Remarks by Bill Nye

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Later on he came into the parlor, wearing a linen ulster with the belt
drooping behind him like the broken harness hanging to a shipwrecked and
stranded mule. His wife looked at him in a way that froze his blood. This
startled him so that he stepped back a pace or two, tangled his feet in
his surcingle, clutched wildly at the empty gas-light, but missed it and
sat down in a tall majolica cuspidor.

There were three games of whist going on when he fell, and there was a
good deal of excitement over the playing, but after he had been pulled out
of the American tear jug and led away, everyone of the twelve
whist-players had forgotten what the trump was.

They say that he has abandoned politics since then, and that now he don't
care whether we have any more November elections or not. I asked him once
if he would be active during the next campaign, as usual, and he said he
thought not. He said a man couldn't afford to be too active in a political
campaign. His constitution wouldn't stand it.

At that time he didn't care much whether the American people had a
president or not. If every public-spirited voter had got to work himself
up into a state of nervous excitability and prostration where reason
tottered on its throne, he thought that we needed a reform.

Those who wished to furnish reasons to totter on their thrones for the
National Central Committee at so much per tot, could do so; he, for one,
didn't propose to farm out his immortal soul and plug hat to the party, if
sixty million people had to stand four years under the administration of a
setting hen.

Spring.

Spring is now here. It has been here before, but not so much so, perhaps,
as it is this year. In spring the buds swell up and bust. The "violets"
bloom once more, and the hired girl takes off the double windows and the
storm door. The husband and father puts up the screen doors, so as to fool
the annual fly when he tries to make his spring debut. The husband and
father finds the screen doors and windows in the gloaming of the garret.
He finds them by feeling them in the dark with his hands. He finds the
rafters, also, with his head. When he comes down, he brings the screens
and three new intellectual faculties sticking out on his brow like the
button on a barn door.

Spring comes with joyous laugh, and song, and sunshine, and the burnt
sacrifice of the over-ripe boot and the hoary overshoe. The cowboy and the
new milch cow carol their roundelay. So does the veteran hen. The common
egg of commerce begins to come forth into the market at a price where it
can be secured with a step-ladder, and all nature seems tickled.

There are four seasons--spring, summer, autumn and winter. Spring is the
most joyful season of the year. It is then that the green grass and the
lavender pants come forth. The little robbins twitter in the branches, and
the horny-handed farmer goes joyously afield to till the soil till the
cows come home.--_Virgil_.

We all love the moist and fragrant spring. It is then that the sunlight
waves beat upon the sandy coast, and the hand-maiden beats upon the sandy
carpet. The man of the house pulls tacks out of himself and thinks of days
gone by, when you and I were young, Maggie. Who does not leap and sing in
his heart when the dandelion blossoms in the low lands, and the tremulous
tail of the lambkin agitates the balmy air?

The lawns begin to look like velvet and the lawn-mower begins to warm its
joints and get ready for the approaching harvest. The blue jay fills the
forest with his classical and extremely _au revoir_ melody, and the
curculio crawls out of the plum-tree and files his bill. The plow-boy puts
on his father's boots and proceeds to plow up the cunning little angle
worm. Anon, the black-bird alights on the swaying reeds, and the
lightning-rod man alights on the farmer with great joy and a new rod that
can gather up all the lightning in two States and put it in a two-gallon
jug for future use.

Who does not love spring, the most joyful season of the year? It is then
that the spring bonnet of the workaday world crosses the earth's orbit and
makes the bank account of the husband and father look fatigued. The low
shoe and the low hum of the bumble-bee are again with us. The little
striped hornet heats his nose with a spirit lamp and goes forth searching
for the man with the linen pantaloons. All nature is full of life and
activity. So is the man with the linen pantaloons. Anon, the thrush will
sing in the underbrush, and the prima donna will do up her voice in a
red-flannel rag and lay it away.

I go now into my cellar to bring out the gladiola bulb and the homesick
turnip of last year. Do you see the blue place on my shoulder? That is
where I struck when I got to the foot of the cellar stairs. The gladiola
bulbs are looking older than when I put them away last fall. I fear me
they will never again bulge forth. They are wrinkled about the eyes and
there are lines of care upon them. I could squeeze along two years without
the gladiola and the oleander in the large tub. If I should give my little
boy a new hatchet and he should cut down my beautiful oleander, I would
give him a bicycle and a brass band and a gold-headed cane.

O spring, spring,
You giddy young thing.[1]

[Footnote 1: From poems of passion and one thing another, by the author of
this sketch.]

The Duke of Rawhide.

"I believe I've got about the most instinct bulldog in the United States,"
said Cayote Van Gobb yesterday. "Other pups may show cuteness and cunning,
you know, but my dog, the Duke of Rawhide Buttes, is not only generally
smart, but he keeps up with the times. He's not only a talented cuss, but
his genius is always fresh and original."

"What are some of his specialties, Van?" said I.

"Oh, there's a good many of 'em, fust and last. He never seems to be
content with the achievements that please other dogs. You watch him and
you'll see that his mind is active all the time. When he is still he's
working up some scheme or another, that he will ripen and fructify later
on.

"For three year's I've had a watermelon patch and run it with more or less
success, I reckon. The Duke has tended to 'em after they got ripe, and I
was going to say that it kept his hands pretty busy to do it, but, to be
more accurate, I should say that it kept his mouth full. Hardly a night
after the melons got ripe and in the dark of the moon, but the Dude would
sample a cowboy or a sheep-herder from the lower Poudre. Watermelons were
generally worth ten cents a pound along the Union Pacific for the first
two weeks, and a fifty-pounder was worth $5. That made it an object to
keep your melons, for in a good year you could grow enough on ten acres to
pay off the national debt.

"Well, to return to my subject. Duke would sleep days during the season
and gather fragments of the rear breadths of Western pantaloons at night.
One morning Duke had a piece of fancy cassimere in his teeth that I tried
to pry out and preserve, so that I could identify the owner, perhaps, but
he wouldn't give it up. I coaxed him and lammed him across the face and
eyes with an old board, but he wouldn't give it to me. Then I watched him.
I've been watchin' him ever since. He took all these fragments of goods I
found, over into the garret above the carriage shed.

"Yesterday I went in there and took a lantern with me. There on the floor
the Duke of Rawhide had arranged all the samples of Rocky Mountain
pantaloons with a good deal of taste, and I don't suppose you'd believe
it, but that blamed pup is collecting all these little scraps to make
himself a crazy quilt.

"You can talk about instinct in animals, but, so far as the Duke of
Rawhide Buttes is concerned, it seems to me more like all-wool genius a
yard wide."

[Illustration]

Etiquette at Hotels.

Etiquette at hotels is a subject that has been but lightly treated upon by
our modern philosophy, and yet it is a subject that lies very near to
every American heart. Had I not already more reforms on hand than I can
possibly successfully operate I would gladly use my strong social
influence and trenchant pen in that direction. Etiquette at hotels, both
on the part of the proprietor, and his hirelings, and the guest, is a
matter that calls loudly for improvement.

The hotel waiter alone, would well repay a close study. From the tardy and
polished loiterer of the effete East, to the off-hand and social equal of
the budding West, all waiters are deserving of philosophical scrutiny. I
was thrown in contact with a waiter in New York last summer, whose manners
were far more polished than my own. Every time I saw him standing there
with his immediate pantaloons and swallow-tail coat, and the far-away,
chastened look of one who had been unfortunate, but not crushed, I felt
that I was unworthy to be waited upon by such a blue-blooded thoroughbred,
and I often wished that we had more such men in Congress. And when he
would take my order and go away with it, and after the meridian of my life
had softened into the mellow glory of the sere and yellow leaf, when he
came back, still looking quite young, and never having forgotten me,
recognizing me readily after the long, dull, desolate years, I was glad,
and I felt that he deserved something more than mere empty thanks and I
said to him: "Ah, sir, you still remember me after years of privation and
suffering. When every one else in New York has forgotten me, with the
exception of the confidence man, you came to me with the glad light of
recognition in your clear eye. Would you be offended if I gave you this
trifling testimonial of my regard?" at the same time giving him my note at
thirty days.

I wanted him to have something by which to always remember me, and I guess
he has.

Speaking of waiters, reminds me of one at Glendive, Montana. We had to
telegraph ahead in order to get a place to sleep, and when we registered
the landlord shoved out an old double-entry journal for us to record our
names and postoffice address in. The office was the bar and before we
could get our rooms assigned us, we had to wait forty-five minutes for the
landlord to collect pay for thirteen drinks and lick a personal friend.
Finally, when he got around to me, he told me that I could sleep in the
night bar-tender's bed, as he would be up all night, and might possibly
get killed and never need it again, anyhow. It would cost me $4 cash in
advance to sleep one night in the bartender's bed, he said, and the house
was so blamed full that he and his wife had got to wait till things kind
of quieted down, and then they would have to put a mattress on the 15 ball
pool table and sleep there.

I called attention to my valuable valise that had been purchased at great
cost, and told him that he would be safe to keep that behind the bar till
I paid; but he said he wasn't in the second-hand valise business, and so I
paid in advance. It was humiliating, but he had the edge on me.

At the tea table I noticed that the waiter was a young man who evidently
had not been always thus. He had the air of one who yearns to have some
one tread on the tail of his coat. Meekness, with me, is one of my
characteristics. It is almost a passion. It is the result of personal
injuries received in former years at the hands of parties who excelled me
in brute force and who succeeded in drawing me out in conversation, as it
were, till I made remarks that were injudicious.

So I did not disagree with this waiter, although I had grounds. When he
came around and snorted in my ear, "Salt pork, antelope and cold beans,"
at the same time leaning his full weight on my back, while he evaded the
revenue laws by retailing his breath to the guests without a license, I
thought I would call for what he had the most of, so I said if he didn't
mind and it wouldn't be too much trouble, I would take cold beans.

I will leave it to the calm, impassionate and unpartisan reader to state
whether that remark ought to create ill-feeling. I do not think it ought.
However, he was irritable, and life to him seemed to be cold and dark. So
he went to the general delivery window that led into the cold bean
laboratory, and remarked in a hoarse, insolent, and ironical tone of
voice:

"Nother damned suspicious looking character wants cold beans."

Fifteen Years Apart.

The American Indian approximates nearer to what man should be--manly,
physically perfect, grand in character, and true to the instincts of his
conscience--than any other race of beings, civilized or uncivilized. Where
do we hear such noble sentiments or meet with such examples of heroism and
self-sacrifice as the history of the American Indian furnishes? Where
shall we go to hear again such oratory as that of Black Hawk and Logan?
Certainly the records of our so-called civilization do not furnish it, and
the present century is devoid of it.

They were the true children of the Great Spirit. They lived nearer to the
great heart of the Creator than do their pale-faced conquerors of to-day
who mourn over the lost and undone condition of the savage. Courageous,
brave and the soul of honor, their cruel and awful destruction from the
face of the earth is a sin of such magnitude that the relics and the
people of America may well shrink from the just punishment which is sure
to follow the assassination of as brave a race as ever breathed the air of
Heaven.

[Illustration: AT FIFTEEN.]

I wrote the above scathing rebuke of the American people when I was 15
years of age. I ran across the dissertation yesterday. As a general rule,
it takes a youth 15 years of age to arraign Congress and jerk the
administration bald-headed. The less he knows about things generally, the
more cheerfully will he shed information right and left.

At the time I wrote the above crude attack upon the government, I had not
seen any Indians, but I had read much. My blood boiled when I thought of
the wrongs which our race had meted out to the red man. It was at the time
when my blood was just coming to a boil that I penned the above paragraph.
Ten years later I had changed my views somewhat, relative to the Indian,
and frankly wrote to the government of the change. When I am doing the
administration an injustice, and I find it out, I go to the president
candidly, and say: "Look here, Mr. President, I have been doing you a
wrong. You were right and I was erroneous. I am not pig-headed and
stubborn. I just admit fairly that I have been hindering the
administration, and I do not propose to do so any more."

So I wrote to Gen. Grant and told him that when I was 15 years of age I
wrote a composition at school in which I had arraigned the people and the
administration for the course taken toward the Indians. Since that time I
had seen some Indians in the mountains--at a distance--and from what I had
seen of them I was led to believe that I had misjudged the people and the
executive. I told him that so far as possible I would like to repair the
great wrong so done in the ardor of youth and to once more sustain the arm
of the government.

He wrote me kindly and said he was glad that I was friendly with the
government again, and that now he saw nothing in the way of continued
national prosperity. He said he would preserve my letter in the archives
as a treaty of peace between myself and the nation. He said only the day
before he had observed to the cabinet that he didn't care two cents about
a war with foreign nations, but he would like to be on a peace footing
with me. The country could stand outside interference better than
intestine hostility. I do not know whether he meant anything personal by
that or not. Probably not.

He said he remembered very well when he first heard that I had attacked
the Indian policy of the United States in one of my school essays. He
still called to mind the feeling of alarm and apprehension which at that
time pervaded the whole country. How the cheeks of strong men had blanched
and the Goddess of Liberty felt for her back hair and exchanged her Mother
Hubbard dress for a new cast-iron panoply of war and Roman hay knife. Oh,
yes, he said, he remembered it as though it had been yesterday.

Having at heart the welfare of the American people as he did, he hoped
that I would never attack the republic again.

And I never have. I have been friendly, not only personally, but
officially, for a good while. Even if I didn't agree with some of the
official acts of the president I would allow him to believe that I did
rather than harass him with cold, cruel and adverse criticism. The
abundant success of this policy is written in the country's wonderful
growth and prosperous peace.

Dessicated Mule.

The red-eyed antagonist of truth is not found alone in the ranks of the
newspaper phalanx. You run up against him in all walks of life. He
flourishes in all professions, and he is ready at all times to entertain.
There is quite a difference between a malicious falsehood and the
different shades of parables, fables with a moral, Sabbath-school books,
newspaper sketches, and anecdotes told to entertain.

A malicious lie is injurious personally. A business lie is a falsehood for
revenue only. But the yarns that are spun around camp-fires, in mining and
logging camps, to while away a dull evening, are not within the
jurisdiction of the criminal code or the home missionary.

On the train, yesterday several old lumbermen were telling about hard
roads and steep hills, engineering skill and so forth. Finally they told
about "snubbing" a loaded team down bad hills, and one man said:

"You might 'snub' down a cheap hill, but you couldn't do it on our road.
We tried it. Couldn't do a thing. Finally we got to building snow-sheds
and hauling sand. You build a snow-shed that covers the grade, then fill
the road in with two feet of loose sand, and you're O.K. We did that last
winter, and when you drive a four-horse load of logs down through them
long snow-sheds on bare ground, mind ye, and the bobs go plowing through
the sand, the sled-shoes will make the fire fly so that you can read the
President's message at midnight."

Then an old man who went to Pike's Peak during the excitement and returned
afterward, woke up and yawned two or three times, and said they used to
have some trouble, a good many years ago getting over the range where the
South Park road now goes from Chalk Creek Canon through Alpine Tunnel to
the Gunnison.

"We tried 'snubbing' and everything we could think of, but it was N.G.

"Finally we got hold of a new kind of 'snub' that worked pretty well. We
had a long table made a-purpose, that would reach to the foot of the hill
from the top, and we'd tie a three-ton load to the end at the top of the
hill; then we would hitch six mules to the end at the foot of the hill.
Well, the principle of the thing was, that as the load went down on the
Gunnison side it would pull the mules up the opposite side, tails first."

"How did it work?"

"Oh, it worked all right if the mules and the load balanced; but one day
we put on a light mule named Emma Abbott, and the load got a start down
the Gunnison side that made that old cable sing. The wagon tipped over and
concussed a keg of blasting powder, and that obliterated the rest of the
goods.

"But the air on the other side was full of mules. You ought to seen 'em
come up that hill!

"It takes considerable of a crisis to affect the natural reserve of six
mules; but when they saw how it was, they backed up that mountain with
great enthusiasm. They didn't touch the ground but once in three thousand
feet, but they struck the canopy of heaven several times.

"When the sky cleared up, we made a careful inventory of the stock.

"We had a second-hand three-inch cable and some desiccated mule. We never
went to look for the wagon; but when the weather got warm, the Coyotes
helped us find Emma Abbott.

"She was hanging by the ear in the crotch of an old hemlock tree.

"Life was extinct.

"We found a few more of the mules, but they were fractional.

"Emma Abbott was the only complete mule we found."

Time's Changes.

I fixed myself and went out trout fishing on the only original
Kinnickinnick river last week. It was a kind of Rip Van Winkle picnic and
farewell moonlight excursion home. I believe that Rip Van Winkle, however,
confined himself to hunting mostly with an old musket that was on the
retired list when Rip took his sleepy drink on the Catskills. If he could
have gone with me fishing last week over the old trail, digging
angle-worms at the same old place where I left the spade sticking in the
grim soil twenty years ago--if we could have waded down the Kinnickinnick
together with high rubber boots on, and got nibbles and bites at the same
places, and found the same old farmers with nearly a quarter of a century
added to their lives and glistening in their hair, we would have had fun
no doubt on that day, and a headache on the day following. This affords me
an opportunity to say that trout may be caught successfully without a
corkscrew. I have tried it. I've about decided that the main reason why so
many large lies are told about the number of trout caught all over the
country, is that at the moment the sportsman pulls his game out of the
water, he labors under some kind of an optical illusion, by reason of
which he sees about nine trout where he ought to see only one.

I wish I had as many dollars as I have soaked deceased angle-worms in that
same beautiful Kinnickinnick. There was a little stream made into it that
we called Tidd's creek. It is still there. This stream runs across Tidd's
farm, and Tidd twenty years ago wouldn't allow anybody to fish in the
creek. I can still remember how his large hand used to feel, as he caught
me by the nape of the neck and threw me over the fence with my amateur
fishing tackle and a willow "stringer" with eleven dried, stiff trout on
it. Last week I thought I would try Tidd's creek again. It was always a
good place to fish, and I felt the same old excitement, with just enough
vague forebodings in it to make it pleasant. Still, I had grown a foot or
so since I used to fish there, and perhaps I could return the compliment
by throwing the old gentleman over his own fence, and then hiss in his ear
"R-r-r-r-e-v-e-n-g-e!!!"

[Illustration: I BECAME MORE FEARLESS.]

I had got pretty well across the "lower forty" and had about decided that
Tidd had been gathered to his fathers, when I saw him coming with his head
up like a steer in the corn. Tidd is a blacksmith by trade, and he has an
arm with hair on it that looks like Jumbo's hind leg. I felt the same old
desire to climb the fence and be alone. I didn't know exactly how to work
it. Then I remembered how people had remarked that I had changed very much
in twenty years, and that for a homely boy I had grown to be a remarkably
picturesque-looking man. I trusted to Tidd's failing eyesight and said:

"How are you?"

He said, "How are you?" That did not answer my question, but I didn't mind
a little thing like that.

Then he said: "I sposed that every pesky fool in this country knew I don't
allow fishing on my land."

"That may be," says I, "but I ain't fishing on your land. I always fish in
a damp place if I can. Moreover, how do I know this is your land? Carrying
the argument still further, and admitting that every peesky fool knows
that you didn't allow fishing here, I am not going to be called a pesky
fool with impunity, unless you do it over my dead body." He stopped about
ten rods away and I became more fearless. "I don't know who you are," said
I, as I took off my coat and vest and piled them up on my fish basket,
eager for the fray. "You claim to own this farm, but it is my opinion that
you are the hired man, puffed up with a little authority. You can't order
me off this ground till you show me a duly certified abstract of title and
then identify yourself. What protection does a gentleman have if he is to
be kicked and cuffed about by Tom, Dick and Harry, claiming they own the
whole State. Get out! Avaunt! If you don't avaunt pretty quick I'll scrap
you and sell you to a medical college."

He stood in dumb amazement a moment, then he said he would go and get his
deed and his shotgun. I said shotguns suited me exactly, and I told him to
bring two of them loaded with giant powder and barbed wire. I would not
live alway. I asked not to stay. When he got behind the corn-crib I
climbed the fence and fled with my ill-gotten gains.

The blacksmith in his prime may lick the small boy, but twenty years
changes their relative positions. Possibly Tidd could tear up the ground
with me now, but in ten more years, if I improve as fast as he fails, I
shall fish in that same old stream again.

Letter From New York.

Dear friend.--Being Sunday, I take an hour to write you a letter in regard
to this place. I came here yesterday without attracting undue attention
from people who lived here. If they was surprised, they concealed it from
me.

I've camped out on the Chug years ago, and went to sleep with no live
thing near me except my own pony, and woke up with the early song of the
coyote, and have been on the lonesome plain for days where it seemed to me
that a hostile would be mighty welcome if he would only say something to
me, but I was never so lonesome as I was here in this big town last night,
although it is the most thick settled place I was ever at.

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