SURPRISE EXPRESSED THAT THE PRESIDENT SHOULD TAKE A MOTHER-IN-LAW INTO HIS CABINET AND ADD HOUSEKEEPING TO HIS OTHER AGONY.
Hudson, Wis., June 3, 1886.
The Hon. Grover Cleveland, Washington, D. C.:
My Dear Sir: You have now assumed a new duty and taken upon yourself an additional responsibility. Not content with the great weight of national affairs, sufficient to crush any other pachyderm, you have cheerfully and almost gleefully become a married man. While I cannot agree with you politically, Grover, I am forced to admire your courage.
This morning a new life opens out to you—the life of a married man. It is indeed a humiliating situation. To be a president of the United States, the roustabout of a free people, is a trying situation; but to be a newly married president, married in the full glare of official life, with the eye of a divided constituency upon you, is to place yourself where nerve is absolutely essential.
I, too, am married, but not under such trying circumstances. Others have been married and still lived, but it has remained for you, Mr. President, young as you are, to pose as a newly wedded president and to take your new mother-in-law into the cabinet with you. For this reason, I say freely that to walk a slack rope across the moist brow of Niagara and carry a nervous man in a wheelbarrow sinks into a mere commonplace. Daniel playing "tag" with a denful of half-starved lions becomes a historic cipher, and the Hebrew children, sitting on a rosy bed of red-hot clinkers in the fiery furnace, are almost forgotten.
With a large wad of civil service wedged in among your back teeth, a larger fragment, perhaps, than you were prepared to masticate when you bit it off; with an agonized southern democracy and a clamorous northern constituency; with disappointment poorly concealed among your friends and hilarity openly expressed by your enemies; with the snarl of the vanquished Mr. Davis, who was at one time a sort of president himself, as he rolls up future majorities for your foes; with a lot of sharp-witted journalists walking all over you every twenty-four hours and climbing up your stalwart frame with their telegraph repair boots on, I am surprised, Grover, honestly, as between man and man, that you should have tried to add housekeeping to all this other agony. Had you been young and tender under the wings I might have understood it, but you must admit, in the quiet and sanctity of your own home, Grover, that you are no gosling. You have arrived at man's estate. You have climbed the barbed-wire fence which separates the fluff and bloom and blossom and bumble-bees of impetuous youth from the yellow fields and shadowy orchards of middle life. You now stand in the full glare of life's meridian. You are entering upon a new experience. Possibly you think that because you are president the annoyances peculiar to the life of a new, green groom will not reach you. Do not fool yourself in this manner. Others have made the same mistake. Position, wealth and fame cannot shut out the awkward and trying circumstances which attend the married man even as the sparks are prone to fly upward.
It will seem odd to you at first, Mr. President, after the affairs of the nation have been put aside for the day and the government fire proof safe locked up for the night, to go up to your boudoir and converse with a bride, with one corner of her mouth full of pins. A man may write a pretty fair message to congress, one that will be accepted and printed all over the country, and yet he may not be fitted to hold a conversation with one corner of a woman's mouth while the other is filled with pins. To some men it is given to be great as statesmen, while to others it is given to be fluent conversationalists under these circumstances.
Mr. President, I may be taking a great liberty in writing to you and touching upon your private affairs, but I noticed that everybody else was doing it and so I have nerved myself up to write you, having once been a married man myself, though not, as I said, under the same circumstances. When I was married I was only a plain justice of the peace, plodding quietly along and striving to do my duty. You was then sheriff of your county. Little did we think in those days that now you would be a freshly married president and I the author of several pieces which have been printed in the papers. Little did we think then, when I was a justice of the peace in Wyoming and you a sheriff in New York, that to-day your timothy lawn would be kicked all to pieces by your admiring constituents, while I would be known and loved wherever the English language is tampered with.
So we have risen together, you to a point from which you may be easily observed and flayed alive by the newspapers, while I am the same pleasant,unassuming, gentlemanly friend of the poor that I was when only a justice of the peace and comparatively unknown.
I cannot close this letter without expressing a wish that your married life may be a joyous one, as the paper at Laramie has said, "and that no cloud may ever come to mar the horizon of your wedded bliss." (This sentence is not my own. I copy it verbatim from a wedding notice of my own written by a western journalist who is now at the Old Woman's Home.)
Mr. President, I hope you will not feel that I have been too forward in writing to you personally over my own name. I mean to do what is best for you. You can truly say that all I have ever done in this way has been for your good. I speak in a plain way sometimes, but I don't beat about the bush. I see that you do not want to have any engrossed bills sent to you for a couple of weeks.
That's the way I was. I told all my creditors to withhold their engrossed bills during my honeymoon, as I was otherwise engrossed. This remark made me a great many friends and added to my large circle of creditors. It was afterward printed in a foreign paper and explained in a supplement of eight pages.
We are all pretty well here at home. I may go to Washington this fall if I can sell a block of stockin the Pauper's Dream, a rich gold claim of mine on Elk mountain. It is a very rich claim, but needs capital to develop it. (This remark is not original with me. I quote from an exchange.)
If I do come over to Washington do not let that make any difference in your plans. If I thought your wife would send out to the neighbors and borrow dishes and such things on my account I would not go a step.
Just stick your head out of the window and whistle as soon as the cabinet is gone and I will come up there and spend the evening.
Remember that I have not grown cold toward you just because you have married. You will find me the kind of a friend who will not desert you just when you are in trouble. Yours, as heretofore,
Bill Nye.
P. S.—I send you to-day a card-receiver. It looks like silver. Do not let your wife bear on too hard when she polishes it. I was afraid you might try to start into keeping house without a card-receiver, so I bought this yesterday. When I got married I forgot to buy a card-receiver, and I guess we would have frozen to death before we could have purchased one, but friends were more thoughtful, and there were nine of them among the gifts. If you decide that it would not be proper for you to receive presents, you may return the card receiver to me, or put it in the cellar-way till I come over there this fall.
B. N.
Harry—I hear that you have lost your father. Allow me to express my sympathy.
Jack (with a sigh)—Thank you. Yes, he has gone; but the event was expected for a long time, and the blow was consequently less severe than if it had not been looked for.
H.—His property was large?
J.—Yes; something like a quarter of a million.
H.—I heard that his intellect, owing to his illness, was somewhat feeble during his latter years. Is there any probability of the will being contested?
J.—No; father was quite sane when he made his will. He left everything to me.
We were riding along on the bounding train yesterday, and some one spoke of the free and democratic way that people in this country got acquainted with each other while traveling. Then we got to talking about railway sociability and railway etiquette, when a young man from EastJasper, who had wildly jumped and grabbed his valise every time the train hesitated, said that it was queer what railway travel would do in the way of throwing people together. He said that in Nebraska once he and a large, corpulent gentleman, both total strangers, were thrown together while trying to jump a washout, and an intimacy sprang up between them that had ripened into open hostility.
From that we got to talking about natural phenomena and storms. I spoke of the cyclone with some feeling and a little bitterness, perhaps, briefly telling my own experience, and making the storm as loud and wet and violent as possible.
Then a gentleman from Kansas, named George L. Murdock, an old cattleman, was telling of a cyclone that came across his range two years ago last September. The sky was clear to begin with, and then all at once, as Mr. Murdock states, a little cloud no larger than a man's hand might have been seen. It moved toward the southwest gently, with its hands in its pockets for a few moments, and then Mr. Murdock discovered that it was of a pale-green color, about sixteen hands high, with dark-blue mane and tail. About a mile from where he stood the cyclone, with great force, swooped down and, with a muffled roar, swept a quarter-section of land out from under a heavy mortgage without injuring themortgage in the least. He says that people came for miles the following day to see the mortgage, still on file at the office of the register of deeds and just as good as ever.
Then a gentleman named Bean, of western Minnesota, a man who went there in an early day and homesteaded it when his nearest neighbor was fifty miles away, spoke of a cyclone that visited his county before the telegraph or railroad had penetrated that part of the state.
Mr. Bean said it was very clear up to the moment that he noticed a cloud in the northwest no larger than a man's hand. It sauntered down in a southwesterly direction like a cyclone that had all summer to do its chores in. Then it gave two quick snorts and a roar, wiped out of existence all the farm buildings he had, sucked the well dry, soured all the milk in the milk house, and spread desolation all over that quarter-section. But Mr. Bean said that the most remarkable thing he remembered was this: He had dug about a pint of angle worms that morning, intending to go over to the lake toward evening and catch a few perch. But when the cyclone came it picked up those angle worms and drove them head first through his new grindstone without injuring the worms or impairing the grindstone. He would have had the grindstone photographed, he said, if the angleworms could have been kept still long enough. He said that they were driven just far enough through to hang on the other side like a lambrequin.
The cyclone is certainly a wonderful phenomenon, its movements are so erratic, and in direct violation of all known rules.
Mr. Louis P. Barker of northern Iowa was also on the car, and he described a cyclone that he saw in the '70s along in September at the close of a hot but clear day. The first intimation that Mr. Barker had of an approaching storm was a small cloud no larger than a man's hand which he discovered moving slowly toward the southwest with a gyratory movement. It then appeared to be a funnel-shaped cloud which passed along near the surface of the ground with its apex now and then lightly touching a barn or a well, and pulling it out by the roots. It would then bound lightly into the air and spit on its hands. What he noticed most carefully on the following day was the wonderful evidences of its powerful suction. It sucked a milch cow absolutely dry, pulled all the water out of his cistern, and then went around to the waste-water pipe that led from the bath-room and drew a 2-year-old child, who was taking a bath at the time, clear down through the two-inch waste-pipe, a distance of 150 feet. He had two inches of the pipe with him and a lock of hair from the child's head.
It is such circumstances as these, coming to us from the mouths of eye-witnesses, that leads us to exclaim: How prolific is nature and how wonderful are all her works—including poor, weak man! Man, who comes into the world clothed in a little brief authority, perhaps, and nothing else to speak of. He rises up in the morning, prevaricates, and dies. Where are our best liars to-day? Look for them where you will and you will find that they are passing away. Go into the cemetery and there you will find them mingling with the dust, but striving still to perpetuate their business by marking their tombs with a gentle prevarication, chiseled in enduring stone.
I have heard it intimated by people who seemed to know what they were talking about that truth is mighty and will prevail, but I do not see much show for her till the cyclone season is over.
The earth is that body in the solar system which most of my readers now reside upon, and which some of them, I regret to say, modestly desire to own and control, forgetting that the earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof. Some men do not care who owns the earth so long as they get the fullness.
The earth is 500,000,000 years of age, accordingto Prof. Proctor, but she doesn't look it to me. The Duke of Argyll maintains that she is 10,000,000 years old last August, but what does an ordinary duke know about these things? So far as I am concerned I will put Proctor's memory against that of any low-priced duke that I have ever seen.
Newton claimed that the earth would gradually dry up and become porous, and that water would at last become a curiosity. Many believe this and are rapidly preparing their systems by a rigid course of treatment, so that they can live for years without the use of water internally or externally.
Other scientists who have sat up nights to monkey with the solar system, and thereby shattered their nervous systems, claim that the earth is getting top-heavy at the north pole, and that one of these days while we are thinking of something else, the great weight of accummulated ice, snow, and the vast accummulation of second-hand arctic relief expeditions, will jerk the earth out of its present position with so much spontaneity, and in such an extremely forthwith manner, that many people will be permanently strabismused and much bric-a-brac will be for sale at a great sacrifice. This may or may not be true. I have not been up in the arctic regions to investigate its truth or falsity, though there seems to be a growing sentiment throughout the country in favor of my going. A great manypeople during the past year have written me and given me their consent.
If I could take about twenty good, picked men, and go up there for the summer, instead of bringing back twenty picked men, I wouldn't mind the trip, and I feel that we really ought to have a larger colony on ice in that region than we now have.
The earth is composed of land and water. Some of the water has large chunks of ice in it. The earth revolves around its own axle once in twenty-four hours, though it seems to revolve faster than that, and to wobble a good deal during the holidays. Nothing tickles the earth more than to confuse a man when he is coming home late at night, and then to rise up suddenly and hit him in the back with a town lot. People who think there is no fun or relaxation among the heavenly bodies certainly have not studied their habits. Even the moon is a humorist.
A friend of mine, who was returning late at night from a regular meeting of the Society for the Amelioration of the Hot Scotch, said that the earth rose up suddenly in front of him, and hit him with a right of way, and as he was about to rise up again he was stunned by a terrific blow between the shoulder blades with an old land grant that he thought had lapsed years ago. When he staggered to his feet he found that the moon, in order to addto his confusion, had gone down in front of him, and risen again behind him, with her thumb on her nose.
So I say, without fear of successful contradiction, that if you do not think that planets and orbs and one thing and another have fun on the quiet you are grossly ignorant of their habits.
The earth is about half way between Mercury and Saturn in the matter of density. Mercury is of about the specific gravity of iron, while that of Saturn corresponds with that of cork in the matter of density and specific gravity. The earth, of course, does not compare with Mercury in the matter of solidity, yet it is amply firm for all practical purposes. A negro who fell out of the tower of a twelve-story building while trying to clean the upper window by drinking a quart of alcohol and then breathing hard on the glass, says that he regards the earth as perfectly solid, and safe to do business on for years to come. He claims that those who maintain that the earth's crust is only 2,500 miles in thickness have not thoroughly tested the matter by a system of practical experiments.
The poles of the earth are merely imaginary. I hate to print this statement in a large paper in such a way as to injure the reputation of great writers on this subject who still cling to the theory that the earth revolves upon large poles, and thatthe aurora borealis is but the reflection from a hot box at the north pole, but I am here to tell the truth, and if my readers think it disagreeable to read the truth, what must be my anguish who have to tell it? The mean diameter of the earth is 7,916 English statute miles, but the actual diameter from pole to pole is a still meaner diameter, being 7,899 miles, while the equatorial diameter is 7,925-1/2 miles.
The long and patient struggle of our earnest and tireless geographers and savants in past years in order to obtain these figures and have them exact, few can fully realize. The long and thankless job of measuring the diameter of the earth, no matter what the weather might be, away from home and friends, footsore and weary, still plodding on, fatigued but determined to know the mean diameter of the earth, even if it took a leg, measuring on for thousands of weary miles, and getting farther and farther away from home, and then forgetting, perhaps, how many thousand miles they had gone, and being compelled to go back and measure it over again while their noses got red and their fingers were benumbed. These, fellow-citizens, are a few of the sacrifices that science has made on our behalf in order that we may not grow up in ignorance. These are a few of the blessed privileges which, along with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, are ours—ours to anticipate, ours to participate, ours to precipitate.
BORN IN SHAME AND REARED AMONG SWINE, HE CONQUERS FAME AND FORTUNE IN PERU WITH THE SWORD—HISTORY OF A SELF-MADE MAN.
BILL NYE.
Perhaps the history of the western hemisphere has never furnished a more wonderful example of the self-made man than may be found in the person of Francisco Pizarro, a gentleman who came to America about 1510, intending to grow up with the country.
Mr. Pizarro was born at Truxillo, Spain, about 1471. His father was a Spanish colonel of foot and his mother was a peasant girl who admired and respected the dashing colonel very much, but felt that she had scruples about marriage, and so, although years afterward Francisco tried his best to make a match between his father and mother, they were never married. It is said that this embittered his whole life. None but those who have experienced it can fully realize what it is to have a thankless parent.
Pizarro's mother's name was Estramadura. This was her maiden name. It was a name which seemed to harmonize well with her rich, pickled-olive complexion and so she retained it all her life. Her son did not have many early advantages, for he was neglected by his mother and allowed to grow up a swineherd, and it is even said that he was suckled by swine in his infancy while his giddy mother joined in the mad whirl at the skating-rink. We can hardly imagine anything more pitiable than the condition of a little child left to rustle for nourishment among the black-and-tan hogs of Spain while his father played old sledge on the frontier in the regular army and his mother stood on her Spanish head and wrote her cigar-box name in the atmosphere at the rink.
Poor little Pizarro had none of the modern advantages, therefore, and his education was extremely crude. The historian says that he grew up a bold, ignorant, and brutal man. He came to what was then called Spanish America at the age of 39 years and assisted Mr. Balboa in discovering the Pacific ocean. Having heard of the existence of Peru with all its wealth, Pizarro secured a band of self-made men like himself and lit out for that province for the purpose of conquering it if he liked it and bringing home some solid silver teapots and gold-lined card-receivers. He was engaged in gathering this line of goods and working them off on the pawnbroker for twenty-one years, during which time he did not get killed, but continued to enjoy a reasonable degree of health and strength.
Although Peru at that time was quite densely populated with an industrious and wealthy class of natives, Pizarro subdued her with 110 foot soldiers armed with old-fashioned muskets that had these full-blown barrels, with muzzles on them like the business end of a tuba horn, sixty-seven mounted men, and two toy cannon loaded with carpet-tacks. With no education, and, what was still harder to bear, the inner consciousness that his parents were plain, common, every-day people whose position in life would not advance him in the estimation of the Peruvians, he battled on. His efforts were crowned with success, insomuch that at the close of theyear 1532 peace was declared and he could breathe the free air once more without fear of getting a bronze arrow-head mixed up with his kidneys when his back was turned. "For the first time in two years," says the historian, "Pizarro was able to take off his tin helmet and his sheet-iron corset at night when he lay down to rest, or undismayed to go forth bareheaded and wearing only his crinkled seersucker coat and a pair of sandals at the twilight hour and till midnight wander alone amid the famous guano groves of Peru."
Such is the history of a man who never even knew how to write his own name. He won fame for himself and great wealth without an education or a long, dark-blue lineage. Pizarro was like Job. You know, we sometimes sing:
Oh, Job, he was a fine young lad,Sing glory hallelujah.His heart was good but his blood was bad,Sing glory hallelujah.
So Pizarro could not brag on his blood and his education was not classical. He could not write his name, though he tried faithfully for many years. Day after day during the campaign, and late into the night, when the yaller dogs of Lima came forth with their Peruvian bark, he would get his orderly sergeant to set him the copy:
"Paul may plant and Apollinaris water, but it is God that giveth the increase."
Then Pizarro would bring out his writing material and his tongue and try to write, but he never could do it. His was not a studious mind. It was more on the knock-down-and-drag-out order.
Pizarro was made a marquis in after years. He was also made a corpse. He acquired the latter position toward the close of his life. He, at one time, married the inca's daughter and founded a long line of grandees, marquises, and macaroni sculptors, whose names may be found on the covers of imported cigar boxes and in the topmost tier of the wrought-iron resorts in our best penitentiaries.
Pizarro lived a very busy life during the conquest, some days killing as many as seventy and eighty Peruvians between sun and sun. But death at last crooked his finger at the marquis and he slept. We all brag and blow our horn here for a few brief years, it is true, but when the grim reaper with his new and automatic twine-binder comes along he gathers us in; the weak and the strong, the ignorant and the educated, the plain and the beautiful, the young and the old, those who have just sniffed the sweet and dew-laden air of life's morning and those who are footsore and weary and waiting—all alike must bow low to the sickle that goes on cutting closer and closer to us even when we sleep.
Had Pizarro thought more about this matter, he would have been ahead to-day.
HE DISCOVERS A MAN WITH AN IDEA—A NEW PLAN OF RUNNING A GOOD HOTEL—IMPROVEMENTS FOR WHICH PEOPLE PAY IN ADVANCE.
The following circular from a hotel-man in Kansas is going about over the country, and it certainly deserves more than a passing notice. I change the name of the hotel and proprietor in order to avoid giving any free boom to a man who seems to be thoroughly self-reliant and able to take care of himself. The rest of the circular is accurately copied:
Kansas.—Dear Sir:Not having enough room under our present arrangements, and wishing to make the Roller-Towel House the recognized head-quarters for traveling men, we desire to enlarge the building. Not having the money on hand to do so, we make the following proposition: If you will advance us $5, to be used for the above purpose, we will deduct that amount from your bill when stopping with us. We feel assured that the traveling men appreciate our efforts to give them first-class accommodations, and as the above amount will be deducted from your bill when stopping with us, we hope for a favorable reply. Should you not visit our town again the loan will be repaid in cash.J. Krash Towel,Proprietor Roller-Towel House.
Kansas.—Dear Sir:Not having enough room under our present arrangements, and wishing to make the Roller-Towel House the recognized head-quarters for traveling men, we desire to enlarge the building. Not having the money on hand to do so, we make the following proposition: If you will advance us $5, to be used for the above purpose, we will deduct that amount from your bill when stopping with us. We feel assured that the traveling men appreciate our efforts to give them first-class accommodations, and as the above amount will be deducted from your bill when stopping with us, we hope for a favorable reply. Should you not visit our town again the loan will be repaid in cash.
J. Krash Towel,Proprietor Roller-Towel House.
Here we have a man with a quiet, gentlemanly way, and yet withal a cool, level head, a man who knows when he needs more room and how best to go to work to remedy that defect. Mr. Towel sees that another row of sleeping rooms, cut low in the ceiling, is actually needed. In fancy he already sees these rooms added to his house. Each has a strip of hemp carpet in front of the bed and a cute little green shade over the window, a shade that falls down when we try to adjust it, filling the room with Kansas dust. In his dreams he seeseach room fitted out with one of those smooth, deceptive beds that are all right until we begin to use them for sleeping purposes, a bed that the tall man lies diagonally across and groans through the livelong night.
Mr. Towel has made a rapid calculation on the buttered side of a menu, and ascertained that if one-half the traveling men in the United States would kindly advance $5, to be refunded in case they did not decide to make a tour to the Roller Towel House, and to be taken out of the bill in case they did, the amount so received would not only add a row of compressed hot-air bedrooms, with flexible soap and a delirious-looking glass, but also insure an electric button, which may or may not connect with the office, and over which said button the following epitaph could be erected:
One Ring for Bell Boy.Two Rings for Porter.Three Rings for Ice Water.Four Rings for Rough on Rats.Five Rings for Borrowed Money.Six Rings for Fire.Seven Rings for Hook and Ladder Company.
In fact, a man could have rings on his fingers and bell-boys on his toes all the time if he wanted to do so.
And yet there will be traveling-men who will receive this kind circular and still hang back. Constant contact with a cold, cruel world has made them cynical, and they will hesitate even after Mr. Towel has said that he will improve his house with the money, and even after he has assured us that we need not visit Kansas at all if we will advance the money. This shows that he is not altogether a heartless man. Mr. Towel may be poor, but he is not without consideration for the feelings of people who loan him money.
For my own part I fully believe that Mr. Towel would be willing to fit up his house and put matches in each room if traveling-men throughout the country would respond to this call for assistance.
But the trouble is that the traveling public expect a landlord to take all the risks and advance all the money. This makes the matter of hotel keeping a hazardous one. Mr. Towel asks the guests to become an interested party. Not that he in so many words agrees to divide the profits proportionately at the end of the year with the stockholders, but he is willing to make his hotel larger, and if food does not come up as fast as it goes down—in price, I mean—he will try to make all his guests feel perfectly comfortable while in his house.
Under favorable circumstances the Roller-Towel House would no doubt be thoroughly refitted andrefurnished throughout. The little writing-table in each room would have its legs reglued, new wicks would be inserted in the kerosene lamps, the stairs would be dazzled over with soft soap, and the teeth in the comb down in the wash-room would be reset and filled. Numerous changes would be made in the corps de ballet also. The large-handed chambermaid, with the cow-catcher teeth and the red Brazil-nut of hair on the back of her head, would be sent down in the dining-room to recite that little rhetorical burst so often rendered by the elocutionist of the dining-room—the smart Aleckutionist, in the language of the poet, beginning: "Bfsteakprkstk'ncoldts," with a falling inflection that sticks its head into the bosom of the earth and gives its tail a tremolo movement in the air.
On receipt of $5 from each one of the traveling men of the union new hinges would be put into the slippery-elm towels; the pink soap would be revarnished; the different kinds of meat on the table will have tags on them, stating in plain words what kinds of meat they are so that guests will not be forced to take the word of servant or to rely on their own judgement; fresh vinegar with a sour taste to it, and without microbes, will be put in the cruets; the old and useless cockroaches will be discharged; and the latest and most approved adjuncts of hotel life will be adopted.
Why, then, should the traveling man hesitate? Why should he doubt and draw back, falter and shrink? Why should he allow pessimism and other foreign substances to get into his system and change his whole life?
Let him remit $5 to the Roller Towel House, and if this should prove a success he may assist other hotels in the same manner. He would thus feel an interest in their growth and prosperity. Then, as he became more and more forehanded, he could assist the railroads, the 'bus lines, and the boot-blacks, barbers, laundries, &c., in the same manner. I would like to call upon the American people in the same way.
I would like very much to establish a nice, expensive home for inebriates. It would cost, properly fitted up, about $750,000 or $800,000. If those who read this article will lend $50, by express or draft, I will take it out of their bill the first time they will stop at my new and attractive inebriate asylum. Who will be the first to contribute?—Boston Globe.
My Dear Son:We are still pegging along here at home in the same old way, your mother and me. We are neither of us real well, and yet I suppose we are as well as folks at our time of life could expect to be. Your mother has a good deal of pain in her side all the while and I am off my feed more or less in the morning. Doc has fixed me up some condition powders that he says will straighten me out right away. Perhaps so. Doc has straightened out a good many people in his time. I wish I had as many dollars as he has straightened out people.
Most every Spring I've had to take a little dandelion root, limbered up with gin, but this year that didn't seem to get there, as the boys say. I fixed up a dost of it and took it day and night for a week till I wore that old dandelion root clear down to skin and bone, but in ten days my appetite was worse than ever and I had a head on me like a 2-year-old colt. Dandelion root never served me that way before and your mother thinks that the goodness is all out of it, may be. It's the same old dandelion root that I've been using for twenty years, and I believe when you've tried a thing and proved it's good, you ortent to change off.
I tried to get your mother to take a dost of it last week for the pain in her side. Fixed up a two-quart jug of it for her, but she can't bear the smell of gin so I had to take it myself. Dandelion is a great purifier of the blood, Henry. Some days after I've been taking this dandelion root for an hour or two I feel as if my blood was pretty near pure enough. I feel like a new man.
You know I wrote you last winter, Henry, that I was going to buy some new-fangled hens in the spring and go into the egg business. Well, I sent east in March for a couple of fowls, one of each sect. They came at $9 per pair over and above railroad charges, which was some $4.35 more on top of that.
I thought that as soon as the hen got here and got her things off and got rested she would proceed to lay some of these here high-priced eggs which we read of in the Poultry-Keepers' Guide and American Eggist. But she seemed pensive, and when I tried to get acquainted with her she would cluck in a croupy tone of voice and go away.
The rooster was no doubt a fine-looking brute when he was shipped, but when he got here he strolled around with a preoccupied air and seemed to feel above us. He was a poker-dot rooster, with gray mane and tail, and he was no doubt refined, but I did not think he should feel above his business, for we are only plain people who are accustomed to the self-made American hen. He seemedbored all the time, and I could see by the way he acted that he pined to be back in Fremont, O., having his picture taken for the Poultry-Keepers' Guide and American Eggist. He still yearned for approbation. He was used to being made of, as your mother says, and it galled him to enter into our plain, humdrum home life.
I never saw such a haughty rooster in my life. Actually, when I got out to feed him in the morning he would give me a cold, arrogant look that hurt my feelings. I know I'm not what you would call an educated man nor a polished man, though I claim to have a son that is both of said things, but I hate to have a rooster crow over me because he has had better advantages and better breeding than I have. So there was no love lost between us, as you can see.
Directly I noticed that the hen began to have spells of vertigo. She would be standing in a corner of the hen retreat, reverting to her joyous childhood at Fremont, O., when all at once she would "fall senseless to the earth and there lie prone upon the sward," to use the words of a great writer whose address has been mislaid. She would remain in this comytoes condition for between five minutes, perhaps. Then she would rally a little, slowly pry open her large, mournful eyes, and seem to murmur "Where am I?"
I could see that she was evading the egg issue in every way and ignoring the great object for which she was created. With the ability to lay eggs worth from $4 to $5.75 per dozen delivered on the cars, I could plainly see that she proposed to roll up this great talent in a napkin and play the invalid act. I do not disguise the fact, Henry, that I was mad. I made a large rectangular affidavit in the inner temple of the horse-barn that this poker-dot hen should never live to say that I had sent her to the seashore for her health when she was eminently fitted by nature to please the public with her lay.
I therefore gave her two weeks to decide on whether she would contribute a few of her meritorious articles or insert herself into a chicken pie.
She still continued haughty to the last moment. So did her pardner. We therefore treated ourselves to a $9 dinner in April.
I then got some expensive eggs from the effete east. They were not robust eggs. They were layed during a time of great depression, I judge. So they were that way themselves also. They came by express, and were injured while being transferred at Chicago. No one has travelled over that line of railroad since.
I do not say that the eggs were bad, but I say that their instincts and their inner life wasn'twhat they ort to have been.
In early May I bought one of these inkybaters that does the work of ten setting hens. I hoped to head off the hen so far as possible, simply purchasing her literary efforts and editing them to suit myself. I cannot endure the society of a low-bred hen, and a refined hen seems to look down on me, and so I thought if I could get one of those ottymatic inkybaters I could have the whole process under my own control, and if the blooded hens wanted to go to the sanitarium and sit around there with their hands in their pockets while the great hungry world of traffic clamored for more spring chickens fried in butter they might do so and be doggoned.
Thereupon I bought one of the medium size, two story hatchers and loaded it with eggs. In my dreams I could see a long procession of fuzzy little chickens marching out of my little inkybater arm in arm, every day or two, while my bank account swelled up like a deceased horse.
I was dreaming one of these dreams night before last at midnight's holy hour when I was rudely awakened by a gallon of cold water in one of my ears. I arose in the darkness and received a squirt of cold water through the window from our ever-watchful and courageous fire department. I opened the casement for the purpose of thankingthem for this little demonstration, wholly unsolicited on my part, when I discovered the hennery was in flames.
I went down to assist the department, forgetting to put on my pantaloons as is my custom out of deference to the usages of good society. We saved the other buildings, but the hatchery is a mass of smoldering ruins. So am I.
It seems that the kerosene lamp which I kept burning in the inkybater for the purpose of maintaining an even temperature, and also for the purpose of showing the chickens the way to the elevator in case they should hatch out in the night, had torched up and ignited the hatchery, so to speak.
I see by my paper that we are importing 200,000,000 of hens' eggs from Europe every year. It'll be 300,000,000 next year so far as I'm concerned, Henry, and you can bet your little pleated jacket on it, too, if you want to.
To-day I send P. O. order No. 143,876 for $3.50. I agree with the bible that "the fool and his money are soon parted." Your father,
Bill Nye.
I am glad to notice a strong effort on the part of the friends of humanity to encourage those whowish to quit the use of tobacco. To quit the use of this weed is one of the most agreeable methods of relaxation. I have tried it a great many times, and I can safely say that it has afforded me much solid felicity.
To violently reform and cast away the weed and at the end of a week to find a good cigar unexpectedly in the quiet, unostentatious pocket of an old vest, affords the most intense and delirious delight.
Scientists tell us that a single drop of the concentrated oil of tobacco on the tongue of an adult dog is fatal. I have no doubt about the truth or cohesive power of this statement, and for that reason I have always been opposed to the use of tobacco among dogs. Dogs should shun the concentrated oil of tobacco, especially if longevity be any object to them. Neither would I advise a man who may have canine tendencies or a strain of that blood in his veins to use the concentrated oil of tobacco as a sozodont. To those who may feel that way about tobacco I would say, shun it by all means. Shun it as you would the deadly upas tree or the still more deadly whipple tree of the topics.
In what I may say under this head please bear in mind that I do not speak of the cigarette. I am now confining my remarks entirely to the subject of tobacco.
The use of the cigarette is, in fact, beneficial inin some ways, and no pest house should try to get along without it. It is said that they are very popular in the orient, especially in the lazar houses, where life would otherwise become very monotonous.
Scientists, who have been unable to successfully use tobacco and who therefore have given their whole lives and the use of their microscopes to the investigation of its horrors, say that cannibals will not eat the flesh of tobacco-using human beings. And yet we say to our missionaries: "No man can be a Christian and use tobacco."
I say, and I say it, too, with all that depth of feeling which has always characterized my earnest nature, that in this we are committing a great error.
What have the cannibals ever done for us as a people that we should avoid the use of tobacco in order to fit our flesh for their tables. In what way have they sought to ameliorate our condition in life that we should strive in death to tickle their palates.
Look at the history of the cannibal for past ages. Read carefully his record and you will see that it has been but the history of a selfish race. Cast your eye back over your shoulder for a century, and what do you find to be the condition of the cannibalists? A new missionary has landed a few weeksprevious perhaps. A little group is gathered about on the beach beneath a tropical tree. Representative cannibals from adjoining islands are present. The odor of sanctity pervades the air.
The chief sits beneath a new umbrella, looking at the pictures in a large concordance. A new plug hat is hanging in a tree near by.
Anon the leading citizens gather about on the ground, and we hear the chief ask his attorney-general whether he will take some of the light or some of the dark meat.
That is all.
Far away in England the paper contains the following personal:
Wanted.—A young man to go as missionary tosupply vacancy in one of the cannibal islands. He must fully understand the appetites and tastes of the cannibals, must be able to reach their inner nature at once, and must not use tobacco. Applicants may communicate in person or by letter.
Wanted.—A young man to go as missionary tosupply vacancy in one of the cannibal islands. He must fully understand the appetites and tastes of the cannibals, must be able to reach their inner nature at once, and must not use tobacco. Applicants may communicate in person or by letter.
Is it strange that under these circumstances those who frequented the cannibal islands during the last century should have quietly accustomed themselves to the use of a peculiarly pernicious, violent, and all-pervading brand of tobacco? I think not.
To me the statement that tobacco-tainted human flesh is offensive to the cannibal does not come home with crushing power.
Perhaps I do not love my fellow-man so well as the cannibal does. I know that I am selfish in this way, and if my cannibal brother desires to polish my wishbone he must take me as he finds me. I cannot abstain wholly from the use of tobacco in order to gratify the pampered tastes of one who has never gone out of his way to do me a favor.
Do I ask the cannibal to break off the pernicious use of tobacco because I dislike the flavor of it in his brisket? I will defy any respectable resident of the cannibal islands to-day to place his finger on a solitary instance where I have ever, by word or deed, intimated that he should make the slightest change in his habits on my account, unless it be that I may have suggested that a diet consisting of more anarchists and less human beings would be more productive of general and lasting good.
My own idea would be to send a class of men to these islands so thoroughly imbued with their great object and the oil of tobacco that the great Caucasian chowder of those regions would be followed by such weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth and such remorse and repentance and gastric upheavals that it would be as unsafe to eat a missionary in the cannibal islands as it is to eat ice-cream in the United States to-day.
The excitement consequent upon the anticipated departure of Mr. Gilder for the north pole has recently awakened in the bosom of the American people a new interest in what I may term that great terra incognita, if I may be pardoned for using a phrase from my own mother tongue.
Let us for a moment look back across the bleak waste of years and see what wonderful progress has been made in the discovery of the pole. We may then ask ourselves, who will be first to tack his location notice on the gnawed and season-cracked surface of the pole itself, and what will he do with it after he has so filed upon it?
Iceland, I presume, was discovered about 860 A. D., or 1,026 years ago, but the stampede to Iceland has always been under control, and you can get corner lots in the most desirable cities of Iceland, and wear a long rickety name with links in it like a rosewood sausage, to-day at a low price. Naddodr, a Norwegian viking, discovered Iceland A. D. 860, but he did not live to meet Lieutenant Greely or any of our most celebrated northern tourists. Why Naddodr yearned to go north anddiscover a colder country than his own, why he should seek to wet his feet and get icicles down his back in order to bring to light more snow-banks and chilblains, I cannot at this time understand. Why should a robust and prosperous viking roam around in the cold trying to nose out more frost-bitten Esquimaux, when he could remain at home and vike?
But I leave this to the thinking mind. Let the thinking mind grapple with it. It has no charms for me. Moreover, I haven't that kind of a mind.
Octher, another Norwegian gentleman, sailed around North cape and crossed the arctic circle in 890 A. D., but he crossed it in the night, and didn't notice it at the time.
Two or three years later, Erik the Red took a large snow-shovel and discovered the east coast of Greenland. Erik the Red was a Northman, and he flourished about the ninth century, and before the war. He sailed around in that country for several years, drinking bay rum and bear's oil and having a good time. He wore fur underclothes all the time, winter and summer, and evaded the poll-tax for a long time. Erik also established a settlement on the south-east coast of Greenland in about latitude 60 degrees north. These people remained here for some time, subsisting on shrimp salad, sea-moss farina, and neat's-foot oil. But finally they became so bored with the quiet country life and thebackward springs that they removed from there to a land that is fairer than day, to use the words of another. They removed during the holidays, leaving their axle grease and all they held dear, including their remains.
From that on down to 1380 we hear or read varying and disconnected accounts of people who have been up that way, acquired a large red chilblain, made an observation, and died. Representatives from almost every quarter of the globe have been to the far north, eaten their little hunch of jerked polar-bear, and then the polar-bear has eaten his little hunch of jerked explorer, and so the good work went on.
The polar bear, with his wonderful retentive faculties, has succeeded in retaining his great secret regarding the pole, together with the man who came out there to find out about it. So up to 1380 a large number of nameless explorers went to this celebrated watering-place, shot a few pemmican, ate a jerked whale, shuddered a couple of times, and died. It has been the history of arctic exploration from the earliest ages. Men have taken their lives and a few doughnuts in their hands, wandered away into the uncertain light of the frozen north, made a few observations—to each other regarding the backward spring—and then cached their skeletons forever.
In 1380 two Italians named Lem took a load of sun-kissed bananas and made a voyage to the extreme north, but the historian says that the accounts are so conflicting, and as the stories told by the two brothers did not agree and neither ever told it the same on two separate occasions, the history of their voyage is not used very much.
Years rolled on, boys continued to go to school and see in their geographies enticing pictures of men in expensive fur clothing running sharp iron spears and long dangerous stab knives into ferocious white bears and snorting around on large cakes of cold ice and having a good time. These inspired the growing youth to rise up and do likewise. So every nation 'neath the sun has contributed its assortments of choice, white skeletons and second hand clothes to the remorseless maw of the hungry and ravenous north.
And still the great pole continued to squeak on through days that were six months long and nights that made breakfast seem almost useless.
In 1477 Columbus went up that way, but did not succeed in starving to death. He got a bird's-eye view of a large deposit of dark-blue ice, got hungry and came home.
During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the northern nations of Europe, and especially the Dutch, kept the discovery business red-hot, butthey did not get any fragments of the true pole. The maritime nations of Europe, together with other foreign powers, dynasties, and human beings, for some time had spells of visiting the polar seas and neglecting to come back. It was the custom then as it is now, to go twenty rods farther than any other man had ever been, eat a deviled bootleg, curl up, and perish. Thousands of the best and brightest minds of all ages have yielded to this wild desire to live on sperm oil, pain-killer and jerked walrus, keep a little blue diary for thirteen weeks, and then feed it to a tall white bear with red gums.
That is not all. Millions of gallons of whiskey are sent to these frozen countries and used by the explorer in treating the untutored Esquimaux, who are not, and never will be, voters. It seems to me utterly ill-advised and shamefully idiotic.
Capitalist—Will you kindly furnish your address once more? You must either stop moving about so or leave some one at home to represent you. Nothing is more humiliating to a literary man of keen sensibilities than to draw at sight and have the draft returned with the memorandum on the back in pencil "Gone to the White mountains," or "Gone to Lake Elmo on another bridal tour," or"Gone to Bayfield to be absent several years," or "Gone to Minnetonka to wait till the clouds roll by."
"Searcher," Peru, Ill.—Cum grano salis was the motto of the ancients, and was written in blue letters at the base of the shield on a field emerald, supported by a cucumber recumbent. The author is unknown.
"S. Q. G.," McGree's Prairie, Iowa, asks: "Do you know of any place where a young man can get a good living?"
That depends on what you call a good living, S. Q. G. If your stomach would not revolt at plain fare, such as poor people use, come up and stop at our house awhile. We don't live high, but we aim to eke out an existence, as it were. Come and abide with us, S. Q. G. Here is where the prince of Wales comes when he gets weary of being heir apparently to the throne. Here is where Bert comes when he has stood a long time, first on one leg and then on the other, waiting for his mother to evacuate said throne. He bids dull care begone, and clothing himself in some of my own gaudy finery he threads a small Limerick hook through the vitals of a long-waisted worm, as we hie us to the bosky dell where the plash of the pleasant-voiced brook replies to the turtle dove's moan. There, where the pale green plush of the moss onthe big flat rocks deadens the footfall of Wales and me, where the tip of the long willow bough monkeys with the stream forever, where neither powers nor principalities, nor things present or things to come, can embitter us, we sit there, young Regina and me, and we live more happy years in twenty minutes than a man generally lives all his whole life socked up against a hard throne with the eagle eye of a warning constituency on him.
It's a good place to come, S. Q. G. Quiet but restful; full of balm for the wounded spirit and close up to nature's great North American heart. That's the idea. Perhaps I do not size you up accurately, S. Q. G. You may be a man who does not pant for the sylvan shade. Very likely you are a seaside resortist and do not care for pants, but I simply say to you that if you are a worthy young man weary with life's great battles—beaten back, perhaps, and wounded—with your neck knocked crooked like a tom-tit that has run against a telegraph wire in the night, come up here into northern Wisconsin, where the butternut gleams in the autumn sunshine and the ax-helve has her home. Come where the sky is a dark and glorious blue and the town a magnificent red. Come where the coral cranberry nestles in the green heart of the yielding marsh and the sand-hill crane stands idly on the sedgy brim of the lonely lake through all the long, idleday with his hands in the tail pockets of his tan-colored coat, trying to remember what he did with his handkerchief.
Come up here, S. Q. G. and be my amanuensis. I want a man to go with me on a little private excursion from the Dallas of the St. Croix to the Sault Ste. Marie. I want him to go with me and act as my private secretary and carry my canoe for me. The salary would be small the first year, but you would have a good deal of fun. Most any one can have fun with me. We would go mostly for relaxation and to build up our systems. My system is pretty well built up, but it would be a pleasure to me to watch you build yours up. What I need is a private secretary to go with me and take down little thinklets that I may have thought. You would have nothing to carry but the canoe, a small tent, my gun and a type-writer. I would carry the field glass. I always carry the field glass because something might happen to it. One time an amanuensis who went with me insisted on carrying the field glass, and the second day he lost the cork out of it, so we had to come back and make a new observation before we could start.
You would be welcome, S. Q. G.; welcome here in the fastness of the forest; welcome where the resinous air of the spruce and the tamarack would kiss your wan cheek; welcome to the rocky shoresof the grand old fresh water monarch, the champion heavyweight of all the great lakes; welcome to the hazy, lazy days of our long voluptuous autumn, the twilight of the closing year; welcome to the shade of the elms, where the sunshine sneaks in on tiptoe and frolics with the dew and the daisies; welcome to the sombre depths of the ever regretful and repentant pines, whose venerable heads are first to greet the day, and whose heaving bosoms hold the night.
Come over, S. Q. G. Be my stenographer and I will show you where a friend of mine has concealed a watermelon patch in the very heart of his corn-field. Come over and we will show him how concealment, like a worm, may feed upon his damaged fruit. Till then, S. Q. G., ta-ta.
Sept. 1.—I have just been preparing a speech for to-morrow evening at our convention. It is a good speech and will take well. It is also sincere.
I will give the outlines of the speech here, so that in case I should die or slip up on a stenographer the basis of my remarks may not perish:
Fellow-Citizens: You have seen fit to renominate me for the office which I have held one termalready—viz.: member of congress from this district.
As you are aware, I am a self-made man. I have carved out my own career from the ground up, as I may say, till to-day I am your nominee for the second time.
What we want these days is not so much men of marked ability as candidates but available, careful and judicious men. We are too apt to strive for the nomination of brilliant men of pronounced opinions when we must need men who can be easily elected. Of what avail is a man of genius and education and robust brains and earnest convictions if we cannot elect him? He is simply a sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal.
Therefore, I would say to the youth of America—could they stand before me to-day—do not strive too hard or strain yourselves by endeavoring to attain some object after you are elected to office. Let your earnest convictions remain dormant. Should a man have convictions these days, let him reserve them for use in his own family. They are not necessary in politics. If a member of congress must have a conviction and earnestly feels as though he could not possibly get along another day without it, let him go to the grand jury and make a clean breast of it.
I may say, fellow-citizens, without egotism, thatI have been judicious both in the heat of the campaign and in the halls of legislation. I have done nothing that could disrupt the party or weaken our vote in this district. It is better to do nothing than to do things that will be injurious to the interests of the majority.
What do you care, gentlemen, for what I said or did in our great session of last winter so long as I came home to you with a solidified vote for this fall; so long as I have not trodden on the toes of the Irish, the German, the Scandinavian, the prohibitionist, the female-suffragist, the anti-mormon, or the international-copyright crank?
Let us be frank with each other, fellow-citizens. Do you ask me on my return to you how many speeches my private secretary and the public printer attached my name to, or how many packages of fly-blown turnip seed I sent to you during the last two years?
No!!!
You ask yourself how is the vote of our party this fall as compared with two years ago? And I answer that not a vote has been mislaid or a ballot erased.
I have done nothing and said nothing that a carping constituency could get hold of. Though I was never in congress before, old members enviedme the long, blank, evasive, and irreproachable record I have made.
No man can say that, even under the stimulating influence of the wine cup, I have given utterance in the last two years to anything that could be distorted into an opinion. And so to-day I come back to you and find my party harmonious, while others return to their homes to be greeted by a disrupted constituency, over whose ruins the ever-alert adversary clambers to success.
So I say to you to-night, Mr. President and gentlemen of the convention, let us leave to the newspapers the expression of what we call earnest convictions—convictions that arise up in after years to belt us across the face and eyes. Let injudicious young men talk about that kind of groceries, but the wary self-made politician who succeeds does not do that way.
It seems odd to me that young men will go on year after year trying to attain distinction by giving utterance to opinions when they can see for themselves that we do not want such men for any place whatever, from juryman to congressman.
If you examine my record for the last session, for instance, you will not find that I spent the day pounding my desk with an autograph album and filling the air with violent utterances pro or con and then sat up nights to get myself interviewedby the disturbing elements of the press. No, sir!
I am not a disturber, a radical or a disrupter!
At Washington I am a healer and at home in my ward I am also a heeler!
What America wants to-day is not so much a larger number of high-browed men who will get up on their hind feet and call on heaven to paralyze their right arms before they will do a wrong act, or ask to have their tongues nailed to the ridge-pole of their mouths rather than utter a false or dangerous doctrine. That was customary when the country was new and infested with bears; when men carried their guns to church with them and drank bay rum as a beverage.
These remarks made good pieces for boys to speak, but they will not do now. What this country needs is a congress about as equally balanced as possible politically, so that when one side walks up and smells of an appropriation the other can growl in a low tone of voice, from December till dog-days. In this way by a pleasing system of postponements, previous questions, points of order, reference to committees, laying on the table, and general oblivion, a great deal may be evaded, and people at home who do not closely read and remember the Congressional Record will not know who was to blame.
Judicious inertness and a gentle air of evasionwill do much to prevent party dissension. I have done that way, and I look for the same old majority that we had at the former election.
I often wonder if Daniel Webster would have the nerve to get up and talk as freely about things now as he used to when politics had not reached the present state of perfection. We often hear people ask why we haven't got any Websters in congress now. I can tell you. They are sat down on long before they get that far along. They are not encouraged to say radical things and split up the vote.
I will now close, thanking you for your kind preferment. I will ever strive, while representing you in congress, to retain my following, and never, by word or deed, endeavor to win fame and applause there at the expense of votes at home. I care not to be embalmed in the school speakers and declaimers of future ages, provided my tombstone shall bear upon it the simple, poetic refrain:
He got there.