Mr. Blackburn, the Heavy Villian—Difficulties With the Scenery—The Play in New York—The Military Parade.
At the performance of "The Phoenix" here, the other night, there was a very affecting place where the play is transferred very quickly from a street scene to the elegant apartments of Mr. Blackburn, the heavy villain. The street scene had to be raised out of the way, and the effect of the transition was somewhat marred by the reluctance of the scenery in rolling up out of the way. It got about half way up, and stopped there in an undecided manner, which annoyed the heavy villain a good deal. He started to make some blood-curdling remarks about Mr. Bludsoe, and had got pretty well warmed up when the scenery came down with a bang on the stage.
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The artist who pulls up the curtain and fills the hall lamps, then pulled the scene up so as to show the villain's feet for fifteen or twenty minutes, but he couldn't get it any farther. It seemed that the clothes line, by which the elaborate scenery is operated, got tangled up some way, and this caused the delay. After that another effort was made, and this time the street scene rolled up to about the third story of a brick hotel shown in the foreground, and stopped there, while the clarionet and first violin continued a kind of sad tremulo. Then a dark hand, with a wart on one finger and an oriental dollar store ring on another, came out from behind the wings and began to wind the clothes-line carefully around the pole at the foot of the scene. The villain then proceeded with his soliloquy, while the street scene hung by one corner in such a way as to make a large warehouse on the corner of the street stand at an angle of about forty-five degrees.
Laramie will never feel perfectly happy until these little hitches are dispensed with. Supposing that at some place in the play, where the heroine is speaking soft and low to her lover and the proper moment has arrived for her to pillow her sunny head upon his bosom, that street scene should fetch loose, and come down with such momentum as to knock the lovers over into the arms of the bass-viol player. Or suppose that in some death-bed act this same scene, loaded with a telegraph pole at the bottom, should settle down all at once in such a way as to leave the death-bed out on the corner of Monroe and Clark streets, in front of a candy store.
Modern stage mechanism has now reached such a degree of perfection that the stage carpenter does not go up on a step ladder, in the middle of a play, and nail the corner of a scene to a stick of 2x4 scantling, while a duel is going on near the step ladder. In all the larger theaters and opera houses, now, they are not doing that way.
Of course little incidents occur, however, even on the best stages, and where the whole thing works all right. For instance, the other day, a young actor, who was kneeling to a beautiful heiress down East, got a little too far front, and some scenery, which was to come together in the middle of the stage to pianissimo music, shut him outside and divided the tableau in two, leaving the young actor apparently kneeling at the foot of a street lamp, as though he might be hunting for a half a dollar that he had just dropped on the sidewalk.
There was a play in New York, not long ago, in which there was a kind of military parade introduced, and the leader of a file of soldiers had his instructions to march three times around the stage to martial music, and then file off at the left, the whole column, of course, following him. After marching once around, the stage manager was surprised to see the leader deliberately wheel, and walk off the stage, at the left, with the whole battalion following at his heels. The manager went to him and abused him shamefully for his haste, and told him he had a mind to discharge him; but the talented hack driver, who thus acted as the military leader, and who had over-played himself by marching off the stage ahead of time, said:
"Well, confound it, you can discharge me if you want to, but what was a man to do? Would you have me march around three times when my military pants were coming off, and I knew it? Military pride, pomp, parade and circumstance, are all right; but it can be overdone. A military squadron, detachment, or whatever it is, can make more of a parade, under certain circumstances, than is advertised. I didn't want to give people more show than they paid for, and I ask you to put yourself in my place. When a man is paid three dollars a week to play a Roman soldier, would you have him play the Greek slave? No, sir; I guess I know what I'm hired to play, and I'm going to play it. When you want me to play Adam in the Garden of Eden, just give me my fig leaf and salary enough to make it interesting, and I will try and properly interpret the character for you, or refund the money at the door."
Firmness is a good thing in its place, but we should early learn that to be firm, we need not stand up against a cyclone till our internal economy is blown into the tops of the neighboring trees. Moral courage is a good thing, but it is useless unless you have a liver to go along with it. Sometimes a man is required to lay down his life for his principles, but the cases where he is expected to lay down his digester on the altar of his belief, are comparatively seldom.
Thousands of our own boys, who to-day are spearing frogs, or bathing in the rivers of their native land and parading on the shingly beach with no clothes on to speak of, are left to chose between such a career of usefulness and greatness of brow, and the humdrum life of a bilious student and pale, sad congressman. Will you rise to the proud pinnacle of fame as a pugilist, boys, or will you plug along as a sorrowing, overworked statesman? Now, in the spring-time of your lives, choose between the two, and abide the consequences.
The Poet of the Greeley Eye—The Dying Cowboy and the Preacher—A Mournful Stanza—Poems by Nye—Apostrophe to an Orphan Mule—Ode to Spring—The Picnic Snoozeds Lament—Ode to the Cucumber—Apostrophe to Oscar Wilde—An Adjustable Campaign Song—The Beautiful Snow.
A new and dazzling literary star has risen above the horizon, and is just about to shoot athwart the starry vault of poesy. How wisely are all things ordered, and how promptly does the new star begin to beam, upon the decline of the old.
Hardly had the sweet singer of Michigan commenced to wane and to flicker, when, rising above the western hills, the glad light of the rising star is seen, and adown the canyons and gulches of the Rocky mountains comes the melodious cadences of the poet of the Greeley Eye.
Couched in the rough terms of the West, robed in the untutored language of the Michael Angelo slang of the miner and the cowboy, the poet at first twitters a little on a bough far up the canyon, gradually waking the echoes, until the song is taken up and handed back by every rock and crag along the rugged ramparts of the mighty mountain barrier.
Listen to the opening stanza of "The Dying Cowboy and the Preacher:"
So, old gospel shark, they tell me I must die;
That the wheels of life's wagon have rolled into their last rut,
Well, I will "pass in my checks" without a whimper or a cry,
And die as I have lived—"a hard nut."
This is no time-worn simile, no hackneyed illustration or bald-headed decrepit comparison, but a new, fresh illustration that appeals to the Western character, and lifts the very soul out of the kinks, as it were.
Wheels of life's wagon have rolled into their last rut.
Ah! how true to nature and yet how grand. How broad and sweeping. How melodious and yet how real. None but the true poet would have thought to compare the close of life to the sudden and unfortunate chuck of the off hind wheel of a lumber wagon into a rut.
In fancy we can see it all. We hear the low, sad kerplunk of the wheel, the loud burst of earnest, logical profanity, and then all is still.
Now and then the swish of a mule's tail through the air, or the sigh of the rawhide as it shimmers and hurtles through the silent air, and then a calm falls upon the scene. Anon, the driver bangs the mule that is ostensibly pulling his daylights out, but who is, in fact, humping up like an angle worm, without nulling a pound.
Then the poet comes to the close of the cowboy's career in this style:
"Do I repent?
"No—of nothing present or past;
"So skip, old preach, on gospel pap I won't be fed;
"My breath comes hard; I—am going—but—I—am game to the—last."
And reckless of the future, as the present, the cowboy was dead.
If we could write poetry like that, do you think we would plod along the dreary pathway of the journalist? Do you suppose that if we had the heaven-born gift of song to such a degree, that we could take hold of the hearts of millions and warble two or three little ditties like that, or write an elegy before breakfast, or construct an ionic, anapestic twitter like the foregoing, that we would carry in our own coal, and trim our own lamps, and wear a shirt two weeks at a time?
No, sir. We would hie us away to Europe or Salt Lake, and let our hair grow long, and we would write some obituary truck that would make people disgusted with life, and they would sigh for death that they might leave their insurance and their obituaries to their survivors.
Oh! lonely, gentle, unobtrusive mule!
Thou standest idly 'gainst the azure sky,
And sweetly, sadly singeth like a hired man.
Who taught thee thus to warble
In the noontide heat and wrestle with
Thy deep, corroding grief and joyless woe?
Who taught thy simple heart
Its pent-up, wildly-warring waste
Of wanton woe to carol forth upon
The silent air?
I chide thee not, because thy
Song is fraught with grief-embittered
Monotony and joyless minor chords
Of wild, imported melody, for thou
Art restless, woe begirt and
Compassed round about with gloom,
Thou timid, trusting, orphan mule!
Few joys, indeed, are thine,
Thou thrice-bestricken, madly
Mournful, melancholy mule.
And he alone who strews
Thy pathway with his cold remains
Can give thee recompense
Of lemoncholy woe.
He who hath sought to steer
Thy limber, yielding tail
Fernist thy crupper-band
Hath given thee joy, and he alone.
'Tis true, he may have shot
Athwart the Zodiac, and, looking
O'er the outer walls upon
The New Jerusalem,
Have uttered vain regrets.
Thou reekest not. O orphan mule,
For it hath given thee joy, and
Bound about thy bursting heart,
And held thy tottering reason
To its throne.
Sing on, O mule, and warble
In the twilight gray,
Unchidden by th heartless throng.
Sing of thy parents on thy father's side.
Yearn for the days now past and gone;
For he who pens these halting,
Limping lines to thee
Doth bid thee yearn, and yearn, and yearn.
In the days of laughing spring time,
Comes the mild-eyed sorrel cow,
With bald-headed patches on her,
Poor and lousy, I allow;
And she waddles through your garden
O'er the radish-beds, I trow.
Then the red-nosed, wild-eyed orphan,
With his cyclopædiee,
Hies him to the rural districts
With more or less alacrity.
And he showeth up its merits
To the bright eternitee.
How the bumble-bee doth bumble
Bumbling in the fragrant air,
Bumbling with his little bumbler,
Till he climbs the golden stair.
Then the angels will provide him
With another bumbilaire.
Gently lay aside the picnic,
For its usefulness is o'er,
And the winter style of misery
Stands and knocks upon your door.
Lariat the lonely oyster,
Drifting on some foreign shore;
Zion needs him in her business—
She can use him o'er and o'er.
Bring along the lonely oyster,
With the winter style of gloom,
And the supper for the pastor,
With its victims for the tomb.
Cast the pudding for the pastor,
With its double iron door;
It will gather in the pastor
For the bright and shining shore.
Put away the little picnic
Till the coming of the spring;
Useless now the swaying hammock
And the idle picnic swing.
Put away the pickled spider
And the cold pressed picnic fly,
And the decorated trousers
With their wealth of custard pie.
O, a cucumber grew by the deep rolling sea,
And it tumbled about in reckless glee
Till the summer waned and the grass turned brown.
And the farmer plucked it and took it to town.
Wrinkled and warty and bilious and blue,
It lay in the market the autumn through;
Till a woman with freckles on her cheek
Led in her husband, so mild and meek.
He purchased the fruit, at her request,
And hid it forever under his vest,
For it doubled him up like a kangaroo,
And now he sleeps 'neath the violets blue.
Soft eyed seraphic kuss
With limber legs and lily on the side,
We greet you from the raw
And uncouth West.
The cowboy yearns to yank thee
To his brawny breast and squeeze
Thy palpitating gizzard
Through thy vest.
Come to the mountain fastness,
Oscar, with thy low neck shirt
And high neck pants;
Fly to the coyote's home,
Thou son of Albion,
James Crow bard and champion aesthete
From o'er the summer sea.
Sit on the fuzzy cactus, king of poesy,
And song,
Ride the fierce broncho o'er the dusty plain,
And le' the zephyr sigh among thy buttery locks.
Welcome thou genius of dyspeptic song,
Thou bilious lunatic from far-off lands.
Come to the home of genius,
By the snowy hills.
And wrestle with the alcoholic inspiration
Of our cordial home.
We yearn
To put the bloom upon thy alabaster nose,
And plant the jim-jams
In thy clustering hair.
Hail, mighty snoozer from across the main!
We greet thee
With our free, untutored ways and wild
Peculiar style of deadly beverage.
Come to the broad, free West and mingle
With our high-toned mob.
Come to the glorious Occident
And dally with the pack-mule's whisk-broom tail;
Study his odd yet soft demeanor,
And peculiar mien.
Tickle his gambrel with a sunflower bud
And scoot across the blue horizon
To the tooness of the sweet and succulent beyond.
We'll gladly
Gather up thy shattered remnants
With a broom and ship thee to thy beauteous home.
Forget us not,
Thou bilious pelican from o'er the sea.
Thou blue-nosed clam
With pimply, bulging brow, but
Come and we will welcome thee
With ancient omelet and fragrant sausage
Of forgotten years.
(Air—Rally Round the Flag, Boys.)
Oh, we'll gather from the hillsides,
We'll gather from the glen,
Shouting the battle cry of....
And we'll round up our voters.
Our brave and trusty men,
Shouting the battle cry of.....
Chorus.
Oh, our candidate forever,
Te doodle daddy a,
Down with old....
Turn a foodie diddy a,
And we'll whoop de dooden do,
Fal de adden adden a,
And don't you never forget it.
Ob, we'll meet the craven foe
On the fall election day,
Shouting the battle cry of...
And we'll try to let him know
That we're going to have our way,
Shouting the battle cry of...
Chorus.
Oh, our candidate forever, etc.
Oh, we're the people's friends,
As all can plainly see,
Shouting the battle cry of....
And we'll whoop de dooden doo,
With our big majority,
And don't you never forget it.
Chorus.
Oh. our candidate forever, etc.
O drifted whiteness covering
The fair face of nature.
Pure as the sigh of a blessed spirit
On the eternal shores, you
Glitter in the summer sun
Considerable. My mortal
Ken seems weak and
Helpless in the midst of
Your dazzling splendor,
And I would hide my
Diminished head like
Serf unclothed in presence
Of his mighty King.
You lie engulphed
Within the cold embrace
Of rocky walls and giant
Cliffs. You spread out
Your white mantle and
Enwrap the whole broad
Universe, and a portion
Of York State.
You seem content
Resting in silent whiteness
On the frozen breast of
The cold, dead earth. You
Think apparently that
You are middling white;
But once I was in the
Same condition. I was
Pure as the beautiful snow,
But I fell. It was a
Right smart fall, too.
It churned me up a
Good deal and nearly
Knocked the supreme
Duplex from its intellectual
Throne. It occurred in
Washington, D. C.
But thou
Snow, lying so spotless
On the frozen earth, as
I remarked before, thou
Hast indeed a soft,
Soft thing. Thou comest
Down like the silent
Movements of a specter,
And thy fall upon the
Earth is like the tread
Of those who walk the
Shores of immortality.
You lie around all
Winter drawing your
Annuities till spring,
And then the soft
Breath from the south with
Touch seductive bids you
Go, and you light out
With more or less alacrity.
William Tell ran a hay ranche near Bergelen, about 580 years ago. Tell had lived in the mountains all his life, and shot chamois and chipmunks with a cross-gun, till he was a bad man to stir up.
At that time Switzerland was run principally by a lot of carpet-baggers from Austria, and Tell got down on them about the year 1307. It seems that Tell wanted the government contract to furnish hay, at $45 a ton, for the Year 1306, and Gessler, who was controlling the patronage of Switzerland, let the contract to an Austrian who had a big lot of condemned hay, farther up the gulch.
One day Gessler put his plug hat up on a telegraph pole, and issued order 236, regular series, to the effect that every snoozer who passed down the toll road should bow to it.
Gessler happened to be in behind the brush when Tell Went by, and he noticed that Bill said "Shoot the hat," and didn't salute it; so he told his men to gather Mr. Tell in, and put him in the refrigerator.
Gessler told him that if he Would shoot a crab-apple from the head of his only son at 200 yards, with a cross-gun, he would give him his liberty.
Tell consented, and knocked the apple higher than Gilroy's kite. Old Gessler, however, noticed another arrow sticking in William's girdle, and he asked what kind of a flowery break that was.
Tell told him that if he had killed the kid instead of busting the apple, he intended to drill a hole through the stomach of Mr. Gessler. This made Gessler mad again, and he took Tell on a picnic up the river, in irons.
Tell jumped off when he got a good chance, and cut across a bend in the river, and when the picnic party came down, he shot Gessler deader than a mackeral.
This opened the ball for freedom, and weakened the Austrian government so much that in the following November they elected Tell to fill the long term, and a half-breed for the short term.
After that, Tell was recognized by the ruling power, and he could get most any contract that he wanted to. He got the service on the stage line up into the Alps increased to a daily, and had the contracts in the name of his son Albert.
The appropriation was increased $150,000 per year, and he had a good thing.
Tell lived many years after this, and was loved by the Swiss people because he had freed their land.
Whenever he felt lonesome, he would take his crossgun and go out and kill a tyrant. He had tyrant on toast most every day till Switzerland was free, and the peasants blessed him as their deliverer.
When Tell got to be an old man he would go out into the mountains and apostrophize them in these memorable words:
"Ye crags and peaks, I'm with you once again. I hold to you the hands I held to you on previous occasions, to show you they are free. The tyrant's crust is busted, so to speak. His race is run, and he himself hath scooted up the flume.Sic semper McGinnis, terra Anna, nux vomica, Schweitzer lease, Timbuctoo, erysipelas, e pluribus unum, sciataca, multum in parvo, vox populi, vox snockomonthegob."
In justice to ourself we desire to state that the 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 anu innocent. This was the case where two little twin cockroaches, whose lives had been unspotted, and whose years had been unclouded by wrong and selfishness were called upon to meet death together. In the stillness of the night, when others slept, these affectionate little twins crept into the glucose syrup and died.
We hope no one will misrepresent this matter. We did weep, and we are not ashamed to own it. We sat there and sobbed until the tablecloth was wet for four feet, and the venerable ham was floating around in tears. It was not for ourself, however, that we wept. No unkindness on the part of an eating house ever provoked such a tornado of woe. We just weep when we see death and are brought in close contact with it. And we were not the only one that shed tears. Dickinson and Warren wept, strong men as they were. Even the butter wept. Strong as it was it could not control its emotions.
We don't very often answer a newspaper attack, but when we are accused of weeping till people have to take off their boots and wring out their socks, we want the public to know what it is for.