Perhaps there is nothing in the line of discovery and improvement that has shown more marked progress in the last century than the railway and its different auxiliaries. When we remember thatmuch less than a century has passed since the first patent for a locomotive to move upon a track was issued, where now we have everything that heart can wish, and, in fact, live better on the road than we do at home, with but thirty-six hours between New York and Minneapolis, and a gorgeous parlor, bedroom, and dining-room between Maine and Oregon, with nothing missing that may go to make life a rich blessing, we are compelled to express our wonder and admiration.
To Peter Cooper is largely due the boom given to railway business, he having constructed the first locomotive ever made in this country, and put it on the Baltimore & Ohio railroad.
The first train ever operated must have been a grand sight. First came the locomotive, a large Babcock fire-extinguisher on trucks, with a smoke-stack like a full-blown speaking-tube with a frill around the top; the engineer at his post in a plug hat, with an umbrella over his head and his hand on the throttle, borrowing a chew of tobacco now and then of the farmers who passed him on their way to town. Near him stood the fireman, now and then bringing in an armful of wood from the fields through which he passed, and turning the damper in the smoke-stack every little while so it would draw. Now and then he would go forward and put a pork-rind on a hot box or pound onthe cylinder head to warn people off the track.
Next comes the tender loaded with nice, white birch wood, an economical style of fuel because its bark may be easily burned off while the wood itself will remain uninjured. Besides the firewood we find on the tender a barrel of rainwater and a tall, blonde jar with wicker-work around it, which contains a small sprig of tansy immersed in four gallons of New England rum. This the engineer has brought with him for use in case of accident. He is now engaged in preparing for the accident in advance.
Next comes the front brakeman in a plug hat about two sizes too large for him. He also wears a long-waisted frock coat with a bustle to it and a tall shirt-collar with a table-spread tie, the ends of which flutter gayly in the morning breeze. As the train pauses at the first station he takes a hammer out of the tool-box and nails on the tire of the fore wheel of his coach. The engineer gets down with a long oil-can and puts a little sewing-machine oil on the pitman. He then wipes it off with his sleeve.
It is now discovered that the rear coach, containing a number of directors and the division superintendent, is missing. The conductor goes to the rear of the last coach, and finds that the string by which the directors' car was attached isbroken, and that, the grade being pretty steep, the directors and one brakeman have no doubt gone back to the starting place.
But the conductor is cool. He removes his bell-crowned plug hat, and, taking out his orders and time-card, he finds that the track is clear, and, looking at a large, valuable Waterbury watch, presented to him by a widow whose husband was run over and killed by the train, he sees he can still make the next station in time for dinner. He hires a livery team to go back after the directors' coach, and, calling "All aboard," he swings lightly upon the moving train.
It is now 10 o'clock, and nineteen weary miles still stretch out between him and the dinner station. To add to the horrors of the situation, the front brakeman discovers that a very thirsty boy in the emigrant car has been drinking from the water-supply tank on the tender, and there is not enough left to carry the train through. Much time is consumed in filling the barrel again at a spring near the track, but the conductor finds a "spotter" on the train, and gets him to do it. He also induces him to cut some more wood and clean out the ashes.
The engineer then pulls out a draw-head and begins to make up time. In twenty minutes he has made up an hour's time, though two miles of hoop-iron are torn from the track behind him. Hesails into the eating station on time, and, while the master mechanic takes several of the coach-wheels over to the machine-shop to soak, he eats a hurried lunch.
The brakeman here gets his tin lanterns ready for the night run and fills two of them with red oil to be used on the rear coach. The fireman puts a fresh bacon-rind on the eccentric, stuffs some more cotton batting around the axles, puts a new lynch-pin in the hind wheels, sweeps the apple-peelings out of the smoking car, and he is ready.
Then comes the conductor, with his plug hat full of excursion tickets, orders, passes, and timechecks; he looks at his Waterbury watch, waves his hand, and calls "All aboard" again. It is upgrade, however, and for two miles the "spotter" has to push behind with all his might before the conductor will allow him to get on and ride.
Thus began the history of a gigantic enterprise which has grown till it is a comfort, a convenience, a luxury, and yet a necessity. It has built up and beautified the desert. It has crept beneath the broad river, scaled the snowy mountain, and hung by iron arms from the canon and the precipice, carrying the young to new lands and reuniting those long separated. It has taken the hopeless to lands of new hope. It has evaded the solitude of the wilderness, spiked down valuable land-grants,killed cheap cattle and then paid a high price for them, whooped through valleys, snorted over lofty peaks, crept through long, dark tunnels, turning the bright glare of day suddenly upon those who thought the tunnel was two miles long, roared through the night and glittered through the day, bringing alike the groom to his beautiful bride and the weeping prodigal to the moss-grown grave of his mother.
You are indeed a heartless, soulless corporation, and yet you are very essential in our business.
HOW OLD BRINDLE MET HER DEATH WITH A TRAIN.
A QUAINT EPISTLE, IN WHICH THE HUMORIST GIVES HIS EXPERIENCE WITH RAILROAD OFFICIALS—HOW HE SECURED PAY FOR A COW.
Dear Henry: Your letter stating that you had just succeeded in running your face for a new curriculum is at hand and contents noted, as the feller said when I wrote to him two years ago and told him that his cussed railroad had mashed old Brin. You remember that just as you entered on what you called your junior year, old Brin remained out all night, and your mother and me took our coffee milkless in the morning.
Well, I went down to the pound to see if she had registered there, but she hadn't been stopping there, the night clerk said. He maintained, however, that "number two-aught-eight"—as he called it—had come in half an hour late with a cow's head on the pilot and brindle hair on the runnin' gears of the tender.
So I went over to the station and found Brin's head there, whereupon I went down the track in search of her, though I feared it would be futile, as you once said about administering a half sole to your summer pantaloons. Well, I was right about it, Henry. If I'd been in the futile business for years I couldn't have been more so than I was on this occasion. The old cow was dead and so identified with the right of way, that her own mother would not have known her.
I spoke to the conductor about it and he said it wasn't on his run and for me to see the other conductor. Time I found him he was on another road and killed in a collision with a lumber train. Then I wrote to the general traffic manager, using great care to spell all the words as near right as possible, and he didn't reply at all. His hired man wrote me, however, with a printing press, that my letter had been received and contents duly noted. In reply would say that the general traffic manager was then attending a tripartitereunion at Chicago, at which meeting the subject of cows would come up. He said that there had been such competition between the Milwaukee, the Northwestern and the Rock Island in the matter of prices paid for shattered cows, that farmers got to dragging their debilitated stock on the track at night and selling it to the roads, after which they would retire from business on their ill-gotten gains.
When the general traffic manager got back I went in to see him. He was very pleasant with me, but said he had nothing to do with the dead cow industry. "Go to the auditor or the general solicitor," said he, "they run the morgue." But they were both away attending a large Eastern mass meeting of auditors and general solicitors, where they where discussing the practicability of a new garnishee-proof pay-car, that some party had patented, they said.
So I went home and wrote to the auditor a nice, long, fluent letter in relation to the cow and her merits. I told him that it wasn't the intrinsic value of the cow that I cared about. Intrinsic value is a term that I found in one of your letters and liked very much. I wrote him that old Brin was an heir-loom and a noble brute. I said among other things that she had never been antagonistic to railroads. She had rather favored them; alsothat her habits and tastes were simple and that she had never aspired to rise above her station in life, and why she should rise higher than the station when she was injured I could not understand. I told him what a good milkster she was, and also that she came up every night as regular as an emetic.
I then wrote my name with a little ornamental squirm to it, added a postscript in which I said that you was now in your junior year, and I thought that about seventy-five dollars would be a fair quotation on such a cow as I had feebly described, and said good-by to him, hoping he would remit at a prior date if possible.
I got a letter after awhile, stating that my favor of the 25th ult. or prox. or something of that nature, had been duly received and contents noted. This was no surprise to me, because that is too often the sad fate of a letter. In fact the same thing had happened to the other one I had previously sent.
I was mad, and wrote to the president of the company stating in crisp language that if his company would pay more cash for cows and do less in the noting and contents business, he would be more apt to endear himself to those who reside along his line and who had their horses scared to death twice a day by his arrogant and bellering besom ofdestruction. "If you will deal more in scads and less in stenography and monkey business," says I, in closing, "you will warm yourself into the hearts of the plain people. Otherwise," I says, "we will arise in our might and walk."
I then, in a humorsome way, marked it "dictated letter" and sent it away.
I got it back in the face by way of the dead-letter office where they know me. I'll bet they had a good laugh over it, for they opened it and read it while it was there. I wouldn't be surprised if every man in Congress had a good hearty laugh over that letter. Congressmen enjoy a good thing once in a while, Henry. They ain't so dumb as they look.
But I finally got my pay for old Brin, to make a long story short. They cut me down some on the price, but I finally got my money. No railroad company can run over a cow of mine and mix her up with a trestle three-quarters of a mile long, without paying for it, and favors received and contents duly noted don't go with
Your father,Bill Nye.
ATTENDS A WESTERN THEATER AND SEES A REMARKABLE SHOOTING AFFRAY.
Those were troublesome times, indeed, when we were trying to settle up the new world and a few other matters at the same time.
Little do the soft-eyed sons of prosperity understand to-day, as they walk the paved streets of the west under the cold glitter of the electric light, surrounded by all that can go to make life sweet and desirable, that not many years ago on that same ground their fathers fought the untutored savage by night and chased the bounding buffalo by day.
All, all is changed. Time in his restless and resistless flight has filed away those early years in the county clerk's office, and these times are not the old times. With the march of civilization I notice that it is safer for a man to attend a theatre than in the early days of the wild and wooly west. Time has made it easier for one to go to the opera and bring his daylights home with him than it used to be.
It seems but a few short years since my room-mate came home one night with a long red furrow plowed along the top of his head, where some gentleman at the theatre had shot him by mistake.My room-mate said that a tall man had objected to the pianist and suggested that he was playing pianissimo when he should have played fortissimo, and trouble grew out of this which had ended in the death of the pianist and the injury of several disinterested spectators.
And yet the excitement of knowing that you might be killed at any moment made the theatre more attractive, and instead of scaring men away it rather induced patronage. Of course it prevented the attendance of ladies who were at all timid, but it did not cause any falling off in the receipts. Some thought it aided a good deal, especially where the show itself didn't have much blood in it.
The Bella Union was a pretty fair sample of the theatre in those days. It was a low wooden structure with a perpetual band on the outside, that played gay and festive circus tunes early and often. Inside you could poison your soul at the bar and see the show at one and the same price of admission. In an adjoining room silent men joined the hosts of faro and the timid tenderfoot gamboled o'er the green.
I visited this place of amusement one evening in the capacity of a reporter for the paper. I would not admit this, even at this late day, only that it has been overlooked in Mr. Talmage since;and if he could go through such an ordeal in the interests of humanity, I might be forgiven for going there professionally to write up the show for our amusement column.
The programme was quite varied. Negro minstrelsy, sleight-of-hand, opera bouffe, high tragedy, and that oriental style of quadrille called the khan-khan, if my sluggish memory be not at fault, formed the principal attractions of the evening.
At about 10:30 or 11 o'clock the khan-khan was produced upon the stage. In the midst of it a tall man rose up at the back of the hall, and came firmly down the aisle with a large, earnest revolver in his right hand. He was a powerfully built man, with a dyed mustache and wicked eye on each side of his thin, red nose. He threw up the revolver with a little click that sounded very loud to me, for he had stopped right behind me and rested his left hand on my shoulder as he gazed over on the stage. I could distinctly hear his breath come and go, for it was a very loud breath, with the odor of onions and emigrant whisky upon it.
The orchestra paused in the middle of a snort, and the man whose duty it was to swallow the clarionet pulled seven or eight inches of the instrument out of his face and looked wildly around. The gentleman who had been agitating the feelings of the bass viol laid it down on the side, crawled inbehind it, and spread a sheet of music over his head.
The stage manager came forward to the footlights and inquired what was wanted. The tall man with the self-cocking credentials answered simply:
"By Dashety Blank to Blank Blank and back again, I want my wife!"
The manager stepped back into the wings for a moment, and when he came forward he also had a large musical instrument such as Mr. Remington used to make before he went into the type-writer business. I can still remember how large the hole in the barrel looked to me, and how I wished that I had gone to the meeting of the Literary club that evening, as I had at first intended to do.
Literature was really more in my line than the drama. I still thought that it was not too late, perhaps, and so I rose and went out quietly so as not to disturb any one, and as I went down the aisle the tall man and stage manager exchanged regrets.
I looked back in time to see the tall man fall in the aisles with his face in the sawdust and his hand over his breast. Then I went out of the theatre in an aimless sort of way, taking a northeasterly direction as the crow flies. I do not think I ran over a mile or two in this way before I discovered that I was going directly away from home. I rested awhile and then returned.
On the street I met the stage manager and the tall, dark man just as they were coming out of the Moss Agate saloon. They said they were very sorry to notice that I got up and came away at a point in the programme where they had introduced what they had regarded as the best feature of the show.
This incident had a great deal to do with turning my attention in the direction of literature instead of the drama.
But I am glad to notice that many of the horrors of the drama are being gradually eliminated as the country gets more thickly settled, and the gory tragedy of a few years ago is gradually giving place to the refining influences of the "Tin Soldier" and "A Rag Baby."
THE BOY WHO MADE A DOLLAR BY A WHIPPING.
BILL NYE.
Will Taylor, the son of the present American consul at Marseilles, was a good deal like other boys while at school in his old home in Hudson, Wis. One day he called his father into the library and said:
"Pa, I don't like to tell you, but the teacher and I have had trouble."
"What's the matter now?"
"Well, I cut one of the desks a little with my knife, and the teacher says I've got to pay $1 or take a lickin'!"
"Well, why don't you take the lickin' and say nothing more about it? I can stand considerable physical pain, so long as it visits our family in that form. Of course it is not pleasant to be flogged, but you have broken a rule of the school, and I guess you'll have to stand it. I presume that the teacher will in wrath remember mercy and avoid disabling you, so that you can't get your coat on any more."
"But, pa, I feel mighty bad over it, already, and if you would pay my fine, I'd never do it again. A dollar isn't much to you, pa, but it's a heap to a boy who hasn't a cent. If I could make a dollar as easy as you can, pa, I'd never let my little boy get flogged that way to save a dollar. If I had a little feller that got licked bekuz I didn't put up for him I'd hate the sight of money always. I'd feel as ef every dollar I had in my pocket had been taken out of my little kid's back."
"Well, now, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll give you a dollar to save you from punishment this time, but if anything of this kind ever occurs againI'll hold you while the teacher licks you and then I'll get the teacher to hold you while I lick you. That's the way I feel about that. If you want to go around whittling up our educational institutions you can do so; but you will have to purchase them afterward yourself. I don't propose to buy any more damaged furniture. You probably grasp my meaning, do you not? I send you to school to acquire an education, not to acquire liabilities, so that you can come around and make an assessment on me. I feel a great interest in you, Willie, but I do not feel as though it should be an assessable interest. I want to go on of course and improve the property, but when I pay my dues on it, I want to know that it goes toward development work. I don't want my assessments to go toward the purchase of a school-desk with American hieroglyphics carved on it. I hope you will bear this in mind, my son, and beware. It will be greatly to your interest to beware. If I were in your place I would put in a large portion of my time in the beware business."
The boy took the dollar and went thoughtfully away to school and no more was ever said about the matter until Mr. Taylor learned casually several months later that the Spartan youth had received the walloping and filed away the $1 for future reference. The boy was afterward heard to say that hefavored a much higher fine in cases of that kind. One whipping was sufficient, he said, but he favored a fine of $5. It ought to be severe enough to make it an object.
It is rather interesting to watch the manner by which old customs have been slightly changed and handed down from age to age. Peculiarities of old traditions still linger among us, and are forked over to posterity like a wappy-jawed tea-pot or a long-time mortgage. No one can explain it, but the fact still remains patent that some of the oddities of our ancestors continue to appear from time to time clothed in the changing costumes of the prevailing fashions.
Along with these choice antiquities and carrying the nut-brown flavor of the dead and relentless original amende in which the offender appeared in public clothed only in a cotton flannel shirt and with a rope around his neck as an evidence of a former recantation down to this day when (sometimes) the pale editor in a stickfull of type admits that "his informant was in error," the amende honorable has marched along with the easy tread of time. Theblue-eyed moulder of public opinion, with one suspender hanging down at his side and writing on a sheet of news-copy paper, has a more extensive costume perhaps than the old-time offender who bowed in the dust in the midst of the great populace and with a halter under his ear admitted his offense, but he does not feel any more cheerful over it.
I have been called upon several times to make the amende honorable, and I admit that it is not an occasion of much mirth and merriment. People who come into the editorial office to invest in a retraction are generally healthy, and have a stiff, reserved manner that no cheerfulness or hospitality can soften.
I remember an incident of this kind which occurred last summer in my office while I was writing something scathing. A large man with an air of profound perspiration about him and a plaid flannel shirt, stepped into the middle of the room and breathed in all the air that I was not using. He said he would give me four minutes in which to retract, and pulled out a watch by which to ascertain the exact time. I asked him if he would not allow me a moment or two to step over to a telegraph office to wire my parents of my awful death. He said I could walk out that door when I walked over his dead body. Then I waited a long time,till he told me my time was up, and asked me what I was waiting for. I told him I was waiting for him to die so that I could walk over his dead body. How could I walk over a corpse until life was extinct?
He stood and looked at me, at first in astonishment, afterward in pity. Finally tears welled up in his eyes and plowed their way down his broad and grimy face. Then he said I need not fear him.
"You are safe," said he. "A youth who is so patient and cheerful as you are, one who would wait for a healthy man to die so you could meander over his pulseless remnants, ought not to die a violent death. A soft-eyed seraph like you, who is no more conversant with the ways of the world than that, ought to be put in a glass vial of alcohol and preserved. I came up here to kill you and throw you into the rain-water barrel, but now that I know what a patient disposition you have, I shudder to think of the crime I was about to commit."
BILL NYE.
I have just returned from a little trip up from the North Wisconsin Railway, where I went tocatch a string of codfish and anything else that might be contagious.
Northern Wisconsin is the place where they yank a big wet log into a mill and turn it into cash as quick as a railroad man can draw his salary out of the pay-car. The log is held on a carriage by means of iron dogs while it is being worked into lumber. These iron dogs are not like those we see on the front steps of a brown stone front occasionally. They are another breed of dogs.
The managing editor of the mill lays out the log in his mind and works it into dimension stuff, shingles, bolts, slabs, edgings, two-by-fours, two-by-eights, two-by-sixes, etc., so as to use the goods to the best advantage, just as a woman takes a dress-pattern and cuts it so she won't have to piece the front breadths and will still have enough left to make a polonaise for last summer's gown.
I stood there for a long time watching the various saws and listening to the monstrous growl and wishing that I had been born a successful timber-thief instead of a poor boy without a rag to my back.
At one of these mills not long ago, a man backed up to get away from the carriage and thoughtlessly backed against a large saw that was revolving at the rate of about 200 times a minute. The saw took a large chew of tobacco from theplug he had in his pistol pocket and then began on him.
But there's no use going into the details. Such things are not cheerful. They gathered him up out of the saw-dust and put him in a nail keg and carried him away, but he did not speak again. Life was quite extinct. Whether it was the nervous shock that killed him, or the concussion of the cold saw against his liver that killed him no one ever knew.
The mill shut down a couple of hours so that the head sawyer could file his saw, and then work was resumed once more.
We should learn from this never to lean on the buzz-saw when it moveth itself aright.
BILL NYE.
A Chinaman does not grab the bit of a broncho and yank it around till the noble beast can see thirteen new and peculiar kinds of fire-works, or kick him in the stomach, or knock his ribs loose, or swear at him until the firmament gets loose and begins to roll together like a scroll, but he gets onthe wrong side and slides into the saddle and smiles and says something like what a guinea hen would say if she got excited and tried to repeat one of Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson's poems backward in his native tongue. At first the broncho seems temporarily rattled, but by-and-by he shoots athwart the sunny sky like a thing of life and comes down with his legs in a cluster like a bunch of asparagus.
This will throw a Chinaman's liver into the northwest corner of his throat, and his upper left hand duodessimo into the middle of next week, but he doesn't complain. He opens his mouth and breaths in all of the atmosphere the rest of the universe can spare, and tickles the broncho on the starboard quarter with his cork sole. The mirth-provoking movement throws the broncho into the wildest hysterics, and for some minutes the spectator doesn't see anything very distinctly. The autumnal twilight seems fraught with blonde broncho and pale-blue shirt tail and Chinaman moving in an irregular orbit, and occasionally throwing off meteoric articles of apparel and pre-historic chunks of ingenious profanity of the vintage of Confucius. When the sky clears up a little the Chinaman's hair is down and in wild profusion about his olive features. His shirt flap is very much frayed, like an American flag that has snapped in the breeze for thirteen weeks.
He finds also that he has telescoped his spinal column and jammed two ribs through the right superior duplex, has two or three vertebræ floating about through his system that he doesn't know what to do with. In fact, the Chinaman is a robust ruin, while the broncho is still in a good state of preservation. Now the broncho humps his back up into a circumambient atmosphere, and when he once bisects the earth's orbit and jabs his feet into the trembling earth a shapeless mass of brocaded silk and coarse black hair and taper nails and celestial shirt-tails and oolong profanity and disorganized Chinese remains comes down apparently from the New Jerusalem, and the coroner goes out on the street to get six good men and a chemist, and they analyze the collection. They report that the deceased had come to his death by reasons of concussion, induced by a ride from the outer battlements of the sweet by-and-by.
Slipperyelmhurst, Hudson, Wis., Oct. 6.—To the Editor:Might I ask, through the column of your justly celebrated paper, if any one will give me the requisite information regarding the care of game during the winter?
My preserves are located on my estate here at Slipperyelmhurst, and while I am absent lecturing in the winter, in answer to the loud calls of the public, I am afraid that my game may not have the proper care, and that unscrupulous people may scalp my fox and poach the eggs of my pheasants.
Besides, I am rather ignorant of the care of game, and I would like to be able to instruct my game-keeper when I go away as to his duties.
The game-keeper at Slipperyelmhurst is what might be called a self-made game-keeper. He never had any instruction in his profession, aside from a slight amount of training in high-low-jack. Therefore he has won his way unassisted to the position he now occupies.
What I wish most of all is to understand the methods of preserving game during the winter so that when it is scarce in the spring I can take a can-opener and astonish people with my own preserves.
My fox succeeded in getting through the summer in fine form. I got him from Long Island where the sportsmen from New York had tried to hunt him for several seasons, but with indifferent success. He was not well broken in the first place, I presume, and the noise of the hounds and domesticated Englishmen in full cry no doubt frightened him. He is still timid and more or lessafraid of the cars. He shies, too, when I lead him past an imitation Englishman. He is in good health, this fall, however, and as I got him at a low price I am greatly pleased. Very likely the reason he did not give good satisfaction in New York was that those who used him did not employ a good earth-stopper. Much depends on this man. Of what use is an active, robust and well-broken fox, well started, if he be permitted to get back into his hole? I have employed as an earth-stopper a gentleman who saws my wood during the winter and who assists us in fox-hunting in the hunting season.
Born in a quiet little rural village called Martelle, in Pierce county, Wisconsin, he early evinced a strong love for sport. Day after day he would abstain from going to school that he might go forth into the woods and study the habits of the chipmunk. For five years his health was impaired to such a degree that he was not well enough to safely attend school, but just barely robust enough to drag himself away to a distance of fourteen miles, where he could snare suckers and try to regain his health. To climb a lightning-rod and skin off the copper wire for snaring purposes with him was but the work of a moment. To go joyously afield day after day and drown out the gopher, while other boys were compelled to gopher an education, was his chief delight.
As a result of this course he is not a close student of books, but he can skin a squirrel without the slightest embarrassment, and you could wake him up suddenly out of a profound slumber and ascertain from him exactly what the best method is for draping a frog over a pickerel hook so as to produce the best and most pleasing effects. Such is the description of a man who, by his own unaided exertions, has risen to the proud position of earth-stopper on my estate.
He is ignorant of the care of wild game, however, and says he has never preserved any. We want to know whether it would be best to sprinkle our fox with camphor and put him down cellar or let him run in the henhouse during the winter.
Would your readers please say, also, if any of them have had any experience in fox-hunting, what is the best treatment for a horse which has injured himself on a barbed-wire fence while in rapid pursuit of the fox? I have a fine fox-hunter that I bought two years ago from a milk-man. This horse was quite high-spirited, and while the hounds were in full cry one day I had to take a barbed-wire fence with him. This horse, which I call Isosceles, because he is one kind of a triangle, went over the fence in such a manner as to catch the pit of his stomach on the barbed wire and expose his interior department and its methods tothe casual spectator. We put back all the stomachs we thought he was entitled to, but he has not done well since that, and I have often thought that possibly we did not succeed in returning all his works. How many stomachs has the adult horse? I am utterly and sadly ignorant in these matters and I yearn for light.
I certainly favor a more thorough knowledge of animal anatomy on the part of our school-children.
Every child should know how many stomachs, bowels and gizzards there are in the fully equipped cow or horse. Nothing is more embarrassing to the true sportsman than to see his favorite horse ripped open by a barbed-wire fence while in full chase, and then not know which digestive organ should go back first, or when they have all been replaced.
So far as Isosceles is concerned, I remember thinking at the time that we must have put back inside of his system about twice as much digestive apparatus as he had before, as my earth-stopper said that we had given that horse enough for a four-horse team, and yet he is ill.
I would like to hear from any of the fox-hunters in Cook county who may have had a similar experience.
Cleveland, O., Oct. 27, 1886.
Last evening I went to hear Mr. Edwin Booth in "Hamlet." I had read the play before, but it was better as he gave it, I think.
The play of "Hamlet" is not catchy, and there is a noticeable lack of local gags in it. A gentleman who stood up behind me and leaned against his breath all the evening said that he thought Ophelia's singing was too disconnected. He is a keen observer and has seen a great many plays. He went out frequently between the acts, and always came back in better spirits. He noticed that I wept a little in one or two places, and said that if I thought that was affecting I ought to see "Only a Farmer's Daughter." He drives a 'bus for the Hollenden Hotel here and has seen a great deal of life. Still, he talked freely with me through the evening, and told me what was coming next. He is a great admirer of the drama, and night after night he may be seen in the foyer, accompanied only by his breath.
There is considerable discussion among critics as to whether Hamlet was really insane or not, but I think that he assumed it in order to throw the prosecution off the track, for he was a very smart man, and when his uncle tried to work off some ofhis Danish prevarications on him I fully expected him to pull a card out of his pocket and present it to his royal tallness, on which might be seen the legend:
I AM SOMETHING OF A LIAR MYSELF!
But I am glad he did not, for it would have seemed out of character in a play like that.
Mr. Booth wore a dark, water-proof cloak all the evening and a sword with which he frequently killed people. He was dressed in black throughout, with hair of the same shade. He is using the same hair in "Hamlet" that he did twenty years ago, though he uses less of it. He wears black knickerbockers and long, black, crockless stockings.
Mr. Booth is doing well in the acting business, frequently getting as high as $2 apiece for tickets to his performances. He was encored by the audience several times last night, but refrained from repeating the play, fearing that it would make it late for those who had to go back to Belladonna, O., after the close of the entertainment.
Toward the end of the play a little rough on rats gets into the elderberry wine and the royal family drink it, after which there is considerable excitement, and a man with a good, reliable stomach-pump would have all he could do. Several of the royal family curl up and perish.
They do not die in the house.
During an interview between Hamlet and his mother an old gentleman who has the honor to be Ophelia's father hides behind a picket fence, so as to overhear the conversation. He gets excited and says something in a low, gutteral tone of voice, whereupon Hamlet runs his sword through the picket fence in such a way as to bore a large hole into the old man, who then dies.
I have heard a great many people speak the piece beginning—
To be or not to be,
but Mr. Booth does it better than any one I have ever heard. I once heard an elocutionist—kind of a smart Alickutionist as my friend The Hoosier Poet would say. This man recited "To be or not to be" in a manner which, he said, had frequently brought tears to eyes unused to weep. He recited it with his right hand socked into his bosom up to the elbow and his fair hair tossed about over his brow. His teeming brain, which claimed to be kind of a four-horse teaming brain, as it were, seemed to be on fire, and to all appearances he was indeed mad. So were the people who listened to him. He hissed it through his clinched teeth and snorted it through his ripe, red nose, wailed it up into the ceiling, and bleated it down the aisles, rolled it over and over against the rafters of his reverberating mouth, handed it out in big capsules, or hissed it through his puckered atomizer of a mouth, wailed and bellowed like a wild and maddened tailless steer in fly-time, darted across the stage like a headless hen, ripped the gentle atmosphere into shreds with his guinea-hen voluntary, bowed to us, and teetered off the stage.
Mr. Booth does not hoist his shoulders and settle back on his "pastern jints" like a man who is about to set a refractory brake on a coal car, neither does he immerse his right arm in his bosom up to the second joint. He seems to have the idea that Hamlet spoke these lines mostly because he felt like saying something instead of doing it to introduce a set of health-lift gestures and a hoarse, baritone snort.
A head of dank hair, a low, mellow, union-depot tone of voice, and a dark-blue, three sheet poster will not make a successful Hamlet, and blessed be the man who knows this without experimenting on the people till he has bunions on his immortal soul. I have sent a note to Mr. Booth this morning asking him to call at my room, No. 6-5/8, and saying that I would give him my idea about the drama from a purely unpartisan standpoint, but it is raining so fast now that I fear he will not be able to come.
TO A YOUTH ABOUT DRUGS AND WRITING.
Mr. Bill Nye, Hudson, Wis.—Dear Sir: I hope you will pardon me for addressing you on a matter of pure business, but I have heard that you are not averse to going out of your way to do a favor now and then to those who are sincere and appreciative.
I have learned from a friend that you have been around all over the west, and so I have taken the liberty of writing you to ask what you think would be the chances of success for a young man if he were to go to Kansas to enter the drug business.
I am a practical young druggist 23 years of age and have some money—a few hundred dollars—with which to go into business. Would you advise Kansas or Colorado as a good part of the west for that business?
I have also written some for the press, but with little success. I enclose you a few slips cut from the papers in which these articles originally appeared. I send stamp for reply and hope you will answer me, even though your time may be taken up pretty well by other matters.
Respectfully yours,Adolph Jaynes, Lock-Box 604.
Hudson, Wis., Oct. 1.—Mr. Adolph Jaynes, Lock-Box 604.—Dear Sir: Your favor of late date is at hand, and I take pleasure in writing this dictated letter to you, using the columns of the ChicagoDaily Newsas a delicate way of reaching you. I will take the liberty of replying to your last question first, if you pardon me, and I say that you would do better, no doubt at once, in a financial way, to go on with your drug business than to monkey with literature.
In the first place, your style of composition is like the present style of dress among men. It is absolutely correct, and therefore it is absolutely like that of nine men out of every ten we meet. Your style of writing has a mustache on it, wears a three-button cutaway of some Scotch mixture, carries a cane, and wears a straight stand-up collar and scarf. It is so correct and so exactly in conformity with the prevailing style of composition, and your thoughts are expressed so thoroughly like other people's methods of dressing up their sentences and sand-papering the soul out of what they say, that I honestly think you would succeed better by trying to subsist upon the quick sales and small profits which the drug trade insures.
Now, let us consider the question of location:
Seriously, you ought to look over the ground yourself, but as you have asked me to give you mybest judgment on the question of preference as between Kansas and Colorado, I will say without hesitation that, if you mean by the drug business the sale of sure-enough drugs, medicines, paints, oils, glass, putty, toilet articles, and prescriptions carefully compounded, I wouldnotgo to Kansas at this time.
If you would like to go to a flourishing country and put out a big basswood mortar in front of your shop in order to sell the tincture of damnation throughout bleeding Kansas, now is your golden opportunity. Now is the accepted time. If it is the great, big, burning desire of your heart to go into a town of 2,000 people and open the thirteenth drug store in order that you may stand behind a tall black walnut prescription case day in and day out, with a graduate in one hand and a Babcock fire-extinguisher in the other, filling orders for whiskey made of stump-water and the juice of future punishment, you will do well to go to Kansas. It is a temperance state and no saloons are allowed there. All is quiet and orderly, and the drug business is a great success.
You can run a dummy drug store there with two dozen dreary old glass bottles on the shelves, punctuated by the hand of time and the Kansas fly of the period, and with a prohibitory law at your back and a tall, red barrel in the back room filledwith a mixture that will burn great holes into nature's heart and make the cemetery blossom as the rose, and in a few years you can sell enough of this justly celebrated preparation for household, scientific and experimental purposes only to fill your flabby pockets with wealth and paint the pure air of Kansas a bright and inflammatory red.
If you sincerely and earnestly yearn for a field where you may go forth and garner an honest harvest from the legitimate effort of an upright soda fountain and free and open sale of slippery elm in its unadulterated condition, I would go to some state where I would not have to enter into competition with a style of pharmacy that has the unholy instincts and ambitions of a blind pig, I would not go into the field where red-eyed ruin simply waited for a prescription blank, not necessarily for publication, but simply as a guaranty of good faith, in order that it may bound forth from behind the prescription case and populate the poor-houses and the paupers' nettle-grown addition to the silent city of the dead.
The great question of how best to down the demon rum is before the American people, and it will not be put aside until it is settled; but while this is being attended to, Mr. Jaynes, I would start a drug store farther away from the center of conflict and go on joyously, sacrificing expensive tinctures, compounds, and syrups at bed-rock prices.
Go on, Mr. Jaynes, dealing out to the yearning, panting public, drugs, paints, oils, glass, putty, varnish, patent medicines, and prescriptions carefully compounded, with none to molest or make afraid, but shun, oh shun the wild-eyed pharmacopeia that contains naught but the festering fluid so popular in Kansas, a compound that holds crime in solution and ruin in bulk, that shrivels up a man's gastric economy, and sears great ragged holes into his immortal soul. Take this advice home to your heart and you will ever command the hearty cooperation of "yours for health," as the late Lydia E. Pinkham so succinctly said.
Bill Nye.
BILL NYE STOPS AT A PLACE WHERE TWO ROADS FORK.
HIS MOURNFUL PILGRIMAGE THROUGH DESOLATE WILDS IN COMPANY WITH THE SOULFUL HOOSIER POET—A TALE OF GLOOM WITHOUT A RAY OF HOPE.
We are moving about over the country, James Whitcomb Riley and I, in the capacity of a moral and spectacular show, I attend to the spectacular part of the business. That is more in my line.
I am writing this at an imitation hotel where the roads fork. I will call it the Fifth Avenue Hotel because the hotel at a railroad junction is generally called the Fifth Avenue, or the Gem City House, or the Palace Hotel. I stopped at an inn some years since called the Palace, and I can truly say that if it had ever been a palace it was very much run down when I visited it.
Just as the fond parent of a white-eyed, two-legged freak of nature loves to name his mentally-diluted son Napoleon, and for the same reason that a prominent horse owner in Illinois last year socked my name on a tall, buckskin-colored colt that did not resemble me, intellectually or physically, a colt that did not know enough to go around a barbed-wire fence, but sought to sift himself through it into an untimely grave, so this man has named his sway-backed wigwam the Fifth Avenue Hotel.
It is different from the Fifth Avenue in many ways. In the first place there is not so much travel and business in its neighborhood. As I said before, this is where two railroads fork. In fact, that is the leading industry here. The growth of the town is naturally slow, but it is a healthy growth. There is nothing in the nature of dangerous or wild-cat speculation in the advancement of this place, and while there has been no noticeable or rapid advance in the principal business, therehas been no falling off at all, and these roads are forking as much to-day as they did before the war, while the same three men who were present for the first glad moment are still here to witness its operation.
Sometimes a train is derailed, as the papers call it, and two or three people have to remain over, as we did, all night. It is at such a time that the Fifth Avenue Hotel is the scene of great excitement. A large codfish, with a broad and sunny smile, and his bosom full of rock salt, is tied in the creek to freshen and fit himself for the responsible position of floor manager of the codfish ball.
A pale chambermaid, wearing a black jersey with large pores in it, through which she is gently percolating, now goes joyously up the stairs to make the little post-office lock-box rooms look ten times worse than they ever did before. She warbles a low refrain as she nimbly knocks loose the venerable dust of centuries, and sets it afloat throughout the rooms. All is bustle about the house.
Especially the chambermaid.
We were put into the guest's chamber here. It has two atrophied beds made up of pains and counterpanes.
This last remark conveys to the reader the presence of a light, joyous feeling which is wholly assumed on my part.
The door of our room is full of holes where locks have been wrenched off in order to let the coroner in. Last night I could imagine that I was in the act of meeting, personally, the famous people who have tried to sleep here and who moaned through the night and who died while waiting for the dawn.
I have no doubt in the world but there is quite a good-sized delegation from this hotel of guests who hesitated about committing suicide, because they feared to tread the sidewalks of perdition, but who became desperate at last and resolved to take their chances, and they have never had any cause to regret it.
We washed our hands on door-knob soap, wiped them on a slippery elm court-plaster, that had made quite a reputation for itself under the non-de-plume of "Towel," tried to warm ourselves at a pocket inkstand stove, that gave out heat like a dark lantern and had a deformed elbow at the back of it.
The chambermaid is very versatile, and waits on the table while not engaged in agitating the overworked mattresses and puny pillows upstairs. In this way she imparts the odor of fried pork to the pillow cases and kerosene to the pie.
She has a wild, nervous and apprehensive look in her eye as though she feared that some Herculean guest might seize her in his great, strong arms and bear her away to a justice of the peace and marry her. She certainly cannot fully realize how thoroughly secure she is from such a calamity. She is just as safe as she was forty years ago, when she promised her aged mother that she would never elope with anyone.
Still, she is sociable at times and converses freely with me at the table, as she leans over my shoulder, pensively brushing the crumbs into my lap with a general utility towel which accompanies her in her various rambles through the house, and she asks which we would rather have—"tea or eggs?"
This afternoon we will pay our bill, in accordance with a life-long custom of ours, and go away to permeate the busy haunts of men. It will be sad to tear ourselves away from the Fifth Avenue Hotel at this place; still, there is no great loss without some small gain, and at our next hotel we may not have to chop our own wood and bring it up-stairs when we want to rest. The landlord of a hotel who goes away to a political meeting and leaves his guests to chop their own wood, and then charges them full price for the rent of a boisterous and tempest-tossed bed, will never endear himself to those with whom he is thrown in contact.
We leave at 2:30 this afternoon, hoping that the two railroads may continue to fork here just the same as though we had remained.
Last fall I desired to add to my rare collection a large hornet's nest. I had an enbalmed tarantula and her porcelain lined nest, and I desired to add to these the gray and airy home of the hornet. I procured one of the large size after cold weather and hung it in my cabinet by a string. I forgot about it until this spring. When warm weather came, something reminded me of it. I think it was a hornet. He jogged my memory in some way and called my attention to it. Memory is not located where I thought it was. It seemed as though whenever he touched me he awakened a memory—a warm memory with a red place all around it.
Then some more hornets came and began to rake up old personalities. I remember that one of them lit on my upper lip. He thought it was a rosebud. When he went away it looked like a gladiolus bulb. I wrapped a wet sheet around it to take out the warmth and reduce the swelling so that I could go through the folding-doors and tell my wife about it.
Hornets lit all over me and walked around on my person. I did not dare to scrape them off, because they are so sensitive. You have to be very guarded in your conduct toward a hornet.
I remember once while I was watching the busy little hornet gathering honey and June bugs from the bosom of a rose, years ago. I stirred him up with a club, more as a practical joke than anything else, and he came and lit on my sunny hair—that was when I wore my own hair—and he walked around through my gleaming tresses quite awhile, making tracks as large as a watermelon all over my head. If he hadn't run out of tracks my head would have looked like a load of summer squashes. I remember I had to thump my head against the smoke house in order to smash him, and I had to comb him out with a fine comb and wear a waste paper basket two weeks for a hat.
Much has been said of the hornet, but he has an odd, quaint way after all, that is forever new.
Out where the blue waves come and go,Out where the zephyrs kiss the strand,Down where the damp tides ebb and flow,Where the ocean monkeys with the sand,William, the hungry, rustles for his meal,Slim William, the eldest, gathers the eel.Up where the johnny jump-ups smile,Up where the green hills meet the sky,Where, out from her window for many a mile,She watches the blue sea dimpling lie,The wife of the eelist, with vizage grim,Sits in the gloaming and watches for him.Down in the moist and moaning sea,Down where the day can never come,With staring eyes that can never seeAnd lips that will ever continue dumb,With eels in his breast, in a large wet wave,William is filling a watery grave.Up where the catnip is breathing hard,Up where the tansy is flecked with dew,Where the vesper soft as the onion peelsWakens the echoes the twilight through,The new-made widow still watches the shoreAnd sits there and waits, as I said before.They come and tell her the pitiful tale,With trembling voice and tear-dimmed eye,They watch her cheek grow slightly pale,Yet wonder at the calm reply:"All our tears are but idle, gentlemen,Go bring in the eels and set him again."