Remarks by Bill Nye (page 5)

“O, he said the lottery man knew him and wouldn’t let him throw.”

“Of course. Same old story. He saw you were a greeney and got you to throw for him. He stood in with the game so that you drew a big prize for the capper, created a big excitement, and you and the crowd sailed in and lost all the money you had. I’ll bet he was a man with a velvet coat, and a moustache dyed a dead black and waxed as sharp as a cambric needle.”

“Yes; that’s his description to a dot. I wonder if he really did do that a-purpose.”

“Well, tell us about it. It does me good to hear a blamed fool tell how he lost his money. Don’t you see that your awkward ways and general greenness struck the capper the first thing, and you not only threw away your own money, but two or three hundred other wappy-jawed pelicans saw you draw a big prize and thought it was yours, then they deposited what little they had and everything was lovely.”

“Well, I’ll tell you how it was, if it’ll do any good and save other young men in the future. You see this capper, as you call him, gave me a $1 bill to throw for him, and I put it into my vest pocket so, along with the dollar bill father gave me. I always carry my money in my right hand vest pocket. Well, I sailed up to the game, big as old Jumbo himself, and put a dollar into the game. As you say, I drawed a big prize, $20 and a silver cup. The man offered me $5 for the cup and I took it.”

“Then it flashed over my mind that I might have got my dollar and the other feller’s mixed, so I says to the proprietor, ‘I will now invest a dollar for a gent who asked me to draw for him.’

“Thereupon I took out the other dollar, and I’ll be eternally chastised if I didn’t draw a brass locket worth about two bits a bushel.”

I didn’t say anything for a long time. Then I asked him how the capper acted when he got his brass locket.

“Well, he seemed pained and grieved about something, and he asked me if I hadn’t time to go away into a quiet place where we could talk it over by ourselves; but he had a kind of a cruel, insincere look in his eye, and I said no, I believed I didn’t care to, and that I was a poor conversationalist, anyhow; and so I came away, and left him looking at his brass locket and kicking holes in the ground and using profane language.

“Afterward I saw him talking to the proprietor of the lottery, and I feel, somehow, that they had lost confidence in me. I heard them speak of me in a jeering tone of voice, and one said as I passed by: ‘There goes the meek-eyed rural convict now,’ and he used a horrid oath at the same time.

“If it hadn’t been for that one little quincidence, there would have been nothing to mar the enjoyment of the occasion.”

Picnic Incidents.

Camping out in summer for several weeks is a good thing generally. Freedom from social restraint and suspenders is a great luxury for a time, and nothing purifies the blood quicker, or makes a side of bacon taste more like snipe on toast, than the crisp ozone that floats through the hills and forests where man can monkey o’er the green grass without violating a city ordinance.

The picnic is an aggravation. It has just enough of civilization to be a nuisance, and not enough barbarism to make life seem a luxury. If our aim be to lean up against a tree all day in a short seersucker coat and ditto pantaloons that segregated while we were festooning the hammock, the picnic is the thing. If we desire to go home at night with a jelly symphony on each knee and a thousand-legged worm in each ear, we may look upon the picnic as a success.

But to those who wish to forget the past and live only in the booming present, to get careless of gain and breathe brand-new air that has never been used, to appease an irritated liver, or straighten out a torpid lung, let me say, pick out a high, dry clime, where there are trout enough to give you an excuse for going there, take what is absolutely necessary and no more, and then stay there long enough to have some fun.

If we picnic, we wear ourselves out trying to have a good time, so that we can tell about it when we get back, but we do not actually get acquainted with each other before we have to quit and return.

To camp, is to change the whole programme of life, and to stop long enough in the never-ending conflict for dollars and distinction, to get a full breath and look over the field. Still, it is not always smooth sailing. To camp, is sometimes to show the material of which we are made. The dude at home is the dude in camp, and wherever he goes he demonstrates that he was made for naught. I do not know what a camping party would do with a dude unless they used him to bait a bear trap with, and even then it would be taking a mean advantage of the bear. The bear certainly has some rights which we are bound in all decency to respect.

James Milton Sherrod said he had a peculiar experience once while he was in camp on the Poudre in Colorado.

“We went over from Larmy,” said he, “in July, eight years ago–four of us. There was me and Charcoal Brown, and old Joe and young Joe Connoy. We had just got comfortably down on the Lower Fork, out of the reach of everybody and sixty miles from a doctor, when Charcoal Brown got sick. Wa’al we had a big time of it. You can imagine yourself somethin’ about it. Long in the night Brown began to groan and whoop and holler, and I made a diagnosis of him. He didn’t have much sand anyhow. He was tryin’ to git a pension from the government on the grounds of desertion and failure to provide, and some such a blame thing or another, so I didn’t feel much sympathy fur him. But when I lit the gas and examined him, I found that he had a large fever on hand, and there we was without a doggon thing in the house but a jug of emigrant whiskey and a paper of condition powders fur the mule. I was a good deal rattled at first to know what the dickens to do fur him. The whiskey wouldn’t do him any good, and, besides, if he was goin’ to have a long spell of sickness we needed it for the watchers.

[Illustration: MAKING USE OF A DUDE.]

“Wa’al, it was rough. I’d think of a thousand things that was good fur fevers, and then I’d remember that we hadn’t got ’em. Finally old Joe says to me, ‘James, why don’t ye soak his feet?’ says he. ‘Soak nuthin’,’ says I; ‘what would ye soak ’em in?’ We had a long-handle frying-pan, and we could heat water in it, of course, but it was too shaller to do any good, anyhow; so we abandoned that synopsis right off. First I thought I’d try the condition powders in him, but I hated to go into a case and prescribe so recklessly. Finally I thought of a case of rheumatiz that I had up in Bitter Creek years ago, and how the boys filled their socks full of hot ashes and put ’em all over me till it started the persbyterian all over me and I got over it. So we begun to skirmish around the tent for socks, and I hope I may be tee-totally skun if there was a blame sock in the whole syndicate. Ez fur me, I never wore ’em, but I did think young Joe would be fixed. He wasn’t though. Said he didn’t want to be considered proud and high strung, so he left his socks at home.

[Illustration: CHARCOAL BROWN’S REPROACHES.]

“Then we begun to look around and finally decided that Brown would die pretty soon if we didn’t break up the fever, so we concluded to take all the ashes under the camp-fire, fill up his cloze, which was loose, tie his sleeves at the wrists, and his pants at the ankles, give him a dash of condition powders and a little whiskey to take the taste out of his mouth, and then see what ejosted nature would do.

“So we stood Brown up agin a tree and poured hot ashes down his back till he begun to fit his cloze pretty quick, and then we laid him down in the tent and covered him up with everything we had in our humble cot. Everything worked well till he begun to perspirate, and then there was music, and don’t you forget it. That kind of soaked the ashes, don’t you see, and made a lye that would take the peelin’ off a telegraph pole.

“Charcoal Brown jest simply riz up and uttered a shrill whoop that jarred the geology of Colorado, and made my blood run cold. The goose flesh riz on old Joe Connoy till you could hang your hat on him anywhere. It was awful.

“Brown stood up on his feet, and threw things, and cussed us till we felt ashamed of ourselves. I’ve seen sickness a good deal in my time, but–I give it to you straight–I never seen an invalid stand up in the loneliness of the night, far from home and friends, with the concentrated lye oozin’ out of the cracks of his boots, and reproach people the way Charcoal Brown did us.

“He got over it, of course, before Christmas, but he was a different man after that. I’ve been out campin’ with him a good many times sence, but he never complained of feelin’ indisposed. He seemed to be timid about tellin’ us even if he was under the weather, and old Joe Connoy said mebbe Brown was afraid we would prescribe fur him or sumthin’.”

Nero.

Nero, who was a Roman Emperor from 54 to 68 A.D., was said to have been one of the most disagreeable monarchs to meet that Rome ever had. He was a nephew of Culigula, the Emperor, on his mother’s side, and a son of Dominitius Ahenobarbust, of St. Lawrence county. The above was really Nero’s name, but in the year 50, A.D., his mother married Claudius and her son adopted the name of Nero Claudius Caesar Drusus Germanicus. This name he was in the habit of wearing during the cold weather, buttoned up in front. During the hot weather, Nero was all the name he wore. In 53, Nero married Octavia, daughter of Claudius, and went right to housekeeping. Nero and Octavia did not get along first-rate. Nero soon wearied of his young wife and finally transferred her to the New Jerusalem.

In 54, Nero’s mother, by concealing the rightful heir to the throne for several weeks and doctoring the returns, succeeded in getting the steady job of Emperor for Nero at a good salary.

His reign was quite stormy and several long, bloody wars were carried on during that period. He was a good vicarious fighter and could successfully hold a man’s coat all day, while the man went to the front to get killed. He loved to go out riding over the battle fields, as soon as it was safe, in his gorgeously bedizened band chariot and he didn’t care if the wheels rolled in gore up to the hub, providing it was some other man’s gore. It gave him great pleasure to drive about over the field of carnage and gloat over the dead. Nero was not a great success as an Emperor, but as a gloater he has no rival in history.

Nero’s reign was characterized, also, by the great conflagration and Roman fireworks of July, 64, by which two-thirds of the city of Rome was destroyed. The emperor was charged with starting this fire in order to get the insurance on a stock of dry goods on Main street.

Instead of taking off his crown, hanging it up in the hall and helping to put out the fire, as other Emperors have done time and again, Nero took his violin up stairs and played, “I’ll Meet You When the Sun Goes Down.” This occasioned a great deal of adverse criticism on the part of those who opposed the administration. Several persons openly criticised Nero’s policy and then died.

A man in those days, would put on his overcoat in the morning and tell his wife not to keep dinner waiting. “I am going down town to criticise the Emperor a few moments,” he would say. “If I do not get home in time for dinner, meet me on the ‘evergreen shore.'”

Nero, after the death of Octavia, married Poppaea Sabina. She died afterward at her husband’s earnest solicitation. Nero did not care so much about being a bridegroom, but the excitement of being a widower always gratified and pleased him.

He was a very zealous monarch and kept Rome pretty well stirred up during his reign. If a man failed to show up anywhere on time, his friends would look sadly at each other and say, “Alas, he has criticised Nero.”

A man could wrestle with the yellow fever, or the small-pox, or the Asiatic cholera and stand a chance for recovery, but when he spoke sarcastically of Nero, it was good-bye John.

When Nero decided that a man was an offensive partisan, that man would generally put up the following notice on his office door:

“Gone to see the Emperor in relation to charge of offensive partisanship. Meet me at the cemetery at 2 o’clock.”

Finally, Nero overdid this thing and ran it into the ground. He did not want to be disliked and so, those who disliked him were killed. This made people timid and muzzled the press a good deal.

The Roman papers in those days were all on one side. They did not dare to be fearless and outspoken, for fear that Nero would take out his ad. So they would confine themselves to the statement that: “The genial and urbane Afranius Burrhus had painted his new and _recherche_ picket fence last week,” or “Our enterprising fellow townsman, Caesar Kersikes, will remove the tail of his favorite bulldog next week, if the weather should be auspicious,” or “Miss Agrippina Bangoline, eldest daughter of Romulus Bangoline, the great Roman rinkist, will teach the school at Eupatorium, Trifoliatum Holler, this summer. She is a highly accomplished young lady, and a good speller.”

Nero got more and more fatal as he grew older, and finally the Romans began to wonder whether he would not wipe out the Empire before he died. His back yard was full all the time of people who had dropped in to be killed, so that they could have it off their minds.

Finally, Nero himself yielded to the great strain that had been placed upon him and, in the midst of an insurrection in Gaul, Spain and Rome itself, he fled and killed himself.

The Romans were very grateful for Nero’s great crowning act in the killing line, but they were dissatisfied because he delayed it so long, and therefore they refused to erect a tall monument over his remains. While they admired the royal suicide and regarded it as a success, they censured Nero’s negligence and poor judgment in suiciding at the wrong end of his reign.

I have often wondered what Nero would have done if he had been Emperor of the United States for a few weeks and felt as sensitive to newspaper criticism as he seems to have been. Wouldn’t it be a picnic to see Nero cross the Jersey ferry to kill off a few journalists who had adversely criticised his course? The great violin virtuoso and light weight Roman tyrant would probably go home by return mail, wrapped in tinfoil, accompanied by a note of regret from each journalist in New York, closing with the remark, that “in the midst of life we are in death, therefore now is the time to subscribe.”

Squaw Jim.

“Jim, you long-haired, backslidden Caucasian nomad, why don’t you say something? Brace up and tell us your experience. Were you kidnapped when you were a kid and run off into the wild wickyup of the forest, or how was it that you came to leave the Yankee reservation and eat the raw dog of the Sioux?”

We were all sitting around the roaring fat-pine fire at the foot of the canon, and above us the full moon was filling the bottom of the black notch in the mountains, where God began to engrave the gulch that grew wider and deeper till it reached the valley where we were.

Squaw Jim was tall, silent and grave. He was as dignified as the king of clubs, and as reticent as the private cemetery of a deaf and dumb asylum. He didn’t move when Dutch Joe spoke to him, but he noticed the remark, and after awhile got up in the firelight, and later on the silent savage made the longest speech of his life.

[Illustration: “BOYS, YOU CALL ME SQUAW JIM.”]

“Boys, you call me Squaw Jim, and you call my girl a half breed. I have no other name than Squaw Jim with the pale faced dude and the dyspeptic sky pilot who tells me of his God. You call me Squaw Jim because I’ve married a squaw and insist on living with her. If I had married Mist-of-the-Waterfall, and had lived in my tepee with her summers, and wintered at St. Louis with a wife who belonged to a tall peaked church, and who wore her war paint, and her false scalp-lock, and her false heart into God’s wigwam, I’d be all right, probably. They would have laughed about it a little among the boys, but it would have been “wayno” in the big stone lodges at the white man’s city.

“I loved a pale faced girl in Connecticut forty years ago. She said she did me, but she met with a change of heart and married a bare-back rider in a circus. Then she ran away with the sword swallower of the side show, and finally broke her neck trying to walk the tight rope. The jury said if the rope had been as tight as she was it might have saved her life.

“Since then I’ve been where the sun and the air and the soil were free. It kind of soothed me to wear moccasins and throw my biled shirt into the Missouri. It took the fever of jealousy and disappointment out of my soul to sleep in the great bosom of the unhoused night. Soon I learned how to parley-vous in the Indian language, and to wear the clothes of the red man. I married the squaw girl who saved me from the mountain fever and my foes. She did not yearn for the equestrian of the white man’s circus. She didn’t know how to raise XxYxZ to the nth power, but she was a wife worthy of the President of the United States. She was way off the trail in matters of etiquette, but she didn’t know what it was to envy and hate the pale faced squaw with the sealskin sacque and the torpid liver, and the high-priced throne of grace. She never sighed to go where they are filling up Connecticut’s celestial exhibit with girls who get mysteriously murdered and the young men who did it go out lecturing. You see I keep posted.

“Boys, you kind of pity me, I reckon, and say Squaw Jim might have been in Congress if he’d stayed with his people and wore night shirts and pared his claws, but you needn’t.

“My wife can’t knock the tar out of a symphony on the piano, but she can mop the dew off the grass with a burglar, and knock out a dude’s eyes at sixty yards rise.

“My wife is a little foggy on the winter style of salvation, and probably you’d stall her on how to drape a silk velvet overskirt so it wouldn’t hang one-sided, but she has a crude idea of an every day, all wool General Superintendent of the Universe and Father of all-Humanity, whether they live under a horse blanket tepee or a Gothic mortgage. She might look out of place before the cross, with her chilblains and her childlike confidence, among the Tom cat sealskin sacques of your camel’s hair Christianity, but if the world was supplied with Christians like my wife, purgatory would make an assignment, and the Salvation Army would go home and hoe corn. Sabe?”

Squaw Jim’s Religion.

Referring to religious matters, the other day, Squaw Jim said: “I was up at the Post yesterday to kind of rub up against royalty, and refresh my memory with a few papers. I ain’t a regular subscriber to any paper, for I can’t always get my mail on time. We’re liable to be here, there and everywhere, mebbe at some celebrated Sioux watering place and mebbe on the warpath, so I can’t rely on the mails much, but I manage, generally, to get hold of a few old papers and magazines now and then. I don’t always know who’s president before breakfast the day after election, but I manage to skirmish around and find out before his term expires.

“Now, speaking about the religion of the day, or, rather, the place where it used to be, it seems to me as if there’s a mistake somewhere. It looks as if religion meant greenness, and infidelity meant science and smartness, according to the papers. I’m no scientist myself. I don’t know evolution from the side of a house. As an evolver I couldn’t earn my board, probably, and I wouldn’t know a protoplasm from a side of sole leather; but I know when I get to the end of my picket rope, and I know just as sure where the knowable quits and the unknowable begins as anybody. I mean I can crawl into a prairie dog hole, and pull the hole in and put it in my pocket, in my poor, weak way, just as well as a scientist can. If a man offered to trade me a spavined megatherium for a foundered hypothesis, I couldn’t know enough about either of the blamed brutes to trade and make a profit. I never run around after delightful worms and eccentric caterpillers. I have so far controlled myself and escaped the habit, but I am able to arrive at certain conclusions. You think that because I am the brother-in-law to an Indian outbreak, I don’t care whether Zion languishes or not; but you are erroneous. You make a very common mistake.

“Mind you, I don’t pretend to be up on the plan of salvation, and so far as vicarious atonement goes, I don’t even know who is the author of it, but I’ve got a kind of hand-made religion that suits me. It’s cheap, and portable, and durable, and stands our severe northern climate first rate. It ain’t the protuberant kind. It don’t protrude into other people’s way like a sore thumb. All-wool religion don’t go around with a chip on it’s shoulder looking for a personal deal.

“If I had time and could move my library around with me during our summer tour, I might monkey with speculative science and expose the plan of creation, but as it is now, I really haven’t time.

[Illustration: MOVING HIS LIBRARY.]

“I say this, however, friends, Romans and backsliders: I think sometimes when my little half-breed girl comes to me in the evening in her night dress, and kneels by me with her little brown face in between my knees, and with my hard hands in her unbraided hair, that she’s got something better than speculative science when she says:

‘Now I lay me down to sleep.
I pray the Lord my soul to keep;
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take:
This I ask for Jesus’ sake;’

“and I know that a million more little angels are saying that same thing, at that same hour, to the same imaginary God, I say to myself, if that is a vain, empty infatuation, blessed be that holy infatuation.

“If that’s a wild and crazy delusion, let me be always deluded. If forty millions of chubby little angels bow their dimpled knees every evening to a false and foolish tradition, let me do so, too. If I die, then I will be in good company, even if I go no farther than the clouds of the valley.”

One Kind of Fool.

A young man, with a plated watch-chain that would do to tie up a sacred elephant, came into Denver the other day from the East, on the Julesburg Short line, and told the hotel clerk that he had just returned from Europe, and was on his way across the continent with the intention of publishing a book of international information. He handed an oilcloth grip across the counter, registered in a bold, bad way and with a flourish that scattered the ink all over the clerk’s white shirt front.

He was assigned to a quiet room on the fifth floor, that had been damaged by water a few weeks before by the fire department. After an hour or two spent in riding up and down the elevator and ringing for things that didn’t cost anything, he oiled his hair and strolled into the dining-room with a severe air and sat down opposite a big cattle man, who never oiled his hair or stuck his nose into other people’s business.

The European traveler entered into conversation with the cattle man. He told him all about Paris and the continent, meanwhile polishing his hands on the tablecloth and eating everything within reach. While he ate another man’s dessert, he chatted on gaily about Cologne and pitied the cattle man who had to stay out on the bleak plains and watch the cows, while others paddled around Venice and acquired information in a foreign land.

At first the cattle man showed some interest in Europe, but after awhile he grew quiet and didn’t seem to enjoy it. Later on the European tourist, with soiled cuffs and auburn mane, ordered the waiters around in a majestic way, to impress people with his greatness, tipped over the vinegar cruet into the salt and ate a slice of boiled egg out of another man’s salad.

Casually a tall Kansas man strolled in and asked the European tourist what he was doing in Denver. The cattle man, who, by the way, has been abroad five or six times and is as much at home in Paris as he is in Omaha, investigated the matter, and learned that the fresh French tourist had been herding hens on a chicken ranch in Kansas for six years, and had never seen blue water. He then took a few personal friends to the dining-room door, and they watched the alleged traveler. He had just taken a long, refreshing drink from the finger bowl of his neighbor on the left and was at that moment, trying to scoop up a lump of sugar with the wrong end of the tongs.

There are a good many fools who drift around through the world and dodge the authorities, but the most disastrous ass that I know is the man who goes West with two dollars and forty cents in his pocket, without brains enough to soil the most delicate cambric handkerchief, and tries to play himself for a savant with so much knowledge that he has to shed information all the time to keep his abnormal knowledge from hurting him.

John Adams’ Diary.

December 3, 1764.–I am determined to keep a diary, if possible, the rest of my life. I fully realize how difficult it will be to do so. Many others of my acquaintance have endeavored to maintain a diary, but have only advanced so far as the second week in January. It is my purpose to write down each evening the events of the day as they occur to my mind, in order that in a few years they may be read and enjoyed by my family. I shall try to deal truthfully with all matters that I may refer to in these pages, whether they be of national or personal interest, and I shall seek to avoid anything bitter or vituperative, trying rather to cool my temper before I shall submit my thoughts to paper.

[Illustration: “WHERE’S THE PIE?”]

December 4.–This morning we have had trouble with the hired girl. It occurred in this wise: We had fully two-thirds of a pumpkin pie that had been baked in a square tin. This major portion of the pie was left over from our dinner yesterday, and last night, before retiring to rest, I desired my wife to suggest something in the cold pie line, which she did. I lit a candle and explored the pantry in vain. The pie was no longer visible. I told Mrs. Adams that I had not been successful, whereupon we sought out the hired girl, whose name is Tootie Tooterson, a foreign damsel, who landed in this country Nov. 7, this present year. She does not understand our language, apparently, especially when we refer to pie. The only thing she does without a strong foreign accent is to eat pumpkin pie and draw her salary. She landed on our coast six weeks ago, after a tedious voyage across the heaving billows. It was a close fight between Tootie and the ocean, but when they quit, the heaving billows were one heave ahead by the log.

Miss Tooterson landed in Massachusetts in a woolen dress and hollow clear down into the ground. A strong desire to acquire knowledge and cold, hand-made American pie seems to pervade her entire being.

She has only allowed Mrs. Adams and myself to eat what she did not want herself.

Miss Tooterson has also introduced into my household various European eccentricities and strokes of economy which deserve a brief notice here. Among other things she has made pie crust with castor oil in it, and lubricated the pancake griddle with a pork rind that I had used on my lame neck. She is thrifty and saving in this way, but rashly extravagant in the use of doughnuts, pie and Medford rum, which we keep in the house for visitors who are so unfortunate as to be addicted to the doughnut, pie or rum habit.

It is discouraging, indeed, for two young people like Mrs. Adams and myself, who have just begun to keep house, to inherit a famine, and such a robust famine, too. It is true that I should not have set my heart upon such a transitory and evanescent terrestrial object like a pumpkin pie so near to T. Tooterson, imported pie soloist, doughnut mastro and feminine virtuoso, but I did, and so I returned from the pantry desolate.

[Illustration: A PIE SOLOIST.]

I told Abigail that unless we poisoned a few pies for Tootie the Adams family would be a short-lived race. I could see with my prophetic eye that unless the Tootersons yielded the Adamses would be wiped out. Abigail would not consent to this, but decided to relieve Miss Tooterson from duty in this department, so this morning she went away. Not being at all familiar with the English language, she took four of Abigail’s sheets and quite a number of towels, handkerchiefs and collars. She also erroneously took a pair of my night-shirts in her poor, broken way. Being entirely ignorant of American customs, I presume that she will put a belt around them and wear them externally to church. I trust that she will not do this, however, without mature deliberation.

[Illustration: IGNORANT OF AMERICAN CUSTOMS.]

I also had a bottle of lung medicine of a very powerful nature which the doctor had prepared for me. By some oversight, Miss Tooterson drank this the first day that she was in our service. This was entirely wrong, as I did not intend to use it for the foreign trade, but mostly for home consumption.

This is a little piece of drollery that I thought of myself. I do not think that a joke impairs the usefulness of a diary, as some do. A diary with a joke in it is just as good to fork over to posterity as one that is not thus disfigured. In fact, what has posterity ever done for me that I should hesitate about socking a little humor into a diary? When has posterity ever gone out of its way to do me a favor? Never! I defy the historian to show a single instance where posterity has ever been the first to recognize and remunerate ability.

John Adams’ Diary.
(No. 2.)

December 6.–It is with great difficulty that I write this entry in my diary, for this morning Abigail thought best for me to carry the oleander down into the cellar, as the nights have been growing colder of late.

I do not know which I dislike most, foreign usurpation or the oleander. I have carried that plant up and down stairs every time the weather has changed, and the fickle elements of New England have kept me rising and falling with the thermometer, and whenever I raised or fell I most always had that scrawny oleander in my arms.

Richly has it repaid us, however, with its long, green, limber branches and its little yellow nubs on the end. How full of promises to the eye that are broken to the heart. The oleander is always just about to meet its engagements, but later on it peters out and fails to materialize.

I do not know what we would do if it were not for our house plants. Every fall I shall carry them cheerfully down cellar, and in the spring I will bring up the pots for Mrs. Adams to weep softly into. Many a night at the special instance and request of my wife I have risen, clothed in one simple, clinging garment, to go and see if the speckled, double and twisted Rise-up-William-Riley geranium was feeling all right.

Last summer Abigail brought home a slip of English ivy. I do not like things that are English very much, but I tolerated this little sickly thing because it seemed to please Abigail. I asked her what were the salient features of the English ivy. What did the English ivy do? What might be its specialty? Mrs. Adams said that it made a specialty of climbing. It was a climber from away back. “All right,” I then to her did straightway say, “let her climb.” It was a good early climber. It climbed higher than Jack’s beanstalk. It climbed the golden stair. Most of our plants are actively engaged in descending the cellar stairs or in ascending the golden stair most all the time.

I descended the stairs with the oleander this morning, though the oleander got there a little more previously than I did. Parties desiring a good, secondhand oleander tub, with castors on it, will do well to give us a call before going elsewhere. Purchasers desiring a good set of second-hand ear muffs for tulips will find something to their advantage by addressing the subscriber.

We also have two very highly ornamental green dogoods for ivy vines to ramble over. We could be induced to sell these dogoods at a sacrifice, in order to make room for our large stock of new and attractive dogoods. These articles are as good as ever. We bought them during the panic last fall for our vines to climb over, but, as our vines died of membranous croup in November, these dogoods still remain unclum. Second-hand dirt always on hand. Ornamental geranium stumps at bed-rock prices. Highest cash prices paid for slips of black-and-tan foliage plants. We are headquarters for the century plant that draws a salary for ninety-nine years and then dies.

I do not feel much like writing in my diary to-day, but the physician says that my arm will be better in a day or two, so that it will be more of a pleasure to do business.

We are still without a servant girl, so I do some of the cooking. I make a fire each day and boil the teakettle. People who have tried my boiled teakettle say it is very fine.

Some of my friends have asked me to run for the Legislature here next election. Somehow I feel that I might, in public life, rise to distinction some day, and perhaps at some future time figure prominently in the affairs of a one-horse republic at a good salary.

I have never done anything in the statesman line, but it does not look difficult to me. It occurs to me that success in public life is the result of a union of several great primary elements, to-wit:

Firstly–Ability to whoop in a felicitous manner.

Secondly–Promptness in improving the proper moment in which to whoop.

Thirdly–Ready and correct decision in the matter of which side to whoop on.

Fourthly–Ability to cork up the whoop at the proper moment and keep it in a cool place till needed.

And this last is one of the most important of all. It is the amateur statesman who talks the most. Fearing that he will conceal his identity as a fool, he babbles in conversation and slashes around in his shallow banks in public.

As soon as I get the house plants down cellar and get their overshoes on for the winter, I will more seriously consider the question of our political affairs here in this new land where we have to tie our scalps on at night and where every summer is an Indian summer.

John Adams’ Diary
(No. 3.)

December 10.–I have put in a long and exhausting day in the court to-day in the case of Merkins vs. Merkins, a suit for divorce in which I am the counsel for the plaintiff, Eliza J. Merkins.

The case itself is a peculiarly trying one, and the plaintiff adds to its horrors by consulting me when I want to do something else. I took her case at an agreed price, and so Mrs. Merkins is trying to get her money’s worth by consulting me in a way I abhor. She has consulted me in every mood and tense that I know of; at my office, on the street, in church, at the festive board and at different funerals to which we both happened to be called. Mrs. Merkins has hung like a pall over several Massachusetts funerals which otherwise had every symptom of success.

I am a great admirer of woman as a woman, but as a client in a suit for divorce she has her peculiarities. I have seen Eliza in every phase of the case. She has been calm and tearful, stormy and snorting, low-spirited and red-nosed, violent and menacing, resigned but sobby, trustful and confidential, high strung and haughty, crushed and weepy.

She makes a specialty of shedding the red-hot scalding tear wherever she can obtain permission to do so. She has wept in my wood-box, in my new spittoon, on my desk and on my birthday. I told her that I wished she would please weep on something else. There were enough objects in nature upon which a poor woman who wept constantly and had no other visible means of support could shed the wild torrents of her grief, without weeping on my anniversary. A man wants to keep his birthday as dry as possible. He hates to have it wept on by a client who has jewed him down to half price, and then insisted on coming in to sob with him in the morning before he has swept the office floor.

One time she came and sobbed on my shoulder. Her tears are of the warm, damp kind, and feel disagreeable as they roll down the neck of a comparative stranger, who never can be aught but a friend. She rested her bonnet on my bosom while she wept, and I then discovered that she has been in the habit of wearing this bonnet while cooking her buckwheat pancakes. I presume she keeps her bonnet on all the time, so that she may be ready to dash out and consult me at all times without delay. Still, she ought not to do it, for when she leans her head on the bosom of her counsel in order to consult him, he detects the odor of the early sausage and the fleeting pancake.

You may bust such a bonnet and crush it if you will, But the scent of the pancake will cling round it still.

As soon as I saw that her object was to lean up against me and not only convulse herself with sobs, but that she intended to jar me also with her great woe, I told her that I would have to request her to avaunt. I then, as she did not act upon my suggestion, avaunted her myself. I avaunted her into a chair with a sickening thud.

[Illustration: A TENDER CASE.]

She then burst forth in a torrent of vituperation. When the abnormal sobber is suddenly corked up, these sobs rankle in the system and burst forth in the shape of vituperation. In the course of her remarks, she stated in a violent manner that she would denounce me throughout the country and retain other counsel. I told her I wished she would, as my sympathies were with Mr. Merkins. I told her that she must either pay me a larger fee or I should insist on her weeping in the alley before she came up.

She then took her departure with a rising inflection. On the following day, however, I found her at the office door, and she stood near and consulted me again, while I took up the ashes and started a fire in the stove.

Her case is quite peculiar.

She wants a divorce from her husband on the grounds of cruelty to animals, or something of that kind, and when she first told me about it I thought she had a case, but when we came to trial I found that she had had every reason to believe that if she could be segregated from Mr. Merkins she could at once become the bride of a gentleman who ploughed the raging main.

Just as we went to the jury to-day with the case, she heard casually that the gentleman who had been in the main-ploughing business had just married without her knowledge or consent.

“Heap Brain.”

Much trouble has been done by a long haired phrenologist in the West who has, during his life, felt of over a hundred thousand heads. A comparison of a large number of charts given in these cases shows that so far no head examined would indicate anything less than a member of the lower house of congress. Artists, orators, prima-donnas and statesmen are plenty, but there are no charts showing the natural-born farmer, carpenter, shoemaker or chambermaid.

That is the reason butter is so high west of the Missouri river to-day, while genius actually runs riot.

What this day and age of the world needs, is a phrenologist who will paw around among the intellectual domes of free-born American citizens, and search out a few men who can milk a cow in a cool and unimpassioned tone of voice.

It is true that every man in America is a sovereign, but he had better not overdo it. The man who sits up nights to be a sovereign and allows the calves to eat his brown-eyed beans, is not leading his fellow men up to a higher and nobler life. The sovereign business can be run in the ground if we are not careful.

[Illustration: A FUTURE PRESIDENT.]

Very likely the white-eyed boy with the hickory dado along the base of his overalls is the boy who in future years is to be the president of the United States. But do not, oh, do not trow, fair young reader, that every Albino youth in our broad land who wears an isosceles triangle in navy blue flannel athwart his system, is going to be the chief magistrate of this mighty republic.

We need statesmen and orators and artists very much; but the world at this moment also needs several athletic parties with the horse-sense adequate to produce flour and other vegetables necessary to feed the aforesaid statesmen, orators, etc., etc.

Let me say a word to the bright-eyed youth of America, Let me murmur in your ear this never dying truth: When a long-haired crank asks you a dollar to tell you, you are a young Demosthenes, stand up and look yourself over at a distance before you swallow it all.

There is no use talking, we have got to procure provisions in some manner, and in order to do so the natural-born bone and muscle of the country must go at and promote the growth of such things, or else we artists, poets and statesmen, will have to take off our standing collars and do it ourselves.

Phrenology is a good thing, no doubt, if we can purify it. So long as it does not become the slave of capital, there is nothing about phrenology that is going to do harm; but when it becomes the creature of the trade dollar, it looks as though the country would be filled up with wild-eyed genius that hasn’t had a square meal for two weeks. The time will surely come when America will demand less statesmanship and more flour; when less statistics and a purer, nobler and more progressive style of beefsteak will demand our attention.

I had hoped that phrenology would step in and start this reform; but so far it has not, within the range of my observation. It may be, however, that the mental giant bump translator with whom I came in contact was not a fair representative. Still, he has been in the business for over thirty years, and some of our most polished criminals have passed under his hands.

An erroneous phrenologist once told me that I would shine as a revivalist, and said that I ought to marry a tall blonde with a nervous, sanguinary temperament. Then he said, “One dollar, please,” and I said, “All right, gentle scientist with the tawny mane, I will give you the dollar and marry the tall blonde with the bank account and bilious temperament, when you give me a chart showing me how to dispose of a brown-eyed brunette with a thoughtful cast of countenance, who married me in an unguarded moment two years ago.”

He looked at me in a reproachful kind of way, struck at me with a chair in an absent-minded manner and stole away.

The Approaching Humorist.

The following letter has been received, and, as it encloses no unsmirched postage stamp to insure a private reply, I take great pleasure in answering it in these pages:

Christiana, Kas., Sept. 22nd, 1884

Dear Sir.–I am studying for a Humorist. Could you help me to some of the Joliest Books that are written? With some of the best Jokes of the Day &c &c &c.

Also what it would be best for me to do for to become an Humorist.

I am said to be a Natural Born Humorist by my friends and all I need is Cultivation to make my mark.

Please reply by return mail.

Kindly Yours

Herman A.H.

For some time I have been grieving over the dearth of humor in America, and wondering who the great coming humorist was to be. Several papers have already deplored the lack of humor in our land, but they have not been able to put their finger on the approaching humorist of the age. Just as we had begun to despair, however, here he comes, quietly and unostentatiously, modestly and ungrammatically. Unheralded and silently, like Maud S. or any other eminent man, he slowly rises above the Kansas horizon, and tells us that it will be impossible to conceal his identity any longer. He is the approaching humorist of the nineteenth century.

It is a serious matter, Herman, to prescribe a course of study that will be exactly what you need to bring you out. Perhaps you might do well to take a Kindergarten course in spelling and the rudiments of grammar; still, that is not absolutely necessary. A friend of mine named Billings has done well as a humorist, though his knowledge of spelling seems to be pitiably deficient. Grammar is convenient where a humorist desires to put on style or show off before crowned heads, but it is not absolutely indispensable.

Regarding the “Joliest Books” necessary for your perusal, in order to chisel your name on the eternal tablets of fame, tastes will certainly differ. I am almost sorry that you wrote to me, because we might not agree. You write like one of these “Joly” humorists such as people employ to go along with a picnic and be the life of the party, and whose presence throughout the country has been so depressing. If one may be allowed to judge of your genius by the few autograph lines forwarded, you belong to that class of brain-workers upon whom devolves the solemn duty of pounding sand. If you are really a brain-worker, will you kindly inform the writer whose brain you are working now, and how you like it as far as you have gone?

American humor has burst forth from all kinds of places, nearly. The various professions have done their share. One has risen from a tramp until he is wealthy and dyspeptic, and another was blown up on a steamboat before he knew that he was a humorist.

Suppose you try that, Herman. M. Quad, one of the very successful humorists of the day, both in a literary and financial way, was blown up by a steamboat before he bloomed forth into the full flush and power of success. Try that, Herman. It is a severe test, but it is bound to be a success. Even if it should be disastrous to you, it will be rich in its beneficial results to those who escape.

[Illustration]

What We Eat.

On 3d street, St. Paul, there stands a restaurant that has outside as a sign, under a glass case, a rib roast, a slice of ham and a roast duck that I remembered distinctly having seen there in 1860 and before the war. I asked an epicure the other day if he thought it right to keep those things there year after year when so many were starving throughout the length and breadth of the land. He then straightway did take me up close so that I could see that the food was made of plaster and painted, as hereinbefore set forth and by me translated, as Walt Whitman would say.

A day or two afterward, at a rural hotel, I struck some of that same roast beef and ham. I thought that the sign had been put on the table by mistake, and I made bold to tell the proprietor about it, on the ground that “any neglect or impertinence on the part of servants should be reported at the office.” He received the information with great rudeness and a most disagreeable air.

There are two kinds of guests who live at the average hotel. One is the party who gets up and walks over the whole _corps de hote_, from the bald-headed proprietor to the bootblack, while the other is the meek and mild-eyed man, doomed to sit at the table and bewail the flight of time and the horrors of starvation while waiting for the relief party to come with his food.

I belong to the latter class. Born, as I was, in a private family, and early acquiring the habit of eating food that was intended to assuage hunger mostly, it takes me a good while to accustom myself to the style of dyspeptic microbe used simply to ornament a bill of fare. Of course it is maintained by some hotel men that food solely for eating purposes is becoming obsolete and _outre_, and that the stuff they put on their bills of fare is just as good to pour down the back of a guest as diet that is cooked for the common, low, perverted taste of people who have no higher aspiration than to eat their food.

Of course the genial, urbane and talented reader will see at once the style of hotel I am referring to. It is the hotel that apes the good hotel and prints a bill of fare solely as a literary effort. That is the hotel where you find the moth-eaten towel and the bed-ridden coffee. There is where you get butter that runs the elevator day times and sleeps on the flannel cakes at night.

It is there that you meet the weary and way-worn steak that bears the toothprints of other guests who are now in a land where the early-rising chambermaid cannot enter.

I also refer to the hotel where the bellboy is simply an animated polisher of banisters, and otherwise extremely useless. It is likewise the house where the syrup tastes like tincture of rhubarb, and the pancakes taste like a hektograph.

The traveling man will call to mind the hotel to which I refer, and he will instantly name it and tell you that he has never spent the Sabbath there.

I honestly believe that some hotel men lose money and custom by trying to issue a large blanket-sheet bill of fare every day, when a more modest list containing two or three things that a human being could eat with impunity would be far more acceptable, healthy and remunerative.

Some people can live on cracked wheat, bran and skimmed milk, no matter where they go, and so they always seem to be perfectly happy; but, while simplicity is my watchword, and while I am Old Simplicity himself, as it were, I haven’t been constructed with stomachs enough to successfully wrestle with these things. I like a few plain dishes with victuals on them, cooked by a person who has had some experience in that line before. I am not so especially tied to high prices and finger-bowls, for I have risen from the common people, and during the first eighteen years of my life I had to dress myself. I was not always the pampered child of enervating luxury that I now am, by any means. So I can subsist for weeks on good, plain food, and never murmur or repine; but where the mistake at some hotels seems to have been made, is in trying to issue a bill of fare every day that will attract the attention of literary minds and excite the curiosity of linguists instead of people who desire to assuage an internal craving for grub.

I use the term grub in its broadest and most comprehensive sense.

So, if I may take the liberty to do so, let me exhort the landlord who is gradually accumulating indebtedness and remorse, to use a plainer, less elaborate, but more edible list of refreshments. Otherwise his guests will all die young.

Let him discard the seamless waffle and the kiln-dried hen. Let him abstain from the debris known as cottage pudding, that being its alias, while the doctors recognize it as old Gastric Disturbance. Too much of our hotel food tastes like the second day of January or the fifth day of July. That’s the whole thing in a few words, and unless the good hotels are nearer together we shall have to multiply our cemetery facilities.

Poor hotels are responsible for lots of drunkards every year. The only time I am tempted to soak my sorrows in rum is after I have read a delusive bill of fare and eaten a broiled barn-hinge with gravy on it that tasted like the broth of perdition. It is then that the demon of intemperance and colic comes to me and, in siren tones, says: “Try our bourbon, with ‘Polly Narius’ on the side.”

Care of House Plants.

Stern winter is the season in which to keep the eye peeled for the fragile little house plant. It is at that time that the coarse and brutal husband carries the Scandinavian flower known as the Ole Ander, part way down the cellar, and allows it to fall the rest of the way. I carried a large Ole Andor up and down stairs for nine years, until the spring of 1880. That was rather a backward spring, and a pale red cow, with one horn done up in a French twist, ate the most of it as it stood on the porch.

[Illustration: CARRYING OUT THE OLE ANDER.]

This cow was a total stranger to me. I had never done anything for her by which to win her esteem. It shows how Providence works through the humblest means sometimes to accomplish a great good.

I have tried many times to find the postoffice address of that lonely cow, so I might comfort her declining years, but she seemed to have melted away into the bosom of space, for I cannot find her. Anyone knowing the whereabouts of a pale red cow, with one horn done up in a French twist, and wearing a look of settled melancholy, will please communicate the same to me, as we have another Ole Ander that will just about fit her, I think, by spring.

[Illustration: WREAKING VENGEANCE.]

Bulbs may be wrapped in cotton and put in a cool place in the fall, and fed to the domestic animals in the spring. Geraniums should put on their buffalo overcoats about the middle of November in our rigid northern clime, and in the spring they will have the same luxuriant foliage as the tropical hat-rack. Vines may be left in the room during the winter until the furnace slips a cog and then you can pull them down and feed them to the family horses. In changing your plants from the living rooms or elsewhere to the cellar in the fall, take great care to avoid injury to the pot. I have experienced some very severe winters in my life, but I have never seen the mercury so low that a flowerpot couldn’t struggle through and look fresh and robust in the spring. The longevity of the pot is surprising when we consider how much death there is all about it. I had a large brown flower-pot once that originally held the germ of a calla lily. This lily emerged from the soil with the light of immortality in its eye. It got up to where we began to be attached to it, and then it died. Then we put a plant in its place which was given us by a friend. I do not remember now what this plant was called, but I know it was sent to us wrapped up in a piece of moist brown paper, and half an hour later a dray drove up to the house with the name of the plant itself. In the summer it required very little care, and in the winter I would cover the little thing up with its name, and it would be safe till spring. One evening we had a free-for-all _musicale_ at my house, and a corpulent friend of mine tried to climb it, and it died. (Tried to climb the plant, not the _musicale_.) The plant yielded to the severe climb it. This joke now makes its _debut_ for the first time before the world. Anyone who feels offended with this joke may wreak his vengeance on a friend of mine named Sullivan, who is passionately fond of having people wreak their vengeance on him. People having a large amount of unwreaked vengeance on hand will do well to give him a call before purchasing elsewhere.

A Peaceable Man.

Will L. Visscher always made a specialty of being a peaceable man. He would make most any sacrifice in order to secure general amnesty. I’ve known him to go around six blocks out of his way, to avoid a stormy interview with a belligerant dog. He was always very tender-hearted about dogs, especially the open-faced bulldog.

But he had a queer experience years ago, in St. Jo, Missouri. He had been city editor of the Kansas City _Journal_ for some time, but one evening, while in the composing-room, the foreman told him that the place for the city editor was down stairs, in his office. He therefore ordered Visscher to go down there. Visscher said he would do so later on, after he got fatigued with the composing-room and wanted change of scene.

The foreman thereupon jumped on Mr. Visscher with a small pica wrought iron side stick. Visscher allowed that he was a peaceable man, but entered into the general chaos of double-leaded editorial, and hair and brass dashes, and dashes for liberty and heterogeneous “pi,” and foot-sticks and teeth, with great zeal. He succeeded in putting a large doric head on the foreman, and although he was a peaceable man, he went down to the office and got his discharge for disturbing the discipline of the office.

He went to St. Jo the same day, and celebrated his _debut_ into the town by a little game of what is known as “draw.” He was fortunate in “filling his hand,” and while he was taking in the stakes, a young man from Arkansas, who was in the game, nipped a two-dollar note in a quiet kind of way, which, however, was detected by Mr. V., who mentioned the matter at the time. This maddened the Arkansas man, and later on he put one of his long arms around Mr. Visscher so as to pinion him, and then smote him across the brow with an instrument, known to science as “the brass knucks.” This irritated Mr. Visscher, and as soon as he had returned to consciousness he remarked that, although it was rather an up-hill job in Missouri, he was trying to be a peaceable man. He then broke the leg of a card-table over the head of the Arkansas man, and went to the doctor to get his own brow sewed on again.

While he was sitting in the doctor’s office a friend of the Arkansas man came in and asked him to please stand up while he knocked him down. Visscher opened a little dialogue with the man, and drew him into conversation till he could open a case of surgical instruments near by, then he took out one of those knives that the surgeons use in removing the viscera from the leading gentleman at a post mortem.

“Now,” said he, sharpening the knife on the stove-pipe and handing down a jar containing alcohol with a tumor in it, “I am a peaceful man and don’t want any fuss; but if you insist on a personal encounter, I will slice off fragments of your physiognomy at my leisure, and for twenty minutes I will fill this office with your favorite features. I make a specialty of being a peaceable man, remember; but if you’ll just say the word, I’ll put overcoat button-holes and eyelet-holes and crazy-quilts all over your system. If I’ve got to kill off the poker-players of St. Jo before I can have any fun, I guess I might as well begin on you as on any one I know.”

[Illustration: HE WAS A PEACEABLE MAN.]

He then made a stab at the man and pinned his coat-tail to the door-frame. Fear loaned the bad man strength, and, splitting the coat-tail, he fled, taking little mementoes of the tumor-jar and shedding them in his flight.

When Mr. Visscher went up to the _Herald_ office soon after to get a job, he was introduced casually to the foreman, who said:

“Ah, this is the young man who licks the foreman of the paper he works on, is it? I am glad to meet you, Mr. Visscher. I am looking for a white-eyed son of a sea-cook who goes around over Missouri thumping the foremen of our leading journals. Come out into the ante-room, Mr. Visscher, till I jar your back teeth loose and send you to the morgue in a gunny-sack.” Mr. Visscher repeated that he was trying to live in Missouri and be a peaceable man, but that if there was anything that he could do to make it pleasant for the foreman, he would cheerfully do it.

Mr. Visscher was a small man, but when he felt aggrieved about anything he was very harassing to his adversary. They “clinched” and threw each other back and forth across the hall with great vigor. When they stopped for breath, the foreman’s coat was pulled over his head and the bosom of Mr. Visscher’s shirt was hanging on the gas-jet. There were also two front teeth on the floor unaccounted for.

Visscher pinned on his shirt-bosom and said he was a peaceable man, but if the custom seemed to demand four fights in one day, he would try to conform to any local usage of the city. Wherever he went, he wanted to fall right into line and be one of the party.

When he got well he was employed on the _Herald_, and for four years edited the amnesty column of the paper successfully.

Biography of Spartacus.

Spartacus, whose given name seems to have been torn off in its passage down through the corridors of time, was born in Thrace and educated as a shepherd. While smearing the noses of the young lambs with tar one spring, in order to prevent the snuffies among them, he thought that he would become a robber. It occurred to him that this calling was the only one he knew of that seemed to be open to the young man without means.

He had hardly got started, however, in the “hold up” industry, when he was captured by the Romans, sold at cost and trained as a gladiator, in a school at Capua. Here he succeeded in stirring up a conspiracy and uniting two hundred or more of the grammar department of the school in a general ruction, as it was then termed.

The scheme was discovered and only seventy of the number escaped, headed by Spartacus. These snatched cleavers from the butcher shops, pickets from the Roman fences and various other weapons, and with them fought their way to the foot hill where they met a wagon train loaded with arms and supplies. They secured the necessary weapons whereby to go into a general war business and established themselves in the crater of Mount Vesuvius.

Spartacus was a man of wonderful carriage and great physical strength. It had always been his theory that a man might as well die of old age as to feed himself to a Roman menagerie. He maintained that he would rather die in a general free fight, where he had a chance, than to be hauled around over the arena by one leg behind a Numidian lion.

So he took his little band and fought his way to Vesuvius. There they had a pleasant time camping out nights and robbing the Roman’s daytimes. The excitement of sleeping in a crater, added a wonderful charm to their lives. While others slept cold in Capua, Spartacus cuddled up to the crater and kept comfortable.

For a long time the little party had it all their own way. They sniffed the air of freedom and lived on Roman spring chicken on the half shell, and it beat the arena business all hollow.

At last, however, an army of 3,000 men was sent against them, and Spartacus awoke one morning to find himself blocked up in his crater. For a time the outlook was not cheering. Spartacus thought of telegraphing the war department for reinforcements, but finally decided not to do so.

Finally, with ladders made of wild vines, the little garrison slipped out through what had seemed an impassable fissure in the crater, got in the rear of the army and demolished it completely. That’s the kind of man that Spartacus was. Fighting was his forte.

Spartacus was also a good public speaker. One of his addresses to the gladiators has been handed down to posterity through the medium of the Fifth Reader, a work that should be in every household. In his speech he states that he was not always thus. But since he is thus, he believes that he has not yet been successfully outthussed by any body.

He speaks of his early life in the citron groves of Syrsilla, and how quiet and reserved he had been, never daring to say “gosh” within a mile of the house; but finally how the Romans landed on his coast and killed off his family. Then he desired to be a fighter. He had killed more lions than any other man in Italy. He kept a big crew of Romans busy, winter and summer, catching fresh lions for him to stick. He had killed a large number of men also. At one matinee for ladies and children he had killed a prominent man from the north, and had done it so fluently that he was encored three times. The stage manager then came forward and asked that the audience would please refrain from another encore as he had run out of men, but if the ladies and children would kindly attend on the following Saturday he hoped to be prepared with a good programme. In fact, he had just heard from his agent who wrote him that they had purchased two big lions and also had a robust gladiator up a tree. He hoped that he could get into town in a day or two with both attractions.

Spartacus finally stood at the head of an army of 100,000 men, all starting out from the little band of 70 that cut loose from Capua with borrowed cleavers and axhandles. This war lasted but two years, during which time Spartacus made Rome howl. Spartacus had too much sense to attack Rome. But at last his army was betrayed and disorganized. With nothing but death or capture for him, he rode out between the two contending armies, shot his war horse in order to save expenses, and on foot rushed into the thickest of the fight. This was positively his last appearance. He killed a large number of people, but at last he yielded to the great pressure that was brought to bear upon him and died.

Probably no man not actually engaged in the practice of medicine ever killed so many people as Spartacus. He did not kill them because he disliked them personally, but because he thought it advisable to do so. Had he lived till the present time he would have done well as a lecturer. “Ten Years in the Arena, with Illustrations,” would draw first-rate at this time among a certain class of people. The large number of people still living in this country, who will lay aside their work and go twenty miles to attend a funeral, no matter whose funeral it is, would, no doubt, enjoy a bull fight or the cairn and refining joy that hovered over the arena. Those who have paid $175,000 to see Colonel John L. Sullivan disfigure a friend, would, no doubt, have made it $350,000 if the victim could have been killed and dragged around over the ring by the leg.

Two thousand years have not refined us so much that we need be puffed up with false pride about it.

Concerning Book Publishing.

“Amateur” writes me that he is about to publish a book, and asks me if I will be kind enough to suggest some good, reliable publisher for him.

This would suggest that “Amateur” wishes to confer his book on some deserving publisher with a view to building him up and pouring a golden stream of wealth into his coffers. “Amateur” already, in his mind’s eye, sees the eager millions of readers knocking each other down and trampling upon one another in the mad rush for his book. In my mind, I see his eye, lighted up with hope, and, though he lives in New Jersey, I fancy I can hear his quickened breath as his bosom heaves.

[Illustration: WISHES TO CONFER HIS BOOK ON SOME DESERVING PUBLISHER.]

Evidently he has never published a book. There is a good deal of fun ahead of him that he does not wot of. I used to think that when I got the last page of my book ready for press, the front yard would be full of publishers tramping down the velvet lawn and the meek-eyed pansies in their crazy efforts to get hold of the manuscript, but when I had written the last word of my first volume of soul-throb, and had opened the casement to look out on the howling, hungry mob of publishers, with checkbooks in one hand and a pillow-case full of scads in the other, I was a little puzzled to notice the abrupt and pronounced manner in which they were not there.

All of us have to struggle before we can catch the eye of the speaker. Milton didn’t get one-fiftieth as much for “Paradise Lost” as I got for my first book, and yet you will find people to-day who claim that if Milton had lived he could have knocked the socks off of me with one hand tied behind him. Recollect, however, that I am not here to open a discussion on this matter. Everyone is entitled to his own opinion in relation to authors. People cannot agree on the relative merits of literature. Now, for instance, last summer I met a man over in South Park, Col., who could repeat page after page of Shakespeare, and yet, when I asked him if he was familiar with the poems of the “Sweet Singer of Michigan,” he turned upon me a look of stolid vacancy, and admitted that he had never heard of her in his life.

A Calm.

The old Greeley Colony in Colorado, a genuine oasis in the desert, with its huge irrigating canals of mountain water running through the mighty wheat fields, glistening each autumn at the base of the range, affords a good deal that is curious, not only to the mind of the gentleman from the States, but even to the man who lives at Cheyenne, W.T., only a few hours’ journey to the north.

You could hardly pick out two cities so near each other and yet so unlike as Cheyenne and Greeley. The latter is quiet, and even accused of being dull, and yet everybody is steadily getting rich. It is a town of readers, thinkers and mental independents. It is composed of the elements of New England shrewdness and Western push, yet Greeley as compared with Cheyenne would be called a typical New England town in the midst of the active, fluctuating, booming West.

Cheyenne is not so tame. With few natural advantages the reputation of Cheyenne is that, in commercial parlance, she is “A 1” for promptness in paying her debts and absence of failures. There is more wealth there in proportion to the number of inhabitants than elsewhere in the civilized world, no doubt. The people take special pleasure in surprising Eastern people who visit them by a reception very often that they will long remember for cordiality, hospitality, and even magnificence.

Still I didn’t start out to write up either Cheyenne or Greeley. I intended to mention casually Dr. Law, of the latter place, who acted as my physician for a few months and coaxed me back from the great hereafter. I had been under the hands of a physician just before, who was also coroner, and who, I found afterward, was trying to treat me professionally as long as the lamp held out to burn, intending afterward to sit upon me officially. He had treated me professionally until he was about ready to summon his favorite coroner’s jury. Then I got irritated and left the county of his jurisdiction.

Learning that Dr. Law was relying solely on the practice of medicine for a livelihood, I summoned him, and after explaining the great danger that stood in the way of harmonizing the practice of medicine and the official work of the inquest business, I asked him if he had any business connection with any undertaking establishment or _hic jacet_ business, and learning from him that he had none, I engaged him to solder up my vertebrae and reorganize my spinal duplex.

Sometimes it isn’t entirely the medicine you swallow that paralyzes pain so much as it is the quiet magnetism of a good story and the snap of a pleasant eye. I had one physician who tried to look joyous when he came into the room, but he generally asked me to run my tongue out till he could see where it was tied on, then he would feel my pulse with his cold finger and time it with a $6 watch, and after that he would write a new prescription for horse medicine and heave a sigh, look at me as he might if it had been the last time he ever expected to see me on earth, and then he would sigh and go away. When he came back he generally looked shocked and grieved to find me alive. This was the _pro tem_ physician and _ex-officio_ coroner. I always felt as though I ought to apologize to him for clinging to life so, when no doubt he had the jury in the hall waiting to “view” me.

Dr. Law used to tell me of the early history of the Greeley Colony, and how the original cranks of the community used to be in session most of the time, and how they sometimes neglected to do their planting to do legislating, and how they overdid the council work and neglected to “bug” their potatoes. I remember, also, of his description of how the crew, working on the original big irrigating canal, struck when it was about half done, and swore that from the Poudre the ditch was going to run up hill, and would, therefore, be a failure. The engineer didn’t know at first what was best to do with the belligerent laborers, but finally he took the leader away from the rest of the crew and said, “Now, I tell you this in confidence, because of course I know perfectly well that the stockholders may kick on it if they hear it, but I’m building the blamed thing as level as I can and putting one end of it in the Poudre and one end in the Platte. Now, if I’m building it up hill the water’ll run down from the Platte into the Poudre, and if not it’ll run from the Poudre into the Platte. Sabe?”

The ditch was built, and now a deep, still river runs from the Poudre to the Platte, according to advertisement.

Greeley is also noted for its watchmakers. I sent my watch to the first one I heard of, and he said it needed cleaning. He cleaned it. I paid him $2 and took it home, when it ran two hours and then suspended. Then I took it to another watchmaker who said that the first man had used machine oil on its works, and had heated the wheels so as to gum the oil on the cogs. He would have to eradicate the cooked oil from the watch, and it would cost me $3. I paid it, and joyfully took the watch home. The next day I found that it had gained time enough to pay for itself. By noon, it had fatigued itself so that it was losing terribly, and by the day following had folded its still hands across its pale face in the sleep that knows no waking. I took it to the third and last jeweler in the town. Everyone said he was a good workman, but a trifle slow. In the afternoon I went in to see how he was getting along with it. He was sitting at his bench with a dice cup in his eye, apparently looking into the digestive economy of the watch.

I looked at him some time, not wishing to disturb him and interfere with his diagnosis. He did not move or say anything. Several people came in to trade and get the correct time, but he paid no attention to them.

I got tired and changed from one foot to the other several times. Then I asked him how he got along, or something of that kind, but he never opened his head. He was the most preoccupied watch savant I ever saw. No outside influence could break up his chain of thought when he got after a diseased watch.

I finally got around on the outside of the shop and looked in the window, where I could get a good view of his face.

He was asleep.

The Story of a Struggler.

My name is Kaulbach. William J. Kaulbach is my name, and I am spending the summer in Canada. I may remain here during the winter, also. My parents are very poor. They had never been wealthy, and at the time of my birth they were even less wealthy than they had been before. As soon as I was born the poverty of my parents attracted my attention. I decided at once to relieve their distress. I intended to aid them from my own pocket, but found upon examination that I had no funds in my pocket; also, no pocket; also, no place to put a pocket if I had brought one with me. So my parents continued to be poor, and to put by a little poverty for a rainy day. I was sole heir to the poverty they had acquired in all these years.

Nature did not do much for me in the way of beauty, either. I was quite plain when born and may still be identified by that peculiarity. Plainess with me is not only a characteristic, but it is a passion. My whole being is wrapped up in it. My hair is a sort of neutral brindle, such as grows upon the top of a retired hair trunk, and my freckles are olive green, fading into a delicate, crushed-bran color. They are very large, and actually pain me at times.

My teacher tried to encourage me by telling me of other poor boys who had grown up to be president of the United States, and he tried to get me to consent to having my name used as a candidate; but I refrained from doing so. I knew that, although I was deserving of the place, I could not endure the bitterness of a campaign, and that the illustrated papers would enlarge upon my personal appearance and bring out my freckles till you could hang your hat on them.

So I grew up to be a stage robber.

When I have my mask on my freckles do not show. I lectured on phrenology at first to get means to prosecute my studies as a stage robber, and when I had perfected myself as a burglar I went abroad to study the methods of the Italian banditti. I was two years under the teaching of the old masters, and acquired great fluency as a robber while there. I studied from nature all the time, and some of my best work was taken from life. I had an opportunity to observe all the methods of the most celebrated garroting maestro and stilletto virtuoso. He was an enthusiast and thoroughly devoted to his art. He had a large price on his head, also. Aside from that he went bareheaded winter and summer.

[Illustration: MAKING HIS DEBUT.]

Finally I returned to my own native land, poor, but fired with a mighty ambition. I went west and proceeded at once to _debut_. I went west to hold up the country. I was very successful, indeed, and have had my hands in the pockets of our most eminent men.

We were isolated from society a good deal, but we met the better class of people now and then in the course of our business. I did not like so much night work, and sometimes we had to eat raw pork because we did not wish to build a fire that would attract mosquitoes and sheriffs. So we were liable more or less to trichina and insomnia, but still we were free from sewer gas and poll tax. We did not get our mail with much regularity, but we got a lick at some mighty fine scenery.

But all this is only incidental. What I desired to say was this: Fame and distinction come high, and when we have them in our grasp at last we find that they bring their resultant sorrows. I worked long and hard for fame, and sat up nights and rode through alkali dust for thousands of miles, that I might be known as the leading robber of the age in which I lived, only to find at last that my great fame was the source of my chief annoyance. It made me so widely known that I felt, as Christine Nilsson says, “as though I lived in a glass case.” Everyone wanted to see me. Everyone wanted my autograph. Everyone wanted my skeleton to hang up in the library.

I could have traveled with a show and drawn a large salary, but I hated to wear a boiler iron overcoat all through the hot weather, after having lived so wild and free. But all this attention worried me so that I could not sleep, and many a night I would arise from the lava bed on which I had reclined, and putting on my dressing-gown and slippers, I would wander about under the stars and wish that I could be an unknown boy again in my far away home. But I could not. I often wished that I could die a natural death, but that was out of the question.

Finally, it got so that I did not dare to take a chew of tobacco, unless I did so under an assumed name. I hardly dared to let go of my six-shooter long enough to wipe my nose, for fear that someone might get the drop on me.

That is the reason why I came to Canada. Here among so many criminals, I do not attract attention, but I use a _nom de plume_ all the time, even here, and all these hot nights, while others take off their clothing, I lie and swelter in my heavy winter _nom de plume_.

The Old Subscriber.

At this season of the year, we are forcibly struck with the earnest and honest effort that is being made by the publisher of the American newspaper. It is a healthy sign and a hopeful one for the future of our country. It occurs to me that with the great advancement of the newspaper, and the family paper, and the magazine, we do not expect leaders and statesmen to think for us so much as we did fifty years ago. We do not allow the newspaper to mold us so much as we did. We enjoy reading the opinion of a bright, brave, and cogent editor because we know that he sits where he can acquire his facts in a few hours from all quarters of the globe, and speak truly to his great audience in relation to those facts, but we have ceased to allow even that man to think for us.

What then is to be the final outcome of all this? Is it not that the average American is going to use, and is using, his thinker more than he ever did before? Will not that thinker then, like the muscle of the blacksmith’s arm, or the mule’s hind foot, grow to a wondrous size as a result? Most assuredly.

The day certainly is not far distant, when the American can not only out-fight, out-row, out-bat, out-run, out-lie, and out-sail all other nationalities; but he will also be able to out-think them. We already point with pride to some of the wonderful thoughts that our leading thinkists, with their thinkers, have thunk. There are native born Americans now living, who have thought of things that would make the head of the amateur thinker ache for a week.

All this is largely due to the free use of the newspaper as a home educator. The newspaper is growing more and more ubiquitous, if I may be allowed the expression. Many poor people, who, a few years ago, could not afford the newspaper, now have it scolloped and put it on their pantry shelves every year.

But I did not start out to enlarge upon the newspaper. I would like to say a word or two more, however, on that general subject. Very often we hear some wise man with the responsibility of the universe on his shoulders, the man who thinks he is the censor of the human race now, and that he will be foreman of the grand jury on the Judgment Day–we hear this kind of man say every little while:

“We’ve got too many papers. We are loaded down with reading matter. Can’t read all my paper every day. Lots of days I throw my paper aside before I get it all read through, and never have a chance to finish it. All that is dead loss.”

It is, of course, a dead loss to that kind of a man. He is the kind of man that expects his family to begin at one side of the cellar and eat right straight across, it–cabbages, potatoes, turnips, pickles, apples, pumpkins, etc., etc.,–without stopping to discriminate. There are none too many papers, so far as the subscriber is concerned. Looking at it from the publisher’s standpoint sometimes, there are too many.

To the man who has inherited too large, wide, sinewy hands, and a brain that under the microscope looks like a hepatized lung, it seems some days as though the field had been over-crowded when he entered it. To the young man who was designed to maul rails or sock the fence-post into the bosom of the earth, and who has evaded that sphere of action and disregarded the mandate to maul rails, or to take a coal-pick and toy with the bowels of the earth, hoping to win an easier livelihood by feeding sour paste to village cockroaches, and still poorer pabulum to his subscribers, the newspaper field seems to be indeed jam full.

But not so the man who is tall enough to see into the future about nine feet. He still remembers that he must live in the hearts of his subscribers, and he makes their wants his own. He is not to proud to listen to suggestions from the man who works. He recognizes that it is not the man with the diamond-mounted stomach who has contributed most to his success, but the man who never dips into society much with the exception of his family, perhaps, and that ought to be good society. A man ought not to feel too good to associate with his wife and children. Generally my sympathies are with his wife and children, if they have to associate with him very much.

But if I could ever get down to it, I would like to say a word on behalf of the old subscriber. Being an old subscriber myself, I feel an interest in his cause; and as he rarely rushes into print except to ask why the police contrive to keep aloof from anything that might look like a fight, or to inquire why the fire department will continue year after year to run through the streets killing little children who never injured the department in any way, just so that they will be in time to chop a hole in the roof of a house that is not on fire, and pour some water down into the library, then whoop through an old tin dipper a few times and go away–as the old subscriber does not generally say much in print except on the above subjects, I make bold to say on his behalf that as a rule, he is not treated half as well as the prodigal son, who has been spending his substance on a rival paper, or stealing his news outright from the old subscriber.

Why should we pat the new subscriber on the back, and give him a new album that will fall to pieces whenever you laugh in the same room? Why should you forget the old love for the new? Do we not often impose on the old subscriber by giving up the space he has paid for to flaming advertisements to catch the coy and skittish gudgeon who still lurks outside the fold? Do we not ofttimes offer a family Bible for a new subscriber when an old subscriber may be in a lost and undone state?

Do we not again and again offer to the wife of our new subscriber a beautiful, plain gold ring, or a lace pin for a year’s subscription and $1, while the wife of our old subscriber is just in the shank of a long, hard, cold winter, without a ring or a pin to her back?

We ought to remember that the old subscriber came to us with his money when we most needed it. He bore with us when we were new in the business, and used such provincialisms as “We have saw” and “If we had knew.” He bore with us when the new column rules were so sharp that they chawed the paper all up, and the office was so cold, waiting for wood to come in on subscription, that the “color” was greasy and reluctant. He took our paper and paid for it, while the new subscriber was in the penitentiary for all we know. He made a mild kick sometimes when he “didn’t git his paper reggler;” but he paid on the first day of January every year in advance, out of an old calfskin wallet that opened out like a concertina, and had a strap that went around it four times, and looked as shiny, and sweaty, and good-natured as the razor-strop that might have been used by Noah.

The old subscriber never asked any rebate, or requested a prize volume of poetry with a red cover, because he had paid for another year; but he simply warmed his numb fingers, so that he could loosen his overalls and lower one side enough to let his hand into the pocket of his best pantaloons underneath, and there he always found the smooth wallet, and inside of it there was always a $2 bill, that had been put there to pay for the paper. Then the old subscriber would warm his hands some more, ask “How’s tricks?” but never begin to run down the paper, and then he would go away to work for another year.

[Illustration: THE RIGHT SORT OF SUBSCRIBER.]

I want to say that this country rests upon a great, solid foundation of old, paid-up subscribers. They are the invisible, rock-ribbed resting-place for the dazzling superstructure and the slim and peaked spire. Whether we procure a new press or a new dress, a new contributor or a new printers’ towel, we must bank on the old subscriber; for the new one is fickle, and when some other paper gives him a larger or a redder covered book, he may desert our standard. He yearns for the flesh-pots and the new scroll saws of other papers. He soon wearies of a uniformly good paper, with no chance to draw a town lot or a tin mine–in Montana.

Let us, therefore, brethren of the press, cling to the old subscriber as he has clung to us. Let us say to him, on this approaching Christmas Eve, “Son, thou art always with me, and all that I have is thine. It was meet that we should make merry, that this, thy brother, who had been a subscriber for our vile contemporary many years, but is alive again, and during a lucid interval has subscribed for our paper; but, after all, we would not go to him if we wanted to borrow a dollar. Remember that you still have our confidence, and when we want a good man to indorse our note at the bank, you will find that your name in our memory is ever fresh and green.”

Looking this over, I am struck with the amount of stuff I have successfully said, and yet there is a paucity of ideas. Some writers would not use the word paucity in this place without first knowing the meaning of it, but I am not that way. There are thousands of words that I now use freely, but could not if I postponed it until I could learn their meaning. Timidity keeps many of our authors back, I think. Many are more timid about using big words than they are about using other people’s ideas.

A friend of mine wanted to write a book, but hadn’t the time to do it. So he asked me if I wouldn’t do it for him. He was very literary, he said, but his business took up all his time, so I asked him what kind of a book he wanted. He said he wanted a funny book, with pictures in it and a blue cover. I saw at once that he had fine literary taste and delicate discrimination, but probably did not have time to give it full swing. I asked him what he thought it would be worth to write such a book. “Well,” he said, he had always supposed that I enjoyed it myself, but if I thought I ought to have pay besides, he would be willing to pay the same as he did for his other writing–ten cents a folio.

He is worth $50,000, because he has documentary evidence to show that a man who made that amount out of deceased hogs, had the misfortune to be his father and then die.

It was a great triumph to be born under such circumstances, and yet the young man lacks the mental stamina necessary to know how to successfully eat common mush and milk in such a low key that will not alarm the police.

I use this incident more as an illustration than anything else. It illustrates how anything may be successfully introduced into an article of this kind without having any bearing whatever upon it.

I like to close a serious essay, or treatise, with some humorous incident, like the clown in the circus out West last summer, who joked along through the performance all the afternoon till two or three children went into convulsions, and hypochondria seemed to reign rampant through the tent. All at once a bright idea struck him. He climbed up on the flying trapeze, fell off, and broke his neck. He was determined to make that audience laugh, and he did it at last. Every one felt repaid for the trouble of going to the circus.

My Dog.

I have owned quite a number of dogs in my life, but they are all dead now. Last evening I visited my dog cemetery–just between the gloaming and the shank of the evening. On the biscuit-box cover that stands at the head of a little mound fringed with golden rod and pickle bottles, the idler may still read these lines, etched in red chalk by a trembling hand:

LITTLE KOSCIUSKO,
–NOT DEAD,–
BUT JERKED HENCE
By Request.
S.Y.L.
(See you Later.)

I do not know why he was called Kosciusko. I do not care. I only know that his little grave stands out there while the gloaming gloams and the soughing winds are soughing.

Do you ask why I am alone here and dogless in this weary world?

I will tell you, anyhow. It will not take long, and it may do me good:

Kosciusko came to me one night in winter, with no baggage and unidentified. When I opened the door he came in as though he had left something in there by mistake and had returned for it.

He stayed with us two years as a watch-dog. In a desultory way, he was a good watch-dog. If he had watched other people with the same unrelenting scrutiny with which he watched me, I might have felt his death more keenly than I do now.

The second year that little Kosciusko was with us, I shaved off a full beard one day while down town, put on a clean collar and otherwise disguised myself, intending to surprise my wife.

Kosciusko sat on the front porch when I returned. He looked at me as the cashier of a bank does when a newspaper man goes in to get a suspiciously large check cashed. He did not know me. I said, “Kosciusko, have you forgotten your master’s voice?”

He smiled sarcastically, showing his glorious wealth of mouth, but still sat there as though he had stuck his tail into the door-steps and couldn’t get it out.

So I waived the formality of going in at the front door, and went around to the portcullis, on the off side of the house, but Kosciusko was there when I arrived. The cook, seeing a stranger lurking around the manor house, encouraged Kosciusko to come and gorge himself with a part of my leg, which he did. Acting on this hint I went to the barn. I do not know why I went to the barn, but somehow there was nothing in the house that I wanted. When a man wants to be by himself, there is no place like a good, quiet barn for thought. So I went into the barn, about three feet prior to Kosciusko.

[Illustration: THE COMBAT.]

Noticing the stairway, I ascended it in an aimless kind of way, about four steps at a time. What happened when we got into the haymow I do not now recall, only that Kosciusko and I frolicked around there in the hay for some time. Occasionally I would be on top, and then he would have all the delegates, until finally I got hold of a pitchfork, and freedom shrieked when Kosciusko fell. I wrapped myself up in an old horse-net and went into the house. Some of my clothes were afterward found in the hay, and the doctor pried a part of my person out of Kosciusko’s jaws, but not enough to do me any good.

I have owned, in all, eleven dogs, and they all died violent deaths, and went out of the world totally unprepared to die.

A Picturesque Picnic.

Railroads have made the Rocky Mountain country familiar and contiguous, I may say, to the whole world; but the somber canon, the bald and blackened cliff, the velvety park and the snowy, silent peak that forever rests against the soft, blue sky, are ever new. The foamy green of the torrent has whirled past the giant walls of nature’s mighty fortress myriads of years, perhaps, and the stars have looked down into the great heart of earth for centuries, where the silver thread of streams, thousands of feet below, has been patiently carving out the dark canon where the eagle and the solemn echo have their home.

I said this to a gentleman from Leadville a short time ago as we toiled up Kenoska Hill, between Platte canon and the South Park, on the South Park and Pacific Railway. He said that might be true in some cases and even more so, perhaps, depending entirely on whether it would or not.

I do not believe at this moment that he thoroughly understood me. He was only a millionaire and his soul, very likely, had never throbbed and thrilled with the mysterious music nature yields to her poet child.

He could talk on and on of porphyry walls and contact veins, gray copper and ruby silver, and sulphurets and pyrites of iron, but when my eye kindled with the majestic beauty of these eternal battlements and my voice trembled a little with awe and wonder; while my heart throbbed and thrilled in the midst of nature’s eloquent, golden silence, this man sat there like an Etruscan ham and refused to throb or thrill. He was about as unsatisfactory a throbber and thriller as I have met for years.

At an elevation of over 10,000 feet above high water mark, Fahrenheit, the South Park, a hundred miles long, surrounded by precipitous mountains or green and sloping foot-hills, burst upon us, In the clear, still air, a hundred miles away, at Pueblo, I could hear a promissory note and cut-throat mortgage drawing three per cent a month. So calm and unruffled was the rarified air that I fancied I could hear the thirteenth assessment on a share of stock at Leadville toiling away at the bottom of a two hundred and fifty foot shaft.

Colorado air is so pure that men in New York have, in several instances, heard the dull rumble of an assessment working as far away as the San Juan country.

At Como, in the park, I met Col. Wellington Wade, the Duke of Dirty Woman’s Ranch, and barber extraordinary to old Stand-up-and-Yowl, chief of the Piebiters.

Colonel Wade is a reformed temperance lecturer. I went to his shop to get shaved, but he was absent. I could smell hair oil through the keyhole, but the Colonel was not in his slab-inlaid emporium. He had been preparing another lecture on temperance, and was at that moment studying the habits of his adversary at a neighboring gin palace. I sat down on the steps and devoured the beautiful landscape till he came. Then I sat down in the chair, and he hovered over me while he talked about an essay he had written on the flowing bowl. His arguments were not so strong as his breath seemed to be. I asked him if he wouldn’t breathe the other way awhile and let me sober up. I learned afterward that although his nose was red, his essay was not.

He would shave me for a few moments, and then he would hone the razor on his breath and begin over again. I think he must have been pickling his lungs in alcohol. I never met a more pronounced gin cocktail symphony and bologna sausage study in my life.

I think Sir Walter Scott must have referred to Colonel Wade when he said, “Breathes there a man with soul so dead?” Colonel Wade’s soul might not have been dead, but it certainly did not enjoy perfect health.

I went over the mountains to Breckenridge the next day, climbed two miles perpendicularly into the sky, rode on a special train one day, a push car the next and a narrow-gauge engine the next. Saw all the beauty of the country, in charge of Superintendent Smith, went over to Buena Vista and had a congestion of the spine and a good time generally. You can leave Denver on a morning train and see enough wild, grand, picturesque loveliness before supper, to store away in your heart and hang upon the walls of memory, to last all through your busy, humdrum life, and it is a good investment, too.

Taxidermy.

This name is from two Greek words which signify “arrangement” and “skin,” so that the ancient Greeks, no doubt, regarded taxidermy as the original skin-game of that period. Taxidermy did not flourish in America prior to the year 1828. At that time an Englishman named Scudder established a museum and general repository for upholstered beasts.

Since then the art has advanced quite rapidly. To properly taxiderm, requires a fine taste and a close study of the subject itself in life, akin to the requirements necessary in order to succeed as a sculptor. I have seen taxidermed animals that would not fool anybody. I recall, at this time especially, a mountain lion, stuffed after death by a party who had not made this matter a subject of close study. The lion was represented in a crouching attitude, with open jaws and red gums. As time passed on and year succeeded year, this lion continued to crouch. His tail became less rampant and drooped like a hired man on a hot day. His gums became less fiery red and his reddish skin hung over his bones in a loose and distraught manner, like an old buffalo robe thrown over the knees of a vinegary old maid. Spiders spun their webs across his dull, white fangs. Mice made their nests in his abdominal cavity. His glass eye became hopelessly strabismussed, and the moths left him bald-headed on the stomach. He was a sad commentary on the extremely transitory nature of all things terrestrial and the hollowness of the stuffed beast.

I had a stuffed bird for a long time, which showed the cunning of the stuffer to a great degree. It afforded me a great deal of unalloyed pleasure, because I liked to get old hunters to look at it and tell me what kind of a bird it was. They did not generally agree. A bitter and acrimonious fight grew out of a discussion in relation to this bird. A man from Vinegar Hill named Lyons and a party called Soiled Murphy (since deceased), were in my office one morning–Mr. Lyons as a witness, and Mr. Murphy in his great specialty as a drunk and disorderly. We had just disposed of the case, and had just stepped down from the bench, intending to take off the judicial ermine and put some more coal in the stove, when the attention of Soiled Murphy was attracted to the bird. He allowed that it was a common “hell-diver with an abnormal head,” while Lyons claimed that it was a kingfisher.

The bird had a duck’s body, the head of a common eagle and the feet of a sage hen. These parts had been adjusted with great care and the tail loaded with lead somehow, so that the powerful head would not tip the bird up behind. With this _rara avis_, to use a foreign term, I loved to amuse and instruct old hunters, who had been hunting all their lives for a free drink, and hear them tell how they had killed hundred of these birds over on the Poudre in an early day, or over near Elk Mountain when the country was new.

So Lyons claimed that he had killed millions of these fowls, and Soiled Murphy, who was known as the tomato can and beer-remnant savant of that country, said that before the Union Pacific Railroad got into that section, these birds swarmed around Hutton’s lakes and lived on horned toads.

The feeling got more and more partisan till Mr. Lyons made a pass at Soiled Murphy with a large red cuspidor that had been presented to me by Valentine Baker, a dealer in abandoned furniture and mines. Mr. Murphy then welted Lyons over the head with the judicial scales. He then adroitly caught a lump of bituminous coal with his countenance and fell to the floor with a low cry of pain.

I called in an outside party as a witness, and in the afternoon both men were convicted of assault and battery. Soiled Murphy asked for a change of venue on the ground that I was prejudiced. I told him that I did not allow anything whatever to prejudice me, and went on with the case.

This great taxidermic masterpiece led to other assaults afterward, all of which proved remunerative in a small way. My successor claimed that the bird was a part of the perquisites of the office, and so I had to turn it over with the docket.

I also had a stuffed weasel from Cummins City that attracted a great deal of attention, both in this country and in Europe. It looked some like a weasel and some like an equestrian sausage with hair on it.

The Ways of Doctors.

“There’s a big difference in doctors, I tell you,” said an old-timer to me the other day. “You think you know something about ’em, but you are still in the fluff and bloom, and kindergarten of life, Wait till you’ve been through what I have.”

“Where, for instance?” I asked him.

“Well, say nothing about anything else, just look at the doctors we had in the war. We had a doctor in our regiment that looked as if he knew so much that it made him unhappy. I found out afterward that he ran a kind of cow foundling asylum, in Utah before the war, and when he had to prescribe for a human being, it seemed to kind of rattle him.

“I fell off’n my horse early in the campaign and broke my leg, I rickolect, and he sot the bone. He thought that a bone should be sot similar to a hen. He made what he called a good splice, but the break was above the knee, and he got the cow idea into his head in a way that set the knee behind. That was bad.

[Illustration: HE GAVE ME A CIGAR.]

“I told him one day that he was a blamed fool. He gave me a cigar and told me I must be a mind reader.

“For several weeks our colonel couldn’t eat anything, and seemed to feel kind of billious. He didn’t know what the trouble was till he went to the doctor. He looked at the colonel a few moments, examined his tongue, and told him right off that he had lost his cud.

“He bragged a good deal on his diagnosis. He said he’d like to see the disease he couldn’t diagnose with one hand tied behind him.

“He was always telling me how he had resuscitated a man they hung over at T—- City in the early day. He was hung by mistake, it seemed. It was a dark night and the Vigilance committee was in something of a hurry, having another party to hang over at Dirty Woman’s ranch that night, and so they erroneously hung a quiet young feller from Illinois, who had been sent west to cure a case of bronchitis. He was right in the middle of an explanation when the head vigilanter kicked the board from under him and broke his neck.

[Illustration: BURIED WITH MILITARY HONORS.]

“All at once, some one said: ‘My God, we have made a ridiculous blunder. Boys, we can’t be too careful about hanging total strangers. A few more such breaks as these, and people from the States will hesitate about coming here to make their homes. We have always claimed that this was a good country for bronchitis, but if we write to Illinois and tell this young feller’s parents the facts, we needn’t look for a very large hegira from Illinois next season. Doc., can’t you do anything for the young man?’

“Then this young physician stepped forward, he says, and put his knee on the back of the boy’s neck, give it a little push, at the same time pulled the head back with a snap that straightened the neck, and the young feller, who was in the middle of a large word, something like ‘contumely,’ when the barrel tipped over, finished out the word and went right on with the explanation. The doctor said he lived a good many years, and was loved and esteemed by all who knew him.

“The doctor was always telling of his triumphs in surgery. He did save a good many lives, too, toward the close of the war. He did it in an odd way, too.

“He had about one year more to serve, and, with his doctoring on one side and the hostility of the enemy on the other, our regiment was wore down to about five hundred men. Everybody said we couldn’t stand it more than another year. One day, however, the doctor had just measured a man for a porus plaster, and had laid the stub of his cigar carefully down on the top of a red powder-keg, when there was a slight atmospheric disturbance, the smell of burnt clothes, and our regiment had to apply for a new surgeon.

“The wife of our late surgeon wrote to have her husband’s remains forwarded to her, but I told her that it would be very difficult to do so, owing to the nature of the accident. I said, however, that we had found an upper set of store teeth imbedded in a palmetto tree near by, and had buried them with military honors, erecting over the grave a large board, on which was inscribed the name and age of the deceased and this inscription:

“_Not dead, but spontaneously distributed. Gone to meet his glorified throng of patients. Ta, ta, vain world_.”

Absent Minded.

I remember an attorney, who practiced law out West years ago, who used to fill his pipe with brass paper fasteners, and try to light it with a ruling pen about twice a day. That was his usual average.

He would talk in unknown tongues, and was considered a thorough and revised encyclopedia on everything from the tariff on a meerschaum pipe to the latitude of Crazy Woman’s Fork west of Greenwich, and yet if he went