{0035}
Robert Ormsby Sweeney is a druggist of St. Paul, and though a recent chronological record reveals the fact that he is a direct descendant of a sure-enough king, and though there is mighty good purple, royal blood in his veins that dates back where kings used to have something to do to earn their salary, he goes right on with his regular business, selling drugs at the great sacrifice which druggists will make sometimes in order to place their goods within the reach of all.
As soon as I learned that Mr. Sweeney had barely escaped being a crowned head, I got acquainted with him and tried to cheer him up, and I told him that people wouldn't hold him in any way responsible, and that as it hadn't shown itself in his family for years he might perhaps finally wear it out.
He is a mighty pleasant man to meet, anyhow, and you can have just as much fun with him as you could with a man who didn't have any royal blood in his veins. You could be with him for days on a fishing trip and never notice it at all.
But I was going to speak more in particular about Mr. Sweeney's cat. Mr. Sweeney had a large cat, named Dr. Mary Walker, of which he was very fond. Dr. Mary Walker remained at the drug store all the time, and was known all over St. Paul as a quiet and reserved cat. If Dr. Mary Walker took in the town after office hours, nobody seemed to know anything about it. She would be around bright and cheerful the next morning and attend to her duties at the store just as though nothing whatever had happened.
One day last summer Mr. Sweeney left a large plate of fly-paper with water on it in the window, hoping to gather in a few quarts of flies in a deceased state. Dr. Mary Walker used to go to this window during the afternoon and look out on the busy street while she called up pleasant memories of her past life. That afternoon she thought she would call up some more memories, so she went over on the counter and from there jumped down on the window-sill, landing with all four feet in the plate of fly-paper.
At first she regarded it as a joke, and treated the matter very lightly, but later on she observed that the fly-paper stuck to her feet with great tenacity of purpose. Those who have never seen the look of surprise and deep sorrow that a cat wears when she finds herself glued to a whole sheet of fly-paper, cannot fully appreciate the way Dr. Mary Walker felt. She did not dash wildly through a $150 plate-glass window, as some cats would have done. She controlled herself and acted in the coolest manner, though you could have seen that mentally she suffered intensely. She sat down a moment to more fully outline a plan for the future. In doing so, she made a great mistake. The gesture resulted in glueing the fly-paper to her person in such a way that the edge turned up behind in the most abrupt manner, and caused her great inconvenience.
{Illustration: AT FIRST SHE REGARDED IT AS A JOKE.}
{0037}
Some one at that time laughed in a coarse and heartless way, and I wish you could have seen the look of pain that Dr. Mary Walker gave him.
Then she went away. She did not go around the prescription case as the rest of us did, but strolled through the middle of it, and so on out through the glass door at the rear of the store. We did not see her go through the glass door, but we found pieces of fly-paper and fur on the ragged edges of a large aperture in the glass, and we kind of jumped at the conclusion that Dr. Mary Walker had taken that direction in retiring from the room.
Dr. Mary Walker never returned to St. Paul, and her exact whereabouts are not known, though every effort was made to find her. Fragments of flypaper and brindle hair were found as far west as the Yellowstone National Park, and as far north as the British line, but the doctor herself was not found. My own theory is, that if she turned her bow to the west so as to catch the strong easterly gale on her quarter, with the sail she had set and her tail pointing directly toward the zenith, the chances for Dr. Mary Walker's immediate return are extremely slim.
{Illustration}
{0038}
{9039}
There will always be a slight difference in the opinions of the young and the mature, relative to the general plan on which the solar system should be operated, no doubt. There are also points of disagreement in other matters, and it looks as though there always would be.
To the young the future has a more roseate hue. The roseate hue comes high, but we have to use it in this place. To the young there spreads out across the horizon a glorious range of possibilities. After the youth has endorsed for an intimate friend a few times, and purchased the paper at the bank himself later on, the horizon won't seem to horizon so tumultuously as it did aforetime. I remember at one time of purchasing such a piece of accommodation paper at a bank, and I still have it. I didn't need it any more than a cat needs eleven tails at one and the same time. Still the bank made it an object for me, and I secured it. Such things as these harshly knock the flush and bloom off the cheek of youth, and prompt us to turn the strawberry box bottom side up before we purchase it.
Youth is gay and hopeful, age is covered with experience and scars where the skin has been knocked off and had to grow on again. To the young a dollar looks large and strong, but to the middle-aged and the old it is weak and inefficient.
When we are in the heyday and fizz of existence, we believe everything; but after awhile we murmur: “What's that you are givin' us,” or words of like character. Age brings caution and a lot of shop-worn experience, purchased at the highest market price. Time brings vain regrets and wisdom teeth that can be left in a glass of water over night.
Still we should not repine. If people would repine less and try harder to get up an appetite by persweating in someone's vineyard at so much per diem, it would be better. The American people of late years seem to have a deeper and deadlier repugnance for mannish industry, and there seems to be a growing opinion that our crops are more abundant when saturated with foreign perspiration. European sweat, if I may be allowed to use such a low term, is very good in its place, but the native-born Duke of Dakota, or the Earl of York State should remember that the matter of perspiration and posterity should not be left solely to the foreigner.
There are too many Americans who toil not, neither do they spin. They would be willing to have an office foisted upon them, but they would rather blow their so-called brains out than to steer a pair of large steel-gray mules from day to day. They are too proud to hoe corn, for fear some great man will ride by and see the termination of their shirts extending out through the seats of their pantaloons, but they are not too proud to assign their shattered finances to a friend and their shattered remains to the morgue.
Pride is all right if it is the right kind, but the pride that prompts a man to kill his mother, because she at last refuses to black his boots any more, is an erroneous pride. The pride that induces a man to muss up the carpet with his brains because there is nothing left for him to do but to labor, is the kind that Lucifer had when he bolted the action of the convention and went over to the red-hot minority.
Youth is the spring-time of life. It is the time to acquire information, so that we may show it off in after years and paralyze people with what we know. The wise youth will “lay low” till he gets a whole lot of knowledge, and then in later days turn it loose in an abrupt manner. He will guard against telling what he knows, a little at a time. That is unwise. I once knew a youth who wore himself out telling people all he knew from day to day, so that when he became a bald-headed man he was utterly exhausted and didn't have anything left to tell anyone. Some of the things that we know should be saved for our own use. The man who sheds all his knowledge, and don't leave enough to keep house with, fools himself.
Two delegates to the General Convocation of the Sons of Ice Water were sitting in the lobby of the Windsor, in the city of Denver, not long ago, strangers to each other and to everybody else. One came from Huerferno county, and the other was a delegate from the Ice Water Encampment of Correjos county.
From the beautiful billiard hall came the sharp rattle of ivory balls, and in the bar-room there was a glitter of electric light, cut glass, and French plate mirrors. Out of the door came the merry laughter of the giddy throng, flavored with fragrant Havana smoke and the delicate odor of lemon and mirth and pine apple and cognac.
The delegate from Correjos felt lonely, and he turned to the Ice Water representative from Huerferno:
“That was a bold and fearless speech you made this afternoon on the demon rum at the convocation.”
“Think so?” said the sad Huerferno man.
“Yes, you entered into the description of rum's maniac till I could almost see the red-eyed centipedes and tropical hornets in the air. How could you describe the jimjams so graphically?”
“Well, you see, I'm a reformed drunkard. Only a little while ago I was in the gutter.”
“So was I.”
“How long ago?”
“Week ago day after to-morrow.”
“Next Tuesday it'll be a week since I quit.”
“Well, I swan!”
“Ain't it funny?”
“Tolerable.”
“It's going to be a long, cold winter; don't you think so?”
“Yes, I dread it a good deal.”
“It's a comfort, though, to know that you never will touch rum again.”
“Yes, I am glad in my heart to-night that I am free from it. I shall never touch rum again.”
When he said this he looked up at the other delegate, and they looked into each other's eyes earnestly, as though each would read the other's soul. Then the Huerferno man said:
“In fact, I never did care much for rum.”
Then there was a long pause.
Finally the Correjos man ventured: “Do you have to use an antidote to cure the thirst?”
“Yes, I've had to rely on that a good deal at first. Probably this vain yearning that I now feel in the pit of the bosom will disappear after awhile.”
“Have you got any antidote with you?”
“Yes, I've got some up in 232-1/2. If you'll come up I'll give you a dose.”
“There's no rum in it, is there?”
“No.”
Then they went up the elevator. They did not get down to breakfast, but at dinner they stole in. The man from Huerferno dodged nervously through the archway leading to the dining-room as though he had doubts about getting through so small a space with his augmented head, and the man from Correjos looked like one who had wept his eyes almost blind over the woe that rum has wrought in our fair land.
When the waiter asked the delegate from Correjos for his dessert order, the red-nosed Son of Ice Water said: “Bring me a cup of tea, some pudding without wine sauce, and a piece of mince pie. You may also bring me a corkscrew, if you please, to pull the brandy out of the mince pie with.”
Then the two reformed drunkards looked at each other, and laughed a hoarse, bitter and joyous laugh.
At the afternoon session of the Sons of Ice Water, the Huerferno delegate couldn't get his regalia over his head.
To the President.—I write this letter not on my own account, but on behalf of a personal friend of mine who is known as a mugwump. He is a great worker for political reform, but he cannot spell very well, so he has asked me to write this letter. He knew that I had been thrown among great men all my life, and that, owing to my high social position and fine education, I would be peculiarly fitted to write you in a way that would not call forth disagreeable remarks, and so he has given me the points and I have arranged them for you.
In the first place, my friend desires me to convey to you, Mr. President, in a delicate manner, and in such language as to avoid giving offense, that he is somewhat disappointed in your Cabinet. I hate to talk this way to a bran-new President, but my friend feels hurt and he desires that I should say to you that he regrets your short-sighted policy. He says that it seems to him there is very little in the course of the administration so far to encourage a man to shake off old party ties and try to make men better. He desires to say that after conversing with a large number of the purest men, men who have been in both political parties off and on for years and yet have never been corrupted by office, men who have left convention after convention in years past because those conventions were corrupt and endorsed other men than themselves for office, he finds that your appointment of Cabinet officers will only please two classes, viz: Democrats and Republicans.
{Illustration: WORKING FOR REFORM.}
{0043}
Now, what do you care for an administration which will only gratify those two old parties? Are you going to snap your fingers in disdain at men who admit that they are superior to anybody else? Do you want history to chronicle the fact that President Cleveland accepted the aid of the pure and highly cultivated gentlemen who never did anything naughty or unpretty, and then appointed his Cabinet from men who had been known for years as rude, naughty Democrats?
My friend says that he feels sure you would not have done so if you had fully realized how he felt about it. He claims that in the first week of your administration you have basely truckled to the corrupt majority. You have shown yourself to be the friend of men who never claimed to be truly good.
If you persist in this course you will lose the respect and esteem of my friend and another man who is politically pure, and who has never smirched his escutcheon with an office. He has one of the cleanest and most vigorous escutcheons in that county. He never leaves it out over night during the summer, and in the winter he buries it in sawdust. Both of these men will go back to the Republican party in 1888 if you persist in the course you have thus far adopted. They would go back now if the Republican party insisted on it.
Mr. President, I hate to write to you in this tone of voice, because I know the pain it will give you. I once held an office myself, Mr. President, and it hurt my feelings very much to have a warm personal friend criticise my official acts.
The worst feature of the whole thing, Mr. President, is that it will encourage crime. If men who never committed any crime are allowed to earn their living by the precarious methods peculiar to manual labor, and if those who have abstained from office for years, by request of many citizens, are to be denied the endorsement of the administration, they will lose courage to go on and do right in the future. My friend desires to state vicariously, in the strongest terms, that both he and his wife feel the same way about it, and they will not promise to keep it quiet any longer. They feel like crippling the administration in every way they can if the present policy is to be pursued.
He says he dislikes to begin thus early to threaten a President who has barely taken off his overshoes and drawn his mileage, but he thinks it may prevent a recurrence of these unfortunate mistakes. He claims that you have totally misunderstood the principles of the mugwumps all the way through. You seem to regard the reform movement as one introduced for the purpose of universal benefit. This was not the case. While fully endorsing and supporting reform, he says that they did not go into it merely to kill time or simply for fun. He also says that when he became a reformer and supported you, he did not think there were so many prominent Democrats who would have claims upon you. He can only now deplore the great national poverty of offices and the boundless wealth of raw material in the Democratic party from which to supply even that meagre demand.
He wishes me to add, also, that you must have over-estimated the zeal of his party for civil service reform. He says that they did not yearn for civil service reform so much as many people seem to think.
I must now draw this letter to a close. We are all well with the exception of colds in the head, but nothing that need give you any uneasiness. Our large seal-brown hen last week, stimulated by a rising egg market, over-exerted herself, and on Saturday evening, as the twilight gathered, she yielded to a complication of pip and softening of the brain and expired in my arms. She certainly led a most exemplary life and the forked tongue of slander could find naught to utter against her.
Hoping that you are enjoying the same great blessing and that you will write as often as possible without waiting for me, I remain,
Very respectfully yours,
Bill Nye.
{Dictated Letter.}
While visiting Naples, last fall, I took a great interest in the wonderful museum there, of objects that have been exhumed from the ruins of Pompeii. It is a remarkable collection, including, among other things, the cumbersome machinery of a large woolen factory, the receipts, contracts, statements of sales, etc., etc., of bankers, brokers, and usurers. I was told that the exhumist also ran into an Etruscan bucket-shop in one part of the city, but, owing to the long, dry spell, the buckets had fallen to pieces.
The object which engrossed my attention the most, however, was what seems to have been a circular issued prior to the great volcanic vomit of 79 A.D., and no doubt prior even to the Christian era. As the date is torn off however, we are left to conjecture the time at which it was issued. I was permitted to make a copy of it, and with the aid of my hired man, I have translated it with great care.
Office of Lucretius & Procalus, Dealers In Flour, Bran, Shorts, Middlings, Screenings, Etruscan Hen Feed, and Other Choice Bric-A-Brac.
Highest Cash Price Paid for Neapolitan Winter Wheat and Roman Corn
Why haul your Wheat through the sand to Herculaneum when we pay the same price here?
Office and Mill, Via VIII, Near the Stabian Gate, Only Thirteen Blocks From the P.O., Pompeii.
Dear Sir: This circular has been called out by another one issued last month by Messrs. Toecorneous & Chilblainicus, alleged millers and wheat buyers of Herculaneum, in which they claim to pay a quarter to a half-cent more per bushel than we do for wheat, and charge us with docking the farmers around Pompeii a pound per bushel more than necessary for cockle, wild buck-wheat, and pigeon-grass seed. They make the broad statement that we have made all our money in that way, and claim that Mr. Lucretius, of our mill, has erected a fine house, which the farmers allude to as the “wild buckwheat villa.”
{Illustration: TWO OLD ROMANS.}
{8047}
We do not, as a general rule, pay any attention to this kind of stuff; but when two snide romans, who went to Herculaneum without a dollar and drank stale beer out of an old Etruscan tomato-can the first year they were there, assail our integrity, we feel justified in making a prompt and final reply. We desire to state to the Roman farmers that we do not test their wheat with the crooked brass tester that has made more money for Messrs. Toecorneous & Chilblainicus than their old mill has. We do not do that kind of business. Neither do we buy a man's wheat at a cash price and then work off four or five hundred pounds of XXXX Imperial hog feed on him in part payment. When we buy a man's wheat we pay him in money. We do not seek to fill him up with sour Carthagenian cracked wheat and orders on the store.
We would also call attention to the improvements that we have just made in our mill. Last week we put a handle in the upper burr, and we have also engaged one of the best head millers in Pompeii to turn the crank day-times. Our old head miller will oversee the business at night, so that the mill will be in full blast night and day, except when the head miller has gone to his meals or stopped to spit on his hands.
The mill of our vile contemporaries at Herculaneum is an old one that was used around Naples one hundred years ago to smash rock for the Neapolitan road, and is entirely out of repair. It was also used in a brick-yard here near Pompeii; then an old junk man sold it to a tenderfoot from Jerusalem as an ice-cream freezer. He found that it would not work, and so used it to grind up potato bugs for blisters. Now it is grinding ostensible flour at Herculaneum.
We desire to state to the farmers about Pompeii and Herculaneum that we aim to please. We desire to make a grade of flour this summer that will not have to be run through the coffee mill before it can be used. We will also pay you the highest price for good wheat, and give you good weight. Our capacity is now greatly enlarged, both as to storage and grinding. We now turn out a sack of flour, complete and ready for use, every little while. We have an extra handle for the mill, so that in case of accident to the one now in use, we need not shut down but a few moments. We call attention to our XXXX Git-there brand of flour. It is the best flour in the market for making angels' food and other celestial groceries. We fully warrant it, and will agree that for every sack containing whole kernels of corn, corncobs, or other foreign substances, not thoroughly pulverized, we will refund the money already paid, and show the person through our mill.
{Illustration: ANCIENT ROMAN MILLER.}
{9048}
We would also like to call the attention of farmers and housewives around Pompeii to our celebrated Dough Squatter. It is purely automatic in its operation, requiring only two men to work it. With this machine two men will knead all the bread they can eat and do it easily, feeling thoroughly refreshed at night. They also avoid that dark maroon taste in the mouth so common in Pompeii on arising in the morning.
To those who do not feel able to buy one of these machines, we would say that we have made arrangements for the approaching season, so that those who wish may bring their dough to our mammoth squatter and get it treated at our place at the nominal price of two bits per squat. Strangers calling for their squat or unsquat dough, will have to be identified.
Do not forget the place, Via VIII, near Stabian gate.
Lucretius & Peocalus,
Dealers in choice family flour, cut feed and oatmeal with or without clinkers in it. Try our lumpless bran for indigestion.
Speaking about cowboys, Sam Stewart, known from Montana to Old Mexico as Broncho Sam, was the chief. He was not a white man, an Indian, a greaser or a negro, but he had the nose of an Indian warrior, the curly hair of an African, and the courtesy and equestrian grace of a Spaniard. A wide reputation as a “broncho breaker” gave him his name.
To master an untamed broncho and teach him to lead, to drive and to be safely-ridden was Sam's mission during the warm weather when he was not riding the range. His special delight was to break the war-like heart of the vicious wild pony of the plains and make him the servant of man.
I've seen him mount a hostile “bucker,” and, clinching his italic legs around the body of his adversary, ride him till the blood would burst from Sam's nostrils and spatter horse and rider like rain. Most everyone knows what the bucking of the barbarous Western horse means. The wild horse probably learned it from the antelope, for the latter does it the same way, i.e., he jumps straight up into the air, at the same instant curving his back and coming down stiff-legged, with all four of his feet in a bunch. The concussion is considerable.
I tried it once myself. I partially rode a roan broncho one spring day, which will always be green in my memory. The day, I mean, not the broncho.
It occupied my entire attention to safely ride the cunning little beast, and when he began to ride me I put in a minority report against it.
I have passed through an earthquake and an Indian outbreak, but I would rather ride an earthquake without saddle or bridle than to bestride a successful broncho eruption. I remember that I wore a large pair of Mexican spurs, but I forgot them until the saddle turned. Then I remembered them. Sitting down on them in an impulsive way brought them to my mind. Then the broncho steed sat down on me, and that gave the spurs an opportunity to make a more lasting impression on my mind.
To those who observed the charger with the double “cinch” across his back and the saddle in front of him like a big leather corset, sitting at the same time on my person, there must have been a tinge of amusement; but to me it was not so frolicsome.
There may be joy in a wild gallop across the boundless plains, in the crisp morning, on the back of a fleet broncho; but when you return with your ribs sticking through your vest, and find that your nimble steed has returned to town two hours ahead of you, there is a tinge of sadness about it all.
Broncho Sam, however, made a specialty of doing all the riding himself. He wouldn't enter into any compromise and allow the horse to ride him.
In a reckless moment he offered to bet ten dollars that he could mount and ride a wild Texas steer. The money was put up. That settled it. Sam never took water. This was true in a double sense. Well, he climbed the cross-bar of the corral-gate, and asked the other boys to turn out their best steer, Marquis of Queensbury rules.
As the steer passed out, Sam slid down and wrapped those parenthetical legs of his around that high-headed, broad-horned brute, and he rode him till the fleet-footed animal fell down on the buffalo grass, ran his hot red tongue out across the blue horizon, shook his tail convulsively, swelled up sadly and died.
It took Sam four days to walk back.
A ten-dollar bill looks as large to me as the star spangled banner, some times; but that is an avenue of wealth that had not occurred to me.
I'd rather ride a buzz-saw at two dollars a day and found.
{Illustration: A BRONCO ERUPTION.}
{9050}
The following paper was read by me in a clear, resonant tone of voice, before the Academy of Science and Pugilism at Erin Prairie, last month, and as I have been so continually and so earnestly importuned to print it that life was no longer desirable, I submit it to you for that purpose, hoping that you will print my name in large caps, with astonishers at the head of the article, and also in good display type at the close:
Some Features Of Evolution.
No one could possibly, in a brief paper, do the subject of evolution full justice. It is a matter of great importance to our lost and undone race. It lies near to every human heart, and exercises a wonderful influence over our impulses and our ultimate success or failure. When we pause to consider the opaque and fathomless ignorance of the great masses of our fellow men on the subject of evolution, it is not surprising that crime is rather on the increase, and that thousands of our race are annually filling drunkards' graves, with no other visible means of support, while multitudes of enlightened human beings are at the same time obtaining a livelihood by meeting with felons' dooms.
These I would ask in all seriousness and in a tone of voice that would melt the stoniest heart: “Why in creation do you do it?” The time is rapidly approaching when there will be two or three felons for each doom. I am sure that within the next fifty years, and perhaps sooner even than that, instead of handing out these dooms to Tom, Dick and Harry as formerly, every applicant for a felon's doom will have to pass through a competitive examination, as he should do.
It will be the same with those who desire to fill drunkards' graves. The time is almost here when all positions of profit and trust will be carefully and judiciously handed out, and those who do not fit themselves for those positions will be left in the lurch, whatever that may be.
It is with this fact glaring me in the face that I have consented to appear before you to-day and lay bare the whole hypothesis, history, rise and fall, modifications, anatomy, physiology and geology of evolution. It is for this that I have poured over such works as Huxley, Herbert Spencer, Moses in the bulrushes, Anaxagoras, Lucretius and Hoyle. It is for the purpose of advancing the cause of common humanity and to jerk the rising generation out of barbarism into the dazzling effulgence of clashing intellects and fermenting brains that I have sought the works of Pythagoras, Democritus and Epluribus. Whenever I could find any book that bore upon the subject of evolution, and could borrow it, I have done so while others slept.
That is a matter which rarely enters into the minds of those who go easily and carelessly through life. Even the general superintendent of the Academy of Science and Pugilism here in Erin Prairie, the hotbed of a free and untrammeled, robust democracy, does not stop to think of the midnight and other kinds of oil that I have consumed in order to fill myself full of information and to soak my porous mind with thought. Even the O'Reilly College of this place, with its strong mental faculty, has not informed itself fully relative to the great effort necessary before a lecturer may speak clearly, accurately and exhaustingly of evolution.
And yet, here in this place, where education is rampant, and the idea is patted on the back, as I may say; here in Erin Prairie, where progress and some other sentiments are written on everything; here where I am addressing you to-night for $2 and feed for my horse, I met a little child with a bright and cheerful smile, who did not know that evolution consisted in a progress from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous.
So you see that you never know where ignorance lurks. The hydra-headed upas tree and bete noir of self-acting progress, is such ignorance as that, lurking in the very shadow of magnificent educational institutions and hard words of great cast. Nothing can be more disagreeable to the scientist than a bete noir. Nothing gives him greater satisfaction than to chase it up a tree or mash it between two shingles.
For this reason, as I said, it gives me great pleasure to address you on the subject of evolution, and to go into details in speaking of it. I could go on for hours as I have been doing, delighting you with the intricacies and peculiarities of evolution, but I must desist. It would please me to do so, and you would no doubt remain patiently and listen, but your business might suffer while you were away, and so I will close, but I hope that anyone now within the sound of my voice, and in whose breast a sudden hunger for more light on this great subject may have sprung up, will feel perfectly free to call on me and ask me about it or immerse himself in the numerous tomes that I have collected from friends, and which relate to this matter.
In closing I wish to say that I have made no statements in this paper relative to evolution which I am not prepared to prove; and, if anything, I have been over-conservative. For that reason I say now, that the person who doubts a single fact as I have given it to-night, bearing upon the great subject of evolution, will have to do so over my dumb remains.
And a man who will do that is no gentleman. I presume that many of these statements will be snapped up and sharply criticised by other theologians and many of our foremost thinkers, but they will do well to pause before they draw me into a controversy, for I have other facts in relation to evolution, and some personal reminiscences and family history, which I am prepared to introduce, if necessary, together with ideas that I have thought up myself. So I say to those who may hope to attract notice and obtain notoriety by drawing me into a controversy, beware. It will be to your interest to beware!
I presume that I could write an entire library of personal reminiscences relative to the eminent people with whom I have been thrown during a busy life, but I hate to do it, because I always regarded such things as sacred from the vulgar eye, and I felt bound to respect the confidence of a prominent man just as much as I would that of one who was less before the people. I remember very well my first meeting with General W.T. Sherman. I would not mention it here if it were not for the fact that the people seem so be yearning for personal reminiscences of great men, and that is perfectly right, too.
It was since the war that I met General Sherman, and it was on the line of the Union Pacific Railway, at one of those justly celebrated eating-houses, which I understand are now abandoned. The colored waiter had cut off a strip of the omelette with a pair of shears, the scorched oatmeal had been passed around, the little rubber door mats fried in butter and called pancakes had been dealt around the table, and the cashier at the end of the hall had just gone through the clothes of a party from Vermont, who claimed a rebate on the ground that the waiter had refused to bring him anything but his bill. There was no sound in the dining-room except the weak request of the coffee for more air and stimulants, or perhaps the cry of pain when the butter, while practicing with the dumb-bells, would hit a child on the head; then all would be still again.
General Sherman sat at one end of the table, throwing a life-preserver to a fly in the milk pitcher.
We had never met before, though for years we had been plodding along life's rugged way—he in the war department, I in the postoffice department. Unknown to each other, we had been holding up opposite corners of the great national fabric, if you will allow me that expression.
I remember, as well as though it were but yesterday, how the conversation began. General Sherman looked sternly at me and said:
“I wish you would overpower that butter and send it up this way.”
“All right,” said I, “if you will please pass those molasses.”
That was all that was said, but I shall never forget it, and probably he never will. The conversation was brief, but yet how full of food for thought! How true, how earnest, how natural! Nothing stilted or false about it. It was the natural expression of two minds that were too great to be verbose or to monkey with social, conversational flapdoodle.
{Illustration: AN ENCOUNTER WITH THE BUTTER.}
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I remember, once, a great while ago, I was asked by a friend to go with him in the evening to the house of an acquaintance, where they were going to have a kind of musicale, at which there was to be some noted pianist, who had kindly consented to play a few strains, I did not get the name of the professional, but I went, and when the first piece was announced I saw that the light was very uncertain, so I kindly volunteered to get a lamp from another room. I held that big lamp, weighing about twenty-nine pounds, for half an hour, while the pianist would tinky tinky up on the right hand, or bang, boomy to bang down on the bass, while he snorted and slugged that old concert grand piano and almost knocked its teeth down its throat, or gently dawdled with the keys like a pale moonbeam shimmering through the bleached rafters of a deceased horse, until at last there was a wild jangle, such as the accomplished musician gives to an instrument to show the audience that he has disabled the piano, and will take a slight intermission while it is sent to the junk shop.
With a sigh of relief I carefully put down the twenty-nine pound lamp, and my friend told me that I had been standing there like liberty enlightening the world, and holding that heavy lamp for Blind Tom.
I had never seen him before, and I slipped out of the room before he had a chance to see me.
I am glad to notice that in the East there is a growing disfavor in the public mind for selecting a practicing physician for the office of coroner. This matter should have attracted attention years ago. Now it gratifies me to notice a finer feeling on the part of the people, and an awakening of those sensibilities which go to make life more highly prized and far more enjoyable.
I had the misfortune at one time to be under the medical charge of a coroner who had graduated from a Chicago morgue and practiced medicine along with his inquest business with the most fiendish delight. I do not know which he enjoyed best, holding the inquest or practicing on his patient and getting the victim ready for the quest.
One day he wrote out a prescription and left it for me to have filled. I was surprised to find that he had made a mistake and left a rough draft of the verdict in my own case and a list of jurors which he had made in memorandum, so as to be ready for the worst. I was alarmed, for I did not know that I was in so dangerous a condition. He had the advantage of me, for he knew just what he was giving me, and how long human life could be sustained under his treatment. I did not.
That is why I say that the profession of medicine should not be allowed to conflict with the solemn duties of the coroner. They are constantly clashing and infringing upon each other's territory. This coroner had a kind of tread-softly-bow-the-head way of getting around the room that made my flesh creep. He had a way, too, when I was asleep, of glancing hurriedly through the pockets of my pantaloons as they hung over a chair, probably to see what evidence he could find that might aid the jury in arriving at a verdict. Once I woke up and found him examining a draft that he had found in my pocket. I asked him what he was doing with my funds, and he said that he thought he detected a draft in the room and he had just found out where it came from.
After that I hoped that death would come to my relief as speedily as possible. I felt that death would be a happy release from the cold touch of the amateur coroner and pro tem physician. I could look forward with pleasure, and even joy, to the moment when my physician would come for the last time in his professional capacity and go to work on me officially. Then the county would be obliged to pay him, and the undertaker could take charge of the fragments left by the inquest.
The duties of the physician are with the living, those of the coroner with the dead. No effort, therefore, should be made to unite them. It is in violation of all the finer feelings of humanity. When the physician decides that his tendencies point mostly toward immortality and the names of his patients are nearly all found on the moss-covered stones of the cemetery, he may abandon the profession with safety and take hold of politics. Then, should his tastes lead him to the inquest, let him gravitate toward the office of coroner; but the two should not be united.
No man ought to follow his fellow down the mysterious river that defines the boundary between the known and the unknown, and charge him professionally till his soul has fled, and then charge a per diem to the county for prying into his internal economy and holding an inquest over the debris of mortality. I therefore hail this movement with joy and wish to encourage it in every way. It points toward a degree of enlightenment which will be in strong contrast with the darker and more ignorant epochs of time, when the practice of medicine was united with the profession of the barber, the well-digger, the farrier, the veterinarian or the coroner.
Why, this physician plenipotentiary and coroner extraordinary that I have referred to, didn't know when he got a call whether to take his morphine syringe or his venire for a jury. He very frequently went to see a patient with a lung tester under one arm and the revised statutes under the other. People never knew when they saw him going to a neighbor's house, whether the case had yielded to the coroner's treatment or not. No one ever knew just when over-taxed nature would yield to the statutes in such case made and provided.
When the jury was impanelled, however, we always knew that the medical treatment had been successfully fatal.
Once he charged the county with an inquest he felt sure of, but in the night the patient got delirious, eluded his nurse, the physician and coroner, and fled to the foot-hills, where he was taken care of and finally recovered.
The experiences of some of the patients who escaped from this man read more like fiction than fact. One man revived during the inquest, knocked the foreman of the jury through the window, kicked the coroner in the stomach, fed him a bottle of violet ink, and, with a shriek of laughter, fled. He is now traveling under an assumed name with a mammoth circus, feeding his bald head to the African lion twice a day at $9 a week and found.
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