoming names.) I think the man who kept the place probably came from Canada. Most all the people in Paris are Canadians. He came forward, and had a slight attack of delirium tremens, and said:
"Ze vooly voo a la boomerang?"
I patted the soda fountain and said:
"No, not so bad as that, if you please. Just squeeze a little of your truck into a tumbler, and flavor it to suit the boys. As for myself, I will take about two fingers of bug juice in mine to sweeten my breath."
But he didn't understand me. His parents had neglected his education, no doubt, and got him a job in a drug store. So I said:
"Look here, you frog-hunting, red-headed Communist, I will give you just five minutes to fix up my beverage, and if you will put a little tangle-foot into it I will pay you; otherwise I will pick up a pound weight and paralyze you. Now, you understand. Flavor it with spirituous frumenti, old rye, benzine—bay rum—anything! Parley voo, e pluribus unum, sic semper go braugh! Do you understand that?"
But he didn't understand it, so I had to kill him. I am having him stuffed. The taxidermist who is doing the job lives down on the Rue de la Crazy Woman's Fork. I think that is the name of the Rue that he lives on.
Paris is quite an old town. It is older and wickeder than Cheyenne, I think, but I may be prejudiced against the place. It is very warm here this summer, and there are a good many odors that I don't know the names of. It is a great national congress of rare imported smells. I have detected and catalogued 1,350 out of a possible 1,400.
I have not enjoyed the Exposition so much as I thought I was going to; partly because it has been so infernally hot, and partly because I have been a little homesick. I was very homesick on board ship; very homesick indeed. About all the amusement that we had crossing the wide waste of waters was to go and lean over the ship's railing by the hour, and telescope the duodenum into the ćsophagus. I used to stand that way and look down into the dark green depths of old ocean, and wonder what mysterious secrets were hidden beneath the green, cold waves and the wide rushing waste of swirling, foamy waters. I learned to love this weird picture at last, and used to go out on deck every morning and swap my breakfast to this priceless panorama for the privilege of watching it all day.
I can't say that I hanker very much for a life on the ocean wave. I am trying to arrange it so as to go home by land. I think I can make up for the additional expense in food. I bought more condemned sustenance, and turned it over to the Atlantic ocean for inspection, than I have eaten since I came here.
They are agitating the matter of instituting carving schools, in the East, so that the rising generation will be able to pass down through the corridors of time without its lap full of dressing and its bosom laden with gravy and remorse. The students at this school will wear barbed-wire masks while practicing. These masks will be similar to those worn by German students, who slice each other up while obtaining an education.
Terrible Loss of Children—Strange Sympathy of the Health Officer—The Old Man's Defense of his Boys—He Gives Free Utterance to his Heresies.
Up in Polk county, Wis., not long ago, a man who had lost eight children by diphtheria, while the ninth hovered between life and death with the same disease, went to the health officer of the town and asked aid to prevent the spread of the terrible scourge. The health officer was cool and collected. He did not get excited over the anguish of the father whose last child was at the moment hovering upon the outskirts of immortality. He calmly investigated the matter, and never for a moment lost sight of the fact that he was a town officer and a professed Christian.
"You ask aid, I understand," said he, "to prevent the spread of the disease, and also that the town shall assist you in procuring new and necessary clothing, to replace that which you have been compelled to burn in order to stop the further inroads of diphtheria. Am I right?"
The poor man answered affirmatively.
"May I ask if your boys who died were Christian boys, and whether they improved their gospel opportunities and attended the Sabbath school, or whether they were profane and given over to Sabbath-breaking?"
The bereft father said that his boys had never made a profession of Christianity; that they were hardly old enough to do so, and that they might have missed some gospel opportunities owing to the fact that they were poor, and hadn't clothes fit to wear to Sabbath school. Possibly, too, they had met with wicked companions, and had been taught to swear; he could not say but they might have sworn, although he thought they would have turned out to be good boys had they lived.
"I am sorry that the case is so bad," said the health officer. "I am led to believe that God has seen fit to visit you with affliction in order to express His divine disapproval of profanity, and I cannot help you. It ill becomes us poor, weak worms of the dust to meddle with the just judgments of God. Whether as an individual or as a quasi corporation, it is well to allow the Almighty to work out His great plan of salvation, and to avoid all carnal interference with the works of God."
The old man went back to his desolated home and to the bedside of his only living child. I met him yesterday and he told me all about it.
"I am not a professor of religion," said he, "but I tell you, Mr. Nye, I can't believe that this board of health has used me right. Somehow I ain't worried about my little fellers that is gone. They was little fellers, anyway, and they wasn't posted on the plan of salvation, but they was always kind and they always minded me and their mother. If God is using diphtheria agin perfanity this season they didn't know it. They was too young to know about it and I was too poor to take the papers, so I didn't know it nuther, i just thought that Christ was partial to kids like mine, just the same as He used to be 2,000 years ago when the country was new. I admit that my little shavers never went to Sabbath school much, and I wasn't scholar enough to throw much light onto God's system of retribution, but I told 'em to behave themselves, and they did, and we had a good deal of fun together—me and the boys—and they was so bright, and square, and cute that I didn't see how they could fall under divine wrath, and I don't believe they did.
"I could tell you lots of smart little things that they used to do, Mr. nye, but they wa'n't mean and cussed. They was just frolicky and gay sometimes because they felt good. I don't believe God had it in for'em bekuz they was like other boys, do you? Fer if I thought so it would kind o' harden me and the old lady and make us sour on all creation.
"Mind you, I don't kick because I'm left alone here in the woods, and the sun don't seem to shine, and the birds seems a little backward about singin' this spring, and the house is so quiet, and she is still all the time and cries in the night when she thinks I am asleep. All that is tough, Mr. Nye—tough as old Harry, too—but it's so, and I ain't murmurin', but when the board of health says to me that the Ruler of the Universe is makin' a tower of northern Wisconsin, mowin' down little boys with sore throat because they say 'gosh,' I can't believe it.
"I know that people who ain't familiar with the facts will shake their heads and say that I am a child of wrath, but I can't help it. All I can do is to go up there under the trees where them little graves is, and think how all-fired pleasant to me them little, short lives was, and how every one of them little fellers was when he come, poor as I was, and how I rastled with poor crops and pine stumps to buy cloze for'em, and didn't care a cent for style as long as they was well. That's the kind of heretic I am, and if God is like a father that settles it. he wouldn't wipe out my family just to establish discipline, I don't believe. The plan of creation must be on a bigger scale than that, it seems to me, or else it's more or less a fizzle.
"That board of health is better read than I am. It takes the papers and can add up figures, and do lots of things that I can't do; but when them fellers tell me that they represent the town of Balsam Lake and the Kingdom of Heaven, my morbid curiosity is aroused, and I want to see the stiffykits of election."
If revolvers could not be sold for less than $500 a piece, with a guarantee on the part of the vendee, signed by good sureties, that he would support the widows and orphans, you would see more longevity lying around loose, and Western cemeteries would cease to roll up such mighty majorities.
Along the dreary pathway of this cloud-environed life of ours there is no joy so pure, no triumph so complete, no success so fraught with rapture, as that of the female artiste who hangs on the flying trapeze by her chilblain and kisses her hand to the perspiring throng.
Publishing Is Not All Joy and Johnny jump-ups—A Singular Letter—Plot of a Novel—Algonquin and Sciatica.
Being a publisher is not all sunshine, joy and johnny-jump-ups, although the gentle and tractable reader may at times think so.
A letter was received two years ago by the publishers of this book, on the outside of which was the request to the "P. Master of Chicago to give to the most reliable man in Chicago and oblige."
The P. Master thereupon gave the letter to Messrs. Belford, Clarke & Co., who have sent it to me as a literary curiosity. I want it to go down to posterity, so I put it in this great work. I simply change the names, and where words are too obscure, doctor them up a little:
Butler, Bates county, Mo., Jan., 1886.
I have a novle fresh and pure from the pen, wich i would like to be examined by you. I wish to bring it before the public the ensuing summer. I have wrote a good deal for the press, and always with great success. I wrote once an article on the growth of pie plant wich was copied fur and wide. You may have heard of me through my poem on "The Cold, Damp Sea or the Murmuring Wave and its Sad Kerplunk."
I dashed it off one summer day for the Scabtown Herald.
In it, I enter the fair field of fancy and with exquisite word painting, I lead the reader on and on until he forgets that breakfast is ready, and follows the thrilling career of Algonquin and his own fair-haired Sciatica through page after page of delirious joy and poetic rithum.
In this novle I have wove a woof of possibilities criss-crossed with pictures of my own wild, unfettered fancy, which makes it a work at once truthful and yet sufficiently unnatural to make it egorly sot for by the great reading world.
The plot of the novle is this:
Algonquin is a poor artist, who paints lovely sunsets and things, nights, and cuts cordwood during the day, struggling to win a competence so that he can sue for the hand of Sciatica, the wealthy daughter of a plumber.
She does not love him much, and treats him coldly; but he perseveres till one of his exquisite pictures is egorly snapt up by a wealthy man at $2. The man afterwards turns out to be Sciatica's pa.
He says unkind things of Algonquin, and intimates that he is a better artist in four-foot wood than he is as a sunset man. He says that Algonquin is more of a Michael Angelo in basswood than anywhere else, and puts a wet blanket on Sciataca's love for Algonquin.
Then Sciataca grows colder than ever to Algonquin, and engages herself to a wealthy journalist.
Just as the wedding is about to take place, Algonquin finds that he is by birth an Ohio man. Sciataca repents and marries her first love. He secures the appointment of governor of Wyoming, and they remove to Cheyenne.
Then there are many little oursts of pictureskness and other things that I would like to see in print.
I send also a picture of myself which I would like to have in the book. Tell the artist to tone down the freckles so that the features may be seen by the observer and put on a diamond pin so that it will have an appearance of wealth, which the author of a book generally wears.
It is not wrote very good, but that won't make any difference when it is in print.
When the reading public begins to devour it, and the scads come rolling in, you can deduct enough for to pay your expenses of printing and pressing, and send me the balance by postoffice money order. Please get it on the market as soon as possible, as I need a Swiss muzzlin and some other togs suitable to my position in liturary circles. Yours truly,
Luella Blinker.
We may often learn a valuable lesson from the stubborn mule, and guard against the too protuberant use of our own ideas in opposition to other powers against which it is useless to contend. It may be wrong for giant powder to blow the top of a man's head off without cause, but repeated contests have proved that even when giant powder is in the wrong, it is eventually victorious.
Mr. Blackburn, the Heavy Villian—Difficulties With the Scenery—The Play in New York—The Military Parade.
At the performance of "The Phoenix" here, the other night, there was a very affecting place where the play is transferred very quickly from a street scene to the elegant apartments of Mr. Blackburn, the heavy villain. The street scene had to be raised out of the way, and the effect of the transition was somewhat marred by the reluctance of the scenery in rolling up out of the way. It got about half way up, and stopped there in an undecided manner, which annoyed the heavy villain a good deal. He started to make some blood-curdling remarks about Mr. Bludsoe, and had got pretty well warmed up when the scenery came down with a bang on the stage.
The artist who pulls up the curtain and fills the hall lamps, then pulled the scene up so as to show the villain's feet for fifteen or twenty minutes, but he couldn't get it any farther. It seemed that the clothes line, by which the elaborate scenery is operated, got tangled up some way, and this caused the delay. After that another effort was made, and this time the street scene rolled up to about the third story of a brick hotel shown in the foreground, and stopped there, while the clarionet and first violin continued a kind of sad tremulo. Then a dark hand, with a wart on one finger and an oriental dollar store ring on another, came out from behind the wings and began to wind the clothes-line carefully around the pole at the foot of the scene. The villain then proceeded with his soliloquy, while the street scene hung by one corner in such a way as to make a large warehouse on the corner of the street stand at an angle of about forty-five degrees.
Laramie will never feel perfectly happy until these little hitches are dispensed with. Supposing that at some place in the play, where the heroine is speaking soft and low to her lover and the proper moment has arrived for her to pillow her sunny head upon his bosom, that street scene should fetch loose, and come down with such momentum as to knock the lovers over into the arms of the bass-viol player. Or suppose that in some death-bed act this same scene, loaded with a telegraph pole at the bottom, should settle down all at once in such a way as to leave the death-bed out on the corner of Monroe and Clark streets, in front of a candy store.
Modern stage mechanism has now reached such a degree of perfection that the stage carpenter does not go up on a step ladder, in the middle of a play, and nail the corner of a scene to a stick of 2x4 scantling, while a duel is going on near the step ladder. In all the larger theaters and opera houses, now, they are not doing that way.
Of course little incidents occur, however, even on the best stages, and where the whole thing works all right. For instance, the other day, a young actor, who was kneeling to a beautiful heiress down East, got a little too far front, and some scenery, which was to come together in the middle of the stage to pianissimo music, shut him outside and divided the tableau in two, leaving the young actor apparently kneeling at the foot of a street lamp, as though he might be hunting for a half a dollar that he had just dropped on the sidewalk.
There was a play in New York, not long ago, in which there was a kind of military parade introduced, and the leader of a file of soldiers had his instructions to march three times around the stage to martial music, and then file off at the left, the whole column, of course, following him. After marching once around, the stage manager was surprised to see the leader deliberately wheel, and walk off the stage, at the left, with the whole battalion following at his heels. The manager went to him and abused him shamefully for his haste, and told him he had a mind to discharge him; but the talented hack driver, who thus acted as the military leader, and who had over-played himself by marching off the stage ahead of time, said:
"Well, confound it, you can discharge me if you want to, but what was a man to do? Would you have me march around three times when my military pants were coming off, and I knew it? Military pride, pomp, parade and circumstance, are all right; but it can be overdone. A military squadron, detachment, or whatever it is, can make more of a parade, under certain circumstances, than is advertised. I didn't want to give people more show than they paid for, and I ask you to put yourself in my place. When a man is paid three dollars a week to play a Roman soldier, would you have him play the Greek slave? No, sir; I guess I know what I'm hired to play, and I'm going to play it. When you want me to play Adam in the Garden of Eden, just give me my fig leaf and salary enough to make it interesting, and I will try and properly interpret the character for you, or refund the money at the door."
Firmness is a good thing in its place, but we should early learn that to be firm, we need not stand up against a cyclone till our internal economy is blown into the tops of the neighboring trees. Moral courage is a good thing, but it is useless unless you have a liver to go along with it. Sometimes a man is required to lay down his life for his principles, but the cases where he is expected to lay down his digester on the altar of his belief, are comparatively seldom.
Thousands of our own boys, who to-day are spearing frogs, or bathing in the rivers of their native land and parading on the shingly beach with no clothes on to speak of, are left to chose between such a career of usefulness and greatness of brow, and the humdrum life of a bilious student and pale, sad congressman. Will you rise to the proud pinnacle of fame as a pugilist, boys, or will you plug along as a sorrowing, overworked statesman? Now, in the spring-time of your lives, choose between the two, and abide the consequences.
The Poet of the Greeley Eye—The Dying Cowboy and the Preacher—A Mournful Stanza—Poems by Nye—Apostrophe to an Orphan Mule—Ode to Spring—The Picnic Snoozeds Lament—Ode to the Cucumber—Apostrophe to Oscar Wilde—An Adjustable Campaign Song—The Beautiful Snow.
A new and dazzling literary star has risen above the horizon, and is just about to shoot athwart the starry vault of poesy. How wisely are all things ordered, and how promptly does the new star begin to beam, upon the decline of the old.
Hardly had the sweet singer of Michigan commenced to wane and to flicker, when, rising above the western hills, the glad light of the rising star is seen, and adown the canyons and gulches of the Rocky mountains comes the melodious cadences of the poet of the Greeley Eye.
Couched in the rough terms of the West, robed in the untutored language of the Michael Angelo slang of the miner and the cowboy, the poet at first twitters a little on a bough far up the canyon, gradually waking the echoes, until the song is taken up and handed back by every rock and crag along the rugged ramparts of the mighty mountain barrier.
Listen to the opening stanza of "The Dying Cowboy and the Preacher:"
So, old gospel shark, they tell me I must die;
That the wheels of life's wagon have rolled into their last rut,
Well, I will "pass in my checks" without a whimper or a cry,
And die as I have lived—"a hard nut."
This is no time-worn simile, no hackneyed illustration or bald-headed decrepit comparison, but a new, fresh illustration that appeals to the Western character, and lifts the very soul out of the kinks, as it were.
Wheels of life's wagon have rolled into their last rut.
Ah! how true to nature and yet how grand. How broad and sweeping. How melodious and yet how real. None but the true poet would have thought to compare the close of life to the sudden and unfortunate chuck of the off hind wheel of a lumber wagon into a rut.
In fancy we can see it all. We hear the low, sad kerplunk of the wheel, the loud burst of earnest, logical profanity, and then all is still.
Now and then the swish of a mule's tail through the air, or the sigh of the rawhide as it shimmers and hurtles through the silent air, and then a calm falls upon the scene. Anon, the driver bangs the mule that is ostensibly pulling his daylights out, but who is, in fact, humping up like an angle worm, without nulling a pound.
Then the poet comes to the close of the cowboy's career in this style:
"Do I repent?
"No—of nothing present or past;
"So skip, old preach, on gospel pap I won't be fed;
"My breath comes hard; I—am going—but—I—am game to the—last."
And reckless of the future, as the present, the cowboy was dead.
If we could write poetry like that, do you think we would plod along the dreary pathway of the journalist? Do you suppose that if we had the heaven-born gift of song to such a degree, that we could take hold of the hearts of millions and warble two or three little ditties like that, or write an elegy before breakfast, or construct an ionic, anapestic twitter like the foregoing, that we would carry in our own coal, and trim our own lamps, and wear a shirt two weeks at a time?
No, sir. We would hie us away to Europe or Salt Lake, and let our hair grow long, and we would write some obituary truck that would make people disgusted with life, and they would sigh for death that they might leave their insurance and their obituaries to their survivors.
Oh! lonely, gentle, unobtrusive mule!
Thou standest idly 'gainst the azure sky,
And sweetly, sadly singeth like a hired man.
Who taught thee thus to warble
In the noontide heat and wrestle with
Thy deep, corroding grief and joyless woe?
Who taught thy simple heart
Its pent-up, wildly-warring waste
Of wanton woe to carol forth upon
The silent air?
I chide thee not, because thy
Song is fraught with grief-embittered
Monotony and joyless minor chords
Of wild, imported melody, for thou
Art restless, woe begirt and
Compassed round about with gloom,
Thou timid, trusting, orphan mule!
Few joys, indeed, are thine,
Thou thrice-bestricken, madly
Mournful, melancholy mule.
And he alone who strews
Thy pathway with his cold remains
Can give thee recompense
Of lemoncholy woe.
He who hath sought to steer
Thy limber, yielding tail
Fernist thy crupper-band
Hath given thee joy, and he alone.
'Tis true, he may have shot
Athwart the Zodiac, and, looking
O'er the outer walls upon
The New Jerusalem,
Have uttered vain regrets.
Thou reekest not. O orphan mule,
For it hath given thee joy, and
Bound about thy bursting heart,
And held thy tottering reason
To its throne.
Sing on, O mule, and warble
In the twilight gray,
Unchidden by th heartless throng.
Sing of thy parents on thy father's side.
Yearn for the days now past and gone;
For he who pens these halting,
Limping lines to thee
Doth bid thee yearn, and yearn, and yearn.
In the days of laughing spring time,
Comes the mild-eyed sorrel cow,
With bald-headed patches on her,
Poor and lousy, I allow;
And she waddles through your garden
O'er the radish-beds, I trow.
Then the red-nosed, wild-eyed orphan,
With his cyclopćdiee,
Hies him to the rural districts
With more or less alacrity.
And he showeth up its merits
To the bright eternitee.
How the bumble-bee doth bumble
Bumbling in the fragrant air,
Bumbling with his little bumbler,
Till he climbs the golden stair.
Then the angels will provide him
With another bumbilaire.
Gently lay aside the picnic,
For its usefulness is o'er,
And the winter style of misery
Stands and knocks upon your door.
Lariat the lonely oyster,
Drifting on some foreign shore;
Zion needs him in her business—
She can use him o'er and o'er.
Bring along the lonely oyster,
With the winter style of gloom,
And the supper for the pastor,
With its victims for the tomb.
Cast the pudding for the pastor,
With its double iron door;
It will gather in the pastor
For the bright and shining shore.
Put away the little picnic
Till the coming of the spring;
Useless now the swaying hammock
And the idle picnic swing.
Put away the pickled spider
And the cold pressed picnic fly,
And the decorated trousers
With their wealth of custard pie.
O, a cucumber grew by the deep rolling sea,
And it tumbled about in reckless glee
Till the summer waned and the grass turned brown.
And the farmer plucked it and took it to town.
Wrinkled and warty and bilious and blue,
It lay in the market the autumn through;
Till a woman with freckles on her cheek
Led in her husband, so mild and meek.
He purchased the fruit, at her request,
And hid it forever under his vest,
For it doubled him up like a kangaroo,
And now he sleeps 'neath the violets blue.
Soft eyed seraphic kuss
With limber legs and lily on the side,
We greet you from the raw
And uncouth West.
The cowboy yearns to yank thee
To his brawny breast and squeeze
Thy palpitating gizzard
Through thy vest.
Come to the mountain fastness,
Oscar, with thy low neck shirt
And high neck pants;
Fly to the coyote's home,
Thou son of Albion,
James Crow bard and champion aesthete
From o'er the summer sea.
Sit on the fuzzy cactus, king of poesy,
And song,
Ride the fierce broncho o'er the dusty plain,
And le' the zephyr sigh among thy buttery locks.
Welcome thou genius of dyspeptic song,
Thou bilious lunatic from far-off lands.
Come to the home of genius,
By the snowy hills.
And wrestle with the alcoholic inspiration
Of our cordial home.
We yearn
To put the bloom upon thy alabaster nose,
And plant the jim-jams
In thy clustering hair.
Hail, mighty snoozer from across the main!
We greet thee
With our free, untutored ways and wild
Peculiar style of deadly beverage.
Come to the broad, free West and mingle
With our high-toned mob.
Come to the glorious Occident
And dally with the pack-mule's whisk-broom tail;
Study his odd yet soft demeanor,
And peculiar mien.
Tickle his gambrel with a sunflower bud
And scoot across the blue horizon
To the tooness of the sweet and succulent beyond.
We'll gladly
Gather up thy shattered remnants
With a broom and ship thee to thy beauteous home.
Forget us not,
Thou bilious pelican from o'er the sea.
Thou blue-nosed clam
With pimply, bulging brow, but
Come and we will welcome thee
With ancient omelet and fragrant sausage
Of forgotten years.
(Air—Rally Round the Flag, Boys.)
Oh, we'll gather from the hillsides,
We'll gather from the glen,
Shouting the battle cry of....
And we'll round up our voters.
Our brave and trusty men,
Shouting the battle cry of.....
Chorus.
Oh, our candidate forever,
Te doodle daddy a,
Down with old....
Turn a foodie diddy a,
And we'll whoop de dooden do,
Fal de adden adden a,
And don't you never forget it.
Ob, we'll meet the craven foe
On the fall election day,
Shouting the battle cry of...
And we'll try to let him know
That we're going to have our way,
Shouting the battle cry of...
Chorus.
Oh, our candidate forever, etc.
Oh, we're the people's friends,
As all can plainly see,
Shouting the battle cry of....
And we'll whoop de dooden doo,
With our big majority,
And don't you never forget it.
Chorus.
Oh. our candidate forever, etc.
O drifted whiteness covering
The fair face of nature.
Pure as the sigh of a blessed spirit
On the eternal shores, you
Glitter in the summer sun
Considerable. My mortal
Ken seems weak and
Helpless in the midst of
Your dazzling splendor,
And I would hide my
Diminished head like
Serf unclothed in presence
Of his mighty King.
You lie engulphed
Within the cold embrace
Of rocky walls and giant
Cliffs. You spread out
Your white mantle and
Enwrap the whole broad
Universe, and a portion
Of York State.
You seem content
Resting in silent whiteness
On the frozen breast of
The cold, dead earth. You
Think apparently that
You are middling white;
But once I was in the
Same condition. I was
Pure as the beautiful snow,
But I fell. It was a
Right smart fall, too.
It churned me up a
Good deal and nearly
Knocked the supreme
Duplex from its intellectual
Throne. It occurred in
Washington, D. C.
But thou
Snow, lying so spotless
On the frozen earth, as
I remarked before, thou
Hast indeed a soft,
Soft thing. Thou comest
Down like the silent
Movements of a specter,
And thy fall upon the
Earth is like the tread
Of those who walk the
Shores of immortality.
You lie around all
Winter drawing your
Annuities till spring,
And then the soft
Breath from the south with
Touch seductive bids you
Go, and you light out
With more or less alacrity.
William Tell ran a hay ranche near Bergelen, about 580 years ago. Tell had lived in the mountains all his life, and shot chamois and chipmunks with a cross-gun, till he was a bad man to stir up.
At that time Switzerland was run principally by a lot of carpet-baggers from Austria, and Tell got down on them about the year 1307. It seems that Tell wanted the government contract to furnish hay, at $45 a ton, for the Year 1306, and Gessler, who was controlling the patronage of Switzerland, let the contract to an Austrian who had a big lot of condemned hay, farther up the gulch.
One day Gessler put his plug hat up on a telegraph pole, and issued order 236, regular series, to the effect that every snoozer who passed down the toll road should bow to it.
Gessler happened to be in behind the brush when Tell Went by, and he noticed that Bill said "Shoot the hat," and didn't salute it; so he told his men to gather Mr. Tell in, and put him in the refrigerator.
Gessler told him that if he Would shoot a crab-apple from the head of his only son at 200 yards, with a cross-gun, he would give him his liberty.
Tell consented, and knocked the apple higher than Gilroy's kite. Old Gessler, however, noticed another arrow sticking in William's girdle, and he asked what kind of a flowery break that was.
Tell told him that if he had killed the kid instead of busting the apple, he intended to drill a hole through the stomach of Mr. Gessler. This made Gessler mad again, and he took Tell on a picnic up the river, in irons.
Tell jumped off when he got a good chance, and cut across a bend in the river, and when the picnic party came down, he shot Gessler deader than a mackeral.
This opened the ball for freedom, and weakened the Austrian government so much that in the following November they elected Tell to fill the long term, and a half-breed for the short term.
After that, Tell was recognized by the ruling power, and he could get most any contract that he wanted to. He got the service on the stage line up into the Alps increased to a daily, and had the contracts in the name of his son Albert.
The appropriation was increased $150,000 per year, and he had a good thing.
Tell lived many years after this, and was loved by the Swiss people because he had freed their land.
Whenever he felt lonesome, he would take his crossgun and go out and kill a tyrant. He had tyrant on toast most every day till Switzerland was free, and the peasants blessed him as their deliverer.
When Tell got to be an old man he would go out into the mountains and apostrophize them in these memorable words:
"Ye crags and peaks, I'm with you once again. I hold to you the hands I held to you on previous occasions, to show you they are free. The tyrant's crust is busted, so to speak. His race is run, and he himself hath scooted up the flume. Sic semper McGinnis, terra Anna, nux vomica, Schweitzer lease, Timbuctoo, erysipelas, e pluribus unum, sciataca, multum in parvo, vox populi, vox snockomonthegob."
In justice to ourself we desire to state that the Cheyenne Sun has villified us and placed us in a false position before the public. It has stated that while at Rock Creek station, in the early part of the week, we were taken for a peanutter, and otherwise ill-treated at the railroad eating corral and omelette emporium, and that in consequence of such treatment we shed great, scalding tears as large as watermelons. This is not true. We did shed the tears as above set forth, but not because of ill-treatment on the part of the eating-house proprietor.
It was the presence of death that broke our heart and opened the fountains of our great deep, so to speak, when we poured the glucose syrup on our pancakes, the stiff and cold remains of a large beetle and two cunning little twin cockroaches fell out into our plate, and lay there hushed in an eternal repose.
Death to us is all powerful. The King of Terrors is to us the mighty sovereign before whom we must all bow, from the mighty emperor down to the meanest slave, from the railroad superintendent, riding in his special car, down to the humblest humorist, all alike must some day curl up and die. This saddens us at all times, but more peculiarly so when Death, with his relentless lawn-mower, has gathered in the young anu innocent. This was the case where two little twin cockroaches, whose lives had been unspotted, and whose years had been unclouded by wrong and selfishness were called upon to meet death together. In the stillness of the night, when others slept, these affectionate little twins crept into the glucose syrup and died.
We hope no one will misrepresent this matter. We did weep, and we are not ashamed to own it. We sat there and sobbed until the tablecloth was wet for four feet, and the venerable ham was floating around in tears. It was not for ourself, however, that we wept. No unkindness on the part of an eating house ever provoked such a tornado of woe. We just weep when we see death and are brought in close contact with it. And we were not the only one that shed tears. Dickinson and Warren wept, strong men as they were. Even the butter wept. Strong as it was it could not control its emotions.
We don't very often answer a newspaper attack, but when we are accused of weeping till people have to take off their boots and wring out their socks, we want the public to know what it is for.
Young children who have to wait till older people have eaten all there is in the house, should not open the dining-room door during the meal and ask the host if he is going to eat all day. It makes the company feel ill at ease, and lays up wrath in the parents' heart.
Children should not appear displeased with the regular courses at dinner, and then fill up on pie. Eat the less expensive food first, and then organize a picnic in the preserves afterward.
Do not close out the last of your soup by taking the plate in your mouth and pouring the liquid down your childish neck. You might spill it on your bosom, and it enlarges and distorts the mouth unnecessarily.
When asked what part of the fowl you prefer, do not say you will take the part that goes over the fence last. This remark is very humorous, but the rising generation ought to originate some new table jokes that will be worthy of the age in which we live.
Children should early learn the use of the fork, and how to handle it. This knowledge can be acquired by allowing them to pry up the carpet tacks with this instrument, and other little exercises, such as the parent mind may suggest.
The child should be taught at once not to wave his bread around over the table, while in conversation, or to fill his mouth full of potatoes, and then converse in a rich tone of voice with someone out in the yard. He might get his dinner down his trochea and cause his parents great anxiety.
In picking up a plate or saucer filled with soup or with moist food, the child should be taught not to parboil his thumb in the contents of the dish, and to avoid swallowing soup bones or other indigestible debris.
Toothpicks are generally the last course, and children should not be permitted to pick their teeth and kick the table through the other exercises. While grace is being said at table, children should know that it is a breach of good breeding to smouge fruit cake, just because their parents' heads are bowed down, and their attention for the moment turned in another direction. Children ought not to be permitted to find fault with the dinner, or fool with the cat while they are eating. Boys should, before going to the table, empty all the frogs and grasshoppers out of their pockets, or those insects might crawl out during the festivities, and jump into the gravy.
If a fly wades into your jelly up to his gambrels, do not mash him with your spoon before all the guests, as death is at all times depressing to those who are at dinner, and retards digestion. Take the fly out carefully, with what naturally adheres to his person, and wipe him on the table cloth. It will demonstrate your perfect command of yourself, and afford much amusement for the company. Do not stand up in your chair and try to spear a roll with your fork. It is not good manners to do so, and you might slip and bust your crust, by so doing. Say "thank you," and "much obliged," and "beg pardon," wherever you can work in these remarks, as it throws people off their guard, and gives you an opportunity to get in your work on the pastry and other bric-a-brac near you at the time.
It is the evening of St. Valentine's Day, and I am thinking of the long ago. St. Valentine's Day is nothing now but a blessed memory. Another landmark has been left behind in our onward march toward the great hereafter. We come upon the earth, battle a little while with its joys and its griefs, and then we pass away to give place to other actors on the mighty stage.
Only a few short years ago what an era St. Valentine's Day was to me. How I still get valentines, but they are different and they effect me differently. They are not of so high an order of merit artistically, and the poetry is more impudent and less on the turtle-dove order.
Some may be neglected on St. Valentine's Day, but I am not. I never go away by myself and get mad because I have been overlooked. I generally get valentines enough to paper a large hall. I file them away carefully and sell them back to the dealer for next year. Then the following St. Valentine's Day I love to look at the familiar features of those I have received in the years agone.
One of these blessed valentines I have learned to love as I do my life. I received it first in 1870. It represents a newspaper reporter with a nose on him like the woman's suffrage movement. It is a large, enthusiastic nose of a bright bay color with bias folds of the same, shirred with dregs of wine. How well I know that nose. The reporter is represented in tight green pants and orange coat. The vest is scarlet and the necktie is maroon, shot with old gold.
The picture represents the young journalist as a little bit disposed to be brainy. The intellect is large and abnormally prominent. It hangs out over the deep-set eyes like the minority juror on the average panel.
I cannot help contrasting this dazzling five-cent valentine with the delicate little poem in pale blue and Torchon lace which I received in the days of yore from the red-headed girl with the wart on her thumb. Ah! how little of genuine pleasure have fame and fortune to offer us compared with that of sitting behind the same school desk with the Bismarck blonde of the school and with her alternately masticating the same hunk of spruce gum.
I sometimes chew gum nowadays to see if it will bring back the old pleasant sensations, but it don't. The teacher is not watching me now. There is too little restraint, and the companion, too, who then assisted in operating the gum business, and used to spit on her slate with such elegance and abandon, and wipe it thoughtfully off with her apron, she too is gone. One summer day when the little birds were pouring forth their lay, and the little lambs were frisking on the green sward, and yanking their tails athwart the ambient air, she lit out for the great untried West with a grasshopper sufferer. The fluff and bloom of existence for her too is gone. She bangs eternal punishment out of thirteen consecutive children near Ogallalla, Neb., and wears out her sweet girlish nature working up her husband's underclothes into a rag carpet. It seems tough, but such is life.
The righteous war against the carrying of pistols is still going bravely on all over the country, and the mayors of the larger cities are making it red hot for every one who violates the law.
This is right. No man ever carried one that he did not intend to kill some one with it. If he does not intend to kill some one, why does he carry a deadly weapon? The result is that very often a man who, if he had gone unarmed as he ought to, would have been a respected citizen, becomes a caged murderer with a weeping, widowed wife and worse than orphaned children at home.
We used to feel at times as though here in this western country we were having a pretty lonesome time of it, never having killed anybody, and we began to think that in order to command respect we would have to start a private cemetery, so one time when we had a good opportunity we drew our pop on a man and shot at him.
He often writes to us now and tells us how healthy he is. Before we shot at him he used to have trouble with his digestion, and every spring he was so bilious that he didn't care whether he lived or not. How he weighs 200 and looks forward to a long and useful life.
Still the revolver is not always a health promoter. It is more deadly as a general rule for the owner than any one else. Half at least of the distressing accidents that occur as a result of carrying a pistol, are distressing mainly to the man who carries the weapon.
We sometimes think that if editors would set the example, and instead of going around armed to the teeth, would rely on the strength of their noble manhood and a white oak club, others would follow and discard the pistol. For a year we have been using a club, with the best results, and although the exercise has been pretty severe at times, the death rate has been considerably reduced, and many of our citizens have been spared to bless the community with their presence.
Let the press of the country take hold of this thing, and the day will come when a man may enter the editorial office as fearlessly as now he goes into the postoffice.
Nothing unnerves a man like going into a sanctum and finding fragments of an old acquaintance scattered over the velvet carpet, or ruthlessly jammed into a porcelain cuspidore.
Dear reader, did you ever wrestle with a hen that had a wild, uncontrollable desire to incubate? Did you ever struggle on, day after day, trying to convince her that her mission was to furnish eggs for your table instead of hovering all day on a door knob, trying to hatch out a litter of front doors?
William II. Root, of this place, who has made the hen a study, both in her home life and while lying in the embrace of death, has struck upon an argument which the average hen will pay more attention to than any other he has discovered in his researches.
He says the modern hen ignores almost everything when she once gets the notion that she has received a call to incubate. You can deluge her with the garden hose, or throw old umbrellas at her, or change her nest, but that don't count with the firm and stubborn hen. You can take the eggs out of the nest and put a blooded bull-dog or a nest of new-laid bumblebees in place of them, and she will hover over them as assiduously as she did before.
William H. Root's hen had shown some signs of this mania, so he took out the eggs and let her try her incubate on a horse rake awhile, just so she could kind of taper off gradual and not have her mind shattered. Then he tried her at hatching out four-tined forks, and at last her taste got so vitiated that she took the contract to furnish the country with bustles by hatching out an old hoop skirt that had gone to seed.
Mr. Boot then made an experiment. We were one of a board of scientists who assisted in the consultation. The owner of the hen got a strip of red flannel and tied it around her tail.
The hen seemed annoyed as soon as she discovered it, No hen cares to have a sash hung on her system that doesn't match her complexion. A seal-brown hen with a red flannel polonaise don't seem to harmonize, and she is aware of it just as much as anybody is.
That hen seemed to have thought of something all at once that had escaped her mind before, and so she went away.
She stepped about nine feet at a lick on the start and gained time as she proceeded. When she bumped her nose against the corner of the stable she changed her mind about her direction. She altered her course a little, but continued her rapid style of movement.
Her eyes began to look wild. She seemed to be losing her reason. She got so pretty soon that she did'nt recognize the faces of her friends. She passed Mr. Root without being able to distinguish him from a total stranger.
These peculiar movements were kept up during the entire afternoon, till the hen got so fatigued that she crawled into a length of old stovepipe, and the committee retired to prepare a report.
It is the opinion of the press that this is a triumph of genius in hen culture. It is not severe, though linn, in its treatment and while it of course annoys and unmans the hen temporarily, it is salutary in its results, and at the same time it furnishes a pleasant little matinee for the spectators. We say to those upon whose hands time hangs heavily these long-days, that there is nothing that soothes the ruffled mind and fills the soul with a glad thrill of pleasure like the erratic movements of a decorated hen. It may not be a high order of enjoyment, but it affords a great deal of laugh to the superficial foot to those who are not very accomplished, and who laugh at things and then consider its propriety afterward.
Calamity is the name of a man who lives in the gold camp of Cummins City. He has another name, but nobody seems to know what it is. It has been torn off the wrapper some way, and so the boys call him Calamity.
He is a man of singular mind and construction. The most noticeable feature about Calamity is his superstitious dread of muscular activity. Some people will not tackle any kind of business enterprise on Friday. Calamity is even more the victim of this vague superstition, and has a dread of beginning work on any day of the week, for fear that some disaster may befall him.
Last spring he had a little domestic trouble, and his wife made complaints that Calamity had worn out an old long-handled shovel on her, trying to convince her about some abstruse theory of his.
The testimony seemed rather against Calamity, and the miners told him that as soon as they got over the rush a little and had the leisure they would have to hang him.
They hoped he would take advantage of the hurry of business and go away, because they didn't want to hang him so early in the season. But Calamity didn't go away. He stayed because it was easier to stay than it was to go. He did not, of course, pine for the notoriety of being the first man hung in the young camp, but rather than pull up stakes and move away from a place where there were so many pleasant associations, he concluded to stay and meet death calmly in whatever form he might come.
One evening, after the work of the day was done and the boys had eaten their suppers, one of them suggested that it would be a good time to hang Calamity. So they got things in shape and went down to the Big Laramie bridge.
Calamity was with them. They got things ready for the exercise to begin, and then asked the victim if he had anything to say. He loosened the rope around his neck a little with one hand, so that he could speak with more freedom, and holding his pantaloons on with the other, said:
"Gentlemen of the convention, I call you to witness that this public demonstration toward me is entirely unsought on my part. I have never courted notoriety.
"Plugging along in comparative obscurity is good enough for me. This is the first time I have ever addressed an audience. That is why I am embarrassed and ill at ease.
"You have brought me here to hang me because I seem harsh and severe with my wife. You have entered the hallowed presence of my home life and assumed the prerogative of subverting my household discipline.
"It is well. I do not care to live, so long as my authority is questioned. You have already changed my submissive wife to an arrogant and self-reliant woman.
"Yesterday I told her to go out and grease the wagon, and she straightened up to her full height and told me to grease it myself.
"I have always been kind and thoughtful to her. When she had to go up in the gulch in the winter after firewood, my coat shielded her from the storm while I sat in the cabin through the long hours. I could name other instances of unselfishness on my part, but I will not take up your time.
"She uses my smoking tobacco, and kicks my vertebrć into my hat on the most unlooked-for occasions. She does not love me any more, and life to me is only a hollow mockery.
"Death, with its wide waste of eternal calm, and its shoreless sea of rest, is a glad relief to me. I go, but I leave in your midst a skittish and able-bodied widow who will make Rome howl. I bequeath her to this camp. She is yours, gentlemen. She is all I have to give, but in giving her to you, I feel that my untimely death will always be looked upon in this gulch as a dire calamity.
"The day will come when you will look back upon this awful night and wish that I was alive again; but it will be too late. I will be far away. My soul will be in the land where domestic infelicity and cold feet can never enter.
"Bury me at the foot of Vinegar Hill, where the sage hen and the fuzzy bumblebee may gambol o'er my lowly grave."
When Calamity had finished, an impromptu caucus was called, and when it was adjourned, Calamity went home to his cabin to surprise his wife. She hasn't fully recovered from the surprise as we go to press.
Little boys who are required by their teacher to write compositions at school can save a great deal of unnecessary worry and anxiety by calling on the editor of this paper, and glancing over the holiday stock of second-hand poems and essays. Debating clubs and juvenile lyceums supplied at a large reduction. The following are a few selections, with price:
"Old Age," a poem written in red ink, price ten cents. "The Dog," blank verse, written on foolscap with a hard pencil, five cents. "Who will love me all the while?" a tale, price three cents per pound. "Hold me in your clean, white arms," song and dance, by the author of "Beautiful Snow," price very reasonable; it must be sold. "She ain't no longer mine, nor I ain't hern," or the sad story of two sundered hearts; spruce gum and licorice taken in exchange for this piece. "God: His attributes and peculiarities," will be sold at a cent and a half per pound, or traded for a tin dipper for the office. Give us a call before purchasing elsewhere.
The stock on hand must be disposed of, in order to give place to the new stock of odes and sonnets on spring, and contributions on the "the violet" and the "skipful lamb."
Neat and beautiful penmanship is very desirable in business correspondence, but it is most important that you should not spell God with a little g or codfish with a k. Ornamental penmanship is good, but it will not take the cuss off if you don't know how to spell. Read your letter over carefully after you have written it, if you can; if not send it with an apology about the rush of business. In ordering goods, state whether you will remit soon or whether the account should be placed in the refrigerator.
A man works twenty years to become known as a scholar, a newspaper man and a gentleman, while the illiterate murderer springs into immediate notoriety in a day, and the widow of his victim cannot even get her life insurance. These things are what make people misanthropic and tenacious of their belief in a hell.
The average English joke has its peculiarities. A sort of mellow distance. A kind of chastened reluctance. A coy and timid, yet trusting, though evanescent intangibility which softly lingers in the untroubled air, and lulls the tired senses to dreamy rest, like the subdued murmur of a hoarse jackass about nine miles up the gulch.
He must be a hardened wretch, indeed, who has not felt his bosom heave and the scalding tear steal down his furrowed cheek after he has read an English joke. There can be no hope for the man who has not been touched by the gentle, pleading, yet all potent sadness embodied in the humorous paragraph of the true Englishman.
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