{0346}
Etiquette at hotels is a subject that has been but lightly treated upon by our modern philosophy, and yet it is a subject that lies very near to every American heart. Had I not already more reforms on hand than I can possibly successfully operate I would gladly use my strong social influence and trenchant pen in that direction. Etiquette at hotels, both on the part of the proprietor, and his hirelings, and the guest, is a matter that calls loudly for improvement.
The hotel waiter alone, would well repay a close study. From the tardy and polished loiterer of the effete East, to the off-hand and social equal of the budding West, all waiters are deserving of philosophical scrutiny. I was thrown in contact with a waiter in New York last summer, whose manners were far more polished than my own. Every time I saw him standing there with his immediate pantaloons and swallow-tail coat, and the far-away, chastened look of one who had been unfortunate, but not crushed, I felt that I was unworthy to be waited upon by such a blue-blooded thoroughbred, and I often wished that we had more such men in Congress. And when he would take my order and go away with it, and after the meridian of my life had softened into the mellow glory of the sere and yellow leaf, when he came back, still looking quite young, and never having forgotten me, recognizing me readily after the long, dull, desolate years, I was glad, and I felt that he deserved something more than mere empty thanks and I said to him: “Ah, sir, you still remember me after years of privation and suffering. When every one else in New York has forgotten me, with the exception of the confidence man, you came to me with the glad light of recognition in your clear eye. Would you be offended if I gave you this trifling testimonial of my regard?” at the same time giving him my note at thirty days.
I wanted him to have something by which to always remember me, and I guess he has.
Speaking of waiters, reminds me of one at Glendive, Montana. We had to telegraph ahead in order to get a place to sleep, and when we registered the landlord shoved out an old double-entry journal for us to record our names and postoffice address in. The office was the bar and before we could get our rooms assigned us, we had to wait forty-five minutes for the landlord to collect pay for thirteen drinks and lick a personal friend. Finally, when he got around to me, he told me that I could sleep in the night bar-tender's bed, as he would be up all night, and might possibly get killed and never need it again, anyhow. It would cost me $4 cash in advance to sleep one night in the bartender's bed, he said, and the house was so blamed full that he and his wife had got to wait till things kind of quieted down, and then they would have to put a mattress on the 15 ball pool table and sleep there.
I called attention to my valuable valise that had been purchased at great cost, and told him that he would be safe to keep that behind the bar till I paid; but he said he wasn't in the second-hand valise business, and so I paid in advance. It was humiliating, but he had the edge on me.
At the tea table I noticed that the waiter was a young man who evidently had not been always thus. He had the air of one who yearns to have some one tread on the tail of his coat. Meekness, with me, is one of my characteristics. It is almost a passion. It is the result of personal injuries received in former years at the hands of parties who excelled me in brute force and who succeeded in drawing me out in conversation, as it were, till I made remarks that were injudicious.
So I did not disagree with this waiter, although I had grounds. When he came around and snorted in my ear, “Salt pork, antelope and cold beans,” at the same time leaning his full weight on my back, while he evaded the revenue laws by retailing his breath to the guests without a license, I thought I would call for what he had the most of, so I said if he didn't mind and it wouldn't be too much trouble, I would take cold beans.
I will leave it to the calm, impassionate and unpartisan reader to state whether that remark ought to create ill-feeling. I do not think it ought. However, he was irritable, and life to him seemed to be cold and dark. So he went to the general delivery window that led into the cold bean laboratory, and remarked in a hoarse, insolent, and ironical tone of voice:
“Nother damned suspicious looking character wants cold beans.”
The American Indian approximates nearer to what man should be—manly, physically perfect, grand in character, and true to the instincts of his conscience—than any other race of beings, civilized or uncivilized. Where do we hear such noble sentiments or meet with such examples of heroism and self-sacrifice as the history of the American Indian furnishes? Where shall we go to hear again such oratory as that of Black Hawk and Logan? Certainly the records of our so-called civilization do not furnish it, and the present century is devoid of it.
They were the true children of the Great Spirit. They lived nearer to the great heart of the Creator than do their pale-faced conquerors of to-day who mourn over the lost and undone condition of the savage. Courageous, brave and the soul of honor, their cruel and awful destruction from the face of the earth is a sin of such magnitude that the relics and the people of America may well shrink from the just punishment which is sure to follow the assassination of as brave a race as ever breathed the air of Heaven.
{Illustration: AT FIFTEEN.}
{8349}
I wrote the above scathing rebuke of the American people when I was 15 years of age. I ran across the dissertation yesterday. As a general rule, it takes a youth 15 years of age to arraign Congress and jerk the administration bald-headed. The less he knows about things generally, the more cheerfully will he shed information right and left.
At the time I wrote the above crude attack upon the government, I had not seen any Indians, but I had read much. My blood boiled when I thought of the wrongs which our race had meted out to the red man. It was at the time when my blood was just coming to a boil that I penned the above paragraph. Ten years later I had changed my views somewhat, relative to the Indian, and frankly wrote to the government of the change. When I am doing the administration an injustice, and I find it out, I go to the president candidly, and say: “Look here, Mr. President, I have been doing you a wrong. You were right and I was erroneous. I am not pig-headed and stubborn. I just admit fairly that I have been hindering the administration, and I do not propose to do so any more.”
So I wrote to Gen. Grant and told him that when I was 15 years of age I wrote a composition at school in which I had arraigned the people and the administration for the course taken toward the Indians. Since that time I had seen some Indians in the mountains—at a distance—and from what I had seen of them I was led to believe that I had misjudged the people and the executive. I told him that so far as possible I would like to repair the great wrong so done in the ardor of youth and to once more sustain the arm of the government.
He wrote me kindly and said he was glad that I was friendly with the government again, and that now he saw nothing in the way of continued national prosperity. He said he would preserve my letter in the archives as a treaty of peace between myself and the nation. He said only the day before he had observed to the cabinet that he didn't care two cents about a war with foreign nations, but he would like to be on a peace footing with me. The country could stand outside interference better than intestine hostility. I do not know whether he meant anything personal by that or not. Probably not.
He said he remembered very well when he first heard that I had attacked the Indian policy of the United States in one of my school essays. He still called to mind the feeling of alarm and apprehension which at that time pervaded the whole country. How the cheeks of strong men had blanched and the Goddess of Liberty felt for her back hair and exchanged her Mother Hubbard dress for a new cast-iron panoply of war and Roman hay knife. Oh, yes, he said, he remembered it as though it had been yesterday.
Having at heart the welfare of the American people as he did, he hoped that I would never attack the republic again.
And I never have. I have been friendly, not only personally, but officially, for a good while. Even if I didn't agree with some of the official acts of the president I would allow him to believe that I did rather than harass him with cold, cruel and adverse criticism. The abundant success of this policy is written in the country's wonderful growth and prosperous peace.
The red-eyed antagonist of truth is not found alone in the ranks of the newspaper phalanx. You run up against him in all walks of life. He flourishes in all professions, and he is ready at all times to entertain. There is quite a difference between a malicious falsehood and the different shades of parables, fables with a moral, Sabbath-school books, newspaper sketches, and anecdotes told to entertain.
A malicious lie is injurious personally. A business lie is a falsehood for revenue only. But the yarns that are spun around camp-fires, in mining and logging camps, to while away a dull evening, are not within the jurisdiction of the criminal code or the home missionary.
On the train, yesterday several old lumbermen were telling about hard roads and steep hills, engineering skill and so forth. Finally they told about “snubbing” a loaded team down bad hills, and one man said:
“You might 'snub' down a cheap hill, but you couldn't do it on our road. We tried it. Couldn't do a thing. Finally we got to building snow-sheds and hauling sand. You build a snow-shed that covers the grade, then fill the road in with two feet of loose sand, and you're O.K. We did that last winter, and when you drive a four-horse load of logs down through them long snow-sheds on bare ground, mind ye, and the bobs go plowing through the sand, the sled-shoes will make the fire fly so that you can read the President's message at midnight.”
Then an old man who went to Pike's Peak during the excitement and returned afterward, woke up and yawned two or three times, and said they used to have some trouble, a good many years ago getting over the range where the South Park road now goes from Chalk Creek Canon through Alpine Tunnel to the Gunnison.
“We tried 'snubbing' and everything we could think of, but it was N.G.
“Finally we got hold of a new kind of 'snub' that worked pretty well. We had a long table made a-purpose, that would reach to the foot of the hill from the top, and we'd tie a three-ton load to the end at the top of the hill; then we would hitch six mules to the end at the foot of the hill. Well, the principle of the thing was, that as the load went down on the Gunnison side it would pull the mules up the opposite side, tails first.”
“How did it work?”
“Oh, it worked all right if the mules and the load balanced; but one day we put on a light mule named Emma Abbott, and the load got a start down the Gunnison side that made that old cable sing. The wagon tipped over and concussed a keg of blasting powder, and that obliterated the rest of the goods.
“But the air on the other side was full of mules. You ought to seen 'em come up that hill!
“It takes considerable of a crisis to affect the natural reserve of six mules; but when they saw how it was, they backed up that mountain with great enthusiasm. They didn't touch the ground but once in three thousand feet, but they struck the canopy of heaven several times.
“When the sky cleared up, we made a careful inventory of the stock.
“We had a second-hand three-inch cable and some desiccated mule. We never went to look for the wagon; but when the weather got warm, the Coyotes helped us find Emma Abbott.
“She was hanging by the ear in the crotch of an old hemlock tree.
“Life was extinct.
“We found a few more of the mules, but they were fractional.
“Emma Abbott was the only complete mule we found.”
I fixed myself and went out trout fishing on the only original Kinnickinnick river last week. It was a kind of Rip Van Winkle picnic and farewell moonlight excursion home. I believe that Rip Van Winkle, however, confined himself to hunting mostly with an old musket that was on the retired list when Rip took his sleepy drink on the Catskills. If he could have gone with me fishing last week over the old trail, digging angle-worms at the same old place where I left the spade sticking in the grim soil twenty years ago—if we could have waded down the Kinnickinnick together with high rubber boots on, and got nibbles and bites at the same places, and found the same old farmers with nearly a quarter of a century added to their lives and glistening in their hair, we would have had fun no doubt on that day, and a headache on the day following. This affords me an opportunity to say that trout may be caught successfully without a corkscrew. I have tried it. I've about decided that the main reason why so many large lies are told about the number of trout caught all over the country, is that at the moment the sportsman pulls his game out of the water, he labors under some kind of an optical illusion, by reason of which he sees about nine trout where he ought to see only one.
I wish I had as many dollars as I have soaked deceased angle-worms in that same beautiful Kinnickinnick. There was a little stream made into it that we called Tidd's creek. It is still there. This stream runs across Tidd's farm, and Tidd twenty years ago wouldn't allow anybody to fish in the creek. I can still remember how his large hand used to feel, as he caught me by the nape of the neck and threw me over the fence with my amateur fishing tackle and a willow “stringer” with eleven dried, stiff trout on it. Last week I thought I would try Tidd's creek again. It was always a good place to fish, and I felt the same old excitement, with just enough vague forebodings in it to make it pleasant. Still, I had grown a foot or so since I used to fish there, and perhaps I could return the compliment by throwing the old gentleman over his own fence, and then hiss in his ear “R-r-r-r-e-v-e-n-g-e!!!”
{Illustration: I BECAME MORE FEARLESS.}
{0354}
I had got pretty well across the “lower forty” and had about decided that Tidd had been gathered to his fathers, when I saw him coming with his head up like a steer in the corn. Tidd is a blacksmith by trade, and he has an arm with hair on it that looks like Jumbo's hind leg. I felt the same old desire to climb the fence and be alone. I didn't know exactly how to work it. Then I remembered how people had remarked that I had changed very much in twenty years, and that for a homely boy I had grown to be a remarkably picturesque-looking man. I trusted to Tidd's failing eyesight and said:
“How are you?”
He said, “How are you?” That did not answer my question, but I didn't mind a little thing like that.
Then he said: “I sposed that every pesky fool in this country knew I don't allow fishing on my land.”
“That may be,” says I, “but I ain't fishing on your land. I always fish in a damp place if I can. Moreover, how do I know this is your land? Carrying the argument still further, and admitting that every peesky fool knows that you didn't allow fishing here, I am not going to be called a pesky fool with impunity, unless you do it over my dead body.” He stopped about ten rods away and I became more fearless. “I don't know who you are,” said I, as I took off my coat and vest and piled them up on my fish basket, eager for the fray. “You claim to own this farm, but it is my opinion that you are the hired man, puffed up with a little authority. You can't order me off this ground till you show me a duly certified abstract of title and then identify yourself. What protection does a gentleman have if he is to be kicked and cuffed about by Tom, Dick and Harry, claiming they own the whole State. Get out! Avaunt! If you don't avaunt pretty quick I'll scrap you and sell you to a medical college.”
He stood in dumb amazement a moment, then he said he would go and get his deed and his shotgun. I said shotguns suited me exactly, and I told him to bring two of them loaded with giant powder and barbed wire. I would not live alway. I asked not to stay. When he got behind the corn-crib I climbed the fence and fled with my ill-gotten gains.
The blacksmith in his prime may lick the small boy, but twenty years changes their relative positions. Possibly Tidd could tear up the ground with me now, but in ten more years, if I improve as fast as he fails, I shall fish in that same old stream again.
Dear friend.—Being Sunday, I take an hour to write you a letter in regard to this place. I came here yesterday without attracting undue attention from people who lived here. If they was surprised, they concealed it from me.
I've camped out on the Chug years ago, and went to sleep with no live thing near me except my own pony, and woke up with the early song of the coyote, and have been on the lonesome plain for days where it seemed to me that a hostile would be mighty welcome if he would only say something to me, but I was never so lonesome as I was here in this big town last night, although it is the most thick settled place I was ever at.
I was so kind of low and depressed that I strolled in to the bar at last, allowing that I could pound on the counter and call up the boys and get acquainted a little with somebody, just as I would at Col. Luke Murrin's, at Cheyenne; but when I waved to the other parties, and told them to rally round the foaming beaker, they apologized, and allowed they had just been to dinner.
Just been to dinner, and there it was pretty blamed near dark! Then I asked 'em to take a cigar, but they mostly cackillated they had no occasion.
I was mad, but what could I do? They was too many for me, and I couldn't coerce the white livered aristocratic mob, for quicker'n scat they could have hollored into a little cupboard they had there in the corner, and in less'n two minits they'd of had the whole police department and the hook and ladder company down there after me with a torch-light procession.
So I swallowed my wrath and a tame drink of cultivated whiskey with Apollo Belvidere on the side, and went out into the auditorium of the hotel.
Here I was very unhappy, being, as the editor of the Green RiverGazettewould say, “the cynosure of all eyes.”
I would rather not be a cynosure, even at a good salary; so I thought I would ask the proprietor to build a fire in my room. I went up to the recorder's office, where the big hotel autograft album is, and asked to see the proprietor.
A good-looking young man came forward and asked me what he could do for me. I said if it wouldn't be too much trouble, I wisht he would build a little fire in my room, and I would pay him for it; or, if he would show me where the woodpile was, I would build the fire myself—I wasn't doing anything special at that time.
He then whistled through his teeth and crooked his finger in a shrill tone of voice to a young party who was working for him, and told him to “build a fire in four-ought-two.”
I then sat down in the auditorium and read out of a railroad tract, which undertook to show that a party that undertook to ride over a rival road, must do so because life was a burden to him, and facility, and comfort, and safety, and such things no object whatever. But still I was very lonely, and felt as if I was far, far away from home.
I couldn't have been more uncomfortable if I'd been a young man I saw twenty-five years ago on the old overland trail. He had gone out to study the Indian character, and to win said Indian to the fold. When I next saw him he was twenty miles farther on. He had been thrown in contact with said Indian in the meantime. I judged he had been making a collection of Indian arrows. He was extremely no more. He looked some like Saint Sebastian, and some like a toothpick-holder.
I was never successfully lost on the plains, and so I started out after supper to find my room. I found a good many other rooms, and tried to get into them, but I did not find four-ought-two till a late hour; then I subsidized the night patrol on the third floor to assist me.
This is a nice place to stop, but it is a little too rich for my blood, I guess Not so much as regards price, but I can see that I am beginning to excite curiosity among the boarders. People are coming here to board just because I am here, and it is disagreeable. I do not court notoriety. I have always lived in a plain way, and I would give a dollar if people would look the other way while I eat my pie.
Yours truly,
E.O.D.
To E. Wm. Nye, Esq.
P.S.—This is not a dictated letter. I left my stenograffer and revolver at Pumpkin Buttes.
E.O.D.
During the hot weather very few crowns are worn this season, and a few hints as to the care of the crown itself may not be out of place.
The crown should not be carelessly hung on the hat rack in the royal hall for the flies to roost upon, but it should be thoroughly cleaned and put away as soon as the weather becomes too hot to wear it comfortably.
Great care should be used in cleaning a gold-plated crown, to avoid wearing out the plate. Take a good stiff tooth brush, with a little soapsuds, and clean the crown thoroughly at first, drying it on a clean towel and taking care not to drop it on the floor and thus knock the moss-agate diadem loose. Next, get a sleeve of the royal undershirt, or, in case you can not procure one readily, the sleeve of a duke or right-bower may be used. Soak this in vinegar, and, with a coat of whiting, polish the crown thoroughly, wrap it in cotton-flannel and put in the bureau. Sometimes, the lining of the crown becomes saturated with hair-oil from constant use and needs cleaning. In such cases the lining may be removed, boiled in concentrated lye two hours, or until tender, and then placed on the grass to bleach in the sun.
Most crowns are size six-and-seven-eights, and they are therefore frequently too large for the number six head of royalty. In such cases a newspaper may be folded lengthwise and laid inside the sweat-band of the crown, thus reducing the size and preventing any accident by which his or her majesty might lose the crown in the coal-bin while doing chores.
After the Fourth of July and other royal holidays, this newspaper may be removed, and the crown will be found none too large for the imperial dome of thought.
Sceptres may be cleaned and wrapped in woolen goods during the hot months. The leg of an old pair of pantaloons makes a good retort to run a sceptre into while not in use. Never try to kill flies or drive carpet tacks with the sceptre. It is an awkward tool at best, and you might 'easily knock a thumb nail loose. Great care should also be taken of the royal robe. Do not use it for a lap robe while dining, nor sleep in it at night. Nothing looks more repugnant than a king on the throne, with little white feathers all over his robe.
It is equally bad taste to govern a kingdom in a maroon robe with white horse hairs all over it.
{Illustration: A HARD-WORKING MONARCH.}
{0359}
I once knew a king who invariably curried his horses in his royal robes; and if the steeds didn't stand around to suit him, he would ever and anon welt them in the pit of the stomach with his cast-iron sceptre. It was greatly to the interest of his horses not to incur the royal displeasure, as the reader has no doubt already surmised.
The robe of the king should only be worn while his majesty is on the throne. When he comes down at night, after his day's work, and goes out after his coal and kindling-wood, he may take off his robe, roll it up carefully, and stick it under the throne, where it will be out of sight. Nothing looks more untidy than a fat king milking a bobtail cow in a Mother Hubbard robe trimmed with imitation ermine.
{An Open Letter.}
Dear Sir: I have seen recently an open letter addressed to me, and written by you in a vein of confidence and strictly sub rosa. What you said was so strictly confidential, in fact, that you published the letter in New York, and it was copied through the press of the country. I shall, therefore, endeavor to be equally careful in writing my reply.
You refer in your kind and confidential note to your experience as an invalid, and your rapid recovery after the use of red-hot Mexican pepper tea in a molten state.
But you did not have such a physician as I did when I had spinal meningitis. He was a good doctor for horses and blind staggers, but he was out of his sphere when he strove to fool with the human frame. Change of scene and rest were favorite prescriptions of his. Most of his patients got both, especially eternal rest. He made a specialty of eternal rest.
He did not know what the matter was with me, but he seemed to be willing to learn.
My wife says that while he was attending me I was as crazy as a loon, but that I was more lucid than the physician. Even with my little, shattered wreck of mind, tottering between a superficial knowledge of how to pound sand and a wide, shoreless sea of mental vacuity, I still had the edge on my physician, from an intellectual point of view. He is still practicing medicine in a quiet kind of way, weary of life, and yet fearing to die and go where his patients are.
He had a sabre wound on one cheek that gave him a ferocious appearance. He frequently alluded to how he used to mix up in the carnage of battle, and how he used to roll up his pantaloons and wade in gore. He said that if the tocsin of war should sound even now, or if he were to wake up in the night and hear war's rude alarum, he would spring to arms and make tyranny tremble till its suspender buttons fell off.
Oh, he was a bad man from Bitter Creek.
One day I learned from an old neighbor that this physician did not have anything to do with preserving the Union intact, but that he acquired the scar on his cheek while making some experiments as a drunk and disorderly. He would come and sit by my bedside for hours, waiting for this mortality to put on immortality, so that he could collect his bill from the estate, but one day I arose during a temporary delirium, and extracting a slat from my couch I smote him across the pit of the stomach with it, while I hissed through my clenched teeth:
“Physician, heal thyself.”
{Illustration: “PHYSICIAN, HEAL THYSELF."}
{8361}
I then tottered a few minutes, and fell back into the arms of my attendants. If you do not believe this, I can still show you the clenched teeth. Also the attendants.
I had a hard time with this physician, but I still live, contrary to his earnest solicitations.
I desire to state that should this letter creep into the press of the country, and thus become in a measure public, I hope that it will create no ill-feeling on your part.
Our folks are all well as I write, and should you happen to be on Lake Superior this winter, yachting, I hope you will drop in and see us. Our latch string is hanging out most all the time, and if you will pound on the fence I will call off the dog.
I frequently buy a copy of your paper on the streets. Do you get the money?
Are you acquainted with the staff ofThe Century, published in New York? I was inThe Centuryoffice several hours last spring, and the editors treated me very handsomely, but, although I have bought the magazine ever since, and read it thoroughly, I have not seen yet where they said that “they had a pleasant call from the genial and urbane William Nye.” I do not feel offended over this. I simply feel hurt.
Before that I had a good notion to write a brief epic on the “Warty Toad,” and send it toThe Centuryfor publication, but now it is quite doubtful.
The Centurymay be a good paper, but it does not take the press dispatches, and only last month I saw in it an account of a battle that to my certain knowledge occurred twenty years ago.
Twenty centuries ago last Christmas there was born in Attica, near Athens, the father of oratory, the greatest orator of whom history has told us. His name was Demosthenes. Had he lived until this spring he would have been 2,270 years old; but he did not live. Demosthenes has crossed the mysterious river. He has gone to that bourne whence no traveler returns.
Most of you, no doubt, have heard about it. On those who may not have heard it, the announcement will fall with a sickening thud.
This sketch is not intended to cast a gloom over your hearts. It was designed to cheer those who read it and make them glad they could read.
Therefore, I would have been glad if I could have spared them the pain which this sudden breaking of the news of the death of Demosthenes will bring. But it could not be avoided. We should remember the transitory nature of life, and when we are tempted to boast of our health, and strength, and wealth, let us remember the sudden and early death of Demosthenes.
Demosthenes was not born an orator. He struggled hard and failed many times. He was homely, and he stammered in his speech; but before his death they came to him for hundreds of miles to get him to open their county fairs and jerk the bird of freedom bald-headed on the Fourth of July.
When Demosthenes' father died, he left fifteen talents to be divided between Demosthenes and his sister. A talent is equal to about $1,000. I often wish I had been born a little more talented.
Demosthenes had a short breath, a hesitating speech, and his manners were very ungraceful. To remedy his stammering, he filled his mouth full of pebbles and howled his sentiments at the angry sea. However, Plutarch says that Demosthenes made a gloomy fizzle of his first speech. This did not discourage him. He finally became the smoothest orator in that country, and it was no uncommon thing for him to fill the First Baptist Church of Athens full. There are now sixty of his orations extant, part of them written by Demosthenes and part of them written by his private secretary.
When he started in, he was gentle, mild and quiet in his manner; but later on, carrying his audience with him, he at last became enthusiastic. He thundered, he roared, he whooped, he howled, he jarred the windows, he sawed the air, he split the horizon with his clarion notes, he tipped over the table, kicked the lamps out of the chandeliers and smashed the big bass viol over the chief fiddler's head.
Oh, Demosthenes was business when he got started. It will be a long time before we see another off-hand speaker like Demosthenes, and I, for one, have never been the same man since I learned of his death.
“Such was the first of orators,” says Lord Brougham. “At the head of all the mighty masters of speech, the adoration of ages has consecrated his place, and the loss of the noble instrument with which he forged and launched his thunders, is sure to maintain it unapproachable forever.”
I have always been a great admirer of the oratory of Demosthenes, and those who have heard both of us, think there is a certain degree of similarity in our style.
And not only did I admire Demosthenes as an orator, but as a man; and, though I am no Vanderbilt, I feel as though I would be willing to head a subscription list for the purpose of doing the square thing by his sorrowing wife, if she is left in want, as I understand that she is.
I must now leave Demosthenes and pass on rapidly to speak of Patrick Henry.
Mr. Henry was the man who wanted liberty or death. He preferred liberty, though. If he couldn't have liberty, he wanted to die, but he was in no great rush about it. He would like liberty, if there was plenty of it; but if the British had no liberty to spare, he yearned for death. When the tyrant asked him what style of death he wanted, he said that he would rather die of extreme old age. He was willing to wait, he said. He didn't want to go unprepared, and he thought it would take him eighty or ninety years more to prepare, so that when he was ushered into another world he wouldn't be ashamed of himself.
One hundred and ten years ago, Patrick Henry said: “Sir, our chains are forged. Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston. The war is inevitable, and let it come. I repeat it, sir, let it come!”
In the spring of 1860, I used almost the same language. So did Horace Greeley. There were four or five of us who got our heads together and decided that the war was inevitable, and consented to let it come.
Then it came. Whenever there is a large, inevitable conflict loafing around waiting for permission to come, it devolves on the great statesmen and bald-headedliteratiof the nation to avoid all delay. It was so with Patrick Henry. He permitted the land to be deluged in gore, and then he retired. It is the duty of the great orator to howl for war, and then hold some other man's coat while he fights.
Over in St. Paul I met a man with eyes of cadet blue and a terra cotta nose. His eyes were not only peculiar in shape, but while one seemed to constantly probe the future, the other was apparently ransacking the dreamy past. While one rambled among the glorious possibilities of the remote yet golden ultimately, the other sought the somber depths of the previously.
He told me that years ago he had a mild case of strabismus and that both eyes seemed to glare down his nose till he got restless and had them operated on. Those were the days when they used to fasten a crochet hook under the internal rectus muscle and cut it a little with a pair of optical sheep shears. The effect of this course was to allow the eye to drift back to a direct line; but this man fell into the hands of a drunken surgeon who cut the muscle too much, and thereby weakened it so that it gradually swung past the point it ought to have stopped at, and he saw with horror that his eye was going to turn out and protrude, as it were, so that a man could hang his hat on it. The other followed suit, and the two orbs that had for years looked along the bridge of the terra cotta nose, gradually separated, and while one looked toward next Christmas with fond anticipations, the other loved to linger over the remembrances of last fall.
This thing continued till he had to peer into the future with his off eye closed, and vice versa.
It is needless to say that he hungered for the blood of that physician and surgeon. He tried to lay violent hands on him and wipe up the ground with him and wear him out across a telegraph pole. But the authorities always prevented the administration of swift and lawful justice.
Time passed on, till one night the abnormal wall-eyed man loosened a board in the sidewalk up town so that the physician and surgeon caught his foot in it and caused an oblique fracture of the scapula, pied his dura mater, busted his cornucopia and wrecked his sarah-bellum.
Perhaps I am in error as to some of these medical terms and their orthography, but that is about the way the man with the divergent orbs told it to me.
The physician and surgeon was quite a ruin. He had to wear clapboards on himself for months, and there were other doctors, and laudable pus and threatened gangrene and doctors' bills, with the cemetery looming up in the near future. Day after day he took his own anti-febrile drinks, and rammed his busted system full of iron and strychnine and beef tea and dover's powders and hypodermic squirt till he wished he could die, but death would not come. He pawed the air and howled. They fed him his own nux vomica, tincture of rhubarb and phosphates and gruel, and brought him back to life with a crooked collar bone, a shattered shoulder blade and a look of woe.
Then he sued the town for $50,000 damages because the sidewalk was imperfect, and the wild-eyed man with the inflamed nose got on the jury.
I will not explain how it was done, but there was a verdict for defendant with costs on the Esculapian wreck. The man with the crooked vision is not handsome, but he is very happy. He says the mills of the gods grind slowly, but they pulverise middling fine.
After I had accumulated a handsome competence as city editor of the old MorningSentinelat Laramie City, and had married and gone to housekeeping with a gas stove and other luxuries, my place on theSentinelwas taken by a newspaper man named Hopkins, who had just graduated from a business college, and who brought a nice glazed grip sack and a diploma with him that had never been used.
Hopkins wrote a fine Spencerian hand and wore a black and tan dog where-ever he went. The boys were willing to overlook his copper-plate hand, but they drew the line at the dog. He not only wrote in beautiful style, but he copied his manuscript, so that when it went in to the printer it was as pretty as a wedding invitation.
{Illustration: HE THREW ME OUT.}