Remarks by Bill Nye

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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.

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