Книга - Bill Nye’s Chestnuts Old and New

Bill Nye's Chestnuts Old and New
Bill Nye




Bill Nye

Bill Nye's Chestnuts Old and New





CHESTNUT-BURR. I. – THE SHAKESPEARE-BACON PUZZLE WRESTLED WITH CONSCIENTIOUSLY





Trusting that it will not in any way impair the sale of Mr. Donnelly's book, I desire to offer here a few words in favor of the theory that William Shakespeare wrote his own works and thought his own thinks. The time has fully arrived when we humorists ought to stand by each other.

I do not undertake to stand up for the personal character of Shakespeare, but I say that he wrote good pieces, and I don't care who knows it. It is doubtless true that at the age of eighteen he married a woman eight years his senior, and that children began to cluster about their hearthstone in a way that would have made a man in a New York flat commit suicide. Three little children within fourteen months, including twins, came to the humble home of the great Bard, and he began to go out and climb upon the haymow to do his writing. Sometimes he would stay away from home for two or three weeks at a time, fearing that when he entered the house some one would tell him that he was again a parent.

Yet William Shakespeare knew all the time that he was a great man, and that some day he would write pieces to speak. He left Stratford at the age of twenty-one and went to London, where he attracted very little attention, for he belonged to the Yeomanry, being a kind of dramatic Horace Greeley, both in the matter of clothes and penmanship. Thus it would seem that while Sir Francis Bacon was attending a business college and getting himself familiar with the whole-arm movement, so as to be able to write a free, cryptogamous hand, poor W. Shakespeare was slowly thinking the hair off his head, while ever and anon he would bring out his writing materials and his bright ready tongue, and write a sonnet on an empty stomach.

Prior to leaving Stratford he is said to have dabbled in the poaching business in a humble way on the estates of Sir Thomas Lucy, since deceased, and that he wrote the following encomium or odelet in a free, running hand, and pinned it on the knight's gate:

O, deer Thomas Lucy,
Your venison's juicy,
Juicy is your venison;
Hence I append my benison.

The rose is red; the violet's blue;
The keeper is a chump and so are you,
Which is why I remark and my language is plain,
Yours truly,
High Low Jack
And the Game.

Let me now once more refer to the matter of the signature. Much has been said of Mr. Shakespeare's coarse, irregular and vulgar penmanship, which, it is claimed, shows the ignorance of its owner, and hence his inability to write the immortal plays. Let us compare the signature of Shakespeare with that of Mr. Greeley, and we notice a wonderful similarity. There is the same weird effort in both cases to out-cryptogam Old Cryptogamous himself, and enshrine immortal thought and heaven-born genius in a burglar-proof panoply of worm fences, and a chirography that reminds the careful student of the general direction taken in returning to Round Knob, N. C., by a correspondent who visited the home of a moonshiner, with a view toward ascertaining the general tendency of homebrewed whisky to fly to the head.

If we judge Shakespeare by his signature, not one of us will be safe. Death will wipe out our fame with a wet sponge. John Hancock in one hundred years from now will be regarded as the author of the Declaration of Independence, and Compendium Gaskell as the author of the Hew York Tribune.

I have every reason to believe that while William Shakespeare was going about the streets of London, poor but brainy, erratic but smart, baldheaded but filled with a nameless yearning to write a play with real water and a topical song in it, Francis Bacon was practicing on his signature, getting used to the full-arm movement, spoiling sheet after sheet of paper, trying to make a violet swan on a red woven wire mattress of shaded loops without taking his pen off the paper, and running the rebus column of a business college paper.

Poets are born, not made, and many of them are born with odd and even disagreeable characteristics. Some men are born poets, while it is true that some acquire poetry while others have poetry thrust upon them. Poetry is like the faculty, if I may so denominate it, of being able to voluntarily move the ears. It is a gift. It cannot be taught to others.

So Shakespeare, with all his poor penmanship, with his proneness to poach, with his poverty and his neglect of his wife and his children, could write a play wherein the leading man and the man who played the bass drum in the orchestra did not claim to have made the principal part.

Shakespeare did not want his plays published. He wanted to keep them out of the press in order to prevent their use at spelling schools in the hands of unskilled artists, and so there was a long period of time during which the papers could not get hold of them for publication.

During this time Francis Bacon was in public life. He and Shakespeare had nothing in common. Both were great men, but Bacon's sphere was different from Shakespeare's, While Bacon was in the Senate, living high and courting investigation, Shakespeare had to stuff three large pillows into his pantaloons and play Falstaff at a one-night stand.

Is it likely that Bacon, breathing the perfumed air of the capitol and chucking the treasury girls under the chin ever and anon, hungered for the false joys of the under-paid and underscored dramatist? Scarcely!

That is one reason win I prefer to take the side of Shakespeare rather than the side of Bacon.

Mr. Donnelly's book shows keen research, and preserves the interest all the way through, for the reader is impressed all along with the idea that there is a hen on, if I may be permitted to coin a phrase; but so far my sympathies and kind regards go with Shakespeare. He was one of the Yeoman of Stratford, and his early record was against him; but where do poets usually come from? Do they first breathe in the immortal sentiments which, in after years, enable their names to defy the front teeth of oblivion while stopping at one of our leading hotels? Did Burns soak his system with the flavor and the fragrance of the Scotch heather while riding on an elevated train? Did any poet ever succeed in getting up close to Nature's great North American heart by studying her habits at a twenty-five dollar german? I trow not. Moreover, every one who studies the history of our great poets and orators will trow likewise. Lord Tennyson wrote better things before he tried to divide his attention between writing poetry and being a Lord. So I say that from our yeomanry frequently spring the boys whose rare old rural memories float in upon and chasten and refine their after-lives even when fame comes, and fills them full of themselves and swells their aching heads as they swoop gayly across the country in a special ear.

I do not go so far as some of the friends of Shakespeare, and say that while he was a lovely character and a great actor, that Bacon was a ham. I do not say that, for Bacon had his good points.

The thing that has done more to injure Shakespeare in the eyes of the historian than aught else, perhaps, was his seeming neglect of his wife. But we should consider both sides of the question before we pass judgment. The Hathaways were queer people, and Anne was unusually so. Her father snubbed her in his will just as her husband did, which shows that Mrs. Shakespeare was not highly esteemed even by her parents. The brief notice which Anne received in these two wills means a good deal, for there is nothing quite so thoroughly unanswerable as a probate snub.

Shakespeare in his own will gave to his wife his second-best bed, and that was all. When we remember that it was a bed that sagged in the middle, and that it operated by means of a bed-cord which had to be tightened and tuned up twice a week, and that the auger-holes in the bedstead seemed ever to mutely appeal for more powder from Persia's great powder magazine, we will be forced to admit that William did not passionately love his wife.

I know that Shakespeare has been severely criticised by the press for leaving his family at Stratford while he himself lived in London, only visiting home occasionally; but I am convinced that he found they could live cheaper in that way. Help in the house was very high at that time in London, and the intelligence offices were doing a very large business without giving very much intelligence. Friends of his told him that it was not only impossible to get enough help in the homes of London, but that there was hardly enough servants to prevent a panic in the Employment Bureaus. Seven, offices were in fact compelled to shut down for a half day at a time, one using the limited stock in the forenoon and the other in the afternoon.

Shakespeare was a perfect gentleman, having been made so by the Herald's College, which invested his father with coat armor. This coat armor made a gentleman of the elder Shakespeare, and as William's mother was already a gentleman under the code, William became one also both on his father's and on his mother's side. Of course all this is mere detail and is dull and uninteresting; but I refer to it to show that those who have read things in Shakespeare's works that they did not like, and who, therefore, say that he was no gentleman, do the great Bard an injustice.

I think I like Shakespeare's expurgated poems best, and I often wish that he had confined himself entirely to that kind. If I had a son who seemed to lean toward poesy and felt like twanging his lyre now and then, I would advise him to write expurgated poems exclusively.

I do not say that Shakespeare was the author of his own works, and it would not look well in me to set up my opinion in opposition to that of scholars, experts and savants who have had more advantages than I have, for I would never take advantage of any one; but I say that somehow the impression has crept into the papers that he was a pretty good little play-writer, and I am glad that Mr. Childs has had a testimonial made and sent over to England that will show an appreciation, at least, of his ability to keep before the people.

It will be noticed by the alert and keen-scented littérateur that I have carefully avoided treading on the tail of Mr. Donnelly's cipher. Being rather a poor mathematician anyway, I will not introduce the cipher at this time, but I will say that although the whole thing happened about three hundred years ago, and has now nearly passed out of my mind, to the best of my recollection Shakespeare, though he was the son of a buckwheater, and though he married his wife with a poetic license, and though he left his family at Stratford rather than take them to live in a London flat, wrote the most of his plays with the assistance of an expurgator who was out of the city most all of the time.

I cannot show Shakespeare's ready wit better at this time than by telling of his first appearance on the stage as I remember it. He came quietly before the footlights with a roll of carpet under one arm and a tack hammer under the other. In those days it was customtomary to nail down stage carpets, and while doing so "Shake," as we all called him then, knocked the nail off his left thumb, whereupon he received an ovation from the audience. Some men would have been rattled and would have "called up," as we say, but Shakespeare was always ready to please his friends or respond to an encore; so putting his right thumb up against a large painted rock in a mountain scene, he obliged by knocking off the other thumb-nail.

Shakespeare wrote the poem called "Venus and Adonis," during the absence of his expurgator, and sent it to the editor of the Stratford Appeal, who deadheaded the paper to him for a year and told him that he wished he would write up any other gossip that might come to his knowledge in that part of the country, especially if it promised to be spicy.

Shakespeare was one of the few Englishmen who never visited this country for two weeks, for the purpose of writing an eight pound book on his impressions of America.




CHESTNUT-BURR II – HOW THE GLORIOUS FOURTH WAS CELEBRATED AT WHALEN'S GROVE LAST YEAR






There were patriotic remarks and greased-pig exercises at Whalen's Grove last year on the Fourth, all of which, according to the Sandy Mush Record-Statesman, passed off with marked success. From the opening prayer to the base-ball contest and greased-pole doings, everything was harmonious, and the receipts were satisfactory. Col. L. Forsyth Heeley acted as marshal of the day, wearing a maroon sash, and mounted on his well-known horse, Mambrino King. A serious accident in the early morning was happily averted by Col. Heeley's coolness and self-possession. A lady from Lower Hominy, whose name could not be ascertained, while actively engaged in listening to the band, and holding her young child so that it could get a good view of the sun, became entangled in her train, which had worked around in front, and while recovering herself Col. L. Forsyth Heeley came down the street in advance of the fire laddies. The horse was rearing high in the air, and going sideways with a squeaking sound, which seemed to be caused by the friction between his second and third stomach. His mouth was wide open, and his fiery-red gums could be seen as far as the eye could reach. Almost every one thought there would be a holocaust; but at that trying instant, as if by magic, Col. Heeley decided to go down the other street.

Our fire ladies made a fine appearance, in their new, hot uniforms, and were not full during the parade, as was stated by the Hickory township World.

Everybody seemed to feel an interest in patriotism, with the exception of an old party from a distance, who opened the exercises by cutting a large watermelon and distributing it with a lavish hand among himself. He then went to sleep in the corner of a fence, where he would have been greatly pestered by flies if he had found out about it in time.

After a pleasant and courteous prayer by rev. Mr. Meeks, in which he laid before the Lord a national policy which he felt certain would make a great hit, our Glee Club sang

Oh, say can you see, etc.

Judge Larraby read the Declaration of Independence in a rich dark red voice, and a self-made man from Hickory township delivered the following impromptu address, the manuscript of which he kindly furnished to the Record-Statesman:

"Fellow Citizens: This is the anniversary of the day when freedom towards all and malice towards none first got a foothold in this country. And we are now to celebrate that day. I say that on that day Tireny and uzurpation got a set-back that they will never recover from. We then paved the way for the poor, oppressed foreigner, so that he could come to our shores and take liberties with our form of government. To be a foreigner here in America to-day is one of the sweetest boons. If I could be just what I would like to be, I would be an oppressed foreigner, landing on pur shores, free from the taxation and responsibility of government, with no social demands made on me, with nothing in my possession but a hearty Godspeed from both political parties, and a strong yearning for freedom. Oh, why was I not born an alien, that both parties wouldn't dast to reproach; an alien that can come here and find a government already established, with no flies on to it; a government of the people, by the people and for the people? (Fire-crackers and applause.)

"On the day that Button Gwinnett put his name to the statement that all men was created more or less equal, the spot on which we now stand was a howling wilderness. Where yonder lemonade-stand now stands and realizes a clean profit of forty-seven dollars and thirty-five cents on an investment of six dollars and fifty cents, the rank thistle nodded in the wynd, and the wild fox dag his hole unscared. If you do not believe this I refer you to the principal of our public school, who is to-day assisting in the band, and who is now in the act of up-ending his alto horn to pour out about a teacupful of liquid melody that he had left over from the last tune.

"And why is this? Why are we to-day a free people, with a surplus in the treasury that nobody can get at? (Loud applause and squeal from a grass-fed horse tied to a tree who is being kicked by a red two-year-old, owned by the Pathmaster of Road District 3.)

"Why are our resources so great that they almost equal our liabilities? Why is everything done to make it pleasant for the rich man and every inducement held ont for the poor man to accumulate more and more poverty? Why is it that so much is said about the tariff by men who do not support their families? Why is it that when we vote for a president of the United States, we have to take our choice between a statesmanlike candidate with great ability and proclivities for grand larceny – why is it that we are given our choice between this kind of a man and what Virgil refers to in his 'Childe Harold' as a chump? (Cheers and cries of 'That's so' from a man who is riveted to the spot by means of a new pitch-plank on which he is sitting and which will not permit him to move out of the sun.)

"One hundred years ago the tastes of our people were simple. Now it takes so much simplicity to keep Congress going that the people don't get a chance at it. A century ago common, home-made rum was the only relaxation known to a plain but abstemious people. Now it takes a man with a mighty good memory to recall the names of some of the things he has drunk when his wife asks him about it on the following morning. I claim to have a good memory of names and things generally, but if you want to get me mixed up and have fun with me, you can do it that way.

"But, fellow-citizens, how can we best preserve the blessing of freedom and fork it over unimpaired to our children? How can we enchance the blood-bought right, which is inherent in every human being, of the people, for the people and by the people, where tyrant foot hath never trod nor bigot forged a chain, for to look back from our country's glorious natal day or forward to a glorious, a happy and a prosperous future with regard to purity of the ballot and free speech. I say for one we cannot do otherwise. (Prolonged applause.)

"I would rather have my right hand cleave to the roof of my mouth than to utter a sentiment that I would regret; but I say that as a people, as a nation or as an inalienable right which no man can gainsay or successfully controvert, not for political purposes, and yet I am often led to inquire whither are we drifting, not only as a people and as a nation, but as a country and as a joint school district, No. 6, where we now stand, and when we are paying a school teacher this summer twenty-two dollars a month to teach the children, little prattling children, during the hot summer weather, how many feet of intestines there are in the human body and what is best to do for it? Last winter we paid thirty-four dollars per month to a man who opened the school with prayer and then made a picture of the digestive organs on the blackboard. And still we wonder that politics is corrupt.

"I tell you that the seeds of vice and wickedness is often sowed at school in the minds of the young by teachers who are paid a large salary to do far different. What do you think of a man who would open a school with prayer and then converse freely about the alimentary canal? Such a man would lead a life of the deepest infamy if he had the least encouragement.

"So I say, fellow-citizens, that we must guard against the influences of the public schools as a nation, for the people, of the people, and by the people. Education is often a blessing in disguise, but we should not pry into things that the finite mind has no business with. How much was Galileo ahead in the long run for going out of his sphere? He was boycotted from morning till night and died poor. Look at Demosthenes. Look at Diogenes. They pried into science, and both of them was poor providers and have since died. Of course their names are frequently used in debating schools, and some claim that this is big pay for what they went through; but I say give me a high-stepping horse, the bright smile of dear ones who are not related to me in any way, the approval of the admiring throng, a large woolly dog that will do as I tell him, a modest little home and unlimited credit at the store, and I do not care how much B. will have to use off from the diameter of a given grindstone, for which he paid an undivided one-fifteenth.

"I know that this is regarded as a queer doctrine by what is called our more Advanced Thinkers but I say let every man who pants for fame select his own style of pant and go ahead. I bid him a most hearty godspeed and hope he will do well.

"But what makes me mad is for a man to come to me and dictate what I shall pant for. This is called intolerance by people who can afford to use words of that size. Intolerance is a thing that makes me tired. Whether it's religious, political or social intolerance, I dislike it very much. People that think I will enjoy voting for a yaller dog that had been picked out for me, or that I will be tickled to death to indorse the religious dogmas of an effete monicky with my eyes shot, don't know me. I say, let every man rely solely on his own thinker, and damned be he who first cries hold, enough! I am not a profane man, but I quote from a poem in using the above quotation.

"But again. In closing, let me say that we owe it to our common country to be peaceable citizens and pay our taxes without murmuring. The time to get in our fine work is on the valuation, and it is too late to kick after that. Let us cultivate a spirit of lofty patriotism, but believe nothing just to oblige others. I used to be a great believer in anything that was submitted for my approval. That was what kept me back. Now, if a man like Jay Gould says he is not feeling so well as he did, I make him show me his tongue.

"We are here to-day to celebrate the birthday of American freedom, as I understand it, and I am here to say that whatever may be said against our refinement and our pork, our style of freedom is sought for everywhere. It is a freedom that will stand any climate and I hear it very highly spoken of wherever I go.

"I am here to state that, as boy and man, I have been a constant user of American freedom for over fifty years, and I can truly say that I feel no desire to turn back; also that there will be a grand, free-for-all scuffle for a greased pig on the vacant lot south of the church at seven o'clock, after which fireworks will be served to those who desire to remain."

And thus did the Fourth of July pass with all its glories in Whalen's Grove in the year of our independence the 110th.




ENCOURAGING GREEN JOKES


I want to encourage green jokes, that have never trotted in harness before, and, besides, I must insist on using my scanty fund of laugh on jokes of the nineteenth century. I have got to draw the line somewhere.




CHESTNUT-BURR III – BILL NYE FINDS COLOROW FULL OF ODD TRAITS






The recent ruction on the part of William H. Colorow, Duke of Rawhide Buttes and heir presumptive to the throne of Yellow Jacket Park, brings the Indian once more to our notice and teaches us that eternal vigilance is the price of government land on the frontier.

Sig. Colorow is of Indian parentage and his lineage, such as it is, is very long. His ancestors run back as far as the earliest dawn of the Christian era. They claimed the land extending in a southerly direction from the North Pole, and seemed to ignore the fact that it had been sold for taxes. The Indian has always been in favor of representation without taxation, and Colorow has believed in a community of grub, allowing the white man to retain a controlling interest in common, wet-browed toil. He has always been willing to divide his bread with the pale face. He has offered, time and again, to give the white man the bread that was sweetened with honest sweat, while he took his plain. He says that to prefer bread that tastes of perspiration shows a depraved taste.

Colorow has for years been a terror to the people of northwestern Colorado, eastern Utah and southern Wyoming. Every spring it used to be his custom to stroll into North Park and prospect for prospectors. Once he came to call on me. He had been there longer than I had and so, of course, it was nothing more than etiquette that he should call on me.

He seemed to enjoy his call very much. I could not think of anything to say, though generally I am of a bright and happy disposition. After I had asked him how his mother was, I could not think of anything else to interest him. Finally I thought of Capt. John Smith and how he amused a hostile band by showing them his compass and new suspenders. I had no compass, but I had a new watch which I carried in a buckskin watch-pocket, and I thought I would show him the sweep-second and fly-back and let him see the wheels go round.

When Colorow is captured, if the United States of America has no use for that watch, I would be glad to have it returned to me at No. 32, Park Row, New York.

Colorow is a man of few words. I will never forget what he said to me when he went away. He held up two fingers and said in a voice that did not seem to waver:

"Meboe so, two sleeps more, you get out."

I sometimes think that when a man says very little we are more apt to take an interest in what he says. It was so in his case. I got to thinking over his remark after he had gone and I decided to accept of his generous offer.

He had given me two sleeps; but I do not require much sleep anyway, and when I got to thinking about Colorow and his restless manner while he was my ghost I could not sleep so well as I had formerly, and so I have been doing the most of my sleeping since that in a more thickly settled country. I remember I was so restless that last night that I walked feverishly about. I walked feverishly about twenty-five miles, I judge, in a northerly direction.

I left a small but growing mine there at that time in charge of the Utes, and I hope they used it judiciously.

The Ute nation is divided into two sections – viz., the Southern Utes, who have been pretty generally friendly, and the Northern or White River Utes, who break out into fits of emotional insanity whenever their ponies got their bellies full of grass.

My policy – one which, I regret to say, has never been adopted by the government – is to hire a sufficient number of armed herders to take the entire grand remnant sale of Indian tribes out on the plains and watch them all summer, rounding them up and counting them every morning and evening to see that they are all there. Through the day they might be kept busy pulling up the "pizen-weed" which grows all over the grazing grounds of the West, and thus they would get plenty of fresh air and at the same time do good in a modest way. But this scheme for "Utelizing" the Utes is a hundred years ahead of the age, and so I do not expect that it will meet with the indorsement of a sluggish administration.

There are, however, two sides to the Indian question, viz., a right and a wrong side. That is why the Indian question wears so well.

One of the great wrongs incident to the matter is the great delay in officially reaching the War Department in such a way as to attract the eye of the speaker. By the time a courier can get in to a telegraph station and wire the governor of a state, who notifies the Adjutant-General to write a dictated letter with his trenchent typewriter, apprising the commander of the department, who is at Coney Island or Carlsbad, with no typewriter nearer than fifteen miles, who wires the governor to make active inquiries about the matter, and by the time the governor has sent a committee, who go to within fifty miles of the scene of hostilities, and return at the end of six weeks to report that they do not know whether there has been an outbreak or not, and then when a ranchman is really killed, and reputable eye-witnesses, who were personally acquainted with deceased, and will swear that they have no interest in the result of the outbreak, come in and make a written and grammatical request for troops, and the War Department gets thoroughly rested, the Indians have gone home, washed the gore off their hands, and resumed their quiet humdrum life. Like trying to treat a man in Liverpool for softening of the brain by applying the mind cure per cable from New York, the remedy is too remote from the disease.

Indians are quick and impulsive in the matter of homicide. They are slow to grapple with anything of a humorous nature, and all the humorous lecturers who have been on the Ute lecture course have lost money, but in the holocaust line, or general arson, torture and massacre business, they act with astonishing rapidity. As a race, they regard this entire land as their own, just as the mosquitoes claim New Jersey, simply because they were there first.

The Indians see that the property is improving, and so they feel more and more wealthy and arrogant. They claim that they will never give up their rights unless they get hard up, and even then it will not count. They always have a mental reservation in these matters, which they prefer to the reservation provided by the government.

Indians naturally dislike to see these lands in the possession of wealthy men whose sons earn a precarious livelihood by playing lawn tennis.

Colorow once made a short speech to his troops, which was taken down at the time by a gentleman who was present and who was collecting material for a new third reader for our common schools.

Colorow claimed that it was incorrect, and the notes were found afterward on the stenographer's body. It is about as ticklish business to report an Indian speech as it is to poultice a boil on the person of the Ameer of Cabul.

In closing Colorow said: "Warriors, our sun is set. We are most of us out on third base, and we have no influence with the umpire.

"Once I could stand on the high ground and one shout would fill the forest with warriors. Now the wailing wind catches up my cry and bears it away like the echo of our former greatness, and I hear a low voice murmur, 'Rats.'

"Whisky and refinement have filled our land with sorrow. The white man crossed the dark waters in his large canoe and filled the forest with churches and railroad accidents.

"The Indian loves not to make money and own aldermen for which he has no use. He loves his wives and his children and intrusts them with the responsibility of doing all his work. The white man comes to us with honeyed words and says if we will divide our lands with him he will give us a present; and when we give him a county and a half he gives us a red collar-button and a blue book, in which he has written in his strange and silent language, 'When this you see, remember me.' Our warriors are weak and have the hearts of women. They care not for the war-path or the chase. Most of them want to go on the stage. Once my warriors went with me at a moment's warning to clean out the foe. They slept in the swamps with the rattlesnakes at night and fought like wolves in the daytime. Now my warriors will not go on the warpath without a valise, and some of them want to carry their dinner.

"Some day, like the fall of a mighty oak in the forest, Colorow will fall to the earth and he will rise no more. You will be scattered to the four winds of heaven, and you will go no more to battle. Some of you will starve to death, while others will go to New York and wear a long linen duster, with the price of cut-rate tickets down the back. Some of you will die with snakes in your moccasins, and others will go to Jerusalem to help rob the Dead wood coach.

"Warriors, I thank you for your kind attention and appreciation. The regular outbreak will begin to-morrow evening at early candle-light. The massacre will open with a song and dance."

Colorow dresses plainly in a coat of paint and a gun.




AWKWARDNESS OF CARRYING WHISKY ABOUT


Whisky is more bulky and annoying to carry about, in the coat-tail pocket than a plug of tobacco; but there have been cases where it was successfully done. I was shown yesterday a little corner that would hold six or eight bushels. It was in the wash-room of a hotel, and was about half full. So were the men who came there, for before night the entire place was filled with empty whisky bottles of every size, shape and smell.




THE RIGHT SORT OF BOY


I am always sorry to see a youth get irritated and pack up his clothes in the heat of debate, and leave the home nest. His future is a little doubtful, and it is hard to prognosticate whether he will fracture limestone for the streets of a great city, or become President of the United States; but there is a beautiful and luminous life ahead of him in comparison with that of the boy who obstinately refuses to leave the home nest. The boy who cannot summon the moral courage some day to uncoil the tendrils of his heart from the clustering idols of the household, to grapple with outrageous fortune, ought to be taken by the ear and led away out into the great untried realm of space.




CHESTNUT-BURR IV – BILL NYE PAYS A BRIEF VISIT TO A PROFESSIONAL STAR READER






Ring the bell and the door will open," is the remark made by a small label over a bell handle in Third avenue, near Eighteenth street, where Mme. La Foy reads the past, present and future at so much per read. Love, marriage, divorce, business, speculation and sickness are there handled with the utmost impunity by "Mme. La Foy, the famous scientific astrologist," who has monkeyed with the planets for twenty years, and if she wanted any information has "read it in the stars." I rang the bell the other day to see if the door would open. It did so after considerable delay, and a pimply boy in knee pants showed me upstairs into the waiting room. After a while I was removed to the consultation room, where Mme. La Foy, seated behind a small oilcloth-covered table, rakes up old personalities and pries into the future at cut rates.

Skirmishing about among the planets for twenty years involves a great deal of fatigue and exposure, to say nothing of the night work, and so Mme. La Foy has the air of one who has put in a very busy life. She is as familiar with planets, though, as you or I might be with our own family, and calls them by their first names. She would know Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, Adonis or any of the other fixed stars the darkest night that ever blew.

"Mme. La Foy De Graw," said I, bowing with the easy grace of a gentleman of the old school, "would you mind peering into the future for me about a half dollar's worth, not necessarily for publication, et cetera."

"Certainly not. What would you like to know?"

"Why, I want to know all I can for the money,"

I said, in a bantering tone. "Of course I do not wish to know what I already know. It is what I do not know now that I desire to know. Tell me what I do not know, Madam. I will detain you but a moment."

She gave me back my large, round half dollar and told me that she was already weary. She asked me to excuse her. She was willing to unveil the future to me in her poor, weak way, but she could not guarantee to let a large flood of light into the darkened basement of a benighted mind for half a dollar.

"You can tell me what year and on what day of what month you were born," said Mme. La Foy, "and I will outline your life to you. I generally require a lock of the hair, but in your case we will dispense with it."

I told her when I was born and the circumstances, as well as I could recall them.

"This brings you under Venus, Mercury and Mars. These three planets were in conjunction at the time of your birth. You were born when the sign was wrong, and you have had more or less trouble ever since. Had you been born when the sign was in the head or the heart, instead of the feet, you would not have spread out over the ground so much.

"Your health is very good, as is the health of those generally who are born under the same auspices that you were. People who are born under the reign of the crab are apt to be cancerous. You, however, have great lung power and wonderful gastric possibilities. Yet, at times, you would be very easily upset. A strong cyclone that would unroof a courthouse or tip over a through train would also upset you, in spite of your broad firm feet, if the wind got behind one of your ears.

"You will be married early and you will be very happy, though your wife will not enjoy herself very much. Your wife will be much happier during her second marriage.

"You will prosper better in business matters without forming any partnerships. Do not go into partnership with a small, dark man, who has neuralgia and a fine yacht. He has abundant means, but he will go through you like an electric shock.

"Tuesdays and Saturdays will be your most fortunate days on which to borrow money of men with light hair. Mondays and Thursdays will be your best days for approaching dark men.

"Look out for a low-sot man accompanied by an office cat, both of whom are engaged in the newspaper business. He is crafty and bald-headed on his father's side. He prints the only paper that contains the full text of his speeches at testimonials and dinners given to other people. Do not loan him money on any account.

"You would succeed well as a musician or an inventor, but you would not do well as a poet. You have all the keen sensibility and strong passion of a poet, but you haven't the hair. Do not try poesy.

"In the future I see you very prosperous You are on the lecture platform speaking. Large crowds of people are jostling each other at the box-office and trying to get their money back.

"Then I see you riding behind a flexible horse that must have cost a large sum of money. You are smoking a cigar that has never been in use before. Then Venus bisects the orbit of Mars, and I see you going home with your head tied up in the lap-robe, you and your spirited horse in the same ambulance."

"But do you see anything for me in the future, Mme. La Foy?" I asked, taking my feet off the table, the better to watch her features; "anything that would seem to indicate political preferment, a reward for past services to my country, as it were?"

"No, not clearly. But wait a moment. Your horoscope begins to get a little more intelligent. I see you at the door of the Senate Chamber. You are counting over your money and looking sadly at a schedule of prices. Then you turn sorrowfully away, and decide to buy a seat in the House instead. Many years after I see you in the Senate. You are there day after day attending to your duties. You are there early, before any one else, and I see you pacing back and forth, up and down the aisles, sweeping out the Senate Chamber and dusting off the seats and rejuvenating the cuspidors."

"Does this horoscope which you are using this season give you any idea as to whether money matters will be scarce with me next week or otherwise, and if so, what I had better do about it?"

"Towards the last of the week you will experience considerable monetary prostration; but just as you have become despondent, at the very tail end of the week, the horizon will clear up and a slight, dark gentleman, with wide trousers, who is a total stranger to you, will loan you quite a sum of money, with the understanding that it is to be repaid on Monday."

"Then you would not advise me to go to Coney Island until the week after next?"

"Certainly not."

"Would it be etiquette in dancing a quadrille to swing a young person of the opposite sex twice round at a select party when you are but slightly acquainted, but feel quite confident that her partner is unarmed?"

"Yes."

"Does your horoscope tell a person what to do with raspberry jelly that will not jell?"

"No, not at the present prices."

"So you predict an early marriage, with threatening weather and strong prevailing easterly winds along the Gulf States?"

"Yes, sir."

"And is there no way that this early marriage may be evaded?"

"No, not unless you put it off till later in life."

"Thank you," I said, rising and looking out the window over a broad sweep of undulating alley and wind-swept roofing; "and now, how much are you out on this?"

"Sir!"

"What's the damage?"

"Oh, one dollar."

"But don't you advertise to read the past, present and future for fifty cents?"

"Well, that is where a person has had other information before in his life and has some knowledge to begin with; but where I fill up a vacant mind entirely, and store it with facts of all kinds, and stock it up so that it can do business for itself, I charge a dollar. I cannot thoroughly relit and refurnish a mental tenement from the ground up for fifty cents."

I do not think we have as good "Astrologists" now as we used to have. Astrologists cannot crawl under the tent and pry into the future as they could three or four thousand years ago.




INGRATITUDE OF THE HUMAN HEART


When I was a child I was different from other boys in many respects. I was always looking about to see what good I could do. I am that way yet. If my little brother wanted to go in swimming contrary to orders, I was not strong enough to prevent him, but I would go in with him and save him from a watery grave. I went in the water thousands of times that way, and as a result he is alive to-day. But he is ungrateful. He hardly ever mentions it now, but he remembers the Gordian knots that I tied in his shirts. He speaks of them frequently.




CHESTNUT-BURR V – CONCERNING THE FRENCH MASTERPIECES AT THE ACADEMY OF DESIGN





Taking The World artist with me in order to know fully what I was talking about, I visited the Academy of Design a day or two ago for the purpose of witnessing some of the pictures from Paris which are now on exhibition there. Many of these pictures are large and beautiful, while others are small and ornery. At the head of the stairs is a smallish picture, with a good, heavy frame and greenish foreground. It is not on the catalogue, so I will try to describe it briefly. About half way between the foreground and middle distance there is a cream-colored perspective, while above this there is a rag-carpet sky, with lumps on it.

"And is there no way of removing these large lumps of paint, so as to give the picture an even appearance?" I asked Mr. McDougall.

"Oh, no; they don't want to do that," he said; "that is the impasto method of putting on the colors, which brings out the salient features of the painting."

So this imposture method, it seems, is really gaining ground, and this picture, with the soldier-overcoat sky and green chenille grass and gargetty distance, would no doubt be worth in Paris thirteen or fourteen dollars.

No. 84 is a picture by Charles Durand, entitled "A Country Woman in Champagne." I was bitterly disappointed in this picture, for though the woman seems to be in good spirits the artist has utterly failed to grapple fully with his subject, and without the catalogue in his hand I would defy the most brilliant connoisseur to say definitely whether or not she is under the influence of liquor.

We next walk around to No. 168, a picture by Camille Pissaro.

M. Pissaro has ten pictures in the Academy, but this one is the best. It is made by the squirt system of painting, graining and kalsomining, which is now becoming so a la mode and rouge et noir. The artist tells me that the colors are carefully arranged in a tin pail and applied to the canvas by means of a squirt gun or Rembrandt stomach pump. This gives the painting a beautiful yet dappled appearance, which could not be obtained with a brush.

This picture is worth three dollars of any man's money for the frame is worth two dollars, and there is at least a dollar's worth of paint on the picture that is just as good as ever. The artist has handled the feet in a masterly manner, bringing them out so that they hang over the frame like a thing of life. If I could paint feet as M. Pissaro does I would not spend my life striping buggies in a close room among coarse men with putty on their pantaloons, but I would burst forth from my humble surroundings, and I would attract the attention of the whole great world of art with my massive and heroic feet. Then from this I would gradually get so that I could make pictures that would resemble people. There is no reason why M. Pissaro should not do well in that way, for he has painted No. 171, "A woman at a Well," in which the most unkempt and uncultivated peasant can at once distinguish which is the woman and which is the well. He is also the author of "Spring," a squirt study with a blue rash, which has broken out where the sky ought to be.

No. 136 is the "Execution of Maximilian," by Edouard Manet, a foreign artist. The scene is laid at the base of an old Mexican slaughter-house. In the foreground may be seen the rear of the Mexican army with its wealth of tournure and cute little gored panties. All Mexican troops have their trousers gored at the hips. Sometimes they also have them gored at the bull-fights which take place there. In the contiguous distance Maximilian maybe seen, wearing the hat which has evidently infuriated the Mexican populace. The artist says that Maximilian objects to being shot, but I pretend not to hear him, and he repeats the remark, so I have to say "Very good, very good," and then we pass on to No. 60, which is entitled "Dreams," by Prévis de Chavannes.

In this picture a weary man, who has worn himself out sleeping in haystacks and trying to solve the labor problem, so that the great curse of industry may be wiped out and the wealthy man made to pay the taxes while the poor man assists in sharing the burden of dividends, is lying on the ground with a pleasant smile on his face. He is asleep, with his mouth slightly ajar, showing how his teeth are fastened in their places. He is smiling in his slumber, and there is hay in his whiskers. Three decalcomanie angels are seen fastened to the sky in the form of a tableau. One is scattering cookies in his pathway, while the second has a laurel wreath which is offered at a great reduction, as the owner is about to leave the city for the summer. These are the new style of wingless angels recently introduced into art and now becoming very popular.

M. Chavannes is also the mechanic who constructed a picture numbered 61 and called the "Poor Fisherman." The history of this little picture is full of pathos. The scene is laid in Newark Bay, N. J. A poor fisherman and his children go out to spend the day, taking their lunch with them.

"O papa, let us take two or three cucumbers with our lunch," says one of the children, in glee.

"Very well, my child," exclaims the father, with ill-concealed delight, "Go down to the market and get one for each of us."

The artist has chosen to make his study of the fisherman a short time after lunch. The father is engaged in regretting something which it is now too late to recall. Cholera infantum has overtaken the younger child and the other is gathering lobelia for her father. The picture is wonderful in its conception ana execution. One can see that he is a poor fisherman, for he has not caught any fish, and the great agony he feels is depicted in his face and the altitude of his hair. The picture might have been called a battle piece or a French interior, with equal propriety.

Manet has several bright and cheery bits of color, among them No. 147, "Spring at Giverny," which might be called Fourth of July in a Roman candle factory without misleading the thoughtful art-student.

No. 150, "Meadows at Giverny," by the same man, is a study in connecting the foreground and background of an oil painting by means of purple hay and dark-blue bunches of boneset in such a way as to deceive the eye.

I have always bitterly regretted that while I was abroad I did not go to Giverny and see the purple hay and navy-blue tansy and water cress which grow there in such great abundance. How often we go hurrying through a country, seeing the old and well-worn features shown us by the professional guides and tourists, forgetting or overlooking more important matters, like a scene in France, No. 142, entitled "Women Bathing." I presume I was within three-quarters of a mile of this view and yet came home without knowing anything about it.

No. 123, "Diana Surprised," is no doubt the best picture in the whole collection. The tall and beautiful figure of Diana in the middle distance in the act of being surprised, is well calculated to appeal to any one with a tender heart or a few extra clothes. Diana has just been in swimming with her entire corps de ballet, and on coming out of the water is surprised to find that someone has stolen her clothes. The artist has very happily caught the attitude and expression at the moment when she is about to offer a reward for them. The picture is so true to life that I instinctively stammered "Excuse me," and got behind the artist who was with me. The figures are life size and the attitudes are easy and graceful in the extreme. One very beautiful young woman in the middle foreground, about seven and one-half inches north of the frame of the picture, with her back to the spectator, crouches at Diana's feet. She has done her beautiful and abundant hair up in a graceful coil at the back of her head, but has gone no further with her toilet when the surprise takes place. The idea is lofty and the treatment beneficial. I do not know that I am using these terms as I should, but I am doing the best I can.

We often hear our friends regret that their portraits, dressed in clothing that has long since become obsolete, are still in existence, and though the features are correctly reproduced, the costume is now so ridiculous as to impair the de trop of the picture and mar its aplomb.

Jules Lefebvre has overcome this great obstacle in a marvelous manner, and gives us Diana and her entire staff surrounded by an atmosphere that time cannot cloud with contumely or obscure with ridicule. Had the artist seen fit to paint Diana wearing a Garibaldi waist and very full skirt with large hoops, and her hair wrapped around two or three large "rats," he might have been true to the customs and costumes of a certain period in the history of art, but it would not have stood the test of time. As it is he has wisely chosen to throw about her a certain air of hauteur which will look just as well in a hundred years as it does now.

The picture has a massive frame and would brighten up one end of a dining-room very much. I was deeply mortified and disappointed to learn that it was not for sale. Actéon is the party who surprised Diana.




CHESTNUT-BURR VI – BILL NYE DIAGNOSTICATES THE PLAINT OF A COUNTRY COUSIN






I hold that I violate no particular amount of confidence when I lay the following private letter before the heated public:

Shirley-on-the-Piscataquis River,

State of Maine, June 20, 1887.

Mr. William Nye, World Office, New York.

Sir: I have been a reader of The World for some time and have frequently noticed the alacrity with which you have come forward and explained things through its columns. You must be indeed a kind-hearted man, or you would not try to throw light on things just to oblige other people, when you do not, as a matter of fact, know what you are talking about. Few men would so far forget their own comfort as to do this in order to please others. Most men are selfish and hang back when asked a difficult question, preferring to wait till they know how to answer it; but you, sir, you seem to be so free always to come forward and explain things, and yet are so buoyant and hopeful that you will escape the authorities, that I have ventured to write you in regard to a matter that I feel somewhat of an interest in. It is now getting along into the shank of the summer and people from the great cities of our land are beginning to care less and less for the allurements of sewer gas, and to sigh for a home in the country and to hanker for the "spare room" in a quiet neighborhood at $2 a week with board.

I have seen a great many rules of etiquette for the guidance of country people who go to the city, but I have never run up against a large, blue-book telling city people how to conduct themselves as to avoid adverse criticism while in the country. Every little while some person writes a piece regarding the queer pranks of a countryman in town and acts it out on the stage and makes a whole pile of money on it, but we do not seem to get the other side of this matter at all. What I desire is that you will give us a few hints in regard to the conduct of city people who visit in the rural districts during the heated term. I am not a professional summer-resort tender or anything of that kind, but I am a plain man, that works and slaves in the lumber woods all winter and then blows it in, if you will allow the term, on some New York friends of my wife's who come down, as they state, for the purpose of relaxation, but really to spread themselves out over our new white coverlids with their clothes on, and murmur in a dreamy voice: "Oh, how restful!"

They also kick because we have no elevated trains that will take them down to the depot, whereas I am not able and cannot get enough ahead or forehanded sufficiently to do so, as heaven is my judge.

They bring with them a small son, who is a pale, emaciated little cuss, with a quiet way of catching my three-year-old heifer by the tail and scaring the life out of her that is far beyond his years. His mother thinks he will not live, mayhap, to grow up, and I hope she may not be disappointed. Still he has a good appetite, and one day last summer, besides his meals, he ate:

One pocketful green apples (pippins),
One pocketful green apples (Ben Davis),
Three large steins rhubarb,
One hatful green gooseberries,
Two ginger cookies, without holes,
Three ginger cookies, with holes,
One adult cucumber, with salt on same,
One glass new milk,
Two uncooked hen eggs, on half-shell.

I laid off all that day from haying in order to follow the little rascal around with a lead pencil and a piece of paper and see how much he would eat. That evening I thought what a beautiful night he had selected for his death. The moon was slipping in and out through the frothy, fleece-lined clouds, and I could imagine the angels just behind the battlements putting the celestial bric-a-brac high enough up so that Henry couldn't get hold of it when he came. I had a slow horse concealed behind the barn, with which I intended going for the doctor. It was a horse with which I had failed to get the doctor in time on a similar occasion, and I felt that he could be relied on now.

Night settled down on the riproaring Piscataquis and deepened the shadows at the base of Russell Mountain. The spruce gum tree of the Moosehead Lake region laid aside its work for the day and the common warty toad of the Pine Tree State began to overestimate himself and inflate his person with the bugs of the evening, now and then lighting up his interior with a lightning bug. It was a glorious evening that little Henry had selected and set aside for his death. But he was really the only one in our house who slept well that night, and seemed to wake up thoroughly refreshed. He is still alive as I write and is coming down here in July emptier than ever.

Oh, sir, can you help me? Will you print this poor petition of mine, with the tear-stains on it, and your reply to it in The World and send me a copy of the paper that I can show to Henry's father, who is a cousin of my wife's but otherwise has nothing to which he can point with pride? Yours sincerely,

Eben L. Tewey.

P. S. – I have presumed some on your good nature, because I have been told that you was born here. I am sorry to say that Shirley has never overcome this entirely. It has hurt her with other towns in the State, but you can see yourself that there was no way we could provide against it. My wife sends love, and hopes you will print this letter without giving my name, or if so, with a fictitious name, as they call it, and perhaps it will fall into the hands of those people who come down here every summer with nothing in them but sincere friendship and go home full of victuals. I wish you would put into it some way a piece that says I do not regard a Christmas present of a chalk meershum pipe, with a red celluloid stem, as an offset against a summer's board of a family that has more malaria than good manners. Slap that in, in your genial way, so as not to give offense, and whenever you visit your old birthplace, and want to just let go all holts and have a good time, come right to our house. I have lathed and plastered the cook-room and fitted it up as a kind of Inebriates' Home, and I would feel tickled to death to have you come and see what you think of it.


E. L. T

P. S. Again. If you print this letter, Slocum would be a good fictitious name to sign to it, and I would want an extra copy of the paper also.

T.

Reply.

Sir: Will you allow me to say that I think it is such letters as the above that create ill-feeling between the people of the country and the people of the city, and cause the relations to be strained, especially those relations that live in the country. Although you are not altogether in the wrong, Eben, and although country people, who live near to nature's heart, have certain inalienable rights which should be respected, yet there is no work on etiquette which covers the case you allude to.

It would be very difficult for me to write out a code of ethics for the government of your relative while in the country, and from the description you give of him I judge that we could not enforce it anyway without calling out the State troops.

I take him to belong to that class of New York business men who are so active doing nothing every day, that in order to impress people with their importance, they are in the habit of pushing a woman or two off the Brooklyn bridge in their wild struggle to get over into the City Hall park and sit down. I presume that he is that kind of a man here, and so we think you ought to get along with him through July and August if we take him for the rest of the year.

He is the kind that would knock down an old woman in the morning, in his efforts to get the first possible elevated train, and then do nothing else all day but try to recover from the shock. I wouldn't be surprised if he ultimately wrote a book on etiquette, which will inform a countryman how to conduct himself while he is in town. Maybe he is writing it now.

I can imagine, Eben, what sad havoc the son of such a man would create in your quiet Piscataquis home. In my mind's eye I can see him trying to carry out his father's lofty notions of refinement and courtesy. I can see his bright smile as he lands at your door and begins to insert himself into your home life, to breathe resinous air of the piney woods, and to pour kerosene into the sugar bowl, to chase the gaudy decalcomanie butterfly, and put angle worms in the churn.

In this man's book on etiquette he will, doubtless, say that should you have occasion while at table to use a toothpick, you should hold a napkin before your mouth while doing so, in order to avoid giving offense to those who are at table. It is not necessary for you to crawl under the table to pick your teeth, or to go out behind the barn, for by throwing a large napkin over your head you can pick your teeth with impunity though you should not use a fork, as it does not look well and it might put out your eye.

Nothing is more disgusting to a refined mind than to see a man at table holding one of his eyes on a fork and scrutinizing it with the other.

In calling on a lady who is away from home leave your card. If the visit is intended for two or three ladies at the house, leave two or three cards, but do not turn down the corner of the card as that custom is now exploded except in three card monte circles and even then it is regarded with suspicion.

All these things, however, are for the guidance of people who come to town, and those who go into the country are left practically without any suitable book to guide them.

I do not know of any better way for you to do, Eben, than to write a polite note to your relatives asking them if they contemplate paying you a visit this summer, and if so at what time, and whether they will bring Henry or not. Use plain white unruled note paper and write only on one side, unless you are a Mugwump in which case you might write on both sides.

Then if they write that they do so contemplate paying you a visit without paying anything else, I do not know of anything for you to do but to go away somewhere for the summer, leaving your house fully insured and in the hands of a reliable incendiary.

Write again, Eben, and feel perfectly free to come and lean on me in all matters of etiquette. Do not come to town without hunting me up. You will find me at the Post-Office forenoons and in the pest-house during the afternoon. Yours, with kind regards.




MEN ARE OFTEN MISUNDERSTOOD


They may be rough on the exterior but they can love Oh, so earnestly, so warmly, so truly, so deeply, so intensely, so yearningly, so fondly, and so universally!




CHESTNUT-BURR VII – BILL NYE IN THE ROLE OF AN UTE INDIAN JENKINS






The following Ute society gossip is full of interest to those who have personal acquaintances and friends, among that set. I have only just received them, and hasten to give them as early as possible, knowing that the readers of The World will all feel an interest in what is going on in and about the reservation:

The season at White River will be unusually gay this winter, and soon there will be one continuous round of hilarity, indigestion, mirth, colic and social hatred, Red Horse, the smoke-tanned horse-fiddle maestro, will play and call off again this winter for germans, grub dances and jack-rabbit gorges as usual.

The Ouray War Club will give a series of hops in November under its own auspices, and in December it will hold two Germans. In going through these Germans no favors will be shown by the club.

Mr. and Mrs. Mexican-Hairless-Dog-upon-whom-there-are-no-Flies have been spending the summer at their delightful hostile home near White River. They have just returned for the winter, beautifully bronzed by the elements, and report one of the most exhilarating outbreaks they ever were to.

Lop-Ear-Son-of-the-Cyclone received a cablegram last week, on his return from the war-path, offering him a princely salary to come to London, and assist in robbing the Deadwood coach. He says the legitimate drama is certainly making wonderful strides. He has heard the American Opera Company in "Hero," and says that no one who has lived on the reservation all his life can have any idea of the strides that are being made on the stage. He has not decided whether to accept the offer or not, but says that if the stage they are going to rob is the operatic stage he will not assist at any price. He says he knows what it is to suffer for clothes himself.

The members of the Chipeta Canoeing Club have just returned from a summer jaunt, and are in good spirits. They report that a good time was had and health greatly improved. The club will give a sociable and gastric recital at its grounds next week. The proceeds will go toward beautifying the grounds of the club and promoting a general good feeling. Each member is permitted to bring one cash friend.

Tail-Man-Who-Toys with-the-Thunderbolts will start to-morrow for the home of the Great White Father, at Washington. He goes to make a treaty or two and be awed by the surplus in the treasury. He will make as many treaties as possible, after which he will invite the Great White Father to visit our young and growing reservation, enjoy our crude hospitality and cultivate the Ute vote.

A select scalp-dance and rum sociable will take place at the foot of the gulch, at the middle of the present moon, after which there will be a presentation speech and resolutions of respect tendered to the Board of Outbreaks and the Sub-Committee on Hostility.

The following will be the menu:

Reservation soup, strengthened with rain-water; condemned sardines, codfish balls, fish plates, railroad frogs' legs, sage hen à la Colorow, jerked jack-rabbits, roasting ears à la massacre, hot-house clams, rattlesnakes' tongues à la fire-water, prickly pears, fruit of the loom, dried apples and whisky. Dancing will be kept up till a late hour.

The approaching nuptials of Fly-by-Night, a partial widower of Snippeta, daughter of Wipe-Up-the-Ground-with-His-Enemies, will be the occasion of quite a tout ensemble and blow-out. He will marry the surviving members of the family of Warnpo-the-Wailer-that-Wakes-Up-in-the-Night. He will on this occasion lead to the altar Mrs. Wampo-the-Wailer, etc., her two daughters and the hired girl. The wedding will take place at the residence of the bride. Invitations are already out and parties who have not yet received any, but who would like to be present and swap a tin napkin ring for a square meal, will be invited if they will leave their address with the groom.

Crash-of-the-Tempest, a prominent man of the tribe, laid a large tumor on our table last week, weighing four pounds, from which he was removed on Wednesday. So far, this is the largest tumor that has been brought in this summer to apply on subscription. Call again, Crash.

Soiled Charley and Peek-a-Boo, delegates of the Ute notion sent to the Great White Father at Washington, returned yesterday from Red Top, the great tepee of the Pale Chief. They made a great many treaties and both are utterly exhausted. Peek-a-Boo is confined to his wigwam by the hallucination that the air is full of bright red bumble bees with blue tails. He says that he does not mind the hostility of the white man, but it is his hospitality that makes him tired.

A full-dress reception and consommé was tendered to the friends of labor at the home of Past Worthy Chief Fly-up-the-Creek, of White River, by his own neighbors and Uncompaghre admirers on Tuesday evening. At an early hour guests began to arrive and crawl under the tent into the reception-room.

A fine band, consisting of a man who had deserted from the regular military band, played Boulanger's March on the bass drum with deep feeling.

The widow of Wampo-the-Wailer and affianced of old Fly-by-Night, wore a dark coiffure, held in place by the wish-bone of a sage hen, and looked first rate.

Miss Wampo, the elder, wore a négligé costume, consisting of a red California blanket, caught back with real burdock burrs and held in place by means of a hame strap.

The younger Miss Wampo wore a Smyrna rug, with bunch grass at the throat.

Mrs. D. W. Peek-a-Boo wore a cavalry saddle blanket, with Turkish overalls and bone ornaments.

Miss Peek-a-Boo wore a straw-colored jardiniere, cut V-shape, looped back with a russet shawl strap and trimmed with rick-rack around the arm-holes. Her eyes danced with merriment, and she danced with most anybody in the wigwam.

Little Casino, the daughter of Fly-Up-the-Creek, of the Uncompaghres, wore the gable end of an "A" tent, trimmed with red flannel rosettes. It had veneered panels, and the new and extremely swell sleeves, blown up above the elbow and tight the rest of the way, in which, as she said in her naive way, they resembled her father, who was tight half of the time and blown up the rest of the time. Little Casino was the life of the party, and it would be hard to opine of anything more charming than her bright and cheery way of telling a funny story, which convulsed her audience, while she quietly completed a fractional flush and took home the long-delayed jack pot to her needy father. She is an intellectual exotic of which the Uncompaghres may well be proud, and is also one of those rare productions of nature never at a loss for something to write in an autograph album. In the album of a young warrior of the Third Ute Infantry she has written: "In friendship's great fruitage, please regard me as your huckleberry, Little Casino."

Our genial townsman, William H. Colorow, is home again after a prolonged hunting and camping trip, during which he was attacked and cordially shot at by a group of gentlemen who came to serve a writ of replevin on him. Col. Colorow does not know exactly what the writ of replevin is for, unless it be for the purpose of accumulating mileage for the sheriff. Few were killed during the engagement, except a small pappoose belonging to Mr. and Mrs. Roll-on-Silver-Moon, who returned last evening with the remains of their child. A late copy of a New York paper alludes to this as "a furious engagement, after which the Indians carried off their dead according to their custom." Mr. and Mrs. Roll-on-Silver-Moon were warned against taking the baby with them on an extended camping trip, but they seemed to think that it would be perfectly safe, as the child was only seven weeks old, and could not have incurred the hostility of the War Department. This was not improbable at all, for, according to the records, it takes from nine to eleven weeks to officially irritate the War Department. The little one now lies at the wigwam of its afflicted parents, on Cavyo street, and certainly does not look as though it could have stood out so long against the sheriff and his posse.

Mrs. Roll-on-Silver-Moon has a painful bullet wound in the shoulder, but feels so grieved about the loss of little Cholera Infantum that she does not make much fuss over her injury. The funeral of the little one will take place this evening, from its late residence, and friends of the parents are cordially invited to come and participate. Wailing will begin promptly at sundown.

Mr. and Mrs. P. P. C. Shinny-on-Your-Own-Ground are just back from a summer jaunt in the Little Big Horn Mountains, whither they went in search of health. They returned laden with golden rod and a large catch of landlocked grasshoppers. As soon as they get thoroughly rested they will announce a select locust, grasshopper and cricket feed at their home, during which a celebrated band from the Staten Island ferry will oblige with a new selection, known as "The Cricket on the Hearth."

Major Santee, who is now at home repairing the roof of his gothic tepee, which was so damaged by the recent storms that it allowed hail, rain and horned cattle to penetrate his apartments at all times of the day or night, says that in the late great Ute war everybody wanted to fight except the Indians and the War Department. He believes that no Indian outbreak can be regarded as a success without the hearty co-operation and godspeed of the government, and a quorum of Indians who are willing to break out into open hostility. Major Santee lost a niece during the recent encounter. She was not hostile to any one, but was respected by all, and will now cast a gloom. She had no hard feelings toward the sheriff or any one of his posse, and had never met them before. She was very plain in appearance, and this was her first engagement. The sheriff now claims that he thought she was reaching for her gun, whereas it appears that she was making a wild grab for her Indian trail.

Major Santee says that he hopes it will be many a long day before the sheriff organizes another Ute outbreak and compels the Utes to come and bring their families. He lays that human life here is now so cheap? especially the red style of human life, that sometimes he is almost tempted to steal two hundred thousand dollars and go to New York, where he will be safe.




SURE CURE FOR BILIOUSNESS


Whenever I get bilious and need exercise, I go over to the south end of town and vicariously hoe radishes for an hour or two till the pores are open, and I feel that delightful languor and the chastened sense of hunger and honesty which comes to the man who is not afraid to toil.




CHESTNUT-BURR VIII – IN AN UNGUARDED MOMENT BILL NYE IS CAPTURED BY A POLITICAL SIREN






I have only just returned from the new-made grave of a little boomlet of my own. Yesterday I dug a little hole in the back yard and buried in it my little boom, where the pie-plant will cast its cooling shadows over it and the pinch-bug can come and carol above it at eventide.

A few weeks ago a plain man came to me and asked me my name. Refreshing my memory by looking at the mark on my linen, I told him promptly who I was. He said he had resided in New York for a long time and felt the hour had now arrived for politics in this city to be purified. Would I assist him in this great work? If so, would I appoint a trysting place where we could meet and tryst? I suggested the holy hush and quiet of lower Broadway or the New York end of the East River bridge at 6 o'clock; but he said no, we might be discovered. So we agreed to meet at my house. There he told me that his idea was to run me for the State Senate this fall, not because he had any political axe to grind, but because he wanted to see old methods wiped out and the will of the people find true and unfettered expression.

"And, sir," I asked, "what party do you represent?"

"I represent those who wish for purity, those who sigh for the results of unbought suffrages, these who despise old methods and yearn to hear the unsmothered voice of the people."

"Then you are Mr. Vox Populi himself, perhaps?"

"No, my name is Kargill, and I am in dead earnest. I represent the party of purity in New York."

"And why did you not bring the party with you? Then you and I and my wife and this party you speak of could have had a game of whist together," said I with an air of inimitable drollery.

But he seemed to be shocked by my trifling manner, and again asked me to be his standard-bearer. Finally I said reluctantly that I would do so, for I have always said that I would never shrink from my duty in case I should become the victim of political preferment.

In Wyoming I had several times accepted the portfolio of justice of the peace, and so I knew what it was to be called forth by the wild and clamorous appeals of my constituents and asked to stand up for principle, to buckle on the armor of true patriotism and with drawn sword and overdrawn salary to battle for the right.

In running for office in Wyoming our greatest expense and annoyance arose from the immense distances we had to travel in order to go over one county. Many a day I have traveled during an exciting canvass from daylight till dark without meeting a voter. But here was a Senatorial district not larger than a joint school district, and I thought that the expense of making a canvass would be comparatively small.

That was where I made a mistake. On the day after Mr. Lucifer Kargill had entered my home and with honeyed words made me believe that New York had been, figuratively speaking, sitting back on her haunches for fifty years waiting for me to come along and be a standard-bearer, a man came to my house who said he had heard that I was looking toward the Senate, and that he had come to see me as the representative of Irving Hall. I said that I did not care a continental for Irving Hall, so far as my own campaign was concerned, as I intended to do all my speaking in the school-houses.

He said that I did not understand him. What he wanted to know was, what percentage of my gross earnings at Albany would go into the Irving Hall sinking fund, provided that organization indorsed me? I said that I was going into this campaign to purify politics, and that I would do what was right toward Irving Hall, in order to be placed in a position where I could get in my work as a purifier.

We then had a long talk upon what he called the needs of the hour. He said that I would make a good candidate, as I had no past. I was unknown and safe. Besides, he could see that I had the elements of success, for I had never expressed any opinion about anything, and had never antagonized any of the different wings of the party by saying anything that people had paid any attention to. He said also that he learned I had belonged to all the different parties, and so would be familiar with the methods of each. He then asked me to sign a pledge and after I had done so he shook hands with me and went away.

The next day I was waited upon by the treasurers of eleven chowder clubs, the financial secretary of the Shanty Sharpshooters and Goat Hill Volunteers. A man also came to obtain means for burying a dead friend. I afterward saw him doing so to some extent. He was burying his friend beneath the solemn shadow of a heavy mahogany-colored mustache, of which he was the sole proprieter.

I was waited upon by delegations from Tammany, the County Democracy and the Jeffersonian Simplicity Chub. Everybody seemed to have dropped his own business in order to wait upon me, I became pledged to every one on condition that I should be elected. It makes me shudder now to think what I may have signed. I paid forty odd dollars for the privilege of voting for a beautiful child, and thus lost all influence with every other parent in the contest. I voted for the most popular young lady and heard afterward that she regarded me only as a friend. I had a biography and portrait of myself printed in an obscure paper that claimed a large circulation, and the first time the forms went into the press a loose screw fell out on the machinery, caught in the forehead of my portrait and peeled back the scalp so that it dropped over the eye like a prayer rag hanging out of the window.

I had paid a boy three dollars to scatter these papers among the neighbors, but I met him as he came out of the office and made it five dollars if he would put them in the bosom of the moaning tide.

I give below a rough draft of expenses, not including; some of the items referred to above:













Yesterday I tried to find the red-nosed man who first asked me to go into the standard-bearer business, in order to withdraw my name, but I could not find him in the directory. I therefore take this means of saying, as I said to my assignee last evening, that if a public office be a public bust, I might just as well bust now and have it over.





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