Remarks by Bill Nye

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I was so kind of low and depressed that I strolled in to the bar at last,
allowing that I could pound on the counter and call up the boys and get
acquainted a little with somebody, just as I would at Col. Luke Murrin's,
at Cheyenne; but when I waved to the other parties, and told them to rally
round the foaming beaker, they apologized, and allowed they had just been
to dinner.

Just been to dinner, and there it was pretty blamed near dark! Then I
asked 'em to take a cigar, but they mostly cackillated they had no
occasion.

I was mad, but what could I do? They was too many for me, and I couldn't
coerce the white livered aristocratic mob, for quicker'n scat they could
have hollored into a little cupboard they had there in the corner, and in
less'n two minits they'd of had the whole police department and the hook
and ladder company down there after me with a torch-light procession.

So I swallowed my wrath and a tame drink of cultivated whiskey with Apollo
Belvidere on the side, and went out into the auditorium of the hotel.

Here I was very unhappy, being, as the editor of the Green River _Gazette_
would say, "the cynosure of all eyes."

I would rather not be a cynosure, even at a good salary; so I thought I
would ask the proprietor to build a fire in my room. I went up to the
recorder's office, where the big hotel autograft album is, and asked to
see the proprietor.

A good-looking young man came forward and asked me what he could do for
me. I said if it wouldn't be too much trouble, I wisht he would build a
little fire in my room, and I would pay him for it; or, if he would show
me where the woodpile was, I would build the fire myself--I wasn't doing
anything special at that time.

He then whistled through his teeth and crooked his finger in a shrill tone
of voice to a young party who was working for him, and told him to "build
a fire in four-ought-two."

I then sat down in the auditorium and read out of a railroad tract, which
undertook to show that a party that undertook to ride over a rival road,
must do so because life was a burden to him, and facility, and comfort,
and safety, and such things no object whatever. But still I was very
lonely, and felt as if I was far, far away from home.

I couldn't have been more uncomfortable if I'd been a young man I saw
twenty-five years ago on the old overland trail. He had gone out to study
the Indian character, and to win said Indian to the fold. When I next saw
him he was twenty miles farther on. He had been thrown in contact with
said Indian in the meantime. I judged he had been making a collection of
Indian arrows. He was extremely no more. He looked some like Saint
Sebastian, and some like a toothpick-holder.

I was never successfully lost on the plains, and so I started out after
supper to find my room. I found a good many other rooms, and tried to get
into them, but I did not find four-ought-two till a late hour; then I
subsidized the night patrol on the third floor to assist me.

This is a nice place to stop, but it is a little too rich for my blood, I
guess Not so much as regards price, but I can see that I am beginning to
excite curiosity among the boarders. People are coming here to board just
because I am here, and it is disagreeable. I do not court notoriety. I
have always lived in a plain way, and I would give a dollar if people
would look the other way while I eat my pie.

Yours truly,

E.O.D.

To E. Wm. Nye, Esq.

P.S.--This is not a dictated letter. I left my stenograffer and revolver
at Pumpkin Buttes.

E.O.D.

Crowns and Crowned Heads.

During the hot weather very few crowns are worn this season, and a few
hints as to the care of the crown itself may not be out of place.

The crown should not be carelessly hung on the hat rack in the royal hall
for the flies to roost upon, but it should be thoroughly cleaned and put
away as soon as the weather becomes too hot to wear it comfortably.

Great care should be used in cleaning a gold-plated crown, to avoid
wearing out the plate. Take a good stiff tooth brush, with a little
soapsuds, and clean the crown thoroughly at first, drying it on a clean
towel and taking care not to drop it on the floor and thus knock the
moss-agate diadem loose. Next, get a sleeve of the royal undershirt, or,
in case you can not procure one readily, the sleeve of a duke or
right-bower may be used. Soak this in vinegar, and, with a coat of
whiting, polish the crown thoroughly, wrap it in cotton-flannel and put in
the bureau. Sometimes, the lining of the crown becomes saturated with
hair-oil from constant use and needs cleaning. In such cases the lining
may be removed, boiled in concentrated lye two hours, or until tender, and
then placed on the grass to bleach in the sun.

Most crowns are size six-and-seven-eights, and they are therefore
frequently too large for the number six head of royalty. In such cases a
newspaper may be folded lengthwise and laid inside the sweat-band of the
crown, thus reducing the size and preventing any accident by which his or
her majesty might lose the crown in the coal-bin while doing chores.

After the Fourth of July and other royal holidays, this newspaper may be
removed, and the crown will be found none too large for the imperial dome
of thought.

Sceptres may be cleaned and wrapped in woolen goods during the hot months.
The leg of an old pair of pantaloons makes a good retort to run a sceptre
into while not in use. Never try to kill flies or drive carpet tacks with
the sceptre. It is an awkward tool at best, and you might 'easily knock a
thumb nail loose. Great care should also be taken of the royal robe. Do
not use it for a lap robe while dining, nor sleep in it at night. Nothing
looks more repugnant than a king on the throne, with little white feathers
all over his robe.

It is equally bad taste to govern a kingdom in a maroon robe with white
horse hairs all over it.

[Illustration: A HARD-WORKING MONARCH.]

I once knew a king who invariably curried his horses in his royal robes;
and if the steeds didn't stand around to suit him, he would ever and anon
welt them in the pit of the stomach with his cast-iron sceptre. It was
greatly to the interest of his horses not to incur the royal displeasure,
as the reader has no doubt already surmised.

The robe of the king should only be worn while his majesty is on the
throne. When he comes down at night, after his day's work, and goes out
after his coal and kindling-wood, he may take off his robe, roll it up
carefully, and stick it under the throne, where it will be out of sight.
Nothing looks more untidy than a fat king milking a bobtail cow in a
Mother Hubbard robe trimmed with imitation ermine.

My Physician.

[An Open Letter.]

Dear Sir: I have seen recently an open letter addressed to me, and written
by you in a vein of confidence and strictly sub rosa. What you said was so
strictly confidential, in fact, that you published the letter in New York,
and it was copied through the press of the country. I shall, therefore,
endeavor to be equally careful in writing my reply.

You refer in your kind and confidential note to your experience as an
invalid, and your rapid recovery after the use of red-hot Mexican pepper
tea in a molten state.

But you did not have such a physician as I did when I had spinal
meningitis. He was a good doctor for horses and blind staggers, but he was
out of his sphere when he strove to fool with the human frame. Change of
scene and rest were favorite prescriptions of his. Most of his patients
got both, especially eternal rest. He made a specialty of eternal rest.

He did not know what the matter was with me, but he seemed to be willing
to learn.

My wife says that while he was attending me I was as crazy as a loon, but
that I was more lucid than the physician. Even with my little, shattered
wreck of mind, tottering between a superficial knowledge of how to pound
sand and a wide, shoreless sea of mental vacuity, I still had the edge on
my physician, from an intellectual point of view. He is still practicing
medicine in a quiet kind of way, weary of life, and yet fearing to die and
go where his patients are.

He had a sabre wound on one cheek that gave him a ferocious appearance. He
frequently alluded to how he used to mix up in the carnage of battle, and
how he used to roll up his pantaloons and wade in gore. He said that if
the tocsin of war should sound even now, or if he were to wake up in the
night and hear war's rude alarum, he would spring to arms and make tyranny
tremble till its suspender buttons fell off.

Oh, he was a bad man from Bitter Creek.

One day I learned from an old neighbor that this physician did not have
anything to do with preserving the Union intact, but that he acquired the
scar on his cheek while making some experiments as a drunk and disorderly.
He would come and sit by my bedside for hours, waiting for this mortality
to put on immortality, so that he could collect his bill from the estate,
but one day I arose during a temporary delirium, and extracting a slat
from my couch I smote him across the pit of the stomach with it, while I
hissed through my clenched teeth:

"Physician, heal thyself."

[Illustration: "PHYSICIAN, HEAL THYSELF."]

I then tottered a few minutes, and fell back into the arms of my
attendants. If you do not believe this, I can still show you the clenched
teeth. Also the attendants.

I had a hard time with this physician, but I still live, contrary to his
earnest solicitations.

I desire to state that should this letter creep into the press of the
country, and thus become in a measure public, I hope that it will create
no ill-feeling on your part.

Our folks are all well as I write, and should you happen to be on Lake
Superior this winter, yachting, I hope you will drop in and see us. Our
latch string is hanging out most all the time, and if you will pound on
the fence I will call off the dog.

I frequently buy a copy of your paper on the streets. Do you get the
money?

Are you acquainted with the staff of _The Century_, published in New York?
I was in _The Century_ office several hours last spring, and the editors
treated me very handsomely, but, although I have bought the magazine ever
since, and read it thoroughly, I have not seen yet where they said that
"they had a pleasant call from the genial and urbane William Nye." I do
not feel offended over this. I simply feel hurt.

Before that I had a good notion to write a brief epic on the "Warty Toad,"
and send it to _The Century_ for publication, but now it is quite
doubtful.

_The Century_ may be a good paper, but it does not take the press
dispatches, and only last month I saw in it an account of a battle that to
my certain knowledge occurred twenty years ago.

All About Oratory.

Twenty centuries ago last Christmas there was born in Attica, near Athens,
the father of oratory, the greatest orator of whom history has told us.
His name was Demosthenes. Had he lived until this spring he would have
been 2,270 years old; but he did not live. Demosthenes has crossed the
mysterious river. He has gone to that bourne whence no traveler returns.

Most of you, no doubt, have heard about it. On those who may not have
heard it, the announcement will fall with a sickening thud.

This sketch is not intended to cast a gloom over your hearts. It was
designed to cheer those who read it and make them glad they could read.

Therefore, I would have been glad if I could have spared them the pain
which this sudden breaking of the news of the death of Demosthenes will
bring. But it could not be avoided. We should remember the transitory
nature of life, and when we are tempted to boast of our health, and
strength, and wealth, let us remember the sudden and early death of
Demosthenes.

Demosthenes was not born an orator. He struggled hard and failed many
times. He was homely, and he stammered in his speech; but before his death
they came to him for hundreds of miles to get him to open their county
fairs and jerk the bird of freedom bald-headed on the Fourth of July.

When Demosthenes' father died, he left fifteen talents to be divided
between Demosthenes and his sister. A talent is equal to about $1,000. I
often wish I had been born a little more talented.

Demosthenes had a short breath, a hesitating speech, and his manners were
very ungraceful. To remedy his stammering, he filled his mouth full of
pebbles and howled his sentiments at the angry sea. However, Plutarch says
that Demosthenes made a gloomy fizzle of his first speech. This did not
discourage him. He finally became the smoothest orator in that country,
and it was no uncommon thing for him to fill the First Baptist Church of
Athens full. There are now sixty of his orations extant, part of them
written by Demosthenes and part of them written by his private secretary.

When he started in, he was gentle, mild and quiet in his manner; but later
on, carrying his audience with him, he at last became enthusiastic. He
thundered, he roared, he whooped, he howled, he jarred the windows, he
sawed the air, he split the horizon with his clarion notes, he tipped over
the table, kicked the lamps out of the chandeliers and smashed the big
bass viol over the chief fiddler's head.

Oh, Demosthenes was business when he got started. It will be a long time
before we see another off-hand speaker like Demosthenes, and I, for one,
have never been the same man since I learned of his death.

"Such was the first of orators," says Lord Brougham. "At the head of all
the mighty masters of speech, the adoration of ages has consecrated his
place, and the loss of the noble instrument with which he forged and
launched his thunders, is sure to maintain it unapproachable forever."

I have always been a great admirer of the oratory of Demosthenes, and
those who have heard both of us, think there is a certain degree of
similarity in our style.

And not only did I admire Demosthenes as an orator, but as a man; and,
though I am no Vanderbilt, I feel as though I would be willing to head a
subscription list for the purpose of doing the square thing by his
sorrowing wife, if she is left in want, as I understand that she is.

I must now leave Demosthenes and pass on rapidly to speak of Patrick
Henry.

Mr. Henry was the man who wanted liberty or death. He preferred liberty,
though. If he couldn't have liberty, he wanted to die, but he was in no
great rush about it. He would like liberty, if there was plenty of it; but
if the British had no liberty to spare, he yearned for death. When the
tyrant asked him what style of death he wanted, he said that he would
rather die of extreme old age. He was willing to wait, he said. He didn't
want to go unprepared, and he thought it would take him eighty or ninety
years more to prepare, so that when he was ushered into another world he
wouldn't be ashamed of himself.

One hundred and ten years ago, Patrick Henry said: "Sir, our chains are
forged. Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston. The war is
inevitable, and let it come. I repeat it, sir, let it come!"

In the spring of 1860, I used almost the same language. So did Horace
Greeley. There were four or five of us who got our heads together and
decided that the war was inevitable, and consented to let it come.

Then it came. Whenever there is a large, inevitable conflict loafing
around waiting for permission to come, it devolves on the great statesmen
and bald-headed _literati_ of the nation to avoid all delay. It was so
with Patrick Henry. He permitted the land to be deluged in gore, and then
he retired. It is the duty of the great orator to howl for war, and then
hold some other man's coat while he fights.

Strabusmus and Justice.

Over in St. Paul I met a man with eyes of cadet blue and a terra cotta
nose. His eyes were not only peculiar in shape, but while one seemed to
constantly probe the future, the other was apparently ransacking the
dreamy past. While one rambled among the glorious possibilities of the
remote yet golden ultimately, the other sought the somber depths of the
previously.

He told me that years ago he had a mild case of strabismus and that both
eyes seemed to glare down his nose till he got restless and had them
operated on. Those were the days when they used to fasten a crochet hook
under the internal rectus muscle and cut it a little with a pair of
optical sheep shears. The effect of this course was to allow the eye to
drift back to a direct line; but this man fell into the hands of a drunken
surgeon who cut the muscle too much, and thereby weakened it so that it
gradually swung past the point it ought to have stopped at, and he saw
with horror that his eye was going to turn out and protrude, as it were,
so that a man could hang his hat on it. The other followed suit, and the
two orbs that had for years looked along the bridge of the terra cotta
nose, gradually separated, and while one looked toward next Christmas with
fond anticipations, the other loved to linger over the remembrances of
last fall.

This thing continued till he had to peer into the future with his off eye
closed, and vice versa.

It is needless to say that he hungered for the blood of that physician and
surgeon. He tried to lay violent hands on him and wipe up the ground with
him and wear him out across a telegraph pole. But the authorities always
prevented the administration of swift and lawful justice.

Time passed on, till one night the abnormal wall-eyed man loosened a board
in the sidewalk up town so that the physician and surgeon caught his foot
in it and caused an oblique fracture of the scapula, pied his dura mater,
busted his cornucopia and wrecked his sarah-bellum.

Perhaps I am in error as to some of these medical terms and their
orthography, but that is about the way the man with the divergent orbs
told it to me.

The physician and surgeon was quite a ruin. He had to wear clapboards on
himself for months, and there were other doctors, and laudable pus and
threatened gangrene and doctors' bills, with the cemetery looming up in
the near future. Day after day he took his own anti-febrile drinks, and
rammed his busted system full of iron and strychnine and beef tea and
dover's powders and hypodermic squirt till he wished he could die, but
death would not come. He pawed the air and howled. They fed him his own
nux vomica, tincture of rhubarb and phosphates and gruel, and brought him
back to life with a crooked collar bone, a shattered shoulder blade and a
look of woe.

Then he sued the town for $50,000 damages because the sidewalk was
imperfect, and the wild-eyed man with the inflamed nose got on the jury.

I will not explain how it was done, but there was a verdict for defendant
with costs on the Esculapian wreck. The man with the crooked vision is not
handsome, but he is very happy. He says the mills of the gods grind
slowly, but they pulverise middling fine.

A Spencerian Ass.

After I had accumulated a handsome competence as city editor of the old
Morning _Sentinel_ at Laramie City, and had married and gone to
housekeeping with a gas stove and other luxuries, my place on the
_Sentinel_ was taken by a newspaper man named Hopkins, who had just
graduated from a business college, and who brought a nice glazed grip
sack and a diploma with him that had never been used.

Hopkins wrote a fine Spencerian hand and wore a black and tan dog
where-ever he went. The boys were willing to overlook his copper-plate
hand, but they drew the line at the dog. He not only wrote in beautiful
style, but he copied his manuscript, so that when it went in to the
printer it was as pretty as a wedding invitation.

[Illustration: HE THREW ME OUT.]

Hopkins ran the city page nine days, and then he came into the city hall
where I was trying a simple drunk and bade me adieu.

I just say this to show how difficult it is for a fine penman to get ahead
as a journalist. Of course good, readable writers like Knox and John
Hancock may become great, but they have to be men of sterling ability to
start with.

I have some of the most bloodcurdling horrors preserved for the purpose of
showing Hopkins' wonderful and vivid style. I will throw them in.

"A little son of our esteemed fellow townsman, J.H. Hayford, suffered
greatly last evening with virulent colic, but this A.M., as we go to
press, is sleeping easily."

Think of shaking the social foundations of a mountain mining and stock
town with such grim, nervous prostrators as that! The next day he startled
Southern Wyoming and Northern Colorado and Utah with the maddening
statement that "our genial friend, Leopold Gussenhoven's fine, yellow dog,
Florence Nightingale, had been seriously threatened with insomnia."

That was the style of mental calisthenics he gave us in a town where death
by opium and ropium was liable to occur, and where five men with their
Mexican spurs on climbed one telegraph pole in one night and sauntered
into the remote indefinitely. Hopkins told me that he had tried to do what
was right, but that he had not succeeded very well. He wrung my hand and
said:

"I have tried hard to make the _Sentinel_ fill a long want felt, but I
have not been fortunate. The foreman over there is a harsh man. He used to
come in and intimate in a frowning and erect tone of voice, that if I did
not produce that copy p.d.q., or some other abbreviation or other, that he
would bust my crust, or words of like import.

"Now that's no way to talk to a man of a nervous temperament who is
engaged in copying a list of hotel arrivals, and shading the capitals as I
was. In the business college it was not that way. Everything was quiet,
and there was nothing to jar a man like that.

"Of course I would like to stay on the _Sentinel_ and draw the princely
salary, but there are two hundred reasons why I cannot do it. So far as
the physical effort is concerned, I could draw the salary with one hand
tied behind me, but there is too much turmoil and mad haste in daily
journalism to suit me, and another thing, the proprietor of the _Sentinel_
this morning stole up behind me and struck me over the head with a
wrought-iron side stick weighing ten pounds. If I had not concealed a coil
spring in my plug hat, the blow would have been deleterious to me.

"Then he threw me out of the door against a total stranger, and flung
pieces of coal at me and called me a copper-plate ass, and said that if I
ever came into the office again he would assassinate me.

"That is the principal reason why I have severed my connection with the
_Sentinel_."

As he said this, Mr. Hopkins took out a polka-dot handkerchief wiped away
a pearly tear the size of a walnut, wrung my hand, also the polka-dot
wipe, and stole out into the great, horrid hence.

Anecdotes of Justice.

The justice of the peace is sometimes a peculiarity, and if someone does
not watch him he will exceed his jurisdiction. It took a constable, a
sheriff, a prosecuting attorney and a club to convince a Wyoming justice
of the peace that he had no right to send a man to the penitentiary for
life. Another justice in Utah sentenced a criminal to be hung on the
following Friday between twelve and one o'clock of said day, but he
couldn't enforce the sentence. A Wisconsin justice of the peace granted a
divorce and in two weeks married the couple over again--ten dollars for
the divorce and two dollars for the relapse. Another Badger justice bound
a young man over to appear and answer at the next term of the Circuit
Court for the crime of chastity, and the evidence was entirely
circumstantial, too.

Another one, when his first case came up, jerked a candle box around
behind the dining-room table, put his hat on the back of his head,
borrowed a chew of tobacco from the prisoner and said: "Now, boys, the
court's open. The first feller that says a word unless I speak to him will
get paralyzed. Now tell your story." Then each witness and the defendant
reeled off his yarn without being sworn. The justice fined the defendant
ten dollars and made the complaining witness pay half the costs. The
justice then took the fine and put it in his pocket, adjourned court, and
in an hour was so full that it took six men to hold his house still long
enough for him to get into the doors.

A North Park justice of the peace and under-sheriff formed a partnership
years ago for the purpose of supplying people with justice at New York
prices, and by doing a strictly cash business they dispensed with a good
deal of justice, such as it was.

It was a misdemeanor to kill game and ship it out of the State, and as
there was a good deal killed there, consisting of elk, antelope and black
tail deer especially, and as it could not be hauled out of the Park at
that season without going across the Wyoming line and back again into the
State of Colorado, the under-sheriff would load himself down with
warrants, signed in blank, and station himself on horseback at the foot of
the pass to the North. He would then arrest everybody indiscriminately who
had any fraction of a deer, antelope or elk on his wagon, try the case
then and there, put on a fine of $25 to $75, which if paid never reached
the treasury, and then he would wait for another victim. The average man
would rather pay the fine than go back a hundred miles through the
mountains to stand trial, so the under-sheriff and justice thrived for
some time. But one day the under-sheriff served his patent automatic
warrant on a young man who refused to come down. The officer then drew one
of those large baritone instruments that generally has a coward at one end
and a corpse at the other. He pointed this at the young man and assessed a
fine of $50 and costs. Instead of paying this fine, the youth, who was
quite nimble, but unarmed, knocked the bogus officer down with the butt
end of his six-mule whip, took his self-cocking credentials away and lit
out. In less than a week the justice and his copper were in the
refrigerator.

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