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Remarks

by Bill Nye · English · Gutenberg #8220 · 901,123 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Remarks

Author: Bill Nye


        
Release date: June 1, 2005 [eBook #8220]
                Most recently updated: March 13, 2018

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK REMARKS ***




Produced by Charles Franks, Beth Trapaga and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team








REMARKS


By BILL NYE.

(EDGAR W. NYE.)


   Ah Sin was his name;
   And I shall not deny,
   In regard to the same,
   What the name might imply:
   But his smile it was pensive and childlike,
   As I frequent remarked to Bill Nye.
   --Bret Harte.


With over one hundred and fifty illustrations,
by J.H. SMITH.


[Illustration]

[Illustration: Bill Nye]


DIRECTIONS.

This book is not designed specially for any one class of people. It is
for all. It is a universal repository of thought. Some of my best
thoughts are contained in this book. Whenever I would think a thought
that I thought had better remain unthought, I would omit it from this
book. For that reason the book is not so large as I had intended. When
a man coldly and dispassionately goes at it to eradicate from his work
all that may not come up to his standard of merit, he can make a large
volume shrink till it is no thicker than the bank book of an outspoken
clergyman.

This is the fourth book that I have published in response to the
clamorous appeals of the public. Whenever the public got to clamoring
too loudly for a new book from me and it got so noisy that I could not
ignore it any more, I would issue another volume. The first was a red
book, succeeded by a dark blue volume, after which I published a green
book, all of which were kindly received by the American people, and,
under the present yielding system of international copyright, greedily
snapped up by some of the tottering dynasties.

But I had long hoped to publish a larger, better and, if possible, a
redder book than the first; one that would contain my better thoughts,
thoughts that I had thought when I was feeling well; thoughts that I
had emitted while my thinker was rearing up on its hind feet, if I may
be allowed that term; thoughts that sprang forth with a wild whoop and
demanded recognition.

This book is the result of that hope and that wish. It is my greatest
and best book. It is the one that will live for weeks after other books
have passed away. Even to those who cannot read, it will come like a
benison when there is no benison in the house. To the ignorant, the
pictures will be pleasing. The wise will revel in its wisdom, and the
housekeeper will find that with it she may easily emphasize a statement
or kill a cockroach.

The range of subjects treated in this book is wonderful, even to me. It
is a library of universal knowledge, and the facts contained in it are
different from any other facts now in use. I have carefully guarded,
all the way through, against using hackneyed and moth-eaten facts. As a
result, I am able to come before the people with a set of new and
attractive statements, so fresh and so crisp that an unkind word would
wither them in a moment.

I believe there is nothing more to add, except that I most heartily
endorse the book. It has been carefully read over by the proof-reader
and myself, so we do not ask the public to do anything that we were not
willing to do ourselves.

I cannot be responsible for the board of orphans whose parents read this
book and leave their children in destitute circumstances.

Bill Nye



CONTENTS.

About Geology
About Portraits
A Bright Future for Pugilism
Absent Minded
A Calm
Accepting the Laramie Postoffice
A Circular
A Collection of Keys
A Convention
A Father's Advice to his Son
A Father's Letter
A Goat in a Frame
A Great Spiritualist
A Great Upheaval
A Journalistic Tenderfoot
A Letter of Regrets
All About Menials
All About Oratory
Along Lake Superior
A Lumber Camp
A Mountain Snowstorm
Anatomy
Anecdotes of Justice
Anecdotes of the Stage
A New Autograph Album
A New Play
An Operatic Entertainment
Answering an Invitation
Answers to Correspondents
A Peaceable Man
A Picturesque Picnic
A Powerful Speech
Archimedes
A Resign
Arnold Winkelreid
Asking for a Pass
A Spencerian Ass
Astronomy
A Thrilling Experience
A Wallula Night
B. Franklin, Deceased
Biography of Spartacus
Boston Common and Environs
Broncho Sam
Bunker Hill
Care of House Plants
Catching a Buffalo
Causes for Thanksgiving
Chinese Justice
Christopher Columbus
Come Back
Concerning Book Publishing
Concerning Coroners
Crowns and Crowned Heads
Daniel Webster
Dessicated Mule
Dogs and Dog Days
Doosedly Dilatory
“Done It A-Purpose”
 Down East Rum
Dr. Dizart's Dog
Drunk in a Plug Hat
Early Day Justice
Eccentricities of Genius
Eccentricity in Lunch
Etiquette at Hotels
Every Man His Own Paper-Hanger
Extracts from a Queen's Diary
Farming in Maine
Favored a Higher Fine
Fifteen Years Apart
Flying Machines
General Sheridan's Horse
George the Third
Great Sacrifice of Bric-a-Brac
Habits of a Literary Man
“Heap Brain”
 History of Babylon
Hours With Great Men
How Evolution Evolves
In Acknowledgment
Insomnia in Domestic Animals
In Washington
“I Spy”
 I Tried Milling
John Adams
John Adams' Diary
John Adams' Diary, (No. 2.)
John Adams' Diary, (No. 3.)
Knights of the Pen
Letter from New York
Letter to a Communist
Life Insurance as a Health Restorer
Literary Freaks
Lost Money
Lovely Horrors
Man Overbored
Mark Antony
Milling in Pompeii
Modern Architecture
More Paternal Correspondence
Mr. Sweeney's Cat
Murray and the Mormons
Mush and Melody
My Dog
My Experience as an Agriculturist
My Lecture Abroad
My Mine
My Physician
My School Days
Nero
No More Frontier
On Cyclones
One Kind of Fool
Our Forefathers
Parental Advice
Petticoats at the Polls
Picnic Incidents
Plato
Polygamy as a Religious Duty
Preventing a Scandal
Railway Etiquette
Recollections of Noah Webster
Rev. Mr. Hallelujah's Hoss
Roller Skating
Rosalinde
Second Letter to the President
She Kind of Coaxed Him
Shorts
Sixty Minutes in America
Skimming the Milky Way
Somnambulism and Crime
Spinal Meningitis
Spring
Squaw Jim
Squaw Jim's Religion
Stirring Incidents at a Fire
Strabismus and Justice
Street Cars and Curiosities
Taxidermy
The Amateur Carpenter
The Approaching Humorist
The Arabian Language
The Average Hen
The Bite of a Mad Dog
The Blase Young Man
The Board of Trade
The Cell Nest
The Chinese God
The Church Debt
The Cow Boy
The Crops
The Duke of Rawhide
The Expensive Word
The Heyday of Life
The Holy Terror
The Indian Orator
The Little Barefoot Boy
The Miner at Home
The Newspaper
The Old South
The Old Subscriber
The Opium Habit
The Photograph Habit
The Poor Blind Pig
The Sedentary Hen
The Silver Dollar
The Snake Indian
The Story of a Struggler
The Wail of a Wife
The Warrior's Oration
The Ways of Doctors
The Weeping Woman
The Wild Cow
They Fell
Time's Changes
To a Married Man
To an Embryo Poet
To Her Majesty
To The President-Elect
Twombley's Tale
Two Ways of Telling It
Venice
Verona
“We”
 What We Eat
Woman's Wonderful Influence
Woodtick William's Story
Words About Washington
Wrestling With the Mazy
“You Heah Me, Sah!”


[Illustration: WE WERE NOT ON TERMS OF INTIMACY.]




My School Days.

Looking over my own school days, there are so many things that I would
rather not tell, that it will take very little time and space for me to
use in telling what I am willing that the carping public should know about
my early history.

I began my educational career in a log school house. Finding that other
great men had done that way, I began early to look around me for a log
school house where I could begin in a small way to soak my system full of
hard words and information.

For a time I learned very rapidly. Learning came to me with very little
effort at first. I would read my lesson over once or twice and then take
my place in the class. It never bothered me to recite my lesson and so I
stood at the head of the class. I could stick my big toe through a
knot-hole in the floor and work out the most difficult problem. This
became at last a habit with me. With my knot-hole I was safe, without it I
would hesitate.

A large red-headed boy, with feet like a summer squash and eyes like those
of a dead codfish, was my rival. He soon discovered that I was very
dependent on that knot-hole, and so one night he stole into the school
house and plugged up the knot-hole, so that I could not work my toe into
it and thus refresh my memory.

Then the large red-headed boy, who had not formed the knot-hole habit went
to the head of the class and remained there.

After I grew larger, my parents sent me to a military school. That is
where I got the fine military learning and stately carriage that I still
wear.

My room was on the second floor, and it was very difficult for me to leave
it at night, because the turnkey locked us up at 9 o'clock every evening.
Still, I used to get out once in a while and wander around in the
starlight. I did not know yet why I did it, but I presume it was a kind of
somnambulism. I would go to bed thinking so intently of my lessons that I
would get up and wander away, sometimes for miles, in the solemn night.

One night I awoke and found myself in a watermelon patch. I was never so
ashamed in my life. It is a very serious thing to be awakened so rudely
out of a sound sleep, by a bull dog, to find yourself in the watermelon
vineyard of a man with whom you are not acquainted. I was not on terms of
social intimacy with this man or his dog. They did not belong to our set.
We had never been thrown together before.

After that I was called the great somnambulist and men who had watermelon
conservatories shunned me. But it cured me of my somnambulism. I have
never tried to somnambule any more since that time.

There are other little incidents of my schooldays that come trooping up in
my memory at this moment, but they were not startling in their nature.
Mine is but the history of one who struggled on year after year, trying to
do better, but most always failing to connect. The boys of Boston would do
well to study carefully my record and then--do differently.




Recollections of Noah Webster.

Mr. Webster, no doubt, had the best command of language of any American
author prior to our day. Those who have read his ponderous but rather
disconnected romance known as “Websters Unabridged Dictionary, or How One
Word Led on to Another.” will agree with me that he was smart. Noah never
lacked for a word by which to express himself. He was a brainy man and a
good speller.

It would ill become me at this late day to criticise Mr. Webster's great
work--a work that is now in almost every library, school-room and counting
house in the land. It is a great book. I do believe that had Mr. Webster
lived he would have been equally fair in his criticism of my books.

I hate to compare my own works with those of Mr. Webster, because it may
seem egotistical in me to point out the good points in my literary labors;
but I have often heard it said, and so do not state it solely upon my own
responsibility, that Mr. Webster's book does not retain the interest of
the reader all the way through.

He has tried to introduce too many characters, and so we cannot follow
them all the way through. It is a good book to pick up and while away an
idle hour with, perhaps, but no one would cling to it at night till the
fire went out, chained to the thrilling plot and the glowing career of its
hero.

Therein consists the great difference between Mr. Webster and myself. A
friend of mine at Sing Sing once wrote me that from the moment he got hold
of my book, he never left his room till he finished it. He seemed chained
to the spot, he said, and if you can't believe a convict, who is entirely
out of politics, who in the name of George Washington can you believe?

Mr. Webster was most assuredly a brilliant writer, and I have discovered
in his later editions 118,000 words, no two of which are alike. This shows
great fluency and versatility, it is true, but we need something else. The
reader waits in vain to be thrilled by the author's wonderful word
painting. There is not a thrill in the whole tome. I had heard so much of
Mr. Webster that when I read his book I confess I was disappointed. It is
cold, methodical and dispassionate in the extreme.

As I said, however, it is a good book to pick up for the purpose of
whiling away an idle moment, and no one should start out on a long journey
without Mr. Webster's tale in his pocket. It has broken the monotony of
many a tedious trip for me.

Mr. Webster's “Speller” was a work of less pretentions, perhaps, and yet
it had an immense sale. Eight years ago this book had reached a sale of
40,000,000, and yet it had the same grave defect. It was disconnected,
cold, prosy and dull. I read it for years, and at last became a close
student of Mr. Webster's style, yet I never found but one thing in this
book, for which there seems to have been such a perfect stampede, that was
even ordinarily interesting, and that was a little gem. It was so
thrilling in its details, and so diametrically different from Mr.
Webster's style, that I have often wondered who he got to write it for
him. It related to the discovery of a boy by an elderly gentleman, in the
crotch of an ancestral apple tree, and the feeling of bitterness and
animosity that sprung up at the time between the boy and the elderly
gentleman.

Though I have been a close student of Mr. Webster for years, I am free to
say, and I do not wish to do an injustice to a great man in doing so, that
his ideas of literature and my own are entirely dissimilar. Possibly his
book has had a little larger sale than mine, but that makes no difference.
When I write a book it must engage the interest of the reader, and show
some plot to it. It must not be jerky in its style and scattering in its
statements.

I know it is a great temptation to write a book that will sell, but we
should have a higher object than that.

I do not wish to do an injustice to a man who has done so much for the
world, and one who could spell the longest word without hesitation, but I
speak of these things just as I would expect people to criticise my work.
If we aspire to monkey with the literati of our day we must expect to be
criticised. That's the way I look at it.

P.S.--I might also state that Noah Webster was a member of the
Legislature of Massachusetts at one time, and though I ought not to throw
it up to him at this date, I think it is nothing more than right that the
public should know the truth.




To Her Majesty.

To Queen Victoria, Regina Dei Gracia and acting mother-in-law on the side:

Dear Madame.--Your most gracious majesty will no doubt be surprised to hear
from me after my long silence. One reason that I have not written for some
time is that I had hoped to see you ere this, and not because I had grown
cold. I desire to congratulate you at this time upon your great success as
a mother-in-law, and your very exemplary career socially. As a queen you
have given universal satisfaction, and your family have married well.

[Illustration: ADVERTISING THE ENTERPRISE.]

But I desired more especially to write you in relation to another matter.
We are struggling here in America to establish an authors' international
copyright arrangement, whereby the authors of all civilized nations may be
protected in their rights to the profits of their literary labor, and the
movement so far has met with generous encouragement. As an author we
desire your aid and endorsement. Could you assist us? We are giving this
season a series of authors' readings in New York to aid in prosecuting the
work, and we would like to know whether we could not depend upon you to
take a part in these readings, rendering selections from your late work.

I assure your most gracious majesty that you would meet some of our best
literary people while here, and no pains would be spared to make your
visit a pleasant one, aside from the reading itself. We would advertise
your appearance extensively and get out a first-class audience on the
occasion of your debut here.

[Illustration: QUEEN VIC. READING.]

An effort would be made to provide passes for yourself, and reduced rates,
I think, could be secured for yourself and suite at the hotels. Of course
you could do as you thought best about bringing suite, however. Some of
us travel with our suites and some do not. I generally leave my suite at
home, myself.

You would not need to make any special change as to costume for the
occasion. We try to make it informal, so far as possible, and though some
of us wear full dress we do not make that obligatory on those who take a
part in the exercises. If you decide to wear your every-day reigning
clothes it will not excite comment on the part of our literati. We do not
judge an author or authoress by his or her clothes.

You will readily see that this will afford you an opportunity to appear
before some of the best people of New York, and at the same time you will
aid in a deserving enterprise.

It will also promote the sale of your book.

Perhaps you have all the royalty you want aside from what you may receive
from the sale of your works, but every author feels a pardonable pride in
getting his books into every household.

I would assure your most gracious majesty that your reception here as an
authoress will in no way suffer because you are an unnaturalized
foreigner. Any alien who feels a fraternal interest in the international
advancement of thought and the universal encouragement of the good, the
true and the beautiful in literature, will be welcome on these shores.

This is a broad land, and we aim to be a broad and cosmopolitan people.
Literature and free, willing genius are not hemmed in by State or national
linos. They sprout up and blossom under tropical skies no less than
beneath the frigid aurora borealis of the frozen North. We hail true merit
just as heartily and uproariously on a throne as we would anywhere else.
In fact, it is more deserving, if possible, for one who has never tried it
little knows how difficult it is to sit on a hard throne all day and write
well. We are to recognize struggling genius wherever it may crop out. It
is no small matter for an almost unknown monarch to reign all day and then
write an article for the press or a chapter for a serial story, only,
perhaps, to have it returned by the publishers. All these things are
drawbacks to a literary life, that we here in America know little of.

I hope your most gracious majesty will decide to come, and that you will
pardon this long letter. It will do you good to get out this way for a few
weeks, and I earnestly hope that you will decide to lock up the house and
come prepared to make quite a visit. We have some real good authors here
now in America, and we are not ashamed to show them to any one. They are
not only smart, but they are well behaved and know how to appear in
company. We generally read selections from our own works, and can have a
brass band to play between the selections, if thought best. For myself, I
prefer to have a full brass band accompany me while I read. The audience
also approves of this plan.

[Illustration: THE ACCOMPANIMENT.]

We have been having some very hot weather here for the past week, but it is
now cooler. Farmers are getting in their crops in good shape, but wheat is
still low in price, and cranberries are souring on the vines. All of our
canned red raspberries worked last week, and we had to can them over
again. Mr. Riel, who went into the rebellion business in Canada last
winter, will be hanged in September if it don't rain. It will be his first
appearance on the gallows, and quite a number of our leading American
criminals are going over to see his debut.

Hoping to hear from you by return mail or prepaid cablegram, I beg leave
to remain your most gracious and indulgent majesty's humble and obedient
servant.

Bill Nye.




Habits of a Literary Man.

The editor of an Eastern health magazine, having asked for information
relative to the habits, hours of work, and style and frequency of feed
adopted by literary men, and several parties having responded who were no
more essentially saturated with literature than I am, I now take my pen in
hand to reveal the true inwardness of my literary life, so that boys, who
may yearn to follow in my footsteps and wear a laurel wreath the year round
in place of a hat, may know what the personal habits of a literary party
are.

I rise from bed the first thing in the morning, leaving my couch not
because I am dissatisfied with it, but because I cannot carry it with me
during the day.

I then seat myself on the edge of the bed and devote a few moments to
thought. Literary men who have never set aside a few moments on rising for
thought will do well to try it.

I then insert myself into a pair of middle-aged pantaloons. It is needless
to say that girls who may have a literary tendency will find little to
interest them here.

Other clothing is added to the above from time to time. I then bathe
myself. Still this is not absolutely essential to a literary life. Others
who do not do so have been equally successful.

Some literary people bathe before dressing.

I then go down stairs and out to the barn, where I feed the horse. Some
literary men feel above taking care of a horse, because there is really
nothing in common between the care of a horse and literature, but
simplicity is my watchword. T. Jefferson would have to rise early in the
day to eclipse me in simplicity. I wish I had as many dollars as I have
got simplicity.

I then go in to breakfast. This meal consists almost wholly of food. I am
passionately fond of food, and I may truly say, with my hand on my heart,
that I owe much of my great success in life to this inward craving, this
constant yearning for something better.

During this meal I frequently converse with my family. I do not feel above
my family, at least, if I do, I try to conceal it as much as possible.
Buckwheat pancakes in a heated state, with maple syrup on the upper side,
are extremely conducive to literature. Nothing jerks the mental faculties
around with greater rapidity than buckwheat pancakes.

After breakfast the time is put in to good advantage looking forward to
the time when dinner will be ready. From 8 to 10 A. M., however, I
frequently retire to my private library hot-bed in the hay mow, and write
1,200 words in my forthcoming book, the price of which will be $2.50 in
cloth and $4 with Russia back.

I then play Copenhagen with some little girls 21 years of age, who live
near by, and of whom I am passionately fond.

After that I dig some worms, with a view to angling. I then angle. After
this I return home, waiting until dusk, however, as I do not like to
attract attention. Nothing is more distasteful to a truly good man of
wonderful literary acquirements, and yet with singular modesty, than the
coarse and rude scrutiny of the vulgar herd.

In winter I do not angle. I read the “Pirate Prince” or the “Missourian's
Mash,” or some other work, not so much for the plot as the style, that I
may get my mind into correct channels of thought I then play “old sledge”
 in a rambling sort of manner. I sometimes spend an evening at home, in
order to excite remark and draw attention to my wonderful eccentricity.

I do not use alcohol in any form, if I know it, though sometimes I am
basely deceived by those who know of my peculiar prejudice, and who do it,
too, because they enjoy watching my odd and amusing antics at the time.

Alcohol should be avoided entirely by literary workers, especially young
women. There can be no more pitiable sight to the tender hearted, than a
young woman of marked ability writing an obituary poem while under the
influence of liquor.

I knew a young man who was a good writer. His penmanship was very good,
indeed. He once wrote an article for the press while under the influence
of liquor. He sent it to the editor, who returned it at once with a cold
and cruel letter, every line of which was a stab. The letter came at a
time when he was full of remorse.

He tossed up a cent to see whether he should blow out his brains or go
into the ready-made clothing business. The coin decided that he should die
by his own hand, but his head ached so that he didn't feel like shooting
into it. So he went into the ready-made clothing business, and now he pays
taxes on $75,000, so he is probably worth $150,000. This, of course,
salves over his wounded heart, but he often says to me that he might have
been in the literary business to-day if he had let liquor alone.




A Father's Letter.

My dear son.--Your letter of last week reached us yesterday, and I enclose
$13, which is all I have by me at the present time. I may sell the other
shote next week and make up the balance of what you wanted. I will
probably have to wear the old buffalo overcoat to meetings again this
winter, but that don't matter so long as you are getting an education.

I hope you will get your education as cheap as you can, for it cramps your
mother and me like Sam Hill to put up the money. Mind you, I don't
complain. I knew education come high, but I didn't know the clothes cost
so like sixty.

I want you to be so that you can go anywhere and spell the hardest word. I
want you to be able to go among the Romans or the Medes and Persians and
talk to any of them in their own native tongue.

I never had any advantages when I was a boy, but your mother and I decided
that we would sock you full of knowledge, if your liver held out,
regardless of expense. We calculate to do it, only we want you to go as
slow on swallowtail coats as possible till we can sell our hay.

Now, regarding that boat-paddling suit, and that baseball suit, and that
bathing suit, and that roller-rinktum suit, and that lawn-tennis suit,
mind, I don't care about the expense, because you say a young man can't
really educate himself thoroughly without them, but I wish you'd send home
what you get through with this fall, and I'll wear them through the winter
under my other clothes. We have a good deal severer winters here than we
used to, or else I'm failing in bodily health. Last winter I tried to go
through without underclothes, the way I did when I was a boy, but a
Manitoba wave came down our way and picked me out of a crowd with its eyes
shet.

In your last letter you alluded to getting injured in a little “hazing
scuffle with a pelican from the rural districts.” I don't want any harm to
come to you, my son, but if I went from the rural districts and another
young gosling from the rural districts undertook to haze me, I would meet
him when the sun goes down, and I would swat him across the back of the
neck with a fence board, and then I would meander across the pit of his
stomach and put a blue forget-me-not under his eye.

Your father aint much on Grecian mythology and how to get the square root
of a barrel of pork, but he wouldn't allow any educational institutions to
haze him with impunity. Perhaps you remember once when you tried to haze
your father a little, just to kill time, and how long it took you to
recover. Anybody that goes at it right can have a good deal of fun with
your father, but those who have sought to monkey with him, just to break
up the monotony of life, have most always succeeded in finding what they
sought.

[Illustration: RETRIBUTIVE JUSTICE.]

I ain't much of a pensman, so you will have to excuse this letter. We are
all quite well, except old Fan, who has a galded shoulder, and hope this
will find you enjoying the same great blessing.

Your Father.




Archimedes.

Archimedes, whose given name has been accidentally torn off and swallowed
up in oblivion, was born in Syracuse, 2,171 years ago last spring. He was
a philosopher and mathematical expert. During his life he was never
successfully stumped in figures. It ill befits me now, standing by his
new-made grave, to say aught of him that is not of praise. We can only
mourn his untimely death, and wonder which of our little band of great men
will be the next to go.

Archimedes was the first to originate and use the word “Eureka.” It has
been successfully used very much lately, and as a result we have the
Eureka baking powder, the Eureka suspender, the Eureka bed-bug buster, the
Eureka shirt, and the Eureka stomach bitters. Little did Archimedes wot,
when he invented this term, that it would come into such general use.

Its origin has been explained before, but it would not be out of place
here for me to tell it as I call it to mind now, looking back over
Archie's eventful life.

King Hiero had ordered an eighteen karat crown, size 7-1/8, and, after
receiving it from the hands of the jeweler, suspected that it had been
adulterated. He therefore applied to Archimedes to ascertain, if possible,
whether such was the case or not. Archimedes had just got in on No. 3, two
hours late, and covered with dust. He at once started for a hot and cold
bath emporium on Sixteenth street, meantime wondering how the dickens he
would settle that crown business.

He filled the bath-tub level full, and, piling up his raiment on the
floor, jumped in. Displacing a large quantity of water, equal to his own
bulk, he thereupon solved the question of specific gravity, and,
forgetting his bill, forgetting his clothes, he sailed up Sixteenth street
and all over Syracuse, clothed in shimmering sunlight and a plain gold
ring, shouting “Eureka!” He ran head-first into a Syracuse policeman and
howled “Eureka!” The policeman said: “You'll have to excuse me; I don't
know him.” He scattered the Syracuse Normal school on its way home, and
tried to board a Fifteenth street bob-tail car, yelling “Eureka!” The
car-driver told him that Eureka wasn't on the car, and referred Archimedes
to a clothing store.

Everywhere he was greeted with surprise. He tried to pay his car-fare, but
found that he had left his money in his other clothes.

Some thought it was the revised statute of Hercules; that he had become
weary of standing on his pedestal during the hot weather, and had started
out for fresh air. I give this as I remember it. The story is foundered on
fact.

Archimedes once said: “Give me where I may stand, and I will move the
world.” I could write it in the original Greek, but, fearing that the
nonpareil delirium tremens type might get short, I give it in the English
language.

It may be tardy justice to a great mathematician and scientist, but I have
a few resolutions of respect which I would be very glad to get printed on
this solemn occasion, and mail copies of the paper to his relatives and
friends:

“WHEREAS, It has pleased an All-wise Providence to remove from our midst
Archimedes, who was ever at the front in all deserving labors and
enterprises; and

“WHEREAS, We can but feebly express our great sorrow in the loss of
Archimedes, whose front name has escaped our memory; therefore

“_Resolved_, That in his death we have lost a leading citizen of Syracuse,
and one who never shook his friends--never weakened or gigged back on
those he loved.

“_Resolved_, That copies of these resolutions will be spread on the
moments of the meeting of the Common Council of Syracuse, and that they be
published in the Syracuse papers eodtfpdq&cod, and that marked copies of
said papers be mailed to the relatives of the deceased.”




To the President-Elect.

Dear Sir.--The painful duty of turning over to you the administration of
these United States and the key to the front door of the White House has
been assigned to me. You will find the key hanging inside the storm-door,
and the cistern-pole up stairs in the haymow of the barn. I have made a
great many suggestions to the outgoing administration relative to the
transfer of the Indian bureau from the department of the Interior to that
of the sweet by-and-by. The Indian, I may say, has been a great source of
annoyance to me, several of their number having jumped one of my most
valuable mining claims on White river. Still, I do not complain of that.
This mine, however, I am convinced would be a good paying property if
properly worked, and should you at any time wish to take the regular army
and such other help as you may need and re-capture it from our red
brothers, I would be glad to give you a controlling interest in it.

[Illustration: A DEARTH OF SOAP IN THE LAUNDRY AND BATH-ROOM.]

You will find all papers in their appropriate pigeon-holes, and a small
jar of cucumber pickles down cellar, which were left over and to which you
will be perfectly welcome. The asperities and heart burnings that were the
immediate result of a hot and unusually bitter campaign are now all
buried. Take these pickles and use them as though they were your own. They
are none too good for you. You deserve them. We may differ politically,
but that need not interfere with our warm personal friendship.

You will observe on taking possession of the administration, that the navy
is a little bit weather-beaten and wormy. I would suggest that it be newly
painted in the spring. If it had been my good fortune to receive a
majority of the suffrages of the people for the office which you now hold,
I should have painted the navy red. Still, that need not influence you in
the course which you may see fit to adopt.

There are many affairs of great moment which I have not enumerated in this
brief letter, because I felt some little delicacy and timidity about
appearing to be at all dictatorial or officious about a matter wherein the
public might charge me with interference.

I hope you will receive the foregoing in a friendly spirit, and whatever
your convictions may be upon great questions of national interest, either
foreign or domestic, that you will not undertake to blow out the gas on
retiring, and that you will in other ways realize the fond anticipations
which are now cherished in your behalf by a mighty people whose aggregated
eye is now on to you.

Bill Nye.

P.S.--You will be a little surprised, no doubt, to find no soap in the
laundry or bath-rooms. It probably got into the campaign in some way and
was absorbed.

B.N.




Anatomy.

The word anatomy is derived from two Greek spatters and three polywogs,
which, when translated, signify “up through” and “to cut,” so that anatomy
actually, when translated from the original wappy-jawed Greek, means to
cut up through. That is no doubt the reason why the medical student
proceeds to cut up through the entire course.

[Illustration: STUDYING ANATOMY.]

Anatomy is so called because its best results are obtained from the
cutting or dissecting of organism. For that reason there is a growing
demand in the neighborhood of the medical college for good second-hand
organisms. Parties having well preserved organisms that they are not
actually using, will do well to call at the side door of the medical
college after 10 P.M.

The branch of the comparative anatomy which seeks to trace the unities of
plan which are exhibited in diverse organisms, and which discovers, as far
as may be, the principles which govern the growth and development of
organized bodies, and which finds functional analogies and structural
homologies, is denominated philosophical or transcendental anatomy. (This
statement, though strictly true, is not original with me.)

Careful study of the human organism after death, shows traces of
functional analogies and structural homologies in people who were supposed
to have been in perfect health all their lives Probably many of those we
meet in the daily walks of life, many, too, who wear a smile and outwardly
seem happy, have either one or both of these things. A man may live a
false life and deceive his most intimate friends in the matter of
anatomical analogies or homologies, but he cannot conceal it from the
eagle eye of the medical student. The ambitious medical student makes a
specialty of true inwardness.

The study of the structure of animals is called zootomy. The attempt to
study the anatomical structure of the grizzly bear from the inside has not
been crowned with success. When the anatomizer and the bear have been
thrown together casually, it has generally been a struggle between the two
organisms to see which would make a study of the structure of the other.
Zootomy and moral suasion are not homogeneous, analogous, nor indigenous.

Vegetable anatomy is called phytonomy, sometimes. But it would not be safe
to address a vigorous man by that epithet. We may call a vegetable that,
however, and be safe.

Human anatomy is that branch of anatomy which enters into the description
of the structure and geographical distribution of the elements of a human
being. It also applies to the structure of the microbe that crawls out of
jail every four years just long enough to whip his wife, vote and go back
again.

Human anatomy is either general, specific, topographical or surgical.
Those terms do not imply the dissection and anatomy of generals,
specialists, topographers and surgeons, as they might seem to imply, but
really mean something else. I would explain here what they actually do
mean if I had more room and knew enough to do it.

Anatomists divide their science, as well as their subjects, into
fragments. Osteology treats of the skeleton, myology of the muscles,
angiology of the blood vessels, splanchology the digestive organs or
department of the interior, and so on.

People tell pretty tough stories of the young carvists who study anatomy
on subjects taken from life. I would repeat a few of them here, but they
are productive of insomnia, so I will not give them.

I visited a matinee of this kind once for a short time, but I have not
been there since. When I have a holiday now, the idea of spending it in
the dissecting-room of a large and flourishing medical college does not
occur to me.

I never could be a successful surgeon, I fear. While I have no hesitation
about mutilating the English, I have scruples about cutting up other
nationalities. I should always fear, while pursuing my studies, that I
might be called upon to dissect a friend, and I could not do that. I
should like to do anything that would advance the cause of science, but I
should not want to form the habit of dissecting people, lest some day I
might be called upon to dissect a friend for whom I had a great
attachment, or some creditor who had an attachment for me.

[Illustration]




Mr. Sweeney's Cat.

Robert Ormsby Sweeney is a druggist of St. Paul, and though a recent
chronological record reveals the fact that he is a direct descendant of a
sure-enough king, and though there is mighty good purple, royal blood in
his veins that dates back where kings used to have something to do to earn
their salary, he goes right on with his regular business, selling drugs at
the great sacrifice which druggists will make sometimes in order to place
their goods within the reach of all.

As soon as I learned that Mr. Sweeney had barely escaped being a crowned
head, I got acquainted with him and tried to cheer him up, and I told him
that people wouldn't hold him in any way responsible, and that as it
hadn't shown itself in his family for years he might perhaps finally wear
it out.

He is a mighty pleasant man to meet, anyhow, and you can have just as much
fun with him as you could with a man who didn't have any royal blood in
his veins. You could be with him for days on a fishing trip and never
notice it at all.

But I was going to speak more in particular about Mr. Sweeney's cat. Mr.
Sweeney had a large cat, named Dr. Mary Walker, of which he was very fond.
Dr. Mary Walker remained at the drug store all the time, and was known all
over St. Paul as a quiet and reserved cat. If Dr. Mary Walker took in the
town after office hours, nobody seemed to know anything about it. She
would be around bright and cheerful the next morning and attend to her
duties at the store just as though nothing whatever had happened.

One day last summer Mr. Sweeney left a large plate of fly-paper with water
on it in the window, hoping to gather in a few quarts of flies in a
deceased state. Dr. Mary Walker used to go to this window during the
afternoon and look out on the busy street while she called up pleasant
memories of her past life. That afternoon she thought she would call up
some more memories, so she went over on the counter and from there jumped
down on the window-sill, landing with all four feet in the plate of
fly-paper.

At first she regarded it as a joke, and treated the matter very lightly,
but later on she observed that the fly-paper stuck to her feet with great
tenacity of purpose. Those who have never seen the look of surprise and
deep sorrow that a cat wears when she finds herself glued to a whole sheet
of fly-paper, cannot fully appreciate the way Dr. Mary Walker felt. She
did not dash wildly through a $150 plate-glass window, as some cats would
have done. She controlled herself and acted in the coolest manner, though
you could have seen that mentally she suffered intensely. She sat down a
moment to more fully outline a plan for the future. In doing so, she made
a great mistake. The gesture resulted in glueing the fly-paper to her
person in such a way that the edge turned up behind in the most abrupt
manner, and caused her great inconvenience.

[Illustration: AT FIRST SHE REGARDED IT AS A JOKE.]

Some one at that time laughed in a coarse and heartless way, and I wish
you could have seen the look of pain that Dr. Mary Walker gave him.

Then she went away. She did not go around the prescription case as the
rest of us did, but strolled through the middle of it, and so on out
through the glass door at the rear of the store. We did not see her go
through the glass door, but we found pieces of fly-paper and fur on the
ragged edges of a large aperture in the glass, and we kind of jumped at
the conclusion that Dr. Mary Walker had taken that direction in retiring
from the room.

Dr. Mary Walker never returned to St. Paul, and her exact whereabouts are
not known, though every effort was made to find her. Fragments of flypaper
and brindle hair were found as far west as the Yellowstone National Park,
and as far north as the British line, but the doctor herself was not
found. My own theory is, that if she turned her bow to the west so as to
catch the strong easterly gale on her quarter, with the sail she had set
and her tail pointing directly toward the zenith, the chances for Dr. Mary
Walker's immediate return are extremely slim.

[Illustration]




The Heyday of Life.

There will always be a slight difference in the opinions of the young and
the mature, relative to the general plan on which the solar system should
be operated, no doubt. There are also points of disagreement in other
matters, and it looks as though there always would be.

To the young the future has a more roseate hue. The roseate hue comes
high, but we have to use it in this place. To the young there spreads out
across the horizon a glorious range of possibilities. After the youth has
endorsed for an intimate friend a few times, and purchased the paper at
the bank himself later on, the horizon won't seem to horizon so
tumultuously as it did aforetime. I remember at one time of purchasing
such a piece of accommodation paper at a bank, and I still have it. I
didn't need it any more than a cat needs eleven tails at one and the same
time. Still the bank made it an object for me, and I secured it. Such
things as these harshly knock the flush and bloom off the cheek of youth,
and prompt us to turn the strawberry box bottom side up before we purchase
it.

Youth is gay and hopeful, age is covered with experience and scars where
the skin has been knocked off and had to grow on again. To the young a
dollar looks large and strong, but to the middle-aged and the old it is
weak and inefficient.

When we are in the heyday and fizz of existence, we believe everything;
but after awhile we murmur: “What's that you are givin' us,” or words of
like character. Age brings caution and a lot of shop-worn experience,
purchased at the highest market price. Time brings vain regrets and wisdom
teeth that can be left in a glass of water over night.

Still we should not repine. If people would repine less and try harder to
get up an appetite by persweating in someone's vineyard at so much per
diem, it would be better. The American people of late years seem to have a
deeper and deadlier repugnance for mannish industry, and there seems to be
a growing opinion that our crops are more abundant when saturated with
foreign perspiration. European sweat, if I may be allowed to use such a
low term, is very good in its place, but the native-born Duke of Dakota,
or the Earl of York State should remember that the matter of perspiration
and posterity should not be left solely to the foreigner.

There are too many Americans who toil not, neither do they spin. They
would be willing to have an office foisted upon them, but they would
rather blow their so-called brains out than to steer a pair of large
steel-gray mules from day to day. They are too proud to hoe corn, for fear
some great man will ride by and see the termination of their shirts
extending out through the seats of their pantaloons, but they are not too
proud to assign their shattered finances to a friend and their shattered
remains to the morgue.

Pride is all right if it is the right kind, but the pride that prompts a
man to kill his mother, because she at last refuses to black his boots any
more, is an erroneous pride. The pride that induces a man to muss up the
carpet with his brains because there is nothing left for him to do but to
labor, is the kind that Lucifer had when he bolted the action of the
convention and went over to the red-hot minority.

Youth is the spring-time of life. It is the time to acquire information,
so that we may show it off in after years and paralyze people with what we
know. The wise youth will “lay low” till he gets a whole lot of knowledge,
and then in later days turn it loose in an abrupt manner. He will guard
against telling what he knows, a little at a time. That is unwise. I once
knew a youth who wore himself out telling people all he knew from day to
day, so that when he became a bald-headed man he was utterly exhausted and
didn't have anything left to tell anyone. Some of the things that we know
should be saved for our own use. The man who sheds all his knowledge, and
don't leave enough to keep house with, fools himself.




They Fell.

Two delegates to the General Convocation of the Sons of Ice Water were
sitting in the lobby of the Windsor, in the city of Denver, not long ago,
strangers to each other and to everybody else. One came from Huerferno
county, and the other was a delegate from the Ice Water Encampment of
Correjos county.

From the beautiful billiard hall came the sharp rattle of ivory balls, and
in the bar-room there was a glitter of electric light, cut glass, and
French plate mirrors. Out of the door came the merry laughter of the giddy
throng, flavored with fragrant Havana smoke and the delicate odor of lemon
and mirth and pine apple and cognac.

The delegate from Correjos felt lonely, and he turned to the Ice Water
representative from Huerferno:

“That was a bold and fearless speech you made this afternoon on the demon
rum at the convocation.”

“Think so?” said the sad Huerferno man.

“Yes, you entered into the description of rum's maniac till I could almost
see the red-eyed centipedes and tropical hornets in the air. How could you
describe the jimjams so graphically?”

“Well, you see, I'm a reformed drunkard. Only a little while ago I was in
the gutter.”

“So was I.”

“How long ago?”

“Week ago day after to-morrow.”

“Next Tuesday it'll be a week since I quit.”

“Well, I swan!”

“Ain't it funny?”

“Tolerable.”


“It's going to be a long, cold winter; don't you think so?”

“Yes, I dread it a good deal.”


“It's a comfort, though, to know that you never will touch rum again.”

“Yes, I am glad in my heart to-night that I am free from it. I shall never
touch rum again.”

When he said this he looked up at the other delegate, and they looked into
each other's eyes earnestly, as though each would read the other's soul.
Then the Huerferno man said:

“In fact, I never did care much for rum.”

Then there was a long pause.

Finally the Correjos man ventured: “Do you have to use an antidote to cure
the thirst?”

“Yes, I've had to rely on that a good deal at first. Probably this vain
yearning that I now feel in the pit of the bosom will disappear after
awhile.”

“Have you got any antidote with you?”

“Yes, I've got some up in 232-1/2. If you'll come up I'll give you a
dose.”

“There's no rum in it, is there?”

“No.”

Then they went up the elevator. They did not get down to breakfast, but at
dinner they stole in. The man from Huerferno dodged nervously through the
archway leading to the dining-room as though he had doubts about getting
through so small a space with his augmented head, and the man from
Correjos looked like one who had wept his eyes almost blind over the woe
that rum has wrought in our fair land.

When the waiter asked the delegate from Correjos for his dessert order,
the red-nosed Son of Ice Water said: “Bring me a cup of tea, some pudding
without wine sauce, and a piece of mince pie. You may also bring me a
corkscrew, if you please, to pull the brandy out of the mince pie with.”

Then the two reformed drunkards looked at each other, and laughed a
hoarse, bitter and joyous laugh.

At the afternoon session of the Sons of Ice Water, the Huerferno delegate
couldn't get his regalia over his head.




Second Letter to the President.

To the President.--I write this letter not on my own account, but on
behalf of a personal friend of mine who is known as a mugwump. He is a
great worker for political reform, but he cannot spell very well, so he
has asked me to write this letter. He knew that I had been thrown among
great men all my life, and that, owing to my high social position and fine
education, I would be peculiarly fitted to write you in a way that would
not call forth disagreeable remarks, and so he has given me the points and
I have arranged them for you.

In the first place, my friend desires me to convey to you, Mr. President,
in a delicate manner, and in such language as to avoid giving offense,
that he is somewhat disappointed in your Cabinet. I hate to talk this way
to a bran-new President, but my friend feels hurt and he desires that I
should say to you that he regrets your short-sighted policy. He says that
it seems to him there is very little in the course of the administration
so far to encourage a man to shake off old party ties and try to make men
better. He desires to say that after conversing with a large number of the
purest men, men who have been in both political parties off and on for
years and yet have never been corrupted by office, men who have left
convention after convention in years past because those conventions were
corrupt and endorsed other men than themselves for office, he finds that
your appointment of Cabinet officers will only please two classes, viz:
Democrats and Republicans.

[Illustration: WORKING FOR REFORM.]

Now, what do you care for an administration which will only gratify those
two old parties? Are you going to snap your fingers in disdain at men who
admit that they are superior to anybody else? Do you want history to
chronicle the fact that President Cleveland accepted the aid of the pure
and highly cultivated gentlemen who never did anything naughty or
unpretty, and then appointed his Cabinet from men who had been known for
years as rude, naughty Democrats?

My friend says that he feels sure you would not have done so if you had
fully realized how he felt about it. He claims that in the first week of
your administration you have basely truckled to the corrupt majority. You
have shown yourself to be the friend of men who never claimed to be truly
good.

If you persist in this course you will lose the respect and esteem of my
friend and another man who is politically pure, and who has never smirched
his escutcheon with an office. He has one of the cleanest and most
vigorous escutcheons in that county. He never leaves it out over night
during the summer, and in the winter he buries it in sawdust. Both of
these men will go back to the Republican party in 1888 if you persist in
the course you have thus far adopted. They would go back now if the
Republican party insisted on it.

Mr. President, I hate to write to you in this tone of voice, because I
know the pain it will give you. I once held an office myself, Mr.
President, and it hurt my feelings very much to have a warm personal
friend criticise my official acts.

The worst feature of the whole thing, Mr. President, is that it will
encourage crime. If men who never committed any crime are allowed to earn
their living by the precarious methods peculiar to manual labor, and if
those who have abstained from office for years, by request of many
citizens, are to be denied the endorsement of the administration, they
will lose courage to go on and do right in the future. My friend desires
to state vicariously, in the strongest terms, that both he and his wife
feel the same way about it, and they will not promise to keep it quiet any
longer. They feel like crippling the administration in every way they can
if the present policy is to be pursued.

He says he dislikes to begin thus early to threaten a President who has
barely taken off his overshoes and drawn his mileage, but he thinks it may
prevent a recurrence of these unfortunate mistakes. He claims that you
have totally misunderstood the principles of the mugwumps all the way
through. You seem to regard the reform movement as one introduced for the
purpose of universal benefit. This was not the case. While fully endorsing
and supporting reform, he says that they did not go into it merely to kill
time or simply for fun. He also says that when he became a reformer and
supported you, he did not think there were so many prominent Democrats who
would have claims upon you. He can only now deplore the great national
poverty of offices and the boundless wealth of raw material in the
Democratic party from which to supply even that meagre demand.

He wishes me to add, also, that you must have over-estimated the zeal of
his party for civil service reform. He says that they did not yearn for
civil service reform so much as many people seem to think.

I must now draw this letter to a close. We are all well with the exception
of colds in the head, but nothing that need give you any uneasiness. Our
large seal-brown hen last week, stimulated by a rising egg market,
over-exerted herself, and on Saturday evening, as the twilight gathered,
she yielded to a complication of pip and softening of the brain and
expired in my arms. She certainly led a most exemplary life and the forked
tongue of slander could find naught to utter against her.

Hoping that you are enjoying the same great blessing and that you will
write as often as possible without waiting for me, I remain,

Very respectfully yours,

Bill Nye.

[Dictated Letter.]




Milling in Pompeii.

While visiting Naples, last fall, I took a great interest in the wonderful
museum there, of objects that have been exhumed from the ruins of Pompeii.
It is a remarkable collection, including, among other things, the
cumbersome machinery of a large woolen factory, the receipts, contracts,
statements of sales, etc., etc., of bankers, brokers, and usurers. I was
told that the exhumist also ran into an Etruscan bucket-shop in one part
of the city, but, owing to the long, dry spell, the buckets had fallen to
pieces.

The object which engrossed my attention the most, however, was what seems
to have been a circular issued prior to the great volcanic vomit of 79
A.D., and no doubt prior even to the Christian era. As the date is torn
off however, we are left to conjecture the time at which it was issued. I
was permitted to make a copy of it, and with the aid of my hired man, I
have translated it with great care.

Office of Lucretius & Procalus,
Dealers In
Flour, Bran, Shorts, Middlings, Screenings, Etruscan Hen Feed, and Other
Choice Bric-A-Brac.

_Highest Cash Price Paid for Neapolitan Winter Wheat and Roman Corn

Why haul your Wheat through the sand to Herculaneum when we pay the same
price here?_

Office and Mill, Via VIII, Near the Stabian Gate, Only Thirteen Blocks
From the P.O., Pompeii.

Dear Sir: This circular has been called out by another one issued last
month by Messrs. Toecorneous & Chilblainicus, alleged millers and wheat
buyers of Herculaneum, in which they claim to pay a quarter to a half-cent
more per bushel than we do for wheat, and charge us with docking the
farmers around Pompeii a pound per bushel more than necessary for cockle,
wild buck-wheat, and pigeon-grass seed. They make the broad statement that
we have made all our money in that way, and claim that Mr. Lucretius, of
our mill, has erected a fine house, which the farmers allude to as the
“wild buckwheat villa.”

[Illustration: TWO OLD ROMANS.]

We do not, as a general rule, pay any attention to this kind of stuff; but
when two snide romans, who went to Herculaneum without a dollar and drank
stale beer out of an old Etruscan tomato-can the first year they were
there, assail our integrity, we feel justified in making a prompt and
final reply. We desire to state to the Roman farmers that we do not test
their wheat with the crooked brass tester that has made more money for
Messrs. Toecorneous & Chilblainicus than their old mill has. We do not do
that kind of business. Neither do we buy a man's wheat at a cash price and
then work off four or five hundred pounds of XXXX Imperial hog feed on him
in part payment. When we buy a man's wheat we pay him in money. We do not
seek to fill him up with sour Carthagenian cracked wheat and orders on the
store.

We would also call attention to the improvements that we have just made in
our mill. Last week we put a handle in the upper burr, and we have also
engaged one of the best head millers in Pompeii to turn the crank
day-times. Our old head miller will oversee the business at night, so that
the mill will be in full blast night and day, except when the head miller
has gone to his meals or stopped to spit on his hands.

The mill of our vile contemporaries at Herculaneum is an old one that was
used around Naples one hundred years ago to smash rock for the Neapolitan
road, and is entirely out of repair. It was also used in a brick-yard here
near Pompeii; then an old junk man sold it to a tenderfoot from Jerusalem
as an ice-cream freezer. He found that it would not work, and so used it
to grind up potato bugs for blisters. Now it is grinding ostensible flour
at Herculaneum.

We desire to state to the farmers about Pompeii and Herculaneum that we
aim to please. We desire to make a grade of flour this summer that will
not have to be run through the coffee mill before it can be used. We will
also pay you the highest price for good wheat, and give you good weight.
Our capacity is now greatly enlarged, both as to storage and grinding. We
now turn out a sack of flour, complete and ready for use, every little
while. We have an extra handle for the mill, so that in case of accident
to the one now in use, we need not shut down but a few moments. We call
attention to our XXXX Git-there brand of flour. It is the best flour in
the market for making angels' food and other celestial groceries. We fully
warrant it, and will agree that for every sack containing whole kernels of
corn, corncobs, or other foreign substances, not thoroughly pulverized, we
will refund the money already paid, and show the person through our mill.

[Illustration: ANCIENT ROMAN MILLER.]

We would also like to call the attention of farmers and housewives around
Pompeii to our celebrated Dough Squatter. It is purely automatic in its
operation, requiring only two men to work it. With this machine two men
will knead all the bread they can eat and do it easily, feeling thoroughly
refreshed at night. They also avoid that dark maroon taste in the mouth so
common in Pompeii on arising in the morning.

To those who do not feel able to buy one of these machines, we would say
that we have made arrangements for the approaching season, so that those
who wish may bring their dough to our mammoth squatter and get it treated
at our place at the nominal price of two bits per squat. Strangers calling
for their squat or unsquat dough, will have to be identified.

Do not forget the place, Via VIII, near Stabian gate.

Lucretius & Peocalus,

Dealers in choice family flour, cut feed and oatmeal with or without
clinkers in it. Try our lumpless bran for indigestion.




Broncho Sam.

Speaking about cowboys, Sam Stewart, known from Montana to Old Mexico as
Broncho Sam, was the chief. He was not a white man, an Indian, a greaser
or a negro, but he had the nose of an Indian warrior, the curly hair of an
African, and the courtesy and equestrian grace of a Spaniard. A wide
reputation as a “broncho breaker” gave him his name.

To master an untamed broncho and teach him to lead, to drive and to be
safely-ridden was Sam's mission during the warm weather when he was not
riding the range. His special delight was to break the war-like heart of
the vicious wild pony of the plains and make him the servant of man.

I've seen him mount a hostile “bucker,” and, clinching his italic legs
around the body of his adversary, ride him till the blood would burst from
Sam's nostrils and spatter horse and rider like rain. Most everyone knows
what the bucking of the barbarous Western horse means. The wild horse
probably learned it from the antelope, for the latter does it the same
way, i.e., he jumps straight up into the air, at the same instant
curving his back and coming down stiff-legged, with all four of his feet
in a bunch. The concussion is considerable.

I tried it once myself. I partially rode a roan broncho one spring day,
which will always be green in my memory. The day, I mean, not the broncho.

It occupied my entire attention to safely ride the cunning little beast,
and when he began to ride me I put in a minority report against it.

I have passed through an earthquake and an Indian outbreak, but I would
rather ride an earthquake without saddle or bridle than to bestride a
successful broncho eruption. I remember that I wore a large pair of
Mexican spurs, but I forgot them until the saddle turned. Then I
remembered them. Sitting down on them in an impulsive way brought them to
my mind. Then the broncho steed sat down on me, and that gave the spurs an
opportunity to make a more lasting impression on my mind.

To those who observed the charger with the double “cinch” across his back
and the saddle in front of him like a big leather corset, sitting at the
same time on my person, there must have been a tinge of amusement; but to
me it was not so frolicsome.

There may be joy in a wild gallop across the boundless plains, in the
crisp morning, on the back of a fleet broncho; but when you return with
your ribs sticking through your vest, and find that your nimble steed has
returned to town two hours ahead of you, there is a tinge of sadness about
it all.

Broncho Sam, however, made a specialty of doing all the riding himself. He
wouldn't enter into any compromise and allow the horse to ride him.

In a reckless moment he offered to bet ten dollars that he could mount and
ride a wild Texas steer. The money was put up. That settled it. Sam never
took water. This was true in a double sense. Well, he climbed the
cross-bar of the corral-gate, and asked the other boys to turn out their
best steer, Marquis of Queensbury rules.

As the steer passed out, Sam slid down and wrapped those parenthetical
legs of his around that high-headed, broad-horned brute, and he rode him
till the fleet-footed animal fell down on the buffalo grass, ran his hot
red tongue out across the blue horizon, shook his tail convulsively,
swelled up sadly and died.

It took Sam four days to walk back.

A ten-dollar bill looks as large to me as the star spangled banner, some
times; but that is an avenue of wealth that had not occurred to me.

I'd rather ride a buzz-saw at two dollars a day and found.

[Illustration: A BRONCO ERUPTION.]




How Evolution Evolves.

The following paper was read by me in a clear, resonant tone of voice,
before the Academy of Science and Pugilism at Erin Prairie, last month,
and as I have been so continually and so earnestly importuned to print it
that life was no longer desirable, I submit it to you for that purpose,
hoping that you will print my name in large caps, with astonishers at the
head of the article, and also in good display type at the close:

Some Features Of Evolution.

No one could possibly, in a brief paper, do the subject of evolution full
justice. It is a matter of great importance to our lost and undone race.
It lies near to every human heart, and exercises a wonderful influence
over our impulses and our ultimate success or failure. When we pause to
consider the opaque and fathomless ignorance of the great masses of our
fellow men on the subject of evolution, it is not surprising that crime is
rather on the increase, and that thousands of our race are annually
filling drunkards' graves, with no other visible means of support, while
multitudes of enlightened human beings are at the same time obtaining a
livelihood by meeting with felons' dooms.

These I would ask in all seriousness and in a tone of voice that would
melt the stoniest heart: “Why in creation do you do it?” The time is
rapidly approaching when there will be two or three felons for each doom.
I am sure that within the next fifty years, and perhaps sooner even than
that, instead of handing out these dooms to Tom, Dick and Harry as
formerly, every applicant for a felon's doom will have to pass through a
competitive examination, as he should do.

It will be the same with those who desire to fill drunkards' graves. The
time is almost here when all positions of profit and trust will be
carefully and judiciously handed out, and those who do not fit themselves
for those positions will be left in the lurch, whatever that may be.

It is with this fact glaring me in the face that I have consented to
appear before you to-day and lay bare the whole hypothesis, history, rise
and fall, modifications, anatomy, physiology and geology of evolution. It
is for this that I have poured over such works as Huxley, Herbert Spencer,
Moses in the bulrushes, Anaxagoras, Lucretius and Hoyle. It is for the
purpose of advancing the cause of common humanity and to jerk the rising
generation out of barbarism into the dazzling effulgence of clashing
intellects and fermenting brains that I have sought the works of
Pythagoras, Democritus and Epluribus. Whenever I could find any book that
bore upon the subject of evolution, and could borrow it, I have done so
while others slept.

That is a matter which rarely enters into the minds of those who go easily
and carelessly through life. Even the general superintendent of the
Academy of Science and Pugilism here in Erin Prairie, the hotbed of a free
and untrammeled, robust democracy, does not stop to think of the midnight
and other kinds of oil that I have consumed in order to fill myself full
of information and to soak my porous mind with thought. Even the O'Reilly
College of this place, with its strong mental faculty, has not informed
itself fully relative to the great effort necessary before a lecturer may
speak clearly, accurately and exhaustingly of evolution.

And yet, here in this place, where education is rampant, and the idea is
patted on the back, as I may say; here in Erin Prairie, where progress and
some other sentiments are written on everything; here where I am
addressing you to-night for $2 and feed for my horse, I met a little child
with a bright and cheerful smile, who did not know that evolution
consisted in a progress from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous.

So you see that you never know where ignorance lurks. The hydra-headed
upas tree and bete noir of self-acting progress, is such ignorance as
that, lurking in the very shadow of magnificent educational institutions
and hard words of great cast. Nothing can be more disagreeable to the
scientist than a bete noir. Nothing gives him greater satisfaction than to
chase it up a tree or mash it between two shingles.

For this reason, as I said, it gives me great pleasure to address you on
the subject of evolution, and to go into details in speaking of it. I
could go on for hours as I have been doing, delighting you with the
intricacies and peculiarities of evolution, but I must desist. It would
please me to do so, and you would no doubt remain patiently and listen,
but your business might suffer while you were away, and so I will close,
but I hope that anyone now within the sound of my voice, and in whose
breast a sudden hunger for more light on this great subject may have
sprung up, will feel perfectly free to call on me and ask me about it or
immerse himself in the numerous tomes that I have collected from friends,
and which relate to this matter.

In closing I wish to say that I have made no statements in this paper
relative to evolution which I am not prepared to prove; and, if anything,
I have been over-conservative. For that reason I say now, that the person
who doubts a single fact as I have given it to-night, bearing upon the
great subject of evolution, will have to do so over my dumb remains.

And a man who will do that is no gentleman. I presume that many of these
statements will be snapped up and sharply criticised by other theologians
and many of our foremost thinkers, but they will do well to pause before
they draw me into a controversy, for I have other facts in relation to
evolution, and some personal reminiscences and family history, which I am
prepared to introduce, if necessary, together with ideas that I have
thought up myself. So I say to those who may hope to attract notice and
obtain notoriety by drawing me into a controversy, beware. It will be to
your interest to beware!




Hours With Great Men.

I presume that I could write an entire library of personal reminiscences
relative to the eminent people with whom I have been thrown during a busy
life, but I hate to do it, because I always regarded such things as sacred
from the vulgar eye, and I felt bound to respect the confidence of a
prominent man just as much as I would that of one who was less before the
people. I remember very well my first meeting with General W.T. Sherman.
I would not mention it here if it were not for the fact that the people
seem so be yearning for personal reminiscences of great men, and that is
perfectly right, too.

It was since the war that I met General Sherman, and it was on the line of
the Union Pacific Railway, at one of those justly celebrated
eating-houses, which I understand are now abandoned. The colored waiter
had cut off a strip of the omelette with a pair of shears, the scorched
oatmeal had been passed around, the little rubber door mats fried in
butter and called pancakes had been dealt around the table, and the
cashier at the end of the hall had just gone through the clothes of a
party from Vermont, who claimed a rebate on the ground that the waiter had
refused to bring him anything but his bill. There was no sound in the
dining-room except the weak request of the coffee for more air and
stimulants, or perhaps the cry of pain when the butter, while practicing
with the dumb-bells, would hit a child on the head; then all would be
still again.

General Sherman sat at one end of the table, throwing a life-preserver to
a fly in the milk pitcher.

We had never met before, though for years we had been plodding along
life's rugged way--he in the war department, I in the postoffice
department. Unknown to each other, we had been holding up opposite corners
of the great national fabric, if you will allow me that expression.

I remember, as well as though it were but yesterday, how the conversation
began. General Sherman looked sternly at me and said:

“I wish you would overpower that butter and send it up this way.”

“All right,” said I, “if you will please pass those molasses.”

That was all that was said, but I shall never forget it, and probably he
never will. The conversation was brief, but yet how full of food for
thought! How true, how earnest, how natural! Nothing stilted or false
about it. It was the natural expression of two minds that were too great
to be verbose or to monkey with social, conversational flapdoodle.

[Illustration: AN ENCOUNTER WITH THE BUTTER.]

I remember, once, a great while ago, I was asked by a friend to go with
him in the evening to the house of an acquaintance, where they were going
to have a kind of musicale, at which there was to be some noted pianist,
who had kindly consented to play a few strains, I did not get the name of
the professional, but I went, and when the first piece was announced I saw
that the light was very uncertain, so I kindly volunteered to get a lamp
from another room. I held that big lamp, weighing about twenty-nine
pounds, for half an hour, while the pianist would tinky tinky up on the
right hand, or bang, boomy to bang down on the bass, while he snorted and
slugged that old concert grand piano and almost knocked its teeth down its
throat, or gently dawdled with the keys like a pale moonbeam shimmering
through the bleached rafters of a deceased horse, until at last there was
a wild jangle, such as the accomplished musician gives to an instrument to
show the audience that he has disabled the piano, and will take a slight
intermission while it is sent to the junk shop.

With a sigh of relief I carefully put down the twenty-nine pound lamp, and
my friend told me that I had been standing there like liberty enlightening
the world, and holding that heavy lamp for Blind Tom.


I had never seen him before, and I slipped out of the room before he had a
chance to see me.




Concerning Coroners.

I am glad to notice that in the East there is a growing disfavor in the
public mind for selecting a practicing physician for the office of
coroner. This matter should have attracted attention years ago. Now it
gratifies me to notice a finer feeling on the part of the people, and an
awakening of those sensibilities which go to make life more highly prized
and far more enjoyable.

I had the misfortune at one time to be under the medical charge of a
coroner who had graduated from a Chicago morgue and practiced medicine
along with his inquest business with the most fiendish delight. I do not
know which he enjoyed best, holding the inquest or practicing on his
patient and getting the victim ready for the quest.

One day he wrote out a prescription and left it for me to have filled. I
was surprised to find that he had made a mistake and left a rough draft of
the verdict in my own case and a list of jurors which he had made in
memorandum, so as to be ready for the worst. I was alarmed, for I did not
know that I was in so dangerous a condition. He had the advantage of me,
for he knew just what he was giving me, and how long human life could be
sustained under his treatment. I did not.

That is why I say that the profession of medicine should not be allowed to
conflict with the solemn duties of the coroner. They are constantly
clashing and infringing upon each other's territory. This coroner had a
kind of tread-softly-bow-the-head way of getting around the room that made
my flesh creep. He had a way, too, when I was asleep, of glancing
hurriedly through the pockets of my pantaloons as they hung over a chair,
probably to see what evidence he could find that might aid the jury in
arriving at a verdict. Once I woke up and found him examining a draft that
he had found in my pocket. I asked him what he was doing with my funds,
and he said that he thought he detected a draft in the room and he had
just found out where it came from.

After that I hoped that death would come to my relief as speedily as
possible. I felt that death would be a happy release from the cold touch
of the amateur coroner and pro tem physician. I could look forward with
pleasure, and even joy, to the moment when my physician would come for the
last time in his professional capacity and go to work on me officially.
Then the county would be obliged to pay him, and the undertaker could take
charge of the fragments left by the inquest.

The duties of the physician are with the living, those of the coroner with
the dead. No effort, therefore, should be made to unite them. It is in
violation of all the finer feelings of humanity. When the physician
decides that his tendencies point mostly toward immortality and the names
of his patients are nearly all found on the moss-covered stones of the
cemetery, he may abandon the profession with safety and take hold of
politics. Then, should his tastes lead him to the inquest, let him
gravitate toward the office of coroner; but the two should not be united.

No man ought to follow his fellow down the mysterious river that defines
the boundary between the known and the unknown, and charge him
professionally till his soul has fled, and then charge a per diem to the
county for prying into his internal economy and holding an inquest over
the debris of mortality. I therefore hail this movement with joy and wish
to encourage it in every way. It points toward a degree of enlightenment
which will be in strong contrast with the darker and more ignorant epochs
of time, when the practice of medicine was united with the profession of
the barber, the well-digger, the farrier, the veterinarian or the coroner.

Why, this physician plenipotentiary and coroner extraordinary that I have
referred to, didn't know when he got a call whether to take his morphine
syringe or his venire for a jury. He very frequently went to see a patient
with a lung tester under one arm and the revised statutes under the other.
People never knew when they saw him going to a neighbor's house, whether
the case had yielded to the coroner's treatment or not. No one ever knew
just when over-taxed nature would yield to the statutes in such case made
and provided.

When the jury was impanelled, however, we always knew that the medical
treatment had been successfully fatal.

Once he charged the county with an inquest he felt sure of, but in the
night the patient got delirious, eluded his nurse, the physician and
coroner, and fled to the foot-hills, where he was taken care of and
finally recovered.

The experiences of some of the patients who escaped from this man read
more like fiction than fact. One man revived during the inquest, knocked
the foreman of the jury through the window, kicked the coroner in the
stomach, fed him a bottle of violet ink, and, with a shriek of laughter,
fled. He is now traveling under an assumed name with a mammoth circus,
feeding his bald head to the African lion twice a day at $9 a week and
found.

[Illustration]




Down East Rum.

Rum has always been a curse to the State of Maine. The steady fight that
Maine has made, for a century past, against decent rum, has been worthy of
a better cause.

Who hath woe? who hath sorrow and some more things of that kind? He that
monkeyeth with Maine rum; he that goeth to seek emigrant rum.

In passing through Maine the tourist is struck with the ever-varying
styles of mystery connected with the consumption of rum.

In Denver your friend says: “Will you come with me and shed a tear?” or
“Come and eat a clove with me.”

In Salt Lake City a man once said to me: “William, which would you rather
do, take a dose of Gentile damnation down here on the corner, or go over
across the street and pizen yourself with some real old Mormon Valley tan,
made last week from ground feed and prussic acid?” I told him that I had
just been to dinner, and the doctor had forbidden my drinking any more,
and that I had promised several people on their death beds never to touch
liquor, and besides, I had just taken a large drink, so he would have to
excuse me.

But in Maine none of these common styles of invitation prevail. It is all
shrouded in mystery. You give the sign of distress to any member in good
standing, pound three times on the outer gate, give two hard kicks and one
soft one on the inner door, give the password, “Rutherford B. Hayes,” turn
to the left, through a dark passage, turn the thumbscrew of a mysterious
gas fixture 90 deg. to the right, holding the goblet of the encampment
under the gas fixture, then reverse the thumbscrew, shut your eyes, insult
your digester, leave twenty-five cents near the gas fixture, and hunt up
the nearest cemetery, so that you will not have to be carried very far.

If a man really wants to drink himself into a drunkard's grave, he can
certainly save time by going to Maine. Those desiring the most prompt and
vigorous style of jim-jams at cut rates will do well to examine Maine
goods before going elsewhere. Let a man spend a week in Boston, where the
Maine liquor law, I understand, is not in force, and then, with no warning
whatever, be taken into the heart of Maine; let him land there a stranger
and a partial orphan, with no knowledge of the underground methods of
securing a drink, and to him the world seems very gloomy, very sad, and
extremely arid.

At the Bangor depot a woman came up to me and addressed me. She was rather
past middle age, a perfect lady in her manners, but a little full.

I said: “Madam, I guess you will have to excuse me. You have the
advantage. I can't just speak your name at this moment. It has been now
thirty years since I left Maine, a child two years old. So people have
changed. You've no idea how people have grown out of my knowledge. I don't
see but you look just as young as you did when I went away, but I'm a poor
hand to remember names, so I can't just call you to mind.”

She was perfectly ladylike in her manner, but a little bit drunk. It is
singular how drunken people will come hundreds of miles to converse with
me. I have often been alluded to as the “drunkard's friend.” Men have been
known to get intoxicated and come a long distance to talk with me on some
subject, and then they would lean up against me and converse by the hour.
A drunken man never seems to get tired of talking with me. As long as I am
willing to hold such a man up and listen to him, he will stand and tell me
about himself with the utmost confidence, and, no matter who goes by, he
does not seem to be ashamed to have people see him talking with me.

[Illustration: THAT BUTTONHOLE.]

I once had a friend who was very much liked by every one, so he drifted
into politics. For seven years he tried to live on free whiskey and
popular approval, but it wrecked him at last. Finally he formed the habit
of meeting me every day and explaining it to me, and giving me free
exhibitions of a breath that he had acquired at great expense. After he
got so feeble that he could not walk any more, this breath of his used to
pull him out of bed and drag him all over town. It don't seem hardly
possible, but it is so. I can show you the town yet.

He used to take me by the buttonhole when he conversed with me. This is a
diagram of the buttonhole.

If I had a son I would warn him against trying to subsist solely on
popular approval and free whiskey. It may do for a man engaged solely in
sedentary pursuits, but it is not sufficient in cases of great muscular
exhaustion. Free whiskey and popular approval on an empty stomach are
highly injurious.




Railway Etiquette.

Many people have traveled all their lives and yet do not know how to
behave themselves when on the road. For the benefit and guidance of such,
these few crisp, plain, horse-sense rules of etiquette have been framed.

In traveling by rail on foot, turn to the right on discovering an
approaching train. If you wish the train to turn out, give two loud toots
and get in between the rails, so that you will not muss up the right of
way. Many a nice, new right of way has been ruined by getting a pedestrian
tourist spattered all over its first mortgage.

On retiring at night on board the train, do not leave your teeth in the
ice-water tank. If every one should do so, it would occasion great
confusion in case of wreck. It would also cause much annoyance and delay
during the resurrection. Experienced tourists tie a string to their teeth
and retain them during the night.

If you have been reared in extreme poverty, and your mother supported you
until you grew up and married, so that your wife could support you, you
will probably sit in four seats at the same time, with your feet extended
into the aisles so that you can wipe them off on other people, while you
snore with your mouth open clear to your shoulder blades.

If you are prone to drop to sleep and breathe with a low death rattle,
like the exhaust of a bath tub, it would be a good plan to tie up your
head in a feather bed and then insert the whole thing in the linen closet;
or, if you cannot secure that, you might stick it out of the window and
get it knocked off against a tunnel. The stockholders of the road might
get mad about it, but you could do it in such a way that they wouldn't
know whose head it was.

Ladies and gentlemen should guard against traveling by rail while in a
beastly state of intoxication.

In the dining car, while eating, do not comb your moustache with your
fork. By all means do not comb your moustache with the fork of another. It
is better to refrain altogether from combing the moustache with a fork
while traveling, for the motion of the train might jab the fork into your
eye and irritate it.

If your desert is very hot and you do not discover it until you have
burned the rafters out of the roof of your mouth, do not utter a wild yell
of agony and spill your coffee all over a total stranger, but control
yourself, hoping to know more next time.

In the morning is a good time to find out how many people have succeeded
in getting on the passenger train, who ought to be in the stock car.

Generally, you will find one male and one female. The male goes into the
wash room, bathes his worthless carcass from daylight until breakfast
time, walking on the feet of any man who tries to wash his face during
that time. He wipes himself on nine different towels, because when he gets
home, he knows he will have to wipe his face on an old door mat. People
who have been reared on hay all their lives, generally want to fill
themselves full of pie and colic when they travel.

The female of this same mammal, goes into the ladies' department and
remains there until starvation drives her out. Then the real ladies have
about thirteen seconds apiece in which to dress.

If you never rode in a varnished car before, and never expect to again,
you will probably roam up and down the car, meandering over the feet of
the porter while he is making up the berths. This is a good way to let
people see just how little sense you had left after your brain began to
soften.

In traveling, do not take along a lot of old clothes that you know you
will never wear.




B. Franklin, Deceased.

Benjamin Franklin, formerly of Boston, came very near being an only child.
If seventeen children had not come to bless the home of Benjamin's
parents, they would have been childless. Think of getting up in the
morning and picking out your shoes and stockings from among seventeen
pairs of them. Imagine yourself a child, gentle reader, in a family where
you would be called upon, every morning, to select your own cud of spruce
gum from a collection of seventeen similar cuds stuck on a window sill.
And yet B. Franklin never murmured or repined. He desired to go to sea,
and to avoid this he was apprenticed to his brother James, who was a
printer. It is said that Franklin at once took hold of the great
Archimedean lever, and jerked it early and late in the interests of
freedom. It is claimed that Franklin at this time invented the deadly
weapon known as the printer's towel. He found that a common crash towel
could be saturated with glue, molasses, antimony, concentrated lye, and
roller composition, and that after a few years of time and perspiration it
would harden so that the “Constant Reader” or “Veritas” could be stabbed
with it and die soon.

[Illustration: A DEADLY ONSLAUGHT.]

Many believe that Franklin's other scientific experiments were productive
of more lasting benefit to mankind than this, but I do not agree with
them.

This paper was called the _New England Courant_. It was edited jointly by
James and Benjamin Franklin, and was started to supply a long-felt want.
Benjamin edited a part of the time and James a part of the time. The idea
of having two editors was not for the purpose of giving volume to the
editorial page, but it was necessary for one to run the paper while the
other was in jail. In those days you couldn't sass the king, and then,
when the king came in the office the next day and stopped his paper, and
took out his ad., you couldn't put it off on “our informant” and go right
along with the paper. You had to go to jail, while your subscribers
wondered why their paper did not come, and the paste soured in the tin
dippers in the sanctum, and the circus passed by on the other side.

[Illustration: STOPPING HIS PAPER.]

How many of us to-day, fellow journalists, would be willing to stay in
jail while the lawn festival and the kangaroo came and went? Who, of all
our company, would go to a prison cell for the cause of freedom while a
double-column ad. of sixteen aggregated circuses, and eleven congresses of
ferocious beasts, fierce and fragrant from their native lair, went by us?

At the age of 17, Ben got disgusted with his brother, and went to
Philadelphia and New York, where he got a chance to “sub” for a few weeks,
and then got a regular “sit.” Franklin was a good printer, and finally got
to be a foreman. He made an excellent foreman, sitting by the hour in the
composing room and spitting on the stone, while he cussed the make-up and
press work of the other papers. Then he would go into the editorial rooms
and scare the editors to death with a wild shriek for more copy. He knew
just how to conduct himself as a foreman, so that strangers would think he
owned the paper.

In 1730, at the age of 24, Franklin married and established the
_Pennsylvania Gazette_. He was then regarded as a great man, and most
everyone took his paper. Franklin grew to be a great journalist, and
spelled hard words with great fluency. He never tried to be a humorist in
any of his newspaper work, and everybody respected him.

Along about 1746 he began to study the construction and habits of
lightning, and inserted a local in his paper, in which he said that he
would be obliged to any of his readers who might notice any new or odd
specimens of lightning, if they would send them into the _Gazette_ office
by express for examination. Every time there was a thunder storm, Franklin
would tell the foreman to edit the paper, and, armed with a string and an
old fruit jar, he would go out on the hills and get enough lightning for a
mess.

[Illustration: “HOW'S TRADE?”]

In 1753 Franklin was made postmaster-general of the colonies. He made a
good postmaster-general, and people say there were less mistakes in
distributing their mail than there has ever been since. If a man mailed a
letter in those days, old Ben Franklin saw that it went where it was
addressed.

Franklin frequently went over to England in those days, partly on
business, and partly to shock the king. He used to delight in going to the
castle with his breeches tucked in his boots, figuratively speaking, and
attract a good deal of attention. It looked odd to the English, of course,
to see him come into the royal presence, and, leaving his wet umbrella up
against the throne, ask the king: “How's trade?” Franklin never put on any
frills, but he was not afraid of a crowned head. He used to say,
frequently, that to him a king was no more than a seven spot.

He did his best to prevent the Revolutionary war, but he couldn't do it,
Patrick Henry had said that the war was inevitable, and given it
permission to come, and it came. He also went to Paris and got acquainted
with a few crowned heads there. They thought a good deal of him in Paris,
and offered him a corner lot if he would build there and start a paper.
They also promised him the county printing, but he said no, he would have
to go back to America, or his wife might get uneasy about him.

Franklin wrote “Poor Richard's Almanac” in 1732-57, and it was republished
in England. Benjamin Franklin had but one son, and his name was William.
William was an illegitimate son, and, though he lived to be quite an old
man, he never got over it entirely, but continued to be but an
illegitimate son all his life. Everybody urged him to do differently, but
he steadily refused to do so.




Life Insurance as a Health Restorer.

Life insurance is a great thing. I would not be without it. My health is
greatly improved since I got my new policy. Formerly I used to have a
seal-brown taste in my mouth when I arose in the morning, but that has
entirely disappeared. I am more hopeful and happy, and my hair is getting
thicker on top. I would not try to keep house without life insurance. Last
September I was caught in one of the most destructive cyclones that ever
visited a republican form of government. A great deal of property was
destroyed and many lives were lost, but I was spared. People who had no
insurance were mowed down on every hand, but aside from a broken leg I was
entirely unharmed.

[Illustration: PROTECTED BY LIFE INSURANCE.]

I look upon life insurance as a great comfort, not only to the
beneficiary, but to the insured, who very rarely lives to realize anything
pecuniarily from his venture. Twice I have almost raised my wife to
affluence and cast a gloom over the community in which I lived, but
something happened to the physician for a few days so that he could not
attend to me, and I recovered. For nearly two years I was under the
doctor's care. He had his finger on my pulse or in my pocket all the time.
He was a young western physician, who attended me on Tuesdays and Fridays.
The rest of the week he devoted his medical skill to horses that were
mentally broken down. He said he attended me largely for my society. I
felt flattered to know that he enjoyed my society after he had been thrown
among horses all the week that had much greater advantages than I.

My wife at first objected seriously to an insurance on my life, and said
she would never, never touch a dollar of the money if I were to die, but
after I had been sick nearly two years, and my disposition had suffered a
good deal, she said that I need not delay the obsequies on that account.
But the life insurance slipped through my fingers somehow, and I
recovered.

In these days of dynamite and roller rinks, and the gory meat-ax of a new
administration, we ought to make some provision for the future.




The Opium Habit.

I have always had a horror of opiates of all kinds. They are so seductive
and so still in their operations. They steal through the blood like a wolf
on the trail, and they seize upon the heart at last with their white fangs
till it is still forever.

Up the Laramie there is a cluster of ranches at the base of the Medicine
Bow, near the north end of Sheep Mountain, and in sight of the glittering,
eternal frost of the snowy range. These ranches are the homes of the young
men from Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Ohio, and now there are several
“younger sons” of Old England, with herds of horses, steers and sheep,
worth millions of dollars. These young men are not of the kind of whom the
metropolitan ass writes as saying “youbetcherlife,” and calling everybody
“pardner.” They are many of them college graduates, who can brand a wild
Maverick or furnish the easy gestures for a Strauss waltz.

They wear human clothes, talk in the United States language, and have a
bank account. This spring they may be wearing chaparajos and swinging a
quirt through the thin air, and in July they may be at Long Branch, or
coloring a meerschaum pipe among the Alps.

Well, a young man whom we will call Curtis lived at one of these ranches
years ago, and, though a quiet, mind-your-own-business fellow, who had
absolutely no enemies among his companions, he had the misfortune to incur
the wrath of a tramp sheep-herder, who waylaid Curtis one afternoon and
shot him dead as he sat in his buggy. Curtis wasn't armed. He didn't dream
of trouble till he drove home from town, and, as he passed through the
gates of a corral, saw the hairy face of the herder, and at the same
moment the flash of a Winchester rifle. That was all.

A rancher came into town and telegraphed to Curtis' father, and then a
half dozen citizens went out to help capture the herder, who had fled to
the sage brush of the foot-hills.

They didn't get back till toward daybreak, but they brought the herder
with them, I saw him in the gray of the morning, lying in a coarse gray
blanket, on the floor of the engine house. He was dead.

I asked, as a reporter, how he came to his death, and they told me--opium!
I said, did I understand you to say “ropium?” They said no, it was opium.
The murderer had taken poison when he found that escape was impossible.

I was present at the inquest, so that I could report the case. There was
very little testimony, but all the evidence seemed to point to the fact
that life was extinct, and a verdict of death by his own hand was
rendered.

It was the first opium work I had ever seen, and it aroused my curiosity.
Death by opium, it seems, leaves a dark purple ring around the neck. I did
not know this before. People who die by opium also tie their hands
together before they die. This is one of the eccentricities of opium
poisoning that I have never seen laid down in the books. I bequeath it to
medical science. Whenever I run up against a new scientific discovery, I
just hand it right over to the public without cost.

Ever since the above incident, I have been very apprehensive about people
who seem to be likely to form the opium habit. It is one of the most
deadly of narcotics, especially in a new country. High up in the pure
mountain atmosphere, this man could not secure enough air to prolong life,
and he expired. In a land where clear, crisp air and delightful scenery
are abundant, he turned his back upon them both and passed away. Is it not
sad to contemplate?




More Paternal Correspondence.

My dear son.--I tried to write to you last week, but didn't get around to
it, owing to circumstances. I went away on a little business tower for a
few days on the cars, and then when I got home the sociable broke loose in
our once happy home.

While on my commercial tower down the Omehaw railroad buying a new
well-diggin' machine of which I had heard a good deal pro and con, I had
the pleasure of riding on one of them sleeping-cars that we read so much
about.

I am going on 50 years old, and that's the first time I ever slumbered at
the rate of forty-five miles per hour, including stops.

I got acquainted with the porter, and he blacked my boots in the night
unbeknownst to me, while I was engaged in slumber. He must have thought
that I was your father, and that we rolled in luxury at home all the time,
and that it was a common thing for us to have our boots blacked by
menials. When I left the car this porter brushed my clothes till the hot
flashes ran up my spinal column, and I told him that he had treated me
square, and I rung his hand when he held it out toards me, and I told him
that at any time he wanted a good, cool drink of buttermilk, to just
holler through our telephone. We had the sociable at our house last week,
and when I got home your mother set me right to work borryin' chairs and
dishes. She had solicited some cakes and other things. I don't know
whether you are on the skedjule by which these sociables are run or not.
The idea is a novel one to me.

The sisters in our set, onct in so often, turn their houses wrong side out
for the purpose of raising four dollars to apply on the church debt. When
I was a boy we worshiped with less frills than they do now. Now it seems
that the debt is a part of the worship.

Well, we had a good time and used up 150 cookies in a short time. Part of
these cookies was devoured and the balance was trod into our all-wool
carpet. Several of the young people got to playing Copenhagen in the
setting-room and stepped on the old cat in such a way as to disfigure him
for life. They also had a disturbance in the front room and knocked off
some of the plastering.

So your mother is feeling slim and I am not very chipper myself. I hope
that you are working hard at your books so that you will be an ornament to
society. Society is needing some ornaments very much. I sincerely hope
that you will not begin to monkey with rum. I should hate to have you with
a felon's doom or fill a drunkard's grave. If anybody has got to fill a
drunkard's grave, let him do it himself. What has the drunkard ever done
for you, that you should fill his grave for him?

[Illustration: ROUGH ON THE OLD CAT.]

I expect you to do right, as near as possible. You will not do exactly
right all the time, but try to strike a good average. I do not expect you
to let your studies encroach, too much on your polo, but try to unite the
two so that you will not break down under the strain. I should feel sad
and mortified to have you come home a physical wreck. I think one physical
wreck in a family is enough, and I am rapidly getting where I can do the
entire physical wreck business for our neighborhood.

I see by your picture that you have got one of them pleated coats with a
belt around it, and short pants. They make you look as you did when I used
to spank you in years gone by, and I feel the same old desire to do it now
that I did then. Old and feeble as I am, it seems to me as though I could
spank a boy that wears knickerbocker pants buttoned onto a Garabaldy waist
and a pleated jacket. If it wasn't for them cute little camel's hair
whiskers of yours I would not believe that you had grown to be a large,
expensive boy, grown up with thoughts. Some of the thoughts you express in
your letters are far beyond your years. Do you think them yourself, or is
there some boy in the school that thinks all the thoughts for the rest?

Some of your letters are so deep that your mother and I can hardly grapple
with them. One of them, especially, was so full of foreign stuff that you
had got out of a bill of fare, that we will have to wait till you come
home before we can take it in. I can talk a little Chippewa, but that is
all the foreign language I am familiar with. When I was young we had to
get our foreign languages the best we could, so I studied Chippewa without
a master. A Chippewa chief took me into his camp and kept me there for
some time while I acquired his language. He became so much attached to me
that I had great difficulty in coming away. I wish you would write in the
United States dialect as much as possible, and not try to paralize your
parents with imported expressions that come too high for poor people.

Remember that you are the only boy we've got, and we are only going
through the motions of living here for your sake. For us the day is
wearing out, and it is now way long into the shank of the evening. All we
ask of you is to improve on the old people. You can see where I fooled
myself, and you can do better. Read and write, and sifer, and polo, and
get nolledge, and try not to be ashamed of your uncultivated parents.

When you get that checkered little sawed-off coat on, and that pair of
knee panties, and that poker-dot necktie, and the sassy little boys holler
“rats” when you pass by, and your heart is bowed down, remember that, no
matter how foolish you may look, your parents will never sour on you.

Your Father.




Twombley's Tale.

My name is Twombley, G.O.P. Twombley is my full name and I have had a
checkered career. I thought it would be best to have my career checked
right through, so I did so.

My home is in the Wasatch Mountains. Far up, where I can see the long,
green, winding valley of the Jordan, like a glorious panorama below me, I
dwell. I keep a large herd of Angora goats. That is my business. The
Angora goat is a beautiful animal--in a picture. But out of a picture he
has a style of perspiration that invites adverse criticism.

Still, it is an independent life, and one that has its advantages, too.

When I first came to Utah, I saw one day, in Salt Lake City, a young girl
arrive. She was in the heyday of life, but she couldn't talk our language.
Her face was oval; rather longer than it was wide, I noticed, and, though
she was still young, there were traces of care and other foreign
substances plainly written there.

She was an emigrant, about seventeen years of age, and, though she had
been in Salt Lake City an hour and a half, she was still unmarried.

She was about the medium height, with blue eyes, that somehow, as you
examined them carefully in the full, ruddy light of a glorious September
afternoon, seemed to resemble each other. Both of them were that way,

I know not what gave me the courage, but I stepped to her side, and in a
low voice told her of my love and asked her to be mine.

She looked askance at me. Nobody ever did that to me before and lived to
tell the tale. But her sex made me overlook it. Had she been any other sex
that I can think of, I would have resented it. But I would not strike a
woman, especially when I had not been married to her and had no right to
do so.

I turned on my heel and I went away. I most always turn on my heel when I
go away. If I did not turn on my own heel when I went away, whose heel
would a lonely man like me turn upon?

Years rolled by. I did nothing to prevent it. Still that face came to me
in my lonely hut far up in the mountains. That look still rankled in my
memory. Before that my memory had been all right. Nothing had ever rankled
in it very much. Let the careless reader who never had his memory rankle
in hot weather, pass this by. This story is not for him.

After our first conversation we did not meet again for three years, and
then by the merest accident. I had been out for a whole afternoon, hunting
an elderly goat that had grown childish and irresponsible. He had wandered
away, and for several days I had been unable to find him. So I sought for
him till darkness found me several miles from my cabin. I realized at once
that I must hurry back, or lose my way and spend the night in the
mountains. The darkness became more rapidly obvious. My way became more
and more uncertain.

Finally I fell down an old prospect shaft. I then resolved to remain where
I was until I could decide what was best to be done. If I had known that
the prospect shaft was there, I would have gone another way. There was
another way that I could have gone, but it did not occur to me until too
late.

I hated to spend the next few weeks in the shaft, for I had not locked up
my cabin when I left it, and I feared that someone might get in while I
was absent and play on the piano. I had also set a batch of bread and two
hens that morning, and all of these would be in sad knead of me before I
could get my business into such shape that I could return.

I could not tell accurately how long I had been in the shaft, for I had no
matches by which to see my watch. I also had no watch.

All at once, someone fell down the shaft. I knew that it was a woman,
because she did not swear when she landed at the bottom. Still, this could
be accounted for in another way. She was unconscious when I picked her up.

I did not know what to do, I was perfectly beside myself, and so was she.
I had read in novels that when a woman became unconscious people generally
chafed her hands, but I did not know whether I ought to chafe the hands of
a person to whom I had never been introduced.

I could have administered alcoholic stimulants to her but I had neglected
to provide myself with them when I fell down the shaft. This should be a
warning to people who habitually go around the country without alcoholic
stimulants.

Finally she breathed a long sigh and murmured, “where am I?” I told her
that I did not know, but wherever it might be, we were safe, and that
whatever she might say to me, I would promise her, should go no farther.

Then there was a long pause.

To encourage further conversation I asked her if she did not think we had
been having a rather backward spring. She said we had, but she prophesied
a long, open fall.

Then there was another pause, after which I offered her a seat on an old
red empty powder can. Still, she seemed shy and reserved. I would make a
remark to which she would reply briefly, and then there would be a pause
of a little over an hour. Still it seemed longer.

Suddenly the idea of marriage presented itself to my mind. If we never got
out of the shaft, of course an engagement need not be announced. No one
had ever plighted his or her troth at the bottom of a prospect shaft
before. It was certainly unique, to say the least. I suggested it to her.

She demurred to this on the ground that our acquaintance had been so
brief, and that we had never been thrown together before. I told her that
this would be no objection, and that my parents were so far away that I
did not think they would make any trouble about it.

She said that she did not mind her parents so much as she did the violent
temper of her husband.

I asked her if her husband had ever indulged in polygamy. She replied that
he had, frequently. He had several previous wives. I convinced her that in
the eyes of the law, and under the Edmunds bill, she was not bound to him.
Still she feared the consequences of his wrath.

Then I suggested a desperate plan. We would elope!

I was now thirty-seven years old, and yet had never eloped. Neither had
she. So, when the first streaks of rosy dawn crept across the soft,
autumnal sky and touched the rich and royal coloring on the rugged sides
of the grim old mountains, we got out of the shaft and eloped.




On Cyclones.

I desire to state that my position as United States Cyclonist for this
Judicial District is now vacant. I resigned on the 9th day of September,
A.D. 1884.

I have not the necessary personal magnetism to look a cyclone in the eye
and make it quail. I am stern and even haughty in my intercourse with men,
but when a Manitoba simoon takes me by the brow of my pantaloons and
throws me across Township 28, Range 18, West of the 5th Principal
Meridian, I lose my mental reserve and become anxious and even taciturn.
For thirty years I had yearned to see a grown up cyclone, of the
ring-tail-puller variety, mop up the green earth with huge forest trees
and make the landscape look tired. On the 9th day of September, A.D. 1884,
my morbid curiosity was gratified.

As the people came out into the forest with lanterns and pulled me out of
the crotch of a basswood tree with a “tackle and fall,” I remember I told
them I didn't yearn for any more atmospheric phenomena. The old desire for
a hurricane that would blow a cow through a penitentiary was satiated. I
remember when the doctor pried the bones of my leg together, in order to
kind of draw my attention away from the limb, he asked me how I liked the
fall style of Zephyr in that locality.

I said it was all right, what there was of it. I said this in a tone of
bitter irony.

Cyclones are of two kinds, viz: the dark maroon cyclone; and the iron gray
cyclone with pale green mane and tail. It was the latter kind I frolicked
with on the above-named date.

My brother and I were riding along in the grand old forest, and I had just
been singing a few bars from the opera of “Whoop 'em Up, Lizzie Jane,”
 when I noticed that the wind was beginning to sough through the trees.
Soon after that, I noticed that I was soughing through the trees also, and
I am really no slouch of a sougher, either, when I get started.

The horse was hanging by the breeching from the bough of a large butternut
tree, waiting for some one to come and pick him.

[Illustration: WAITING TO BE PICKED.]

I did not see my brother at first, but after a while he disengaged himself
from a rail fence and came where I was hanging, wrong end up, with my
personal effects spilling out of my pockets. I told him that as soon as
the wind kind of softened down, I wished he would go and pick the horse.
He did so, and at midnight a party of friends carried me into town on a
stretcher. It was quite an ovation. To think of a torchlight procession
coming way out there into the woods at midnight, and carrying me into town
on their shoulders in triumph! And yet I was once only a poor boy!

It shows what may be accomplished by anyone if he will persevere and
insist on living a different life.

The cyclone is a natural phenomenon, enjoying the most robust health. It
may be a pleasure for a man with great will power and an iron constitution
to study more carefully into the habits of the cyclone, but as far as I am
concerned, individually, I could worry along some way if we didn't have a
phenomenon in the house from one year's end to another.

As I sit here, with my leg in a silicate of soda corset, and watch the
merry throng promenading down the street, or mingling in the giddy
torchlight procession, I cannot repress a feeling toward a cyclone that
almost amounts to disgust.




The Arabian Language.

The Arabian language belongs to what is called the Semitic or Shemitic
family of languages, and, when written, presents the appearance of a
general riot among the tadpoles and wrigglers of the United States.

The Arabian letter “jeem” or “jim,” which corresponds with our J,
resembles some of the spectacular wonders seen by the delirium tremons
expert. I do not know whether that is the reason the letter is called jeem
or jim, or not.

The letter “sheen” or “shin,” which is some like our “sh” in its effect,
is a very pretty letter, and enough of them would make very attractive
trimming for pantalets or other clothing. The entire Arabic alphabet, I
think, would work up first-rate into trimming for aprons, skirts, and so
forth.

Still it is not so rich in variety as the Chinese language. A Chinaman who
desires to publish a paper in order to fill a long felt want, must have a
small fortune in order to buy himself an alphabet. In this country we get
a press, and then, if we have any money left, we lay it out in type; but
in China the editor buys himself an alphabet and then regards the press as
a mere annex. If you go to a Chinese type maker and ask him to show you
his goods, he will ask you whether you want a two or a three story
alphabet.

The Chinese compositor spends most of his time riding up and down the
elevator, seeking for letters and dusting them off with a feather duster.
In large and wealthy offices the compositor sits at his case with the copy
before him, and has five or six boys running from one floor to another,
bringing him the letters of this wild and peculiar alphabet.

Sometimes they have to stop in the middle of a long editorial and send
down to Hong Kong and have a letter cast specially for that editorial.

Chinese compositors soon die from heart disease, because they have to run
up stairs and down so much in order to get the different letters needed.

One large publisher tried to have his case arranged in a high building
without floors, so that the compositor could reach each type by means of a
long pole, but one day there was a slight earthquake shock that spilled
the entire alphabet out of the case, all over the floor, and although that
was ninety-seven years ago last April, there are still two bushels of pi
on the floor of that office. The paper employs rat printers, and as they
have been engaged in assorting and distributing this mass of pi, it is
called rat pi in China, and the term is quite popular.

When the editor underscores a word, the Chinese compositor charges $9
extra for italicizing it. This is nothing more than fair, for he may have
to go all over the empire, and climb twenty-seven flights of stairs to
find the necessary italics. So it is much more economical in China to use
body type mostly in setting up a paper, and the old journalist will avoid
caps and italics, unless he is very wealthy.

Arabian literature is very rich, and more especially so in verse. How the
Arabian poets succeeded so well in writing their verse in their own
language, I can hardly understand. I find it very difficult to write
poetry which will be greedily snapped up and paid for, even when written
in the English language, but if I had to paw around for an hour to get a
button-hook for the end of the fourth line, so that it would rhyme with
the button-hook in the second line of the same verse, I believe it would
drive me mad.

The Arabian writer is very successful in a tale of fiction. He loves to
take a tale and re-write it for the press by carefully expunging the
facts. It is in lyric and romantic writing that he seems to excel.

The Arabian Nights is the most popular work that has survived the harsh
touch of time. Its age is not fully known, and as the author has been dead
several hundred years, I feel safe in saying that a number of the
incidents contained in this book are grossly inaccurate.

It has been translated several times with more or less success by various
writers, and some of the statements contained in the book are well worthy
of the advanced civilization, and wild word painting incident to a heated
presidential campaign.




Verona.

We arrived in Verona day before yesterday. Most every one has heard of the
Two Gentlemen of Verona. This is the place they came from. They have never
returned. Verona is not noted for its gentlemen now. Perhaps that is the
reason I was regarded as such a curiosity when I came here.

[Illustration: THE ODORS OF VERONA.]

Verona is a good deal older town than Chicago, but the two cities have
points of resemblance after all. When the southern simoon from the stock
yards is wafted across the vinegar orchards of Chicago, and a load of
Mormon emigrants get out at the Rock Island depot and begin to move around
and squirm and emit the fragrance of crushed Limburger cheese, it reminds
one of Verona.

The sky is similar, too. At night, when it is raining hard, the sky of
Chicago and Verona is not dissimilar. Chicago is the largest place,
however, and my sympathies are with her. Verona has about 68,000 people
now, aside from myself. This census includes foreigners and Indians not
taxed.

Verona has an ancient skating rink, known in history as the amphitheatre,
It is 404-1/2 feet by 516 in size, and the wall is still 100 feet high in
places. The people of Verona wanted me to lecture there, but I refrained.
I was afraid that some late comers might elbow their way in and leave one
end of the amphitheatre open and then there would be a draft. I will speak
more fully on the subject of amphitheatres in another letter. There isn't
room in this one.

Verona is noted for the Capitular library, as it is called. This is said
to be the largest collection of rejected manuscripts in the world. I stood
in with the librarian and he gave me an opportunity to examine this
wonderful store of literary work. I found a Virgil that was certainly over
1,600 years old. I also found a well preserved copy of “Beautiful Snow.” I
read it. It was very touching indeed. Experts said it was 1,700 years old,
which is no doubt correct. I am no judge of the age of MSS. Some can look
at the teeth of a literary production and tell within two weeks how old it
is, but I can't. You can also fool me on the age of wine. My rule used to
be to observe how old I felt the next day and to fix that as the age of
the wine, but this rule I find is not infallible. One time I found myself
feeling the next day as though I might be 138 years old, but on
investigation we found that the wine was extremely new, having been made
at a drug store in Cheyenne that same day.

[Illustration: THE NEXT MORNING.]

Looking these venerable MSS. over, I noticed that the custom of writing
with a violet pencil on both sides of the large foolscap sheet, and then
folding it in sixteen directions and carrying it around in the pocket for
two or three centuries, is not a late American invention, as I had been
led to suppose. They did it in Italy fifteen centuries ago. I was
permitted also to examine the celebrated institutes of Gaius. Gaius was a
poor penman, and I am convinced from a close examination of his work that
he was in the habit of carrying his manuscript around in his pocket with
his smoking tobacco. The guide said that was impossible, for smoking
tobacco was not introduced into Italy until a comparatively late day.
That's all right, however. You can't fool me much on the odor of smoking
tobacco.

The churches of Verona are numerous, and although they seem to me a little
different from our own in many ways, they resemble ours in others. One
thing that pleased me about the churches of Verona was the total absence
of the church fair and festival as conducted in America. Salvation seems
to be handed out in Verona without ice cream and cake, and the odor of
sancity and stewed oysters do not go inevitably hand in hand. I have
already been in the place more than two days and I have not yet been
invited to help lift the old church debt on the cathedral. Perhaps they
think I am not wealthy, however. In fact there is nothing about my dress
or manner that would betray my wealth. I have been in Europe now six weeks
and have kept my secret well. Even my most intimate traveling companions
do not know that I am the Laramie City postmaster in disguise.

The cathedral is a most imposing and massive pile. I quote this from the
guide book. This beautiful structure contains a baptismal font cut out of
one solid block of stone and made for immersion, with an inside diameter
of ten feet. A man nine feet high could be baptized there without injury.
The Venetians have a great respect for water. They believe it ought not to
be used for anything else but to wash away sins, and even then they are
very economical about it.

[Illustration]

There is a nice picture here by Titian. It looks as though it had been
left in the smoke house 900 years and overlooked. Titian painted a great
deal. You find his works here ever and anon. He must have had all he could
do in Italy in an early day, when the country was new. I like his pictures
first rate, but I haven't found one yet that I could secure at anything
like a bed rock price.




A Great Upheaval.

I have just received the following letter, which I take the liberty of
publishing, in order that good may come out of it, and that the public
generally may be on the watch:

William Nye, Esq.--

_Dear Sir:_ There has been a great religious upheaval here, and great
anxiety on the part of our entire congregation, and I write to you, hoping
that you may have some suggestions to offer that we could use at this time
beneficially.

All the bitter and irreverent remarks of Bob Ingersoll have fallen
harmlessly upon the minds of our people. The flippant sneers and wicked
sarcasms of the modern infidel, wise in his own conceit, have alike passed
over our heads without damage or disaster. These times that have tried
men's souls have only rooted us more firmly in the faith, and united us
more closely as brothers and sisters.

We do not care whether the earth was made in two billion years or two
minutes, so long as it was made and we are satisfied with it. We do not
care whether Jonah swallowed the whale or the whale swallowed Jonah. None
of these things worry us in the least. We do not pin our faith on such
little matters as those, but we try to so live that when we pass on beyond
the flood we may have a record to which we may point with pride.

But last Sabbath our entire congregation was visibly moved. People who had
grown gray in this church got right up during the service and went out,
and did not come in again. Brothers who had heard all kinds of infidelity
and scorned to be moved by it, got up, and kicked the pews, and slammed
the doors, and created a young riot.

For many years we have sailed along in the most peaceful faith, and
through joy or sorrow we came to the church together to worship. We have
laughed and wept as one family for a quarter of a century, and an humble
dignity and Christian style of etiquette have pervaded our incomings and
our outgoings.

That is the reason why a clear case of disorderly conduct in our church
has attracted attention and newspaper comment. That is the reason why we
want in some public way to have the church set right before we suffer from
unjust criticism and worldly scorn.

It has been reported that one of the brothers, who is sixty years of age,
and a model Christian, and a good provider, rose during the first prayer,
and, waving his plug hat in the air, gave a wild and blood-curdling whoop,
jumped over the back of his pew, and lit out. While this is in a measure
true, it is not accurate. He did do some wild and startling jumping, but
he did not jump over the pew. He tried to, but failed. He was too old.

It has also been stated that another brother, who has done more to build
up the church and society here than any other one man of his size, threw
his hymn book across the church, and, with a loud wail that sounded like
the word “Gosh!” hissed through clenched teeth, got out through the window
and went away. This is overdrawn, though there is an element of truth in
it, and I do not try to deny it.

There were other similar strong evidences of feeling throughout the
congregation, none of which had ever been noticed before in this place.
Our clergyman was amazed and horrified. He tried to ignore the action of
the brethren, but when a sister who has grown old in our church, and been
such a model and example of rectitude that all the girls in the county
were perfectly discouraged about trying to be anywhere near equal to her;
when she rose with a wild snort, got up on the pew with her feet, and
swung her parasol in a way that indicated that she would not go home till
morning, he paused and briefly wound up the services.

Of course there were other little eccentricities on the part of the
congregation, but these were the ones that people have talked about the
most, and have done us the most damage abroad.

Now, my desire is that through the medium of the press you will state that
this great trouble which has come upon us, by reason of which the ungodly
have spoken lightly of us, was not the result of a general tendency to
dissent from the statements made by our pastor, and therefore an
exhibition of our disapproval of his doctrines, but that the janitor had
started a light fire in the furnace, and that had revived a large nest of
common, streaked, hot-nosed wasps in the warm air pipe, and when they came
up through the register and united in the services, there was more or less
of an ovation.

Sometimes Christianity gets sluggish and comatose, but not under the above
circumstances. A man may slumber on softly with his bosom gently rising
and falling, and his breath coming and going through one corner of his
mouth like the death rattle of a bath-tub, while the pastor opens out a
new box of theological thunders and fills the air full of the sullen roar
of sulphurous waves, licking the shores of eternity and swallowing up the
great multitudes of the eternally lost; but when one little wasp, with a
red-hot revelation, goes gently up the leg of that same man's pantaloons,
leaving large, hot tracks whenever he stopped and sat down to think it
over, you will see a sudden awakening and a revival that will attract
attention.

I wish that you would take this letter, Mr. Nye, and write something from
it in your own way, for publication, showing how we happened to have more
zeal than usual in the church last Sabbath, and that it was not directly
the result of the sermon which was preached on that day.

Yours, with great respect,

William Lemons.




The Weeping Woman.

I have not written much for publication lately, because I did not feel
well, I was fatigued. I took a ride on the cars last week and it shook me
up a good deal.

The train was crowded somewhat, and so I sat in a seat with a woman who
got aboard at Minkin's Siding. I noticed as we pulled out of Minkin's
Siding, that this woman raised the window so that she could bid adieu to a
man in a dyed moustache. I do not know whether he was her dolce far
niente, or her grandson by her second husband. I know that if he had been
a relative of mine, however, I would have cheerfully concealed the fact.

[Illustration: SHE SOBBED SEVERAL MORE TIMES.]

She waved a little 2x6 handkerchief out of the window, said “good-bye,”
 allowed a fresh zephyr from Cape Sabine to come in and play a xylophone
interlude on my spinal column, and then burst into a paroxysm of damp, hot
tears.

I had to go into another car for a moment, and when I returned a pugilist
from Chicago had my seat. When I travel I am uniformly courteous,
especially to pugilists. A pugilist who has started out as an obscure boy
with no money, no friends, and no one to practice on, except his wife or
his mother, with no capital aside from his bare hands; a man who has had
to fight his way through life, as it were, and yet who has come out of
obscurity and attracted the attention of the authorities, and won the good
will of those with whom he came in contact, will always find me cordial
and pacific. So I allowed this self-made man with the broad, high,
intellectual shoulder blades, to sit in my seat with his feet on my new
and expensive traveling bag, while I sat with the tear-bedewed memento
from Minkin's Siding.

She sobbed several more times, then hove a sigh that rattled the windows
in the car, and sat up. I asked her if I might sit by her side for a few
miles and share her great sorrow. She looked at me askance. I did not
resent it. She allowed me to take the seat, and I looked at a paper for a
few moments so that she could look me over through the corners of her
eyes. I also scrutinized her lineaments some.

She was dressed up considerably, and, when a woman dresses up to ride in a
railway train, she advertises the fact that her intellect is beginning to
totter on its throne. People who have more than one suit of clothes should
not pick out the fine raiment for traveling purposes. This person was not
handsomely dressed, but she had the kind of clothes that look as though
they had tried to present the appearance of affluence and had failed to do
so.

This leads me to say, in all seriousness, that there is nothing so sad as
the sight of a man or woman who would scorn to tell a wrong story, but who
will persist in wearing bogus clothes and bogus jewelry that wouldn't fool
anybody.

My seat-mate wore a cloak that had started out to bamboozle the American
people with the idea that it was worth $100, but it wouldn't mislead
anyone who might be nearer than half a mile. I also discovered, that it
had an air about it that would indicate that she wore it while she cooked
the pancakes and fried the doughnuts. It hardly seems possible that she
would do this, but the garment, I say, had that air about it.

She seemed to want to converse after awhile, and she began on the subject
of literature, picking up a volume that had been left in her seat by the
train boy, entitled: “Shadowed to Skowhegan and Back; or, The Child Fiend;
price $2,” we drifted on pleasantly into the broad domain of letters.

Incidentally I asked her what authors she read mostly.

“O, I don't remember the authors so much as I do the books,” said she; “I
am a great reader. If I should tell you how much I have read, you wouldn't
believe it.”

I said I certainly would. I had frequently been called upon to believe
things that would make the ordinary rooster quail.

If she discovered the true inwardness of this Anglo-American “Jewdesprit,”
 she refrained from saying anything about it.

“I read a good deal,” she continued, “and it keeps me all strung up. I
weep, O so easily.” Just then she lightly laid her hand on my arm, and I
could see that the tears were rising to her eyes. I felt like asking her
if she had ever tried running herself through a clothes wringer every
morning? I did feel that someone ought to chirk her up, so I asked her if
she remembered the advice of the editor who received a letter from a young
lady troubled the same way. She stated that she couldn't explain it, but
every little while, without any apparent cause, she would shed tears, and
the editor asked her why she didn't lock up the shed.

We conversed for a long time about literature, but every little while she
would get me into deep water by quoting some author or work that I had
never read. I never realized what a hopeless ignoramus I was till I heard
about the scores of books that had made her shed the scalding, and yet
that I had never, never read. When she looked at me with that far-away
expression in her eyes, and with her hand resting lightly on my arm in
such a way as to give the gorgeous two karat Rhinestone from Pittsburg
full play, and told me how such works as “The New Made Grave; or The Twin
Murderers” had cost her many and many a copious tear, I told her I was
glad of it. If it be a blessed boon for the student of such books to weep
at home and work up their honest perspiration into scalding tears, far be
it from me to grudge that poor boon.

I hope that all who may read these lines, and who may feel that the pores
of their skin are getting torpid and sluggish, owing to an inherited
antipathy toward physical exertion, and who feel that they would rather
work up their perspiration into woe and shed it in the shape of common
red-eyed weep, will keep themselves to this poor boon. People have
different ways of enjoying themselves, and I hope no one will hesitate
about accepting this or any other poor boon that I do not happen to be
using at the time.




The Crops.

I have just been through Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin, on a tour of
inspection. I rode for over ten days in these States in a sleeping-car,
examining crops, so that I could write an intelligent report.

[Illustration]

Grain in Northern Wisconsin suffered severely in the latter part of the
season from rust, chintz bug, Hessian fly and trichina. In the St. Croix
valley wheat will not average a half crop. I do not know why farmers
should insist upon leaving their grain out nights in July, when they know
from the experience of former years that it will surely rust.

In Southern Wisconsin too much rain has almost destroyed many crops, and
cattle have been unable to get enough to eat, unless they were fed, for
several weeks. This is a sad outlook for the farmer at this season.

In the northern part of the State many fields of grain were not worth
cutting, while others barely yielded the seed, and even that of a very
inferior quality.

The ruta-baga is looking unusually well this fall, but we cannot subsist
entirely upon the ruta-baga. It is juicy and rich if eaten in large
quantities, but it is too bulky to be popular with the aristocracy.

Cabbages in most places are looking well, though in some quarters I notice
an epidemic of worms. To successfully raise the cabbage, it will be
necessary at all times to be well supplied with vermifuge that can be
readily administered at any hour of the day or night.

The crook-neck squash in the Northwest is a great success this season. And
what can be more beautiful, as it calmly lies in its bower of green vines
in the crisp and golden haze of autumn, than the cute little crook-neck
squash, with yellow, warty skin, all cuddled up together in the cool
morning, like the discarded wife of an old Mormon elder--his first attempt
in the matrimonial line, so to speak, ere he had gained wisdom by
experience.

The full-dress, low-neck-and-short-sleeve summer squash will be worn as
usual this fall, with trimmings of salt and pepper in front and revers of
butter down the back.

N.B.--It will not be used much as an outside wrap, but will be worn mostly
inside.

Hop-poles in some parts of Wisconsin are entirely killed. I suppose that
continued dry weather in the early summer did it.

Hop-lice, however, are looking well. Many of our best hop-breeders thought
that when the hop-pole began to wither and die, the hop-louse could not
survive the intense dry heat; but hop-lice have never looked better in
this State than they do this fall.

I can remember very well when Wisconsin had to send to Ohio for hop-lice.
Now she could almost supply Ohio and still have enough to fill her own
coffers.

[Illustration: ENJOYING HIMSELF AT THE DANCE.]

I do not know that hop-lice are kept in coffers, and I may be wrong in
speaking thus freely of these two subjects, never having seen either a
hop-louse or a coffer, but I feel that the public must certainly and
naturally expect me to say something on these subjects. Fruit in the
Northwest this season is not a great success. Aside from the cranberry and
choke-cherry, the fruit yield in the northern district is light. The early
dwarf crab, with or without, worms, as desired--but mostly with--is
unusually poor this fall. They make good cider. This cider when put into a
brandy flask that has not been drained too dry, and allowed to stand until
Christmas, puts a great deal of expression into a country dance. I have
tried it once myself, so that I could write it up for your valuable paper.

People who were present at that dance, and who saw me frolic around there
like a thing of life, say that it was well worth the price of admission.
Stone fence always flies right to the weakest spot. So it goes right to my
head and makes me eccentric.

The violin virtuoso who “fiddled,” “called off” and acted as justice of
the peace that evening, said that I threw aside all reserve and entered
with great zest into the dance, and seemed to enjoy it much better than
those who danced in the same set with me. Since that, the very sight of a
common crab apple makes my head reel. I learned afterward that this cider
had frozen, so that the alleged cider which we drank that night was the
clear, old-fashioned brandy, which of course would not freeze.

We should strive, however, to lead such lives that we will never be
ashamed to look a cider barrel square in the bung.

[Illustration]




Literary Freaks.

People who write for a livelihood get some queer propositions from those
who have crude ideas about the operation of the literary machine. There is
a prevailing idea among those who have never dabbled in literature very
much, that the divine afflatus works a good deal like a corn sheller. This
is erroneous.

To put a bushel of words into the hopper and have them come out a poem or
a sermon, is a more complicated process than it would seem to the casual
observer.

I can hardly be called literary, though I admit that my tastes lie in that
direction, and yet I have had some singular experiences in that line. For
instance, last year I received flattering overtures from three young men
who wanted me to write speeches for them to deliver on the Fourth of July.
They could do it themselves, but hadn't the time. If I would write the
speeches they would be willing to revise them. They seemed to think it
would be a good idea to write the speeches a little longer than necessary
and then the poorer parts of the effort could be cut out. Various prices
were set on these efforts, from a dollar to “the kindest regards.” People
who have squeezed through one of our adult winters in this latitude,
subsisting on kind regards, will please communicate with the writer,
stating how they like it.

One gentleman, who was in the confectionery business, wanted a lot of
“humorous notices wrote for to put into conversation candy.” It was a big
temptation to write something that would be in every lady's mouth, but I
refrained. Writing gum drop epitaphs may properly belong to the domain of
literature, but I doubt it. Surely I do not want to be haughty and above
my business, but it seems to me that this is irrelevant.

Another man wanted me to write a “piece for his boy to speak,” and if I
would do so, I could come to his house some Saturday night and stay over
Sunday. He said that the boy was “a perfect little case to carry on and
folks didn't know whether he would develop into a condemb fool or a
youmerist.” So he wanted a piece of one of them tomfoolery kind for the
little cuss to speak the last day of school.

[Illustration: HIS MOTTO.]

A coal dealer who had risen to affluence by selling coal to the poor by
apothecaries' weight, wrote to ask me for a design to be used as a family
crest and a motto to emblazon on his arms. I told him I had run out of
crests, but that “weight for the wagon, we'll all take a ride,” would be a
good motto; or he might use the following: “The fuel and his money are
soon parted.” He might emblazon this on his arms, or tattoo it on any
other part of his system where he thought it would be becoming to his
complexion. I never heard from him again, and I do not know whether he was
offended or not.

Two young men in Massachusetts wrote me a letter in which they said they
“had a good thing on mother.” They wanted it written up in a facetious
vein. They said that their father had been on the coast a few weeks
before, engaged in the eeling industry. Being a good man, but partially
full, he had mingled himself in the flowing tide and got drowned. Finally,
after several days' search, the neighbors came in sadly and told the old
lady thai they had found all that was mortal of James, and there were two
eels in the remains. They asked for further instructions as to deceased.
The old lady swabbed out her weeping eyes, braced herself against the sink
and told the men to “bring in the eels and set him again.”

The boys thought that if this could be properly written up, “it would be a
mighty good joke on mother.” I was greatly shocked when I received this
letter. It seemed to me heartless for young men to speak lightly of their
widowed mother's great woe. I wrote them how I felt about it, and rebuked
them severely for treating their mother's grief so lightly. Also for
trying to impose upon me with an old chestnut.




A Father's Advice to His Son.

My dear Henry.--Your pensive favor of the 20th inst., asking for more
means with which to persecute your studies, and also a young man from
Ohio, is at hand and carefully noted.

I would not be ashamed to have you show the foregoing sentence to your
teacher, if it could be worked, in a quiet way, so as not to look
egotistic on my part. I think myself that it is pretty fair for a man that
never had any advantages.

But, Henry, why will you insist on fighting the young man from Ohio? It is
not only rude and wrong, but you invariably get licked. There's where the
enormity of the thing comes in.

It was this young man from Ohio, named Williams, that you hazed last year,
or at least that's what I gether from a letter sent me by your warden. He
maintains that you started in to mix Mr. Williams up with the campus in
some way, and that in some way Mr. Williams resented it and got his fangs
tangled up in the bridge of your nose.

You never wrote this to me or to your mother, but I know how busy you are
with your studies, and I hope you won't ever neglect your books just to
write to us.

Your warden, or whoever he is, said that Mr. Williams also hung a
hand-painted marine view over your eye and put an extra eyelid on one of
your ears.

I wish that, if you get time, you would write us about it, because, if
there's anything I can do for you in the arnica line, I would be pleased
to do so.

The president also says that in the scuffle you and Mr. Williams swapped
belts as follows, to-wit: That Williams snatched off the belt of your
little Norfolk jacket, and then gave you one in the eye.

From this I gether that the old prez, as you faseshusly call him, is an
youmorist. He is not a very good penman, however; though, so far, his
words have all been spelled correct.

I would hate to see you permanently injured, Henry, but I hope that when
you try to tramp on the toes of a good boy simply because you are a
seanyour and he is a fresh, as you frequently state, that he will arise
and rip your little pleated jacket up the back and make your spinal colyum
look like a corderoy bridge in the spring tra la. (This is from a Japan
show I was to last week.)

Why should a seanyour in a colledge tromp onto the young chaps that come
in there to learn? Have you forgot how I fatted up the old cow and beefed
her so that you could go and monkey with youclid and algebray? Have you
forgot how the other boys pulled you through a mill pond and made you
tobogin down hill in a salt barrel with brads in it? Do you remember how
your mother went down there to nuss you for two weeks and I stayed to
home, and done my own work and the housework too and cooked my own vittles
for the whole two weeks?

And now, Henry, you call yourself a seanyour, and therefore, because you
are simply older in crime, you want to muss up Mr. Williams's features so
that his mother will have to come over and nuss him. I am glad that your
little pleated coat is ripped up the back, Henry, under the circumstances,
and I am also glad that you are wearing the belt--over your off eye. If
there's anything I can do to add to the hilarity of the occasion, please
let me know and I will tend to it.

The lop-horned heifer is a parent once more, and I am trying in my poor,
weak way to learn her wayward offspring how to drink out of a patent pail
without pushing your old father over into the hay-mow. He is a cute little
quadruped, with a wild desire to have fun at my expense. He loves to
swaller a part of my coat-tail Sunday morning, when I am dressed up, and
then return it to me in a moist condition. He seems to know that when I
address the sabbath school the children will see the joke and enjoy it.

Your mother is about the same, trying in her meek way to adjust herself to
a new set of teeth that are a size too large for her. She has one large
bunion in the roof of her mouth already, but is still resolved to hold out
faithful, and hopes these few lines will find you enjoying the same great
blessing.

You will find inclosed a dark-blue money-order for four eighty-five. It is
money that I had set aside to pay my taxes, but there is no novelty about
paying taxes. I've done that before, so it don't thrill me as it used to.

Give my congratulations to Mr. Williams. He has got the elements of
greatness to a wonderful degree. If I happened to be participating in that
colledge of yours, I would gently but firmly decline to be tromped onto.

So good-bye for this time.

Your Father.




Eccentricity in Lunch.

Over at Kasota Junction, the other day, I found a living curiosity. He was
a man of about medium height, perhaps 45 years of age, of a quiet
disposition, and not noticeable or peculiar in his general manner. He runs
the railroad eating-house at that point, and the one odd characteristic
which he has, makes him well known all through three or four States. I
could not illustrate his eccentricity any better than by relating a
circumstance that occurred to me at the Junction last week. I had just
eaten breakfast there and paid for it. I stepped up to the cigar case and
asked this man if he had “a rattling good cigar.”

[Illustration: THE ANTIQUE LUNCH.]

Without knowing it I had struck the very point upon which this man seems
to be a crank, if you will allow me that expression, though it doesn't fit
very well in this place. He looked at me in a sad and subdued manner and
said, “No, sir; I haven't a rattling good cigar in the house. I have some
cigars there that I bought for Havana fillers, but they are mostly filled
with pieces of Colorado Maduro overalls. There's a box over yonder that I
bought for good, straight ten cent cigars, but they are only a chaos of
hay and Flora, Fino and Damfino, all socked into a Wisconsin wrapper. Over
in the other end of the case is a brand of cigars that were to knock the
tar out of all other kinds of weeds, according to the urbane rustler who
sold them to me, and then drew on me before I could light one of them.
Well, instead of being a fine Colorado Claro with a high-priced wrapper,
they are common Mexicano stinkaros in a Mother Hubbard wrapper. The
commercial tourist who sold me those cigars and then drew on me at sight
was a good deal better on the draw than his cigars are. If you will
notice, you will see that each cigar has a spinal column to it, and this
outer debris is wrapped around it. One man bought a cigar out of that box
last week. I told him, though, just as I am telling you, that they were no
good, and if he bought one he would regret it. But he took one and went
out on the veranda to smoke it. Then he stepped on a melon rind and fell
with great force on his side. When we picked him up he gasped once or
twice and expired. We opened his vest hurriedly and found that, in
falling, this bouquet de Gluefactoro cigar, with the spinal column, had
been driven through his breast bone and had penetrated his heart. The
wrapper of the cigar never so much as cracked.”

“But doesn't it impair your trade to run on in this wild, reckless way
about your cigars?”

“It may at first, but not after awhile. I always tell people what my
cigars are made of, and then they can't blame me; so, after awhile they
get to believe what I say about them. I often wonder that no cigar man
ever tried this way before. I do just the same way about my lunch counter.
If a man steps up and wants a fresh ham sandwich I give it to him if I've
got it, and if I haven't it I tell him so. If you turn my sandwiches over,
you will find the date of its publication on every one. If they are not
fresh, and I have no fresh ones, I tell the customer that they are not so
blamed fresh as the young man with the gauze moustache, but that I can
remember very well when they were fresh, and if his artificial teeth fit
him pretty well he can try one.

“It's just the same with boiled eggs. I have a rubber dating stamp, and as
soon as the eggs are turned over to me by the hen for inspection, I date
them. Then they are boiled and another date in red is stamped on them. If
one of my clerks should date an egg ahead, I would fire him too quick.

“On this account, people who know me will skip a meal at Missouri
Junction, in order to come here and eat things that are not clouded with
mystery. I do not keep any poor stuff when I can help it, but if I do, I
don't conceal the horrible fact.

“Of course a new cook will sometimes smuggle a late date onto a mediaeval
egg and sell it, but he has to change his name and flee.

“I suppose that if every eating-house should date everything, and be
square with the public, it would be an old story and wouldn't pay; but as
it is, no one trying to compete with me, I do well out of it, and people
come here out of curiosity a good deal.

“The reason I try to do right and win the public esteem is that the
general public never did me any harm and the majority of people who travel
are a kind that I may meet in a future state. I should hate to have a
thousand traveling men holding nuggets of rancid ham sandwiches under my
nose through all eternity, and know that I had lied about it. It's an
honest fact, if I knew I'd got to stand up and apologize for my hand-made,
all-around, seamless pies, and quarantine cigars, Heaven would be no
object.”




Insomnia in Domestic Animals.

If there be one thing above another that I revel in, it is science. I have
devoted much of my life to scientific research, and though it hasn't made
much stir in the scientific world so far, I am positive that when I am
gone the scientists of our day will miss me, and the red-nosed theorist
will come and shed the scalding tear over my humble tomb.

My attention was first attracted to insomnia as the foe of the domestic
animal, by the strange appearance of a favorite dog named Lucretia Borgia.
I did not name this animal Lucretia Borgia. He was named when I purchased
him. In his eccentric and abnormal thirst for blood he favored Lucretia,
but in sex he did not. I got him partly because he loved children. The
owner said Lucretia Borgia was an ardent lover of children, and I found
that he was. He seemed to love them best in the spring of the year, when
they were tender. He would have eaten up a favorite child of mine, if the
youngster hadn't left a rubber ball in his pocket which clogged the
glottis of Lucretia till I could get there and disengage what was left of
the child.

Lucretia soon after this began to be restless. He would come to my
casement and lift up his voice, and howl into the bosom of the silent
night. At first I thought that he had found some one in distress, or
wanted to get me out of doors and save my life. I went out several nights
in a weird costume that I had made up of garments belonging to different
members of my family. I dressed carefully in the dark and stole out to
kill the assassin referred to by Lucretia, but he was not there. Then the
faithful animal would run up to me and with almost human, pleading eyes,
bark and run away toward a distant alley. I immediately decided that some
one was suffering there. I had read in books about dogs that led their
masters away to the suffering and saved people's lives; so, when Lucretia
came to me with his great, honest eyes and took little mementoes out of
the calf of my leg, and then galloped off seven or eight blocks, I
followed him in the chill air of night and my Mosaic clothes. I wandered
away to where the dog stopped behind a livery stable, and there, lying in
a shuddering heap on the frosty ground, lay the still, white features of a
soup bone that had outlived its usefulness.

On the way back, I met a physician who had been up town to swear in an
American citizen who would vote twenty-one years later, if he lived. The
physician stopped me and was going to take me to the home of the
friendless, when he discovered who I was.

[Illustration: EXCITING PUBLIC CURIOSITY.]

You wrap a tall man, with a William H. Seward nose, in a flannel robe, cut
plain, and then put a plug hat and a sealskin sacque and Arctic overshoes
on him, and put him out in the street, under the gaslight, with his trim,
purple ankles just revealing themselves as he madly gallops after a
hydrophobia infested dog, and it is not, after all, surprising that
people's curiosity should be a little bit excited.

After I had introduced myself to the physician and asked him for a cigar,
explaining that I could not find any in the clothes I had on, I asked him
about Lucretia Borgia. I told the doctor how Lucretia seemed restless
nights and nervous and irritable days, and how he seemed to be almost a
mental wreck, and asked him what the trouble was.

He said it was undoubtedly “insomnia.” He said that it was a bad case of
it, too. I told him I thought so myself. I said I didn't mind the insomnia
that Lucretia had so much as I did my own. I was getting more insomnia on
my hands than I could use.

He gave me something to administer to Lucretia. He said I must put it in a
link of sausage and leave the sausage where it would appear that I didn't
want the dog to get it, and then Lucretia would eat it greedily.

I did so. It worked well so far as the administration of the remedy was
concerned, but it was fatal to my little, high strung, yearnful dog. It
must have contained something of a deleterious character, for the next
morning a coarse man took Lucretia Borgia by the tail and laid him where
the violets blow. Malignant insomnia is fast becoming the great foe to the
modern American dog.




Along Lake Superior.

I have just returned from a brief visit to Duluth. After strolling along
the Bay of Naples and watching old Vesuvius vomit red-hot mud, vapor and
other campaign documents, Duluth is quite a change. The ice in the bay at
Duluth was thirty-eight inches in depth when I left there the last week in
March, and we rode across it with the utmost impunity. By the time these
lines fall beneath the eye of the genial, courteous and urbane reader, the
new railroad bridge across the bay, over a mile and a half long, will have
been completed, so that you may ride from Chicago to Duluth over the
Northwestern and Omaha railroads with great comfort. I would be glad to
digress here and tell about the beauty of the summer scenery along the
Omaha road, and the shy and beautiful troutlet, and the dark and silent
Chippewa squawlet and her little bleached out pappooselet, were it not for
the unkind and cruel thrusts that I would invoke from the scenery cynic
who believes that a newspaper man's opinions may be largely warped with a
pass.

Duluth has been joked a good deal, but she stands it first-rate and takes
it good naturedly. She claims 16,000 people, some of whom I met at the
opera house there. If the rest of the 16,000 are as pleasant as those I
conversed with that evening, Duluth must be a pleasant place to live in.
Duluth has a very pleasant and beautiful opera house that seats 1,000
people. A few more could have elbowed their way into the opera house the
evening that I spoke there, but they preferred to suffer on at home.

Lake Superior is one of the largest aggregations of fresh wetness in the
world, if not the largest. When I stop to think that some day all this
cold, cold water will have to be absorbed by mankind, it gives me a cramp
in the geographical center.

Around the west end of Lake Superior there is a string of towns which
stretches along the shore for miles under one name or another, all waiting
for the boom to strike and make the northern Chicago. You cannot visit
Duluth or Superior without feeling that at any moment the tide of trade
will rise and designate the point where the future metropolis of the
northern lakes is to be. I firmly believe that this summer will decide it,
and my guess is that what is now known as West Superior is to get the
benefit. For many years destiny has been hovering over the west end of
this mighty lake, and now the favored point is going to be designated.
Duluth has past prosperity and expensive improvements in her favor, and in
fact the whole locality is going to be benefited, but if I had a block in
West Superior with a roller rink on it, I would wear my best clothes every
day and claim to be a millionaire in disguise. Ex-President R. B. Hayes
has a large brick block in Duluth, but he does not occupy it. Those who go
to Duluth hoping to meet Mr. Hayes will be bitterly disappointed.

The streams that run into Lake Superior are alive with trout, and next
summer I propose to go up there and roast until I have so thoroughly
saturated my system with trout that the trout bones will stick out through
my clothes in every direction and people will regard me as a beautiful
toothpick holder.

Still there will be a few left for those who think of going up there. All
I will need will be barely enough to feed Albert Victor and myself from
day to day. People who have never seen a crowned head with a peeled nose
on it are cordially invited to come over and see us during office hours.
Albert is not at all haughty, and I intend to throw aside my usual reserve
this summer also--for the time. P. Wales' son and I will be far from the
cares that crowd so thick and fast on greatness. People who come to our
cedar bark wigwam to show us their mosquito bites, will be received as
cordially as though no great social chasm yawned between us.

Many will meet us in the depths of the forest and go away thinking that we
are just common plugs of whom the world wots not; but there is where they
will fool themselves.

Then, when the season is over, we will come back into the great maelstrom
of life, he to wait for his grandmother's overshoes and I to thrill
waiting millions from the rostrum with my “Tale of the Broncho Cow.” And
so it goes with us all. Adown life's rugged pathway some must toil on from
daylight to dark to earn their meagre pittance as kings, while others are
born to wear a swallow-tail coat every evening and wring tears of genuine
anguish from their audiences.

They tell some rather wide stories about people who have gone up there
total physical wrecks and returned strong and well. One man said that he
knew a young college student, who was all run down and weak, go up there
on the Brule and eat trout and fight mosquitoes a few months, and when he
returned to his Boston home he was so stout and well and tanned up that
his parents did not know him. There was a man in our car who weighed 300
pounds. He seemed to be boiling out through his clothes everywhere. He was
the happiest looking man I ever saw. All he seemed to do in this life was
to sit all day and whistle and laugh and trot his stomach, first on one
knee and then on the other.

He said that he went up into the pine forests of the Great Lake region a
broken-down hypochondriac and confirmed consumptive. He had been measured
for a funeral sermon three times, he said, and had never used either of
them. He knew a clergyman named Brayley who went up into that region with
Bright's justly celebrated disease. He was so emaciated that he couldn't
carry a watch. The ticking of the watch rattled his bones so that it made
him nervous, and at night they had to pack him in cotton so that he
wouldn't break a leg when he turned over. He got to sleeping out nights on
a bed of balsam and spruce boughs and eating venison and trout.

When he came down in the spring, he passed through a car of lumbermen and
one of them put a warm, wet quid of tobacco in his plug hat for a joke.
There were a hundred of these lumbermen when the preacher began, and when
the train got into Eau Claire there were only three of them well enough to
go around to the office and draw their pay.

This is just as the story was given to me and I repeat it to show how
bracing the climate near Superior is. Remember, if you please, that I do
not want the story to be repeated as coming from me, for I have nothing
left now but my reputation for veracity, and that has had a very hard
winter of it.




I Tried Milling.

I think I was about 18 years of age when I decided that I would be a
miller, with flour on my clothes and a salary of $200 per month. This was
not the first thing I had decided to be, and afterward changed my mind
about.

I engaged to learn my profession of a man called Sam Newton, I believe; at
least I will call him that for the sake of argument. My business was to
weigh wheat, deduct as much as possible on account of cockle, pigeon grass
and wild buckwheat, and to chisel the honest farmer out of all he would
stand. This was the programme with Mr. Newton; but I am happy to say that
it met with its reward, and the sheriff afterward operated the mill.

On stormy days I did the book-keeping, with a scoop shovel behind my ear,
in a pile of middlings on the fifth floor. Gradually I drifted into doing
a good deal of this kind of brain work. I would chop the ice out of the
turbine wheel at 5 o'clock A.M., and then frolic up six flights of stairs
and shovel shorts till 9 o'clock P.M.

By shoveling bran and other vegetables 16 hours a day, a general knowledge
of the milling business may be readily obtained. I used to scoop middlings
till I could see stars, and then I would look out at the landscape and
ponder.

I got so that I piled up more ponder, after a while, than I did middlings.

One day the proprietor came up stairs and discovered me in a brown study,
whereupon he cursed me in a subdued Presbyterian way, abbreviated my
salary from $26 per month to $18 and reduced me to the ranks.

Afterward I got together enough desultory information so that I could
superintend the feed stone. The feed stone is used to grind hen feed and
other luxuries. One day I noticed an odor that reminded me of a hot
overshoe trying to smother a glue factory at the close of a tropical day.
I spoke to the chief floor walker of the mill about it, and he said “dod
gammit” or something that sounded like that, in a course and brutal
manner. He then kicked my person in a rude and hurried tone of voice, and
told me that the feed stone was burning up.

He was a very fierce man, with a violent and ungovernable temper, and,
finding that I was only increasing his brutal fury, I afterward resigned
my position. I talked it over with the proprietor, and both agreed that it
would be best. He agreed to it before I did, and rather hurried up my
determination to go.

[Illustration: HE MADE IT AN OBJECT FOR ME TO GO.]

I rather hated to go so soon, but he made it an object for me to go, and I
went. I started in with the idea that I would begin at the bottom of the
ladder, as it were, and gradually climb to the bran bin by my own
exertions, hoping by honesty, industry, and carrying two bushels of wheat
up nine flights of stairs, to become a wealthy man, with corn meal in my
hair and cracked wheat in my coat pocket, but I did not seem to accomplish
it.

Instead of having ink on my fingers and a chastened look of woe on my
clear-cut Grecian features, I might have poured No. 1 hard wheat and
buckwheat flour out of my long taper ears every night, if I had stuck to
the profession. Still, as I say, it was for another man's best good that I
resigned. The head miller had no control over himself and the proprietor
had rather set his heart on my resignation, so it was better that way.

Still I like to roll around in the bran pile, and monkey in the cracked
wheat. I love also to go out in the kitchen and put corn meal down the
back of the cook's neck while my wife is working a purple silk Kensington
dog, with navy blue mane and tail, on a gothic lambrequin.

I can never cease to hanker for the rumble and grumble of the busy mill,
and the solemn murmur of the millstones and the machinery are music to me.
More so than the solemn murmur of the proprietor used to be when he came
in at an inopportune moment, and in that impromptu and extemporaneous
manner of his, and found me admiring the wild and beautiful scenery. He
may have been a good miller, but he had no love for the beautiful. Perhaps
that is why he was always so cold and cruel toward me. My slender, willowy
grace and mellow, bird-like voice never seemed to melt his stony heart.




Our Forefathers.

Seattle, W.T., December 12.--I am up here on the Sound in two senses. I
rode down to-day from Tacoma on the Sound, and to-night I shall lecture at
Frye's Opera House.

Seattle is a good town. The name lacks poetic warmth, but some day the man
who has invested in Seattle real estate will have reason to pat himself on
the back and say “ha ha,” or words to that effect. The city is situated on
the side of a large hill and commands a very fine view of that world's
most calm and beautiful collection of water, Puget Sound.

I cannot speak too highly of any sheet of water on which I can ride all
day with no compunction of digestion. He who has tossed for days upon the
briny deep, will understand this and appreciate it; even if he never
tossed upon the angry deep, if it happened to be all he had, he will be
glad to know that the Sound is a good piece of water to ride on. The
gentle reader who has crossed the raging main and borrowed high-priced
meals of the steamship company for days and days, will agree with me that
when we can find a smooth piece of water to ride on we should lose no time
in crossing it.

In Washington Territory the women vote. That is no novelty to me, of
course, for I lived in Wyoming for seven years where women vote, and I
held office all the time. And still they say that female voters are poor
judges of men, and that any pleasing $2 adonis who comes along and asks
for their suffrages will get them.

Not much!!!

Woman is a keen and correct judge of mental and moral worth. Without
stopping to give logical reasons for her course, perhaps, she still
chooses with unerring judgment at the polls.

Anyone who doubts this statement, will do well to go to the old poll books
in Wyoming and examine my overwhelming majorities--with a powerful
magnifier.

I have just received from Boston a warm invitation to be present in that
city on Forefathers' day, to take part in the ceremonies and join in the
festivities of that occasion.

Forefathers, I thank you! Though this reply will not reach you for a long
time, perhaps, I desire to express to you my deep appreciation of your
kindness, and, though I can hardly be regarded as a forefather myself, I
assure you that I sympathize with you.

Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to be with you on this day of
your general jubilee and to talk over old times with you.

One who has never experienced the thrill of genuine joy that wakens a man
to a glad realization of the fact that he is a forefather, cannot
understand its full significance. You alone know how it is yourself, you
can speak from experience.

In fancy's dim corridors I see you stand, away back in the early dawn of
our national day, with the tallow candle drooping and dying in its socket,
as you waited for the physician to come and announce to you that you were
a forefather.

Forefathers; you have done well. Others have sought to outdo you and wrest
the laurels from your brow, but they did not succeed. As forefathers you
have never been successfully scooped.

I hope that you will keep up your justly celebrated organization. If a
forefather allows his dues to get in arrears, go to him kindly and ask him
like a brother to put up. If he refuses to do so, fire him. There is no
reason why a man should presume upon his long standing as a forefather to
become insolent to other forefathers who are far his seniors. As a rule, I
notice it is the young amateur forefather who has only been so a few days,
in fact, who is arrogant and disobedient.

I have often wished that we could observe Forefathers' day more generally
in the West. Why we should allow the Eastern cities to outdo us in this
matter while we hold over them in other ways, I cannot understand. Our
church sociables and homicides in the West will compare favorably with
those of the effeter cities of the Atlantic slope. Our educational
institutions and embezzlers are making rapid strides, especially our
embezzlers. We are cultivating a certain air of refinement and haughty
reserve which enables us at times to fool the best judges. Many of our
Western people have been to the Atlantic seaboard and remained all summer
without falling into the hands of the bunko artist. A cow gentleman friend
of mine who bathed his plump limbs in the Atlantic last summer during the
day, and mixed himself up in the mazy dance at night, told me on his
return that he had enjoyed the summer immensely, but that he had returned
financially depressed.

“Ah,” said I, with an air of superiority which I often assume while
talking to men who know more than I do, “you fell into the hands of the
cultivated confidence man?”

“No, William,” he said sadly, “worse than that. I stopped at a seaside
hotel. Had I gone to New York City and hunted up the gentlemanly bunko man
and the Wall street dealer in lamb's pelts, as my better judgment
prompted, I might have returned with funds. Now I am almost insolvent. I
begin life again with great sorrow, and the same old Texas steer with
which I went into the cattle industry five years ago.”

But why should we, here in the West, take readily to all other
institutions common to the cultured East and ignore the forefather
industry? I now make this public announcement, and will stick to it, viz:
I will be one of ten full-blooded American citizens to establish a branch
forefather's lodge in the West, with a separate fund set aside for the
benefit of forefathers who are no longer young. Forefathers are just as
apt to become old and helpless as anyone else. Young men who contemplate
becoming forefathers should remember this.




In Acknowledgement.

To The Metropolitan Guide Publishing Co., New York.

Gentlemen.--I received the copy of your justly celebrated “Guide to rapid
Affluence, or How to Acquire Wealth Without Mental Exertion,” price
twenty-five cents. It is a great boon.

I have now had this book sixteen weeks, and, as I am wealthy enough, I
return it. It is not much worn, and if you will allow me fifteen cents for
it, I would be very grateful. It is not the intrinsic value of the fifteen
cents that I care for so much, but I would like it as a curiosity.

The book is wonderfully graphic and thorough in all its details, and I was
especially pleased with its careful and useful recipe for ointments. One
style of ointment spoken of and recommended by your valuable book, is
worthy of a place in history. I made some of it according to your formula.
I tried it on a friend of mine. He wore it when he went away, and he has
not as yet returned. I heard, incidentally, that it adhered to him. People
who have examined it say that it retains its position on his person
similar to a birthmark.

Your cement does not have the same peculiarity. It does everything but
adhere. Among other specialties it effects a singular odor. It has a
fragrance that ought to be utilized in some way. Men have harnessed the
lightning, and it seems to me that the day is not far distant when a man
will be raised up who can control this latent power. Do you not think that
possibly you have made a mistake and got your ointment and cement formula
mixed? Your cement certainly smells like a corrupt administration in a
warm room.

Your revelations in the liquor manufacture, and how to make any mixed
drink with one hand tied, is well worth the price of the book. The chapter
on bar etiquette is also excellent. Very few men know how to properly
enter a bar-room and what to do after they arrive. How to get into a
bar-room without attracting attention, and how to get out without police
interference, are points upon which our American drunkards are lamentably
ignorant. How to properly address a bar tender, is also a page that no
student of good breeding could well omit.

I was greatly surprised to read how simple the manufacture of drinks under
your formula is. You construct a cocktail without liquor and then rob
intemperance of its sting. You also make all kinds of liquor without the
use of alcohol, that demon under whose iron heel thousands of our sons and
brothers go down to death and delirium annually. Thus you are doing a good
work.

You also unite aloes, tobacco and Rough on Rats, and, by a happy
combination, construct a style of beer that is non-intoxicating.

No one could, by any possible means, become intoxicated on your justly
celebrated beer. He would not have time. Before he could get inebriated he
would be in the New Jerusalem.

Those who drink your beer will not fill drunkards' graves. They will close
their career and march out of this life with perforated stomachs and a
look of intense anguish.

Your method of making cider without apples is also frugal and
ingenious. Thousands of innocent apple worms annually lose their lives
in the manufacture of cider. They are also, in most instances, wholly
unprepared to die. By your method, a style of wormless cider is
constructed that would not fool anyone. It tastes a good deal like
rain water that was rained about the first time that any raining was
ever done, and was deprived of air ever since.

[Illustration: HOW TO WIN AFFECTION.]

The closing chapter on the subject of “How to win the affections of the
opposite sex at sixty yards,” is first-rate. It is wonderful what triumph
science and inventions have wrenched from obdurate conditions! Only a few
years ago, a young man had to work hard for weeks and months in order to
win the love of a noble young woman. Now, with your valuable and scholarly
work, price twenty-five cents, he studies over the closing chapter an hour
or two, then goes out into society and gathers in his victim. And yet I do
not grudge the long, long hours I squandered in those years when people
were in heathenish darkness. I had no book like yours to tell me how to
win the affections of the opposite sex. I could only blunder on, week
after week and yet I do not regret it. It was just the school I needed. It
did me good.

Your book will, no doubt, be a good thing for those who now grope, but I
have groped so long that I have formed the habit and prefer it. Let me go
right on groping. Those who desire to win the affections of the opposite
sex at one sitting, will do well to send two bits for your great work, but
I am in no hurry. My time is not valuable.




Preventing a Scandal.

Boys should never be afraid or ashamed to do little odd jobs by which to
acquire money. Too many boys are afraid, or at least seem to be
embarrassed when asked to do chores, and thus earn small sums of money. In
order to appreciate wealth we must earn it ourselves. That is the reason I
labor. I do not need to labor. My parents are still living, and they
certainly would not see me suffer for the necessities of life. But life in
that way would not have the keen relish that it would if I earned the
money myself.

Sawing wood used to be a favorite pastime with boys twenty years ago. I
remember the first money I ever earned was by sawing wood. My brother and
myself were to receive $5 for sawing five cords of wood. We allowed the
job to stand, however, until the weather got quite warm, and then we
decided to hire a foreigner who came along that way one glorious summer
day when all nature seemed tickled and we knew that the fish would be apt
to bite. So we hired the foreigner, and while he sawed, we would bet with
him on various “dead sure things” until he got the wood sawed, when he
went away owing us fifty cents.

We had a neighbor who was very wealthy. He noticed that we boys earned our
own spending money, and he yearned to have his son try to ditto. So he
told the boy that he was going away for a few weeks and that he would give
him $2 per cord, or double price, to saw the wood. He wanted to teach the
boy to earn and appreciate his money. So, when the old man went away, the
boy secured a colored man to do the job at $1 per cord, by which process
the youth made $10. This he judiciously invested in clothes, meeting his
father at the train in a new summer suit and a speckled cane. The old man
said he could see by the sparkle in the boy's clear, honest eyes, that
healthful exercise was what boys needed.

When I was a boy I frequently acquired large sums of money by carrying
coal up two flights of stairs for wealthy people who were too fat to do it
themselves. This money I invested from time to time in side shows and
other zoological attractions.

One day I saw a coal cart back up and unload itself on the walk in such a
way as to indicate that the coal would have to be manually elevated inside
the building. I waited till I nearly froze to death, for the owner to come
along and solicit my aid. Finally he came. He smelled strong of carbolic
acid, and I afterward learned that he was a physician and surgeon.

We haggled over the price for some time, as I had to carry the coal up two
flights in an old waste paper basket and it was quite a task. Finally we
agreed. I proceeded with the work. About dusk I went up the last flight of
stairs with the last load. My feet seemed to weigh about nineteen pounds
apiece and my face was very sombre.

In the gloaming I saw my employer. He was writing a prescription by the
dim, uncertain light. He told me to put the last basketful in the little
closet off the hall and then come and get my pay. I took the coal into the
closet, but I do not know what I did with it. As I opened the door and
stepped in, a tall skeleton got down off the nail and embraced me like a
prodigal son. It fell on my neck and draped itself all over me. Its
glittering phalanges entered the bosom of my gingham shirt and rested
lightly on the pit of my stomach. I could feel the pelvis bone in the
small of my back. The room was dark, but I did not light the gas. Whether
it was the skeleton of a lady or gentleman, I never knew; but I thought,
for the sake of my good name, I would not remain. My good name and a
strong yearning for home were all that I had at that time.

So I went home. Afterwards, I learned that this physician got all his coal
carried up stairs for nothing in this way, and he had tried to get rooms
two flights further up in the building, so that the boys would have
further to fall when they made their egress.




About Portraits.

Hudson, Wis., August 25, 1885.

Hon. William F. Vilas, Postmaster-General, Washington, D.C.

Dear Sir,--For some time I have been thinking of writing to you and asking
you how you were getting along with your department since I left it. I did
not wish to write you for the purpose of currying favor with an
administration against which I squandered a ballot last fall. Neither do I
desire to convey the impression that I would like to open a correspondence
with you for the purpose of killing time. If you ever feel like sitting
down and answering this letter in an off-hand way it would please me very
much, but do not put yourself out to do so. I wanted to ask you, however,
how you like the pictures of yourself recently published by the patent
insides. That was my principal object in writing. Having seen you before
this great calamity befell you, I wanted to inquire whether you had really
changed so much. As I remember your face, it was rather unusually
intellectual and attractive for a great man. Great men are very rarely
pretty. I guess that, aside from yourself, myself, and Mr. Evarts, there
is hardly an eminent man in the country who would be considered handsome.
But the engraver has done you a great injustice, or else you have sadly
changed since I saw you. It hardly seems possible that your nose has
drifted around to leeward and swelled up at the end, as the engraver would
have us believe. I do not believe that in a few short months the look of
firmness and conscious rectitude that I noticed could have changed to that
of indecision and vacuity which we see in some of your late portraits as
printed.

[Illustration: A NOSE ON THE BIAS.]

I saw one yesterday, with your name attached to it, and it made my heart
ache for your family. As a resident in your State I felt humiliated. Two
of Wisconsin's ablest men have been thus slaughtered by the rude broad-axe
of the engraver. Last fall, Senator Spooner, who is also a man with a
first-class head and face, was libeled in this same reckless way. It makes
me mad, and in that way impairs my usefulness. I am not a good citizen,
husband or father when I am mad. I am a perfect simoom of wrath at such
times, and I am not responsible for what I do.

Nothing can arouse the indignation of your friends, regardless of party,
so much as the thought that while you are working so hard in the
postoffice at Washington with your coat off, collecting box rent and
making up the Western mail, the remorseless engraver and electrotyper are
seeking to down you by making pictures of you in which you appear either
as a dude or a tough.

While I have not the pleasure of being a member of your party, having
belonged to what has been sneeringly alluded to as the g.o.p., I cannot
refrain from expressing my sympathy at this time. Though we may have
differed heretofore upon important questions of political economy, I
cannot exult over these portraits. Others may gloat over these efforts to
injure you, but I do not. I am not much of a gloater, anyhow.

I leave those to gloat who are in the gloat business.

Still, it is one of the drawbacks incident to greatness. We struggle hard
through life that we may win the confidence of our fellow-men, only at
last to have pictures of ourselves printed and distributed where they will
injure us.

[Illustration: ASSORTED PHYSIOGNOMY.]

I desire to add before closing this letter, Mr. Vilas, that with those who
are acquainted with you and know your sterling worth, these portraits will
make no difference. We will not allow them to influence us socially or
politically. What the effect may be upon offensive partisans who are total
strangers to you, I do not know.

My theory in relation to these cuts is, that they are combined and
interchangeable, so that, with slight modifications, they are used for all
great men. The cut, with the extras that go with it, consists of one head
with hair (front view), one bald head (front view), one head with hair
(side view), one bald head (side view), one pair eyes (with glasses), one
pair eyes (plain), one Roman nose, one Grecian nose, one turn-up nose, one
set whiskers (full), one moustache, one pair side-whiskers, one chin, one
set large ears, one set medium ears, one set small ears, one set
shoulders, with collar and necktie for above, one monkey-wrench, one set
quoins, one galley, one oil can, one screwdriver. These different features
are then arranged so that a great variety of clergymen, murderers,
senators, embezzlers, artists, dynamiters, humorists, arsonists,
larcenists, poets, statesmen, base ball players, rinkists, pianists,
capitalists, bigamists and sluggists are easily represented. No newspaper
office should be without them. They are very simple, and any child can
easily learn to operate it. They are invaluable in all cases, for no one
knows at what moment a revolting crime may be committed by a comparatively
unknown man, whose portrait you wish to give, and in this age of rapid
political transformations, presentations and combinations, no enterprising
paper should delay the acquisition of a combined portrait for the use of
its readers.

Hoping that you are well, and that you will at once proceed to let no
guilty man escape, I remain, yours truly,

Bill Nye.




The Old South.

The Old South Meeting House, in Boston, is the most remarkable structure
in many respects to be found in that remarkable city. Always eager
wherever I go to search out at once the gospel privileges, it is not to be
wondered at, that I should have gone to the Old South the first day after
I landed in Boston.

It is hardly necessary to go over the history of the Old South, except,
perhaps, to refresh the memory of those who live outside of Boston. The
Old South Society was organized in 1669, and the ground on which the old
meetinghouse now stands was given by Mrs. Norton, the widow of Rev. John
Norton, since deceased. The first structure was of wood, and in 1729 the
present brick building succeeded it. King's Handbook of Boston says: “It
is one of the few historic buildings that have been allowed to remain in
this iconoclastic age.”

So it seems that they are troubled with iconoclasts in Boston, too. I
thought I saw one hanging around the Old South on the day I was there, and
had a good notion to point him out to the authorities, but thought it was
none of my business.

I went into the building and registered, and then from force of habit or
absent-mindedness handed my umbrella over the counter and asked how soon
supper would be ready. Everybody registers, but very few, I am told, ask
how soon supper will be ready. The Old South is now run on the European
plan, however.

The old meeting-house is chiefly remarkable for the associations that
cluster around it. Two centuries hover about the ancient weather-vane and
look down upon the visitor when the weather is favorable.

Benjamin Franklin was baptized and attended worship here, prior to his
wonderful invention of lightning. Here on each succeeding Sabbath sat the
man who afterwards snared the forked lightning with a string and put it
in a jug for future generations. Here Whitefield preached and the rebels
discussed the tyranny of the British king. Warren delivered his famous
speech here upon the anniversary of the Boston massacre and the “tea
party” organized in this same building. Two hundred years ago exactly,
the British used the Old South as a military riding school, although a
majority of the people of Boston were not in favor of it.

It would be well to pause here and consider the trying situation in which
our ancestors were placed at that time. Coming to Massachusetts as they
did, at a time when the country was new and prices extremely high, they
had hoped to escape from oppression and establish themselves so far away
from the tyrant that he could not come over here and disturb them without
suffering from the extreme nausea incident to a long sea voyage. Alas,
however, when they landed at Plymouth rock there was not a decent hotel in
the place. The same stern and rock-bound coast which may be discovered
along the Atlantic sea-board to-day was there, and a cruel, relentless sky
frowned upon their endeavors.

Where prosperous cities now flaunt to the sky their proud domes and
floating debts, the rank jimson weed nodded in the wind and the pumpkin
pie of to-day still slumbered in the bosom of the future. What glorious
facts have, under the benign influence of fostering centuries, been born
of apparent impossibility. What giant certainties have grown through these
years from the seeds of doubt and discouragement and uncertainty! (Big
firecrackers and applause.)

[Illustration: MR. FRANKLIN EXPERIMENTS.]

At that time our ancestors had but timidly embarked in the forefather
business. They did not know that future generations in four-button
cutaways would rise up and call them blessed and pass resolutions of
respect on their untimely death. If they stayed at home the king taxed
them all out of shape, and if they went out of Boston a few rods to get
enough huckleberries for breakfast, they would frequently come home so
full of Indian arrows that they could not get through a common door
without great pain.

Such was the early history of the country where now cultivation and
education and refinement run rampant and people sit up all night to print
newspapers so that we can have them in the morning.

The land on which the Old South stands is very valuable for business
purposes, and $400,000 will have to be raised in order to preserve the old
landmark to future generations. I earnestly hope that it will be secured,
and that the old meeting-house--dear not alone to the people of Boston,
but to the millions of Americans scattered from sea to sea, who cannot
forget where first universal freedom plumed its wings--will be spared to
entertain within its hospitable walls, enthusiastic and reverential
visitors for ages without end.




Knights of the Pen.

When you come to think of it, it is surprising that so many newspaper men
write so that any one but an expert can read it. The rapid and voluminous
work, especially of daily journalism, knocks the beautiful business
college penman, as a rule, higher than a kite. I still have specimens of
my own handwriting that a total stranger could read.

I do not remember a newspaper acquaintance whose penmanship is so
characteristic of the exacting neatness and sharp, clear cut style of the
man, as is that of Eugene Field, of the Chicago _News_. As the “Nonpareil
Writer” of the Denver _Tribune_, it was a mystery to me when he did the
work which the paper showed each day as his own. You would sometimes find
him at his desk, writing on large sheets of “print paper” with a pen and
violet ink, in a hand that was as delicate as the steel plate of a bank
note and the kind of work that printers would skirmish for. He would ask
you to sit down in the chair opposite his desk, which had two or three old
exchanges thrown on it. He would probably say, “Never mind those papers.
I've read them. Just sit down on them if you want to.” Encouraged by his
hearty manner, you would sit down, and you would continue to sit down till
you had protruded about three-fourths of your system through that hollow
mockery of a chair. Then he would run to help you out and curse the chair,
and feel pained because he had erroneously given you the ruin with no seat
to it. He always felt pained over such things. He always suffered keenly
and felt shocked over the accident until you had gone away, and then he
would sigh heavily and “set” the chair again.

[Illustration: THE RUIN.]

Frank Pixley, the editor of the San Francisco _Argonaut_, is not
beautiful, though the _Argonaut_ is. He is grim and rather on the Moses
Montefiore style of countenance, but his hand-writing does not convey the
idea of the man personally, or his style of dealing with the Chinese
question. It is rather young looking, and has the uncertain manner of an
eighteen-year-old boy.

Robert J. Burdette writes a small but plain hand, though he sometimes
suffers from the savage typographical error that steals forth at such a
moment as ye think not, and disfigures and tears and mangles the bright
eyed children of the brain.

Very often we read a man's work and imagine we shall find him like it,
cheery, bright and entertaining; but we know him and find that personally
he is a refrigerator, or an egotist, or a man with a torpid liver and a
nose like a rose geranium. You will not be disappointed in Bob Burdette,
however, You think you will like him, and you always do. He will never be
too famous to be a gentleman.

George W. Peck's hand is of the free and independent order of chirography.
It is easy and natural, but not handsome. He writes very voluminously,
doing his editorial writing in two days of the week, generally Friday and
Saturday. Then he takes a rapid horse, a zealous bird dog and an improved
double barrel duck destroyer and communes with nature.

Sam Davis, an old time Californian, and now in Nevada, writes the freest
of any penman I know. When he is deliberate, he may be betrayed into
making a deformed letter and a crooked mark attached to it, which he
characterizes as a word. He puts a lot of these together and actually pays
postage on the collection under the delusion that it is a letter, that it
will reach its destination, and that it will accomplish its object.

He makes up for his bad writing, however, by being an unpublished volume
of old time anecdotes and funny experiences.

Goodwin, of the old _Territorial Enterprise_, and Mark Twain's old
employer, writes with a pencil in a methodical manner and very plainly.
The way he sharpens a “hard medium” lead pencil and skins the apostle of
the so-called Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, makes my heart
glad. Hardly a day passes that his life is not threatened by the low
browed thumpers of Mormondom, and yet the old war horse raises the
standard of monogamy and under the motto, “One country, one flag and one
wife at a time,” he smokes his old meerschaum pipe and writes a column of
razor blades every day. He is the buzz saw upon which polygamy has tried
to sit. Fighting these rotten institutions hand to hand and fighting a
religious eccentricity through an annual message, or a feeble act of
congress, are two separate and distinct things.

If I had a little more confidence in my longevity than I now have, I would
go down there to the Valley of the Jordan, and I would gird up my loins,
and I would write with that lonely warrior at Salt Lake, and with the aid
and encouragement of our brethren of the press who do not favor the right
of one man to marry an old woman's home, we would rotten egg the bogus
Temple of Zion till the civilized world, with a patent clothes pin on its
nose, would come and see what was the matter.

I see that my zeal has led me away from my original subject, but I haven't
time to regret it now.




The Wild Cow.

When I was young and used to roam around over the country, gathering
water-melons in the light of the moon, I used to think I could milk
anybody's cow, but I do not think so now. I do not milk a cow now unless
the sign is right, and it hasn't been right for a good many years. The
last cow I tried to milk was a common cow, born in obscurity; kind of a
self-made cow. I remember her brow was low, but she wore her tail high and
she was haughty, oh, so haughty.

I made a common-place remark to her, one that is used in the very best of
society, one that need not have given offence anywhere. I said “So”--and
she “soed.” Then I told her to “hist” and she histed. But I thought she
overdid it. She put too much expression in it.

Just then I heard something crash through the window of the barn and fall
with a dull, sickening thud on the outside. The neighbors came to see what
it was that caused the noise. They found that I had done it in getting
through the window.

I asked the neighbors if the barn was still standing. They said it was.
Then I asked if the cow was injured much. They said she seemed to be quite
robust. Then I requested them to go in and calm the cow a little, and see
if they could get my plug hat off her horns.

I am buying all my milk now of a milkman. I select a gentle milkman who
will not kick, and feel as though I could trust him. Then, if he feels as
though he could trust me, it is all right.

[Illustration: THE WILD COW.]




Spinal Meningitis.

So many people have shown a pardonable curiosity about the above named
disease, and so few have a very clear idea of the thrill of pleasure it
affords the patient, unless they have enjoyed it themselves, that I have
decided to briefly say something in answer to the innumerable inquiries I
have received.

Up to the moment I had a notion of getting some meningitis, I had never
employed a physician. Since then I have been thrown in their society a
great deal. Most of them were very pleasant and scholarly gentlemen, who
will not soon be forgotten; but one of them doctored me first for
pneumonia, then for inflammatory rheumatism, and finally, when death was
contiguous, advised me that I must have change of scene and rest.

I told him that if he kept on prescribing for me, I thought I might depend
on both. Change of physicians, however, saved my life. This horse doctor,
a few weeks afterward, administered a subcutaneous morphine squirt in the
arm of a healthy servant girl because she had the headache, and she is now
with the rest of this veterinarian's patients in a land that is fairer
than this.

She lived six hours after she was prescribed for. He gave her change of
scene and rest. He has quite a thriving little cemetery filled with people
who have succeeded in cording up enough of his change of scene and rest to
last them through all eternity. He was called once to prescribe for a man
whose head had been caved in by a stone match-box, and, after treating the
man for asthma and blind staggers, he prescribed rest and change of scene
for him, too. The poor asthmatic is now breathing the extremely rarified
air of the New Jerusalem.

Meningitis is derived from the Latin _Meninges_, membrane, and--_itis_, an
affix denoting inflammation, so that, strictly speaking, meningitis is the
inflammation of a membrane, and when applied to the spine, or cerebrum, is
called spinal meningitis, or cerebro-spinal meningitis, etc., according to
the part of the spine or brain involved in the inflammation. Meningit

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