Remarks by Bill Nye

B >> Bill Nye >> Remarks

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35

I was once a justice of the peace, and a good many funny little incidents
occurred while I held that office. I do not allude to my official life
here in order to call attention to my glowing career, for thousands of
others, no doubt, could have administered the affairs of the office as
well as I did, but rather to speak of one incident which took place while
I was a J.P.

One night after I had retired and gone to sleep a milkman, called Bill
Dunning, rang the bell and got me out of bed. Then he told me that a man
who owed him a milk bill of $35 was all loaded up and prepared to slip
across the line overland into Colorado, there to grow up with the country
and acquire other indebtedness, no doubt. Bill desired an attachment for
the entire wagon-load of goods and said he had an officer at hand to serve
the writ.

"But," said I, as I wrapped a "welcome" husk door mat around my glorious
proportions, "how do you know while we converse together he is not winging
his way down the valley of the Paudre?"

"Never mind that, jedge," says William. "You just fix the dockyments and
I'll tend to the defendant."

In an hour Bill returned with $35 in cash for himself and the entire costs
of the court, and as we settled up and fixed the docket I asked Bill
Dunning how he detained the defendant while we made out the affidavit bond
and writ of attachment.

"You reckollect, jedge," says William, "that the waggin wheel is held onto
the exle with a big nut. No waggin kin go any length of time without that
there nut onto the exle. Well, when I diskivered that what's-his-name was
packed up and the waggin loaded, I took the liberty to borrow one o' them
there nuts fur a kind of momento, as it were, and I kept that in my pocket
till we served the writ and he paid my bill and came to his milk, if
you'll allow me that expression, and then I says to him, 'Pardner,' says
I, you are going far, far away where I may never see you again. Take this
here nut,' says I, 'and put it onto the exle of the oft hind wheel of your
waggin, and whenever you look at it hereafter, think of poor old Bill
Dunning, the milkman.'"

The Chinese God.

I presume that I shall not be accused of sacrilege in referring to the
Chinese god as an inferior piece of art. Viewed simply from an artistic
and economical standpoint, it seems to me that the Chinaman should have
less pride in his bow-legged and inefficient god than in any other
national institution.

I do not wish to be understood as interfering with any man's religious
views; but when polygamy is made a divine decree, or a basswood deity is
whittled out and painted red, to look up to and to worship, I cannot treat
that so-called religious belief with courtesy and reverence. I am quite
liberal in all religious matters. People have noticed that and remarked
it, but the Oriental god of commerce seems to me to be greatly over-rated.
He seems to lack that genuine decision of character which should be a
feature of an over-ruling power.

I ask the phrenologist to come with me and examine the head of the alleged
Josh, and to state whether or not he believes that the properly balanced
head of a successful god should not have a more protuberant knob of
spirituality, and a less pronounced alimentiveness. Should the bump of
combativeness hang out over the ear, while time, tune and calculation are
noticeably reticent? I certainly wot not.

Again, how can the physiognomy of the Celestial Josh be consistent with a
moral and temperate god? The low brow would not indicate a pronounced
omniscience, and the Jumbo ears and the copious neck would not impress me
with the idea of purity and spirituality.

It is, no doubt, wrong to attack sacred matters for the purpose of gaining
notoriety; but I believe I am right, when I assert that the Chinese god
must go. We should not be Puritanical, but we might safely draw the line
at the bow-legged and sedentary goddess of leprosy.

If Confucius bowed the suppliant knee to that goggle-eyed jim-jam Josh,
I am grieved to know it. If such was the case, the friends of Confucius
should keep the matter from me. I cannot believe that the great
philosopher wallowed in the dust at the feet of such a polka-dot
carricature of a gorilla's horrid dream.

I bought a Chinese god once, for four bits. He was not successful in
the profession which he aimed to follow. Whatever he may have been in
China, he was not a very successful god in the English language. I put
him upon the mantel, and the clock stopped, the servant girl sent in
her resignation, and a large dog jumped through the parlor-window. All
this happened within two hours from the time I erected the lop-eared,
knocked-kneed and club-footed Oolong in my household.

[Illustration: THE DOG EXITS.]

Perhaps this may have been largely due to my ignorance of his habits.
Possibly if I had been more familiar with his eccentricities, it would
have been all right; but as it was, there was no book of instructions
given with him, and I couldn't seem to make him work.

During the week following, the prospect shaft of the New Jerusalem mine
struck a subterranean gulf-stream and water-logged the stock, a tall
yellow dog, under the weight of a great woe, picked out my cistern to
suicide in, and I skated down the cellar-stairs on my shoulder-blades
and the phrenological location known as Love of Home, in such a terrible
manner as to jar the foundations of the earth, and kick a large hole out
of the bosom of the night.

I then met with a change of heart, and overthrew the warty heathen god,
and knocked him galley west. My hens at once began to watch the produce
market, and, noticing the high price of eggs, commenced to orate with
great zeal instead of standing around with their hands in their pockets. I
saw the new moon over my right shoulder, and all nature seemed gay once
more.

The above are a few of my reasons for believing that the Chinese god is
either greatly over-estimated, or else shippers and producers are flooding
the market with fraudulent gods.

A Great Spiritualist.

I have an uncle who is a physician, and a very busy one at that. He is a
very active man, and allows himself very little relaxation indeed. How
many times he has said to me, "Well, I can't stand here and fool away my
time with you. I've got a typhoid fever patient down in the lower end of
town who will get well if I don't get over there this forenoon."

He never allows himself any relaxation to speak of, except to demonstrate
the truth of spiritualism. He does love to monkey with the supernatural,
and he delights in getting hold of some skeptical friend and convincing
him of the presence of spirits beyond a doubt. I've known him to ignore
two cases of croup and one case of twins to attend a seance and help
convince a doubting Thomas on the spirit question.

I believe that he and I, together with a little time in which to prepare,
could convince the most skeptical. He says that with a friend to assist
him, who is _en rapport_, and who has a little practice, he can reach the
stoniest heart. He is a very susceptible medium indeed, and created a
great furore in his own town. He said it was a great comfort to him to
converse with his former patients, and he felt kind of attached to them,
so that he hated to be separated from them, even in death.

Spiritualism had quite a run in his neighborhood at one time, as I have
said. Even his own family yielded to the convincing proof and the
astounding phenomena. If his wife hadn't found some of his spiritual
tracks down cellar, she would have remained firm, no doubt, but the doctor
forgot and left his step-ladder down there, and that showed where the hole
in the floor opened into his mysterious cabinet.

He said if he had been a little more careful, no doubt he could have
convinced anybody of the presence of spirits or anything else. He said he
didn't intend to give up as long as there was anything left in the cellar.

He had such unwavering confidence in the phenomena that all he asked of
anybody was faith and a buckskin string about two feet long.

He and his brother, a reformed member of Congress, read the inmost
thoughts of a skeptical friend all one evening by the aid of supernatural
powers and a tin tube. The reformed member of Congress acted as medium,
and the doctor, who was unfortunately and ostensibly called away into the
country early in the evening, remained at the window outside, where he
could read the queries written by the victim on a slip of paper. Then he
would run around the house and murmur the same through a tin tube at
another window by the medium's ear.

It was astounding. The skeptical man would write some deep question on a
slip of paper, and after the medium had felt of his brow, and groaned a
few hollow groans, and rolled his eyes up, he would answer it without
having been within twenty feet of the question or the questioner. The
victim said he would never doubt again.

What a comfort it was to know that immortality was an established fact. If
he could have heard a man talking in a low tone of voice through an old
tin dipper handle, at the south window on the ground floor, and
occasionally swearing at a mosquito on the back of his neck, he would have
hesitated.

An old-timer over there said that Woodworth would be a mighty good
physician if he would let spiritualism alone. He claimed that no man could
be a great physician and surgeon and still be a fanatic on spiritualism.

General Sheridan's Horse.

I have always taken a great interest in war incidents, and more so,
perhaps, because I wasn't old enough to put down the rebellion myself. I
have been very eager to get hold of and hoard up in my memory all its
gallant deeds of both sides, and to know the history of those who figured
prominently in that great conflict has been one of my ambitions.

I have also watched with interest the steady advancement of Phil Sheridan,
the black-eyed warrior with the florid face and the Winchester record. I
have also taken some pains to investigate the later history of the old
Winchester war horse.

"Old Rienzi died in our stable a few years after the war," said a Chicago
livery man to me, a short time ago. "General Sheridan left him with us and
instructed us to take good care of him, which we did, but he got old at
last, and his teeth failed upon him, and that busted his digestion, and he
kind of died of old age, I reckon."

"How did General Sheridan take it?"

"Oh, well, Phil Sheridan is no school girl. He didn't turn away when old
Rienzi died and weep the manger full of scalding regret. If you know
Sheridan, you know that he don't rip the blue dome of heaven wide open
with unavailing wails. He just told us to take care of its remains, patted
the old cuss on the head a little and walked off. Phil Sheridan don't go
around weeping softly into a pink bordered wipe when a horse dies. He
likes a good horse, but Rienzi was no Jay-Eye-See for swiftness, and he
wasn't the purtiest horse you ever see, by no means."

"Did you read lately how General Sheridan don't ride on horseback since
his old war horse died, and seems to have lost all interest in horses?"

"No, I never did. He no doubt would rather ride in a cable car or a
carriage than to jar himself up on a horse. That's all likely enough,
but, as I say, he's a matter of fact little fighter from Fighttown. He
never stopped to snoot and paw up the ground and sob himself into
bronchitis over old Rienzi. He went right on about his business, and,
like old King What's-His-name he hollered for another hoss, and the War
Department never slipped a cog."

Later on I read that the old war horse was called Winchester and that he
was still alive in a blue grass pasture in Kentucky. The report said that
old Winchester wasn't very coltish, and that he was evidently failing. I
gathered the idea that he was wearing store teeth, and that his memory was
a little deficient, but that he might live yet for years. After that I met
a New York livery stable prince, at whose palace General Sheridan's
well-known Winchester war horse died of botts in '71. He told me all
about it and how General Sheridan came on from Chicago at the time, and
held the horse's head in his lap while the fleet limbs that flew from
Winchester down and saved the day, stiffened in the great, mysterious
repose of death. He said Sheridan wept like a child, and as he told the
touching tale to me I wept also. I say I wept. I wept about a quart, I
would say. He said also that the horse's name wasn't Winchester nor
Rienzi; it was Jim.

I was sorry to know it. Jim is no name for a war horse who won a victory
and a marble bust and a poem. You can't respect a horse much if his name
was Jim.

After that I found out that General Sheridan's celebrated Winchester horse
was raised in Kentucky, also in Pennsylvania and Michigan; that he went
out as a volunteer private; that he was in the regular service prior to
the war, and that he was drafted, and that he died on the field of battle,
in a sorrel pasture, in '73, in great pain on Governor's Island; that he
was buried with Masonic honors by the Good Templars and the Grand Army of
the Republic; that he was resurrected by a medical college and dissected;
that he was cremated in New Orleans and taxidermed for the Military Museum
at New York. Every little while I run up against a new fact relative to
this noted beast. He has died in nine different States, and been buried in
thirteen different styles, while his soul goes marching on. Evidently we
live in an age of information. You can get more information nowadays, such
as it is, than you know what to do with.

A Circular.

To my friends, regardless of party.--Many friends having solicited me to
apply for a foreign mission under the present administration, I have
finally consented to do so, and last week filed my application for such
missions as might still remain vacant.

To insure my appointment, much will remain for you to do. I now call upon
my friends to aid me by their united effort. I especially solicit the aid
of my friends who have repeatedly heretofore promised it to me while
drunk.

[Illustration: PLENTY OF CORRESPONDENCE.]

You will see at a glance that I can only make the application. You must
support it by your petitions and letters. It would be of little use for
one man to write five thousand letters to the president, but if five
thousand people each write him a letter in which casual reference is made
to my social worth and 7-1/3 octave brain, it will make him pay attention.

My idea would be for each of my friends to set aside one day in each week
to write to the president, opening it in a chatty way by asking him if he
does not think we are having rather a backward spring, and what he is
doing for his cut worms now, and how his folks are, etc., etc. Then
gradually lead up to the statement that you think I would be an ornament
to the administration if I should go abroad and linger on a foreign strand
at $2,000 per linger and stationery.

This will keep the president properly stirred up, and cause him to earn
his salary. The effect will be to secure the appointment at last, as you
will see if you persevere.

I need not add that I will do what is right by my friends upon receiving
my commission.

Do not neglect this suggestion because it comes to you in the form of a
circular, but remember it and act upon it. Remember that, although the
president is stubborn as Sam Hill, he will at last yield to fatigue, and
when tired nature can hold out no longer, the last letter will drop from
his nerveless hand and he will surrender.

[Illustration: NURSING THE FIERY STEED.]

Some of you will urge that I have been an offensive partisan, but when you
come to think it over I have not been so all-fired partisan. There have
been days and days when it did not show itself very much. However, that is
not the point. I want your hearty indorsement and I want it to be entirely
voluntary, and if you do not give it, and give it freely and voluntarily,
you hadn't better ask me for any more favors.

All the newspapers most heartily indorse me. The _Rocky Mountain Whoop_
very truthfully says:

"Mr. Nye called at our office yesterday and subscribed for our paper. We
are proud to add him to our list of paid-up subscribers, and should he
renew his subscription next year, paying in advance, we will cheerfully
refer to it among other startling news."

I have a scrap-book full of such indorsements as this, and now, if my
friends will peel their coats and write as they should, I can make this
administration open its eyes.

Several papers in Iowa have alluded to my being in town, and referred to
the fact that I had paid my bills while there. But press indorsements
alone are not sufficient. What is needed is the written testimony of
friends and neighbors. No matter how poor or humble or worthless you may
be, write to Mr. Cleveland and tell him how much confidence you have in
me, and if you can call to mind any little acts of kindness, or any times
when I have got up in the night to give you a dollar, or nurse a colicky
horse for you, throw that in. Throw it in anyhow. It will do no harm, and
may do much good.

I can solemnly promise all my friends that if they will secure my
appointment to a foreign country for four years, I will not return during
that time. What more can I offer? I will stay longer if I am reappointed.
I would do anything for my friends.

Do not throw this circular carelessly aside. Read it carefully over and
act upon it. Some of you are poor spellers, and will try to get out of it
in that way. Others are in the penitentiary and cannot spare the time. But
to one and all I say, write, and write regularly, to the president. Do not
wait for a reply from him, because he is pretty busy now; but he will be
tickled to death to hear from you, and anything you say about me will give
him great pleasure.

N.B.--Please be careful not to inclose this circular in your letter to the
president.

The Photograph Habit.

No doubt the photograph habit, when once formed, is one of the most
baneful, and productive of the most intense suffering in after years, of
any with which we are familiar. Some times it seems to me that my whole
life has been one long, abject apology for photographs that I have shed
abroad throughout a distracted country.

Man passes through seven distinct stages of being photographed, each one
exceeding all previous efforts in that line.

First he is photographed as a prattling, bald-headed baby, absolutely
destitute of eyes, but making up for this deficiency by a wealth of mouth
that would make a negro minstrel olive green with envy. We often wonder
what has given the average photographer that wild, hunted look about the
eyes and that joyless sag about the knees. The chemicals and the indoor
life alone have not done all this. It is the great nerve tension and
mental strain used in trying to photograph a squirming and dark red child
with white eyes, in such a manner as to please its parents.

An old-fashioned dollar store album with cerebro-spinal meningitis, and
filled with pictures of half-suffocated children in heavily-starched white
dresses, is the first thing we seek on entering a home, and the last thing
from which we reluctantly part.

The second stage on the downward road is the photograph of the boy with
fresh-cropped hair, and in which the stiff and protuberant thumb takes a
leading part.

Then follows the portrait of the lad, with strongly marked freckles and a
look of hopeless melancholy. With the aid of a detective agency, I have
succeeded in running down and destroying several of these pictures which
were attributed to me.

Next comes the young man, 21 years of age, with his front hair plastered
smoothly down over his tender, throbbing dome of thought. He does not care
so much about the expression on the mobile features, so long as his left
hand, with the new ring on it, shows distinctly, and the string of
jingling, jangling charms on his watch chain, including the cute little
basket cut out of a peach stone, stand out well in the foreground. If the
young man would stop to think for a moment that some day he may become
eminent and ashamed of himself, he would hesitate about doing this.

Soon after, he has a tintype taken in which a young lady sits in the
alleged grass, while he stands behind her with his hand lightly touching
her shoulder as though he might be feeling of the thrilling circumference
of a buzz saw. He carries this picture in his pocket for months, and looks
at it whenever he may be unobserved.

Then, all at once, he discovers that the young lady's hair is not done up
that way any more, and that her hat doesn't seem to fit her. He then, in a
fickle moment, has another tintype made, in which another young woman,
with a more recent hat and later coiffure, is discovered holding his hat
in her lap.

This thing continues, till one day he comes into the studio with his wife,
and tries to see how many children can be photographed on one negative by
holding one on each knee and using the older ones as a back-ground.

The last stage in his eventful career, the old gentleman allows himself to
be photographed, because he is afraid he may not live through another
long, hard winter, and the boys would like a picture of him while he is
able to climb the dark, narrow stairs which lead to the artist's room.

Sadly the thought comes back to you in after years, when his grave is
green in the quiet valley, and the worn and weary hands that have toiled
for you are forever at rest, how patiently he submitted while his daughter
pinned the clean, stiff, agonizing white collar about his neck, and
brushed the velvet collar of his best coat; how he toiled up the long,
dark, lonesome stairs, not with the egotism of a half century ago, but
with the light of anticipated rest at last in his eyes--obediently, as he
would have gone to the dingy law office to have his will drawn--and meekly
left the outlines of his kind old face for those he loved and for whom he
had so long labored.

It is a picture at which the thoughtless may smile, but it is full of
pathos, and eloquent for those who knew him best. His attitude is stiff
and his coat hunches up in the back, but his kind old heart asserts itself
through the gentle eyes, and when he has gone away at last we do not
criticise the picture any more, but beyond the old coat that hunches up in
the back, and that lasted him so long, we read the history of a noble
life.

Silently the old finger-marked album, lying so unostentatiously on the
gouty centre table, points out the mile-stones from infancy to age, and
back of the mistakes of a struggling photographer is portrayed the
laughter and the tears, the joy and the grief, the dimples and the gray
hairs of one man's life-tine.

Rosalinde.

In answer to a former article relative to the dearth of woman here, we are
now receiving two to five letters per day from all classes and styles of
young, middle-aged and old women who desire to come to Wyoming.

Some of them would like to come here to work and obtain an honest
livelihood, and some of them desire to come here and marry cattle kings.

A recent letter from Michigan, written in lead pencil, and evidently
during hours when the writer should have been learning her geography
lesson, is very enthusiastic over the prospect of coming out here where
one girl can have a lover for every day in the week. She signs herself
Rosalinde, with a small r, and adds in a postscript that she "means
business."

Yes, Rosalinde, that's what we are afraid of. We had a kind of a vague
fear that you meant business, so we did not reply to your letter. Wyoming
already has women enough who write with a lead pencil. We are also pretty
well provided with poor spellers, and we do not desire to ransack Michigan
for affectionate but sap-headed girls.

Stay in Michigan, Rosalinde, until we write to you, and one of these days
when you have been a mother eight or nine times, and as you stand in the
golden haze in the back yard, hanging out damp shirts on an uncertain
line, while your ripe and dewy mouth is stretched around a bass-wood
clothes pin, you will thank us for this advice.

Michigan is the place for you. It is the home of the Sweet Singer and the
abiding place of the Detroit _Free Press_. We can't throw any such
influences around you here as those you have at your own door.

Do not despair, Rosalinde. Some day a man, with a great, warm, manly heart
and a pair of red steers, will see you and love you, and he will take you
in his strong arms and protect you from the Michigan climate, just as
devotedly as any of our people here can. We do not wish to be
misunderstood in this matter. It is not as a lover that we have said so
much on the girl question, but in the domestic aid department, and when we
get a long letter from a young girl who eats slate pencils and reads Ouida
behind her atlas, we feel like going over there to Michigan with a trunk
strap and doing a little missionary work.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35