ASQUASH-NOSED scientist from away up the creek, asks, "What is literature!" Cast your eye over these logic-imbued columns, you sun-dried savant from the remote precincts. Drink at the never-failing Boomerang springs of forgotten lore, you dropsical wart of a false and erroneous civilization. Read our "Address to the Duke of Stinking Water," or the "Ode to the Busted Snoot of a Shattered Venus DeMilo," if you want to fill up your thirsty soul with high-priced literature. Don't go around hungering for literary pie while your eyes are closed and your capacious ears are filled with bales of hay.
DOWN at Nathrop, Colorado, there is a large, new, and fine hotel, where no guest ever ate or slept. It stands there near the South Park track like the ghost of some nice, clean country inn. The reader will naturally ask if the house is haunted, that no one stops at the very attractive hotel in a country where good hotels are rare. No, it is not that. It in not haunted so much as it would like to be. Though it is a fine hotel, there is no town nearer it than Buena Vista, and no one is going to do business at Buena Yista and go up to Nathrop on a hand-car for his meals.
It is a case where a smart aleck of a man built a hotel, and asked his fellow citizens to come and form a town around him and make him rich. Mr. Nathrop was rather an impulsive man, and one day he said something that reflected on another impulsive man, and when people came and looked for Nathrop, they found that his body was tangled up in the sage brush, and his soul was marching on.
The hotel was just completed, and the ladders, and the handsome lime barrels, and hods, and old nail kegs, and fragments of laths, and pieces of bricks, and scaffolds, and all those things that go to make life desirable, are still there adorning the hotel and the front yard; but there is no handsome man with a waxed mustache inside at the desk, shaking his head sadly when he is asked for a room, and looking at you with that high-born pity and contempt for your pleading, that the hotel clerk—heir apparent to the universe—always keeps for those who go to him with humility.
There is no Senegambian, with a whisk broom, waiting to brush your clothes off your back, and leave you arrayed in a birth-mark and the earache, at twenty-five cents per brush. There is no young, fair masher, strutting up and down the piazza, trying to look brainy and capable of a thought. It is only a hollow mockery, for the chamber-maid with the large slop-pail does not come at daylight to pound on your door, and try to get in and fix up your room, and wake you up, and frighten you to death with her shocking chaos of wart-environed and freckle-frescoed beauty.
There the new hotel will, no doubt, stand for ages, while a little way off, in his quiet grave, the proprietor, laid to rest in an old linen handkerchief, is sleeping away the years till he shall be awakened by the last grand reveille. There's no use talking, it's tough.
THE popularity of the above-named chieftain dates from a very trifling little incident, as did that of many other men who are now great.
Spotted Tail had never won much distinction up to that time, except as the owner of an appetite, in the presence of which his tribe stood in dumb and terrible awe.
During the early days of what is now the great throbbing and ambitious west, the tribe camped near Fort Sedgwick, and Big Mouth, a chief of some importance, used to go over to the post regularly for the purpose of filling his brindle hide full of "Fort Sedgwick Bloom of Youth."
As a consequence of Big Mouth's fatal yearning for liquid damnation, he generally got impudent, and openly announced on the parade ground that he could lick the entire regular army. This used to offend some of the blood-scarred heroes who had just arrived from West Point, and in the heat of debate they would warm the venerable warrior about two feet below the back of his neck with the fiat of their sabers.
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This was a gross insult to Big Mouth, and he went back to the camp, where he found Spotted Tail eating a mule that had died of inflammatory rheumatism. Big Mouth tearfully told the wild epicure of the way he had been treated, and asked for a council of war. Spot picked his teeth with a tent pin, and then told the defeated relic of a mighty race that if he would quit strong drink, he would be subjected to fewer insults.
Big Mouth then got irritated, and told S. Tail that his remarks showed that he was standing, in with the aggressor, and was no friend to his people.
Spotted Tail said that Mr. B. Mouth was a liar, by yon high heaven, and before there was time to think it over, he took a butcher knife, about four feet long, from its scabbard and cut Mr. Big Mouth plumb in two just between the umbilicus and the watch pocket.
As the reader who is familiar with anatomy has already surmised, Big Mouth died from the effects of this wound, and Spotted Tail was at once looked upon as the Moses of his tribe. He readily rose to prominence, and by his strict attention to the duties of his office, made for himself a name as a warrior and a pie biter, at which the world turned pale.
This should teach us the importance of taking the tide at its flood, which leads on to fortune, and to lay low when there is a hen on, as Benjamin Franklin has so truly said.
SPEAKING of New York politics," said Judge Hildreth, of Cummings, the other day, "they have a cheerful way of doing business in Gotham, and at first it rather surprised me. I went into New York a short time before election, and a Democratic friend told me I had better go and get registered so I could 'wote.' I did so, for I hate to lose the divine right of suffrage, even when I'm a good way from home.
"When election day came around, I went over to the polls in a body, in the afternoon, but they wouldn't let me vote. I told them I was registered all right, and that I had a right and must exercise it the same as any other Democrat in this enlightened land, but they swore at me and entreated me roughly, and told me to go there myself, and that I had already voted once and couldn't do it any more. I had always thought that New York was prone to vigilance and industry in the suffrage business, and early and often was what I supposed was the grand hailing sign. It made me mad, therefore, to have the city get so virtuous all at once that it couldn't even let me vote once.
"I was irritated and extremely ill-natured when I went back to Mr. McGinnis, and told him. of the great trouble I had had with the judges of election, and I denounced New York politics with a great deal of fervor.
"Mr. McGinnis said it was all right.
"'That's aizy enough to me, George. Give me something difficult. Sit down and rist yoursilf. Don't get excited and talk so loud. I know'd yez was out lasht night wid the byes and you didn't feel like gettin' up airly to go to the polls, so I got wan av the byes to go over and wote your name. That's all roight, come here 'nd have someding.'
"I saw at a glance that New York people were attending to these things thoroughly and carefully, and since that when I hear that 'a full vote hasn't been polled in New York city' for some unknown cause, I do not think it is true. I look upon the statement with great reserve, for I believe they vote people there who have been dead for centuries, and people who have not yet arrived in this country, nor even expressed a desire to come over. I am almost positive that they are still voting the bones of old A. T. Stewart up in the doubtful wards, and as soon as Charlie Ross is entitled to vote, he will most assuredly be permitted to represent.
"Why, there's one ward there where they vote the theatre ghosts and the spirit of Hamlet's father hasn't missed an election for a hundred years."
IFIND," said an old man to a Boomerang reporter, yesterday, "that there is absolutely no limit to the durability of the teeth, if they are properly taken care of. I never drink hot drinks, always brush my teeth morning and evening, avoid all acids whatever, and although I am 65 years old, my teeth are as good as ever they were."
"And that is all you do to preserve your teeth, is it?"
"Yes, sir; that's all—barring, perhaps, the fact that I put them in a glass of soft water nights."
MR. BEECHER, has raked in $2,000,000 with his brain. A good, tall, bulging brow, and a brain that will give down like that, are rather to be chosen than a blind lead, and an easy running cerebellum, than a stone quarry with a silent but firm skunk in it.
THE telephone line between Cheyenne and Laramie City will soon be in operation. It won't work, however. It may be a success for a time, but sooner or later Bill Nye will set his lopsided jaws at work in front of the transmitter, and pour a few quarts of untutored lies into the contribution box, which does service as a part of the telephone machine. Then the wires will be yanked off the poles, a hissing torrent of prevarication will blow the battery jars clean over into Utah, and the listener at the Cheyenne end will be gathered up in a basket. Weeping friends will hold a funeral over a pair of old boots and a fragment of shoulder blade—the remains of the departed Cheyennese. It is a weird and pixycal thing to be a natural born liar, but there are times when a robust lie will successfully defy the unanimous inventive genius of the age."—Sun.
Oh, do not say those cruel words, kind friend. Do not throw it up to us that we are weird and pixycal. Oh, believe us, kind sir, we may have done wrong, but we never did that. We know that election is approaching, and all sorts of bygone crookedness is raked up at that time, even when a man is not a candidate for office, but we ask the public to scan our record and see if the charge made by theSunis true. It may be that years ago we escaped justice and fled to the west under an assumed name, but no man ever before charged us with being weird and pixycal. We have been in all kinds of society, perhaps, and mingled with people who were our inferiors, having been pulled by the police once while visiting a Democratic caucus, but that was our misfortune, not our fault. We were not a member of the caucus and were therefore discharged, but even little things like that ought to be forgotten.
As for entering any one's apartments and committing a pixycal crime, we state now without fear of successful contradiction, that it is not so. It is no sign because a man in an unguarded moment entered the Rock Creek eating house and gave way to his emotions, that he is a person to be shunned. It was hunger, and not love for the questionable, that made us go there. It is not because we are by nature weird or pixycal, for we are not. We are not angry over this charge. It just simply hurts and grieves us. It comes too, at a time when we are trying to lead a different life, and while others are trying to lend us every aid and encouragement. We have many friends in Cheyenne who want to see us come up and take higher ground, but how can we do so if the press lends its influence against us. That's just the way we feel about it. If the public prints try to put us down and crush us in this manner, we will probably get desperate and be just as weird and pixycal as we can be.
SPOKANE IKE," the Indian who killed a doctor last summer for failing to cure his child, has been hanged. This shows the onward march of civilization, and vouchsafes to us the time when a doctor's life will be in less danger than that of his patient.
N.P. WILLIS once said: "The sweetest thing in life is the unclouded welcome of a wife." This is true, indeed, but when her welcome is clouded with an atmosphere of angry words and coal scuttles, there is something about it that makes a man want to go out in the woodshed and sleep on the ice-chest.
SOME enemy to mankind has recently invented an infernal machine known as the pillow-sham holder, which is attached to the head of the bedstead and works with a spiral spring. It is a kind of refined towel-rack on which you hang your pillow-shams at night so they wont get busted by the man of the house. The man of the house generally gets the pillow-shams down under his feet when he undresses and polishes off his cunning little toes on the lace poultice on which his wife prides herself. This pillow-sham holder saves all this. You just yank your pillow-sham off the bed and hang it on this high-toned sham holder, where it rests all night. At least that's the intention. After a little while, however, the spring gets weak, and the holder buckles to, or caves in, or whatever you may call it, at the most unexpected moment. The slightest movement on the part of the occupant of the bed, turns loose the pillow-sham holder, and the slumberer gets it across the bridge of his or her nose, as the case may be. Sometimes the vibration caused by a midnight snore, will unhinge this weapon of the devil, and it will whack the sleeper across the features in a way that scares him almost to death. If you think it is a glad surprise to get a lick across the perceptive faculties in the middle of a sound slumber, when you are dreaming of elysium and high-priced peris and such things as that, just try the death-dealing pillow-sham holder, and then report in writing to the chairman of the executive committee. It is well calculated to fill the soul with horror and amaze. A raven-black Saratoga wave, hanging on the back of a chair, has been known to turn white in a single night as the result of the sudden kerflummix of one of these cheerful articles of furniture.
OUR Saturday dispatches announce that an infernal machine had just been received at the office of Chief Justice Field, and later on, Justice Field, who was in Wyoming Saturday, said to a reporter that the machine was one that was sent to him in 1866, and that last week he sent it down to a gun factory to have the powder taken out, as he wished to stuff it and preserve it among the archives.
With the aid of the telegraph and the facilities of the Associated Press, it does seem as though we were living in an age of almost miraculous possibilities. Here is an instance where an infernal machine is sent to a prominent man, and in less than sixteen years the news is flashed to the four quarters of the globe like lightning. How long will it be before the whole bloody history of the war of the rebellion will be sent to every hamlet in the land? How long before the safe arrival of the ark, and the losses occasioned by the deluge, will be given to us in dollars and cents?
People don't fully realize the advantages we possess in this glorious nineteenth century. They take all these things as a matter of course, and forget how the palpitating brain palps for them, and how the quivering nerve quivs on and on through the silent night in order that humanity may keep informed in relation to ancient history.
THERE'S one little national matter that has been neglected about long enough, it seems to us. If the goddess of liberty is allowed to go barefoot for another century, her delicate toes will spread out over this nation like the shadow of a great woe.
ONCE, when a section-crew came down the mountain on the South Park road, from Alpine Tunnel to Buena Vista, a very singular thing occurred, which has never been given to the public. Every one who knows anything at all, knows that riding down that mountain on a push-car, descending at the rate of over 200 feet to the mile, means utter destruction, unless the brake is on. This brake is nothing more nor less then a piece of scantling, which is applied between one of the wheels and the car-bed, in such a way as to produce great friction.
The section-crew referred to, got on at Hancock with their bronzed and glowing hides as full of arsenic and rain-water as they could possibly hold. Being recklessly drunk, they enjoyed the accumulated velocity of the car wonderfully, until the section boss lost the break off the car, and then there was a slight feeling of anxiety. The car at last acquired a velocity like that of a young and frolicsome bob-tailed comet turned loose in space. The boys began to get nervous at last, and asked each other what should be done.
There seemed to be absolutely nothing to do but to shoot onward into the golden presently.
All at once the section boss thought of something. He was drunk, but the deadly peril of the moment suggested an idea. There was a rope on the car which would do to tie to something heavy and cast off for an anchor. The idea was only partially successful, however, for there was nothing to tie to but a spike hammer. This was tried but it wouldn't work. Then it was decided to tie it to some one of the crew and cast him loose in order to save the lives of those who remained. It was a glorious opportunity. It was a heroic thing to do. It was like Arnold Winklered's great sacrifice, by which victory was gained by filling his own system full of lances and making a toothpick holder of himself, in order that his comrades might break through the ranks of their foes.
George O'Malley, the section boss, said that he was willing that Patsy McBride should snatch the laurels from outrageous fortune and bind them on his brow, but Mr. McBride said he didn't care much for the encomiums of the world. He hadn't lost any encomiums, and didn't want to trade his liver for two dollars' worth of damaged laurels.
Everyone declined. All seemed willing to go down into history without any ten-line pay-local, and wanted someone else to get the effulgence. Finally, it was decided that a man by the name of Christian Christianson was the man to tie to. He had the asthma anyhow, and life wasn't much of an object to him, so they said that, although he declined, he must take the nomination, as he was in the hands of his friends.
So they tied the rope around Christian and cast anchor.
The car slowed up and at last stopped still. The plan had succeeded. Five happy wives greeted their husbands that night as they returned from the jaws of destruction. Christian Christianson did not return. The days may come and the days may go, but Christian's wife will look up toward the summit' of the snow-crowned mountains in vain.
He will never entirely return. He has done so partially, of course, but there are still missing fragments of him, and it looks as though he must have lost his life.
IN justice to ourself we desire to state that the CheyenneSunhas villified us and placed us in a false position before the public. It has stated that while at Rock Creek station, in the early part of the week, we were taken for a peanutter, and otherwise ill-treated at the railroad eating corral and omelette emporium, and that in consequence of such treatment we shed great scalding tears as large as watermelons. This is not true. We did shed the tears as above set forth, but not because of ill-treatment on the part of the eating-house proprietor.
It was the presence of death that broke our heart and opened the fountains of our great deep, so to speak. When we poured the glucose syrup on our pancakes, the stiff and cold remains of a large beetle and two cunning little twin cockroaches fell out into our plate, and lay there hushed in an eternal repose.
Death to us is all powerful. The King of Terrors is to us the mighty sovereign before whom we must all bow, from the mighty emperor down to the meanest slave, from the railroad superintendent, riding in his special car, down to the humblest humorist, all alike must some day curl up and die. This saddens us at all times, but more peculiarly so when Death, with his relentless lawn mower, has gathered in the young and innocent. This was the case where two little twin cockroaches, whose lives had been unspotted, and whose years had been unclouded by wrong and selfishness, were called upon to meet death together. In the stillness of the night, when others slept, these affectionate little twins crept into the glucose syrup and died.
We hope no one will misrepresent this matter. We did weep, and we are not ashamed to own it. We sat there and sobbed until the tablecloth was wet for four feet, and the venerable ham was floating around in tears. It was not for ourself, however, that we wept. No unkindness on the part of an eating-house ever provoked such a tornado of woe. We just weep when we see death and are brought in close contact with it. And we were not the only one that shed tears. Dickinson and Warren wept, strong men as they were. Even the butter wept. Strong as it was it could not control its emotions.
We don't very often answer a newspaper attack, but when we are accused of weeping till people have to take off their boots and wring out their socks, we want the public to know what it is for.
WE were surprised and grieved to see, on Monday evening, a man in the dress circle at the performance of Hazel Kirke at Blackburn's Grand Opera House, who had communed with the maddening bowl till he was considerably elated. When Pitticus made a good hit, or Hazel struck a moist lead, and everybody wept softly on the carpet, this man furnished a war-whoop that not only annoyed the audience, but seemed also to break up the actors a little. Later, he got more quiet, and at last went to sleep and slid out of his chair on the floor. It is such little episodes as these that make strangers dissatisfied with the glorious west. When you go to see something touchful on the stage, you do not care to have your finer feelings ruffled by the yells of a man who has got a corner on delirium tremens.
It is also humiliating to our citizens to be pulled up off the floor by the coat-collar and steered out the door by a policeman.
We hope that as progress is more plainly visible in Wyoming, and as we get more and more refined, such things will be of less and less frequent occurrence, till a man can go to see a theatrical performance with just as much comfort as he would in New York and other eastern towns.
Another point while we are discussing the performance of Hazel Kirke. There were some present on Monday night, sitting hack in the third balcony, who need a theatrical guide to aid them in discovering which are the places to weep and which to gurgle.
It was a little embarrassing to Miss Ellsler to make a grand dramatic hit that was supposed to yank loose a freshet of woe, to be greeted with a snort of demoniac laughter from the rear of the grand opera house.
It seemed to unnerve her and surprise her, but she kept her balance and her head. When death and ruin, and shame and dishonor, were pictured in their tragic horror, the wild, unfettered humorist of a crude civilization fairly yelled with delight. He thought that the tomb and such things were intended to be synonymous with the minstrel show and the circus. He thought that old Dunstan Kirke was there with his sightless eyes to give Laramie the grandest, riproaringest tempest of mirth that she had ever experienced. That is why we say that we will never have a successful performance in the theatrical line, till some of this class are provided with laugh-and-cry guide books.
ACORRESPONDENT of the New YorkPostsays that the codfish frequents "the table lands of the sea." The codfish, no doubt, does this to secure as nearly as possible a dry, bracing atmosphere. This pure air of the submarine table lands gives to the codfish that breadth of chest and depth of lungs which we have always noticed.
The glad, free smile of the codfish is largely attributed to the exhilaration of this oceanic altitoodleum.
The correspondent further says, that "the cod subsists largely on the sea cherry." Those who have not had the pleasure of seeing the codfish climb the sea cherry tree in search of food, or clubbing the fruit from the heavily-laden branches with chunks of coral, have missed a very fine sight.
The codfish, when at home rambling through the submarine forests, does not wear his vest unbuttoned, as he does while loafing around the grocery stores of the United States.
AFORT STEELE taxidermist has presented this office with a stuffed bird of prey about nine feet high, which we have put up inThe Boomerangoffice, and hereby return thanks for. It is a kind of a cross between a dodo and a meander-up-the-creek. Its neck is long, like the right of way to a railway, and its legs need some sawdust to make them look healthy. Those who subscribe for the paper, can look at this great work of art free.
This bird is noted for its brief and horizontal alimentary canal. It has no devious digestive arrangements, but contents itself with an economical and unostentatious trunk-line of digestion so simple that any child can understand it. He (or she, as the case may be) in his (or her) stocking feet can easily look over into next fall, and when standing in our office, peers down at us from over the stove-pipe in a reproachful way that fills us with remorse.
We have labeled it "The Democrat Wading Up Salt Creek" and filed it away near the skull of an Indian that we killed years ago when we got mad and wiped out a whole tribe. The geological name of this bird we do not at this moment recall, but it is one of those sorrowful-looking fowls that stick their legs out behind when they fly, and are not good for food.
Parties wishing to see the bird, and subscribe for theHome Journalcan obtain an audience by kicking three times on the last hall door on the left and throwing two dollars through the transom.
THERE is some prospect of ostrich farming developing into quite an industry in the southwest, and it will sometime be a cold day when the simple-minded rustic of that region will not have ostrich on toast if he wants it. Ostrich farming, however, will always have its drawbacks. The hen ostrich is not a good layer as a rule, only laying two eggs per annum, which, being about the size of a porcelain wash bowl, make her so proud that she takes the balance of the year for the purpose of convalescing.
The ostrich is chiefly valuable for the plumage which he wears, and which, when introduced into the world of commerce, makes the husband almost wish that he were dead.
Probably the ostrich will not come into general use as an article of food, few people caring for it, as the meat is coarse, and the gizzard full of old hardware, and relics of wrecked trains and old irons left where there has been a fire.
Carving the ostrich is not so difficult as carving the quail, because the joints are larger and one can find them with less trouble. Still, the bird takes up a great deal of room at the table, and the best circles are not using them.
The ostrich does not set She don't have time. She does not squat down over something and insist on hatching it out if it takes all summer, but she just lays a couple of porcelain cuspidors in the hot sand when she feels like it, and then goes away to the seaside to quiet her shattered nerves.
OLD CHIEF POCOTELLO, now at the Fort Hall agency, in answer to an inquiry relative to the true Christian character of a former Indian agent at that place, gave in very terse language the most accurate description of a hypocrite that was ever given to the public. "Ugh! Too much God and no flour."
IT begins to look now as though Major F. G. Wilson, who stopped here a short time last week and week before, might be a gentleman in disguise. He has done several things since he left here, that look to a man up a tree like something irregular and peculiar. The major has not only prevaricated, but he has done so in such a way as to beat his friends and to make them yearn for his person in order that they may kick him over into the inky night of space. He has represented himself as confidential adviser and literary tourist of several prominent New York, Chicago, Omaha and Tie Siding dailies, and had such good documents to show in proof of his identity in that capacity that he has received many courtesies which, as an ordinary American dead-beat, he might have experienced great difficulty in securing. We simply state this in order to put our esteemed contemporaries on their guard, so that they will not let him spit in their overshoes and enjoy himself as he did here. He wears a white hat on his head and a crooked tooth in the piazza of his mouth. This pearly fang he uses to masticate and reduce little delicate irregular fragments of plug tobacco, which he borrows of people who have time to listen to the silvery tinkle of his bazoo.
When last seen he was headed west, and will probably strike Eureka, Nevada, in a week or two. His mission seems to be mainly to make people feel a goneness in their exchequer, and to distribute tobacco dados over the office stoves of our great land. He is a man who writes long letters to the New YorkHeraldthat are never printed. His freshly blown nose is red, but his newspaper articles are not. He claims to represent the Mutual Reserve Fund Life Association lately, too. The company represents the Insurance and he attends to the Mutual Reserve Fund. He has mutually reserved all the funds he could get hold of since he struck the west, besides mutually reserving enough strong drink to eat a hole through the Ames monument.
Such men as Major Wilson make us suspicious of humanity, and very likely the next man who comes along here and represents that he is a great man, and wants five dollars on his well-rounded figure and fair fame will have to be identified. We have helped forty or fifty such men to make a bridal tour of Wyoming and now we are going to saw off and quit. When a great journalist comes into this office again with an internal revenue tax on his breath and nineteen dollars back on his baggage, we will probably pick up a fifty pound chunk of North Park quartz and spread his intellectual faculties around this building till it looks like the Custer massacre.
WHAT becomes of our bodies?" asks a soft eyed scientist, and we answer in stentorian tones, that they get inside of a red flannel undershirt as the maple turns to crimson and the sassafras to gold. Ask us something difficult, ethereal being, if you want to see us get up and claw for our library of public documents.
AMILD-EYED youth, wearing a dessert-spoon hat and polka-dot socks, went into Middle Park the other day and claimed to be a mining expert. The boys inveigled him into driving a stick of giant powder into a drill-hole at the bottom of a shaft with an old axe, and now they are trying to get him out of the ground with ammonia and a tooth-brush.
THE want column of the ChicagoNewsfor October 10th has the following: "Twelve frightful examples' wanted, to travel with Scott Marble's new drama and appear in the realistic bar-room scene of the 'Drunkard's Daughter.' Arthur G. Cambridge, dramatic agent, 75 South Clark street."
This throws open a field of usefulness to a class of men who hitherto have seen no prospect whatever for the future. It brings within the reach of such men a business which, requiring no capital, still gives the actor much time to do as he chooses. Beauty often wins for itself a place in the great theatrical world, but it is rare that the tomato nose and the watery eye secure a salary for their proprietors. Business must be picking up when the wiggly legs and danger-signal nose will bring so much per week and railroad fare. Perhaps prohibition has got the "frightful example" business down to where it commands the notice of the world because of its seldom condition.
AT the performance of "The Phoenix" here, the other night, there was a very affecting place where the play is transferred very quickly from a street scene to the elegant apartments of Mr. Blackburn, the heavy villain. The street scene had to be raised out of the way, and the effect of the transition was somewhat marred by the reluctance of the scenery in rolling up out of the way. It got about half way up, and stopped there in an undecided manner, which annoyed the heavy villain a good deal. He started to make some blood-curdling remarks about Mr. Bludsoe, and had got pretty well warmed up when the scenery came down with a bang on the stage. The artist who pulls up the curtain and fills the hall lamps, then pulled the scene up so as to show the villain's feet for fifteen or twenty minutes, but he couldn't get it any farther. It seemed that the clothes line, by which the elaborate scenery is operated, got tangled up some way, and this caused the delay. After that another effort was made, and this time the street scene rolled up to about the third story of a brick hotel shown in the foreground, and stopped there, while the clarionet and first violin continued a kind of sad tremulo. Then a dark hand, with a wart on one finger and an oriental dollar store ring on another, came out from behind the wings and began to wind the clothes-line carefully around the pole at the foot of the scene. The villain then proceeded with his soliloquy, while the street scene hung by one corner in such a way as to make a large warehouse on the corner of the street stand at an angle of about forty-five degrees.
Laramie will never feel perfectly happy until these little hitches are dispensed with. Supposing that at some place in the play, where the heroine is speaking soft and low to her lover and the proper moment has arrived for her to pillow her sunny head upon his bosom, that street scene should fetch loose, and come down with such momentum as to knock the lovers over into the arms of the bass-viol player. Or suppose that in some death-bed act this same scene, loaded with a telegraph pole at the bottom, should settle down all at once in such a way as to leave the death-bed out on the corner of Monroe and Clark streets, in front of a candy store.
Modern stage mechanism has now reached such a degree of perfection that the stage carpenter does not go up on a step ladder, in the middle of a play, and nail the corner of a scene to a stick of 2x4 scantling, while a duel is going on near the step ladder. In all the larger theatres and opera houses, now, they are not doing that way.
Of course little incidents occur, however, even on the best stages, and where the whole thing works all right. For instance, the other day, a young actor, who was kneeling to a beautiful heiress down east, got a little too far front, and some scenery, which was to come together in the middle of the stage to pianissimo music, shut him outside and divided the tableau in two, leaving the young actor apparently kneeling at the foot of a street lamp, as though he might be hunting for a half a dollar that he had just dropped on the sidewalk.
There was a play in New York, not long ago, in which there was a kind of military parade introduced, and the leader of a file of soldiers had his instructions to march three times around the stage to martial music, and then file off at the left, the whole column, of course, following him. After marching once around, the stage manager was surprised to see the leader deliberately wheel, and walk off the stage, at the left, with the whole battalion following at his heels. The manager went to him and abused him shamefully for his haste, and told him he had a mind to discharge him; but the talented hack driver, who thus acted as the military leader, and who had over-played himself by marching off the stage ahead of time, said: