Remarks by Bill Nye

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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.

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