IN June the medicated tropical fruit known as the rhubarb-pie is in full bloom. The farmer goes forth into his garden to find out where the coy, old setting hen is hiding from the vulgar gaze, and he discovers that his pie-plant is ripe. He then forms a syndicate with his wife for the purpose of publishing the seditious and rebellious pie.
It is singular that the War Department has never looked into the scheme for fighting the Indians with rhubarb-pie, instead of the regular army. One-half the army could then put in its time court-martialing the other half, and all would be well.
Rhubarb undoubtedly has its place in themateria medica, but when it sneaks into the pie of commerce it is out of place. Castor-oil, and capsicum, and dynamite, and chloroform, and porous-plasters, and arsenic, all have their uses in one way or another, but they would not presume to enter into the composition of a pie.
They know it would not be tolerated. But rhubarb, elated with its success as a drug, forgets its humble origin and aspires to become au article of diet.
Now the pumpkin knows its place. You never knew of a pumpkin trying to monkey with science. The pumpkin knows that it was born to bury itself in the bosom of the pumpkin-pie. It does not therefore, go about the country claiming to be a remedy for spavin.
Supposing that the gory, yet toothsome steak, that grows on the back of the twenty-one-year-old steer's neck, should claim for itself that it could go into a drug-store and cure rheumatism and heartburn. Wouldn't every one say that it was out of place and uncalled for? Certainly. The back of the tough old steer's neck knows that it is destined for the mince-pie, and nature did not intend otherwise. So also with the vulcanized gristle, and arctic overshoe heel, and the shoe-string, and the white button, and all those elements that go to make up the mince-pie. They do not try to make medicines and cordials and anodynes of themselves. Rhubarb is the only thing that successfully holds its place with the apothecary, and yet draws a salary in the pie business.
I do not know how others may look at this matter, but I do not think it is right. Still you find this medicated pie in the social circle everywhere. We guard our homes with the strictest surveillance in other matters, and yet we allow the low, vulgar pie-plant-pie to creep into our houses and into our hearts. That is, it creeps into our hearts figuratively speaking. The heart is not, as a matter of fact, one of the digestive organs, but I use the term just as all poets do under like circumstances.
Many, however, will always continue to use the rhubarb-pie, and for those I give below a receipt which has stood the test of years,—one which results in a pie that frosts and sudden atmospheric changes cannot injure.
None but the youngest rhubarb should be used in making pies. Go out and kill your rhubarb with a club, taking care not to kill the old and tough variety. Give it a chance to repent. Remove the skin carefully, and take out the digestive economy of the plant. Be specially careful to get off the "fuzzy" coating, as rhubarb-pies with hair on are not in such favor as they were when the country was new. Now put in the basement of cement and throw on your rhubarb. Flavor with linseed-oil, and hammer out the top crust until it is moderately thin. Then solder on the cover and drill holes for the copper rivets. Having headed the rivets in place, nail on zinc monogram, and kiln-dry the pie slowly. When it is cooled, put on two coats of metallic paint, and adjust the time-lock. After you find that the pie is impervious to the action of chilled steel or acids, remove and feed it to the man who cheerfully pays for his whiskey and steals his newspaper.
LAST night I was awakened by the cry of fire. It was a loud, hoarse cry, such as a large, adult man might emit from his window on the night air. The town was not large, and the fire-department, I had been told, was not so effective as it should have been.
For that reason I arose and carefully dressed myself in order to assist, if possible. I carefully lowered myself from my room by means of a staircase which I found concealed in a dark and mysterious corner of the passage.
On the streets all was confusion. The hoarse cry of fire had been taken up by others, passed around from one to another, till it had swollen into a dull roar. The cry of fire in a small town is always a grand sight.
All along the street in front of Mr. Pendergast's roller rink the blanched faces of the people could be seen. Men were hurrying to and fro, knocking the by-standers over in their frantic attempts to get somewhere else. With great foresight Mr. Pendergast, who had that day finished painting his roller rink a dull-roan color, removed from the building the large card which bore the legend
so that those who were so disposed might feel perfectly free to lean up against the rink and watch the progress of the flames.
Anon the bright glare of the devouring element might have been seen bursting through the casement of Mr. Cicero Williams' residence, facing on the alley west of Mr. Pendergast's rink. Across the street the spectator whose early education had not been neglected could distinctly read the sign of our esteemed fellow-townsman, Mr. Alonzo Burlingame, which was lit up by the red glare of the flames so that the letters stood out plain as follows:
Dealer in Soft and Hard Coal, Ice-Cream, Wood, Lime.
Cement, Perfumery, Nails, Putty, Spectacles, and Horse
Radish.
Chocolate Caramels and Tar Roofing.
Gas-Pitting and Undertaking in All Its Branches.
Hides, Tallow and Maple Syrup.
Fine Gold Jewelry, Silverware and Salt.
Glue, Codfish and Gent's Neckwear.
Undertaker and Confectioner.
}}"Diseases of Horses and Children a Specialty."
John White, Ptr.
The flames spread rapidly, until they threat ened the Palace rink of our esteemed fellow-townsman, Mr. Pendergast, whose genial and urbane manner has endeared him to all.
With a degree of forethought worthy of a better cause, Mr. Leroy W. Butts suggested the propriety of calling out the hook and ladder company, an organization of which every one seemed to be justly proud. Some delay ensued in trying to find the janitor of Pioneer Hook and Ladder Company No. 1's building, but at last he was secured, and after he had gone home for the key, Mr. Butts ran swiftly down the street to awake the foreman, but after he had dressed himself and inquired anxiously about the fire, he said that he was not foreman of the company since the 2d of April.
Meantime the fire-fiend continued to rise up ever and anon on his hind feet and lick up salt barrel after salt barrel in close proximity to the Palace rink, owned by our esteemed fellow-citizen, Mr. Pendergast. Twice Mr. Pendergast was seen to shudder, after which he went home and filled out a blank which he forwarded to the insurance company.
Just as the town seemed doomed the hook-and-ladder company came rushing down the street with their navy-blue hook-and-ladder truck. It is indeed a beauty, being one of the Excelsior noiseless hook-and-ladder factory's best instruments, with tall red pails and rich blue ladders.
Some delay ensued, as several of the officers claimed that under a new by-law passed in January they were permitted to ride on the truck to fires. This having been objected to by a gentleman who had lived in Chicago for several years, a copy of the by-laws was sent for and the dispute summarily settled. The company now donned its rubber overcoats with great coolness and proceeded at once to deftly twist the tail of the fire-fiend.
It was a thrilling sight as James McDonald, a brother of Terrance McDonald, Trombone, Ind., rapidly ascended one of the ladders in the full glare of the devouring element and fell off again.
Then a wild cheer rose to a height of about nine feet, and all again became confused.
It was now past 11 o'clock, and several of the members of the hook-and-ladder company who had to get up early the next day in order to catch a train excused themselves and went home to seek much-needed rest.
Suddenly it was discovered that the brick livery stables of Mr. McMichaels, a nephew of our worthy assessor, was getting hot. Leaving the Palace rink to its fate, the hook-and-ladder company directed its attention to the brick barn, and after numerous attempts at last succeeded in getting its large iron prong fastened on the second story window-sill, which was pulled out. The hook was again inserted but not so effectively, bringing down this time an armful of hay and part of an old horse blanket. Another courageous jab was made with the iron hook, which succeeded in pulling out about five cents' worth of brick. This was greeted by a wild burst of applause from the bystanders, during which the hook-and-ladder company fell over each other and added to the horror of the scene by a mad burst of pale-blue profanity.
It was not long before the stable was licked up by the fire-fiend, and the hook-and-ladder company directed its attention toward the undertaking, embalming, and ice-cream parlors of our highly-esteemed fellow-townsman, Mr. A. Burlingame. The company succeeded in pulling two stone window-sills out of this building before it burned. Both times they were encored by the large and aristocratic audience.
Mr. Burlingame at once recognized the efforts of the heroic firemen by tapping a keg of beer, which he distributed among them at twenty-five cents per glass.
This morning a space forty-seven feet wide, where but yesterday all was joy and prosperity and beauty, is covered over with blackened ruins. Mr. Pendergast is overcome by grief at the loss of his rink, but assures us that if he is successful in getting the full amount of his insurance he will take the money and build two rinks, either one of which will be far more imposing than the one destroyed last evening.
A movement is on foot to give a literary and musical entertainment at Burley's Hall to raise funds for the purchase of new uniforms for the "fire laddies," at which Mrs. Butts has consented to sing "When the Robins Nest Again," and Miss Mertie Stout will recite "'Ostler Joe," a selection which never fails to offend the best people everywhere. Twenty-five cents for each offence. Let there be a full house.
YOU think, no doubt, William, that I am happy, but I cannot say that I am. I will tell you my little reminiscence if you don't mind, and you can judge for yourself." These were the words of Big Steve, as we sat together one evening, watching the dealer slide the cards out of his little tin photograph album, while the crowd bought chips of the banker and corded them up out the green table.
"You look on me as a great man to inaugurate a funeral, and wish that you had a miscellaneous cemetery yourself to look back on; but greatness always has its drawbacks. We cannot be great unless we pay the price. What we call genius is after all only industry and perseverance. When my father undertook to clean me out, in our own St. Lawrence County home, I filed his coat-tails full of bird-shot and fled. Father afterwards said that he could have overlooked it so far as the coat was concerned, but he didn't want it shot to pieces while he had it on.
"Then I went to Kansas City and shot a colored man. That was a good many years ago, and you could kill a colored man then as you can a Chinaman now, with impunity, or any other weapon you can get your hands onto. Still the colored man had friends and I had to go further West. I went to Nevada then, and lived under a cloud and anom de plume, as you fellers say.
"I really didn't want to thin out the population of Nevada, but I had to protect myself. They say that after a feller has killed his man, he has a thirst for blood and can't stop, but that ain't so. You 'justifiable-homicide' a man and get clear, and then you have to look out for friends of the late lamented. You see them everywhere. If your stomach gets out of order you see the air full of vengeance, and you drink too much and that don't help it. Then you kill a man on suspicion that he is follering you up, and after that you shoot in an extemporaneous, way, that makes life in your neighborhood a little uncertain.
"That's the way it was with me. I've got where I don't sleep good any more, and the fun of life has kind of pinched out, as we say in the mines. It's a big thing to run a school-meeting or an election, but it hardly pays me for the free spectacular show I see when I'm trying to sleep. You know if you've ever killed a man—"
"No, I never killed one right out," I said apologetically. "I shot one once, but he gained seventy-five pounds in less than six months."
"Well, if you ever had, you'd notice that he always says or does something that you can remember him by. He either says, 'Oh, I am shot'! or 'You've killed me'! or something like that, in a reproachful way, that you can wake up in the night and hear most any time. If you kill him dead, and he don't say a word, he will fall hard on the ground, with a groan that will never stop. I can shut my eyes and hear one now. After you've done it, you always wish they'd showed a little more fight. You could forgive 'em if they'd cuss you, and holler, and have some style about 'em, but they won't. They just reel, and fall, and groan. Do you know I can't eat a meal unless my back is agin' the wall. I asked Wild Bill once how he could stand it to turn his back on the crowd and eat a big dinner. He said he generally got drunk just before dinner, and that helped him out.
"So you see, William, that if a man is a great scholar, he is generally dyspeptic; if he's a big preacher, they tie a scandal to his coat-tail, and if he's an eminent murderer, he has insomnia and loss of appetite. I almost wish sometimes that I had remained in obscurity. Its a big thing to be a public man, with your name in the papers and everybody afraid to collect a bill of you, for fear you'll let the glad sunlight into their thorax; but when you can't eat nor sleep, and you're liable to wake up with your bosom full of buckshot, or your neck pulled out like a turkey-gobler's, and your tongue hanging out of your mouth in a ludicrous manner, and your overshoes failing to touch the ground by about ten feet, you begin to look back on your childhood and wish you could again be put there, sleepy and sinless, hungry and happy."
IT HAD been a day of triumph at Erastina. Buffalo Bill, returning from Marlborough House, had amused the populace with the sports of an amphitheatre to an extent hitherto unknown even in that luxurious city. A mighty multitude of people from Perth Amboy and New York had been present to watch the attack on the Dead wood coach and view with bated breath the conflict in the arena.
The shouts of revelry had died away. The last loiterer had retired from the bleaching boards and the lights in the palace of the cowboy band were extinguished. The moon piercing the tissue of fleecy clouds, tipped the dark waters about Constable Hook with a wavy, tremulous light. The dark-browed Roman soldier, wearing an umbrella belonging to Imre Kiralfy, wabbled slowly homeward, the proud possessor of a large rectangular "jag."
No sound was heard save the low sob of some retiring wave as it told its story to the smooth pebbles of the beach, or the lower sob of some gentleman who had just sought to bed down a brand-new bucking bronco from Ogallalla and decided to escape violently through the roof of the tent; then all was still as the breast when the spirit has departed. Anon the smoke-tanned Cheyenne snore would steal in upon the silence and then die away like the sough of a summer breeze. In the green-room of the amphitheatre a little band of warriors had assembled. The foam of conflict yet lingered on their lips, the scowl of battle yet hung upon their brows, and the large knobs on their classic profiles indicated that it had been a busy day with them. The night wynd blew chill and the warrior had added to his moss-agate ear-bobs a heavy coat of maroon-colored roof paint.
There was an embarrassing silence of a little spell and then Red Shirt, fighting chief of the Sioux Nation borrowed a chew of tobacco from Aurelius Poor Doe, stepped forth and thus addressed them:
Fellow-Citizens and Gentlemen of the Wild West: Ye call me chief, and ye do well to call him chief who for two long years has met in the arena every shape of man or beast that the broad empire of Nebraska could furnish, and yet has never lowered his arm.
If there be one among you can say that ever at grub dance or scalp german or on the war-path my action did belie my tongue let him stand forth and say it and I will send him home with his daylights done up in the morning paper. If there be three in all your company dare face me on the bloody sands let them come on and I will bore holes in the arena with them and utilize them in fixing up a sickening spectacle.
And yet I was not alway thus, a hired butcher attacking a Deadwood coach, both afternoon and evening, the savage chief of still more savage men.
My ancestors came from Illinois. They dwelt there in the vine-clad hills and citron groves of the Sangamon at a time when the country was overrun with Indians. Instead of paying to see Indians, my ancestors would walk a long distance over a poor road in order to get a shot at a white man.
In Dakota my early life ran quiet as the clear brook by which I babbled, and my boyhood was one long, happy summer day. We bathed in the soiled waters of the upper Missouri and ate the luscious prickly pear in the land of the Dakotahs.
I did not then know what war was, but when Sitting Bull told me of Marathon and Leuctra and Bull Run, and how at a fortified railroad pass Imre Kiralfy had withstood the whole Roman army, my cheek burned, I knew not why, and I thought what a glorious thing it would be to leave the reservation and go upon the warpath. But my mother kissed my throbbing temples and bade me go soak my head and think no more of those old tales and savage wars.
That very night the entire regular army and wife landed on our coasts. They tore down our tepee, stampeded our stock, stole our grease paints and played a mean trick on our dog.
To-day in the arena I killed a man in the Black Hills coach, and when I undid his cinch, behold! he was my friend. The same sweet smile was on his face that I had noted when I met him on my trip abroad. He knew me smiled faintly, made a few false motions and died. I begged that I might bear away the body to my tepee and express it to his country seat, near Limerick, and upon my bended knees, amid the dust and blood of the arena, I begged this pool favor, and a Roman prætor from St. George answered: "Let the carrion rot. There are no noble men but Romans and banana men. Let the show go on. Give us our money's worth. Bring out the bobtail lion from Abyssinia and the bucking bronco from Dead Man's Ranch." And the assembled maids and matrons and the rabble shouted in derision and told me to brace up, and bade Johnnie git his gun, git his gun, git his gun, and other vile flings which I do not now recall. And so must you, fellow warriors, and so must I, die like dogs. Ye stand here like giants (N. Y. Giants) as ye are, but to-morrow the fangs of the infuriated buffalo may sink into your quivering flesh. To-night ye stand here in the full flush of health and conscious rectitude, but to-morrow some crank may shoot you from the Deadwood coach.
Hark! Hear ye yon buffalo roaring in her den? 'Tis three days since she tasted flesh, but to-morrow she will have warrior on toast, and don't you forget it. And she will fling your vertebrae about her cage like the costly Etruscan pitcher of a League nine.
If ye are brutes, then stand here like fat oxen waiting for the butcher's knife. If ye are men, arise and follow me. We will beat down the guard, overpower the ticket-chopper and cut for the tall timber. We will go through Ellum Park, Port Richmond, Tower Hill, West Brighton, Sailors' Snug Harbor and New Brighton like a colored revival through a watermelon patch, beat down the walls of the Circus Maximus, tear the mosquito bars from the windows of Nero's palace, capture the Roman ballet and light out for Europe.
O comrades! warriors!! gladiators!!!
If we be men, let us die like men, beneath the blue sky, don't you know, and by the still waters, according to Gunter, in the presence of the nobility, rather than be stepped on by a spoiled bronco, surrounded by low tradesmen from New York.
THERE can be nothing more pathetic than to watch the decay of a race, even though it be a scrub race. To watch the decay of the Indian race, has been with me, for many years a passion, and the more the Indian has decayed the more reckless I have been in studying his ways.
The Indian race for over two hundred years has been a race against Time, and I need hardly add that Time is away ahead as I pen these lines.
I dislike to speak of myself so much, but I have been identified with the Indians more or less for fifteen years. In 1876 I was detailed by a San Francisco paper to attend the Custer massacre and write it up, but not knowing where the massacre was to be held I missed my way and wandered for days in an opposite direction. When I afterwards heard how successful the massacre was, and fully realized what I had missed, my mortification knew no bounds, but I might have been even more so if I had been successful. We never know what is best for us.
But the Indian is on the wane, whatever that is. He is disappearing from the face of the earth, and we find no better illustration of this sad fact than the gradual fading away of the Shinnecock Indians near the extremity of Long Island.
In company withThe Worldartist, who is paid a large salary to hold me up to ridicule in these columns, I went out the other day to Southampton and visited the surviving members of this great tribe.
Neither of us knows the meaning of fear. If we had been ordered by the United States Government to wipe out the whole Shinnecock tribe we would have taken a damp towel and done it.
The Shinnecock tribe now consists of James Bunn and another man. But they are neither of them pure-blooded Shinnecock Indians. One-Legged Dave, an old whaler, who, as the gifted reader has no doubt already guessed, has but one leg, having lost the other in going over a reef many years ago, is a pure-blooded Indian, but not a pure-blooded Shinnecock. Most of these Indians are now mixed up with the negro race by marriage and are not considered warlike.
The Shinnecocks have not been rash enough to break out since they had the measles some years ago, but we will let that pass.
There are now about 150 Shinnecocks on the reservation, the most of whom are negroes. They live together in peace and hominy, trying most of the time to ascertain what the wild waves are saying in regard to fish.
There is an air of gentle, all-pervading peace which hangs over the Shinnecock hills and that had its effect even upon my tumultuous and aggressive nature, wooing me to repose. I could rest there all this summer and then, after a good night's sleep, I could go right at it again in the morning. Rest at Southampton does not seem to fatigue one as it does elsewhere.
The Shinnecock Indian has united his own repose of manner with the calm and haughty distrust of industry peculiar to the negro, and the result is something that approaches nearer to the idea of eternal rest than anything I have ever seen. The air seems to be saturated with it and the moonlight is soaked full of calm. It would be a good place in which to wander through the gloaming and pour a gallon or so of low, passionate yearning into the ear of a loved one.
As a friend of mine, who is the teacher of modern languages and calisthenics in an educational institution, once said, "the air seems filled with that delicious dolce farina for which those regions is noted for." I use his language because I do not know now how I could add to it in any way.
We visited Mr. James Bunn at his home on Huckleberry avenue, saw the City Hall and Custom House and obtained a front view of it, secured a picture of the residence of the Street Commissioner and then I talked with Mr. Bunn while the artist got a marine view of his face.
Mr. Bunn was for forty years a whaler, but had abandoned the habit now, as there is so little demand among the restaurants for whales, and also because there are fewer whales. I ascertained from him that the whale at this season of the year does not readily rise to the fly, but bites the harpoon greedily during the middle of the day.
Mr. Bunn also gave us a great deal of other Information, among other things informing us of the fact that the white men had been up to their old tricks and were trying to steal portions of the reservation that had not been nailed down. He did not say whether it was the same man who is trying to steal the old Southampton graveyard or not.
James is about seventy-five years old and his father once lived in a wigwam on the Shinnecock Hills. Mr. Bunn says that the country has changed very much in the past 250 years and that I would hardly know the place if I could have seen it at first. During that time he says two other houses have been built and he has reshingled the L of his barn with hay.
He told us the thrilling story of the Spanish Sylph and how she was wrecked many years ago on the coast near his house, and how the Spanish dollars burst out of her gaping side and fell with a low, mellow plunk into the raging main.
How and then the sea has given up one of these "sand-dollars" as the years went by, and not over two years ago one was found along the shore near by. What I blame the Shinnecock Indians for is their fatal yearning to subsist solely on this precarious income.
But with the decline of the whaling industry, due somewhat to the great popularity of natural and acquired gas as a lubricant, together with the cheap methods of picking up electricity and preserving it for illuminating purposes, and also to the fact that whales are more skittish than they used to be, the Shinnecock whaler is left high and dry.
It is, indeed, a pathetic picture. Here on the stern and rock-bound coast, where their ancestors greeted Columbus and other excursionists as they landed on the new dock and at once had their pictures taken in a group for the illustration on the greenbacks, now the surviving relic of a brave people, with bowed heads and frosting locks, are waiting a few days only for the long, dark night of merciful oblivion.
So he walks in the night-time, all through the long fly time, he walks by the sorrowful sea, and he yearns to wake never, but lie there forever in the arms of the sheltering sea, to lie in the lap of the sea.
At least that is my idea of the way the Shinnecock feels about it.
The Indian race, wherever we find it, gives us a wonderful illustration of the great, inherent power of rum as a human leveler. The Indian has, perhaps, greater powers of endurance than the white man, and enters into the great unequal fight with rum almost hilariously, but he loses his presence of mind and forgets to call a cab at the proper moment. This is a matter that has never been fully understood even by the pale face, and of course the Indian is a perfect child in the great conflict with rum. The result is that the Indian is passing away under our very eyes, and the time will soon come when the Indian agent will have to seek some other healthful, outdoor exercise.
So the consumptive Shinnecock, the author of "Shinny on Your Own Ground and Other Games," is soon to live only in the flea-bitten records of a great nation. Once he wrote pieces for the boys to speak in school, and contributed largely to McGuffy's and Sander's periodicals, but now you never hear of an Indian who is a good extemporaneous public speaker, or who can write for sour apples.
He no longer makes the statement that he is an aged hemlock, that his limbs are withered and his trunk attached by the constable. He has ceased to tell through the columns of the Fifth Reader how swift he used to be as a warrior and that the war-path is now overgrown with grass. He very seldom writes anything for the papers except over the signature of Veritas, and the able young stenographer who used to report his speeches at the council fire seems to have moved away.
Two hundred and fifty years ago the Shinnecock Hills were covered by a dense forest, but in that brief period, as if by magic, two and one-half acres of that ground have been cleared, which is an average of an entire acre for every hundred years. When we stop to consider that very little of this work was done by the women and that the men have to attend to the cleaning of the whales in order to prepare them for the table, and also write their contributions for the school-books and sign treaties with the White Father at Washington, we are forced to admit that had the Indian's life been spared for a few thousand years more he would have been alive at the end of that time.
So they wander on together, waiting for the final summons. Waiting for the pip or measles, and their cough is dry aud hacking as they cough along together towards the large and wide hereafter.
They have lived so near Manhattan, where refinement is so plenty, where the joy they jerk from barley—every other day but Sunday—gives the town a reddish color, that the Shinnecock is dying, dying with his cowhide boots on, dying with his hectic flush on, while the church bells chime in Brooklyn and New Yorkers go to Jersey, go to get their fire-water, go to get their red-eyed bug-juice, go to get their cooking whiskey.
Far away at Minnehaha, in the land of the Dakota, where the cyclone feels so kinky, rising on its active hind-feet, with its tail up o'er the dash-board, blowing babies through the grindstone without injuring the babies, where the cyclone and the whopper journey on in joy together—there refinement and frumenti, with the new and automatic maladies and choice diseases that belong to the Caucasian, gather in the festive red man, take him to the reservation, rob him while his little life lasts, rob him till he turns his toes up, rob him till he kicks the bucket.
And the Shinnecock is fading, he who greeted Chris. Columbus when he landed, tired and seasick, with a breath of peace and onions; he who welcomed other strangers, with their notions of refinement and their knowledge of the Scriptures and their fondness for Gambrinus—they have compassed his damnation and the Shinnecock is busted.
NOAH Webster probably had the best command of language of any author of our time. Those who have read his great work entitled Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, or How One Word Led to Another, will agree with me that he was smart. Noah never lacked for a word by which to express himself. He was a brainy man and a good speller.
We were speaking of Mr. Webster on the way up here this afternoon, and a gentleman from Ashland told me of his death. Those of you who have read Mr. Webster's works will be pained to learn of this. One by one our eminent men are passing away. Mr. Webster has passed away; Napoleon Bonaparte is no more, and Dr. Mary Walker is fading away. This has been a severe winter on Sitting Bull, and I have to guard against the night air a good deal myself.
It would ill become me at this late date to criticise Mr. Webster's work, a work that is now I may say in nearly every office, home, school-room and counting-room in the land. It is a great book. I only hope that had Mr. Webster lived he would have been equally fair in his criticism of my books.
I hate to compare my books with Mr. Webster's, because it looks egotistical in me; but although Noah's book is larger than mine and has more literary attractions as a book to set a child on at the table, it does not hold the interest of the reader all the way through.
He has tried to introduce too many characters into his book at the expense of the plot. It is a good book to pick up and while away a leisure hour, perhaps, but it is not a work that could rivet your interest till midnight, while the fire went out and the thermometer went down to 47 below zero. You do not hurry through the pages to see whether Reginald married the girl or not. Mr. Webster didn't seem to care whether he married the girl or not.
Therein consists the great difference between Noah and myself. He don't keep up the interest. A friend of mine at Sing Sing who secured one of my books, said he never left his room till he had devoured it. He said he seemed chained to the spot, and if you can't believe a convict who is entirely ont of politics, who in the name of George Washington can you believe?
Mr. Webster was certainly a most brilliant writer, but a little inclined, perhaps, to be wrong. I have discovered in some of his later books 118,000 words no two of which are alike. This shows great fluency and versatility, it is true, but we need something else. The reader waits in vain to be thrilled by the author's wonderful word-painting. There is not a thrill in the whole tome. Noah wasn't much of a thriller. I am free to confess that when I read this book, of which I had heard so much, I was bitterly disappointed. It is a larger book than mine and costs more, and has more pictures in it than mine, but is it a work that will make a man lead a different life? What does he say of the tariff? What does he say of the roller skating rink? He is silent. He is full of cold, hard words and dry definitions, but what does he say of the Mormons and female suffrage, and how to cure the pip? Nothing. He evades everything, just as a man does when he writes a letter accepting the nomination for President.
As I said before, however, it is a good book to pickup for a few moments or to read on the train. I could never think of taking a long r. r. journey without Mr. Webster's tale in my pocket. I would just as quick think of traveling without my bottle of cough medicine as to start out without Mr. Webster's book.
Mr. Webster's Speller was a work of less pretensions, perhaps, but it had an immense sale. Eight years ago 40,000,000 of these books had been sold, and yet it had the same grave defect. It was disconnected, cold, prosy and dull. I read it for years, and at last became a very close student of Mr. Webster's style. Still I never found but one thing in the book for which there was such a stampede, which was even ordinarily interesting, and that was a perfect gem. It was so thrilling in detail and so different from Mr. Webster's general style that I have often wondered who he got to write it for him. Perhaps it was the author of theBread Winners. It related to the discovery of a boy in the crotch of an old apple tree by an elderly gentleman, and the feeling of bitterness and animosity that sprang up between the two, and how the old man told the boy at first that he had better come down out of that tree, because he was afraid the limb would break with him and let him fall. Then, as the boy still remained, he told him that those were not eating-apples, that they were just common cooking-apples, and that there were worms in them. But the boy said he didn't mind a little thing like that. So then the old gentleman got irritated and called the dog and threw turf at the boy, and at last saluted him with pieces of turf and decayed cabbages; and after he had gone away the old man pried the bulldog's jaws open and found a mouthful of pantaloons and a freckle. I do not tell this, of course, in Mr. Webster's language but I give the main points as they recur now to my mind.
Though I have been a close student of Mr. Webster for years and examined his style closely, I am free to say that his ideas about writing a book are not the same as mine. Of course it is a great temptation for a young author to write a book that will have a large sale, but that should not be all. We should have a higher object than that, and strive to interest those who read our books. It should not be jerky and scattering in its statements.
I do not wish to do an injustice to a great man who I learn is now no more, a man who has done so much for the world and who could spell the longest word without hesitation, but I speak of these things just as I would expect others to criticise nay work. If one aspire to monkey with theliteratiof our day we must expect to be criticised. I have been criticised myself. When I was in public life—as a justice of the peace in the Rocky Mountains—a man came in one day and criticised me so that I did not get over it for two weeks.
I might add, though I dislike to speak of it now, that Mr. Webster was at one time a member of the Legislature of Massachusetts. I believe that was the only time he ever stepped aside from the straight and narrow way. A good many people do not know this, but it is true. It only shows how a good man may at one time in his life go wrong.