Remarks by Bill Nye

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Fifteen years should then be devoted to the study of American politics,
especially civil service reform, looking at it from a non-partisan
standpoint. If possible, the last five years should be spent abroad.
London is the place to go if you wish to get a clear, concise view of
American politics, and Chicago or Milwaukee would be a good place for the
young English journalist to go and study the political outlook of England.

The student should then take a medical and surgical course, so that he
may be able to attend to contusions, fractures and so forth, which may
occur to himself or to the party who may come to his office for a
retraction and by mistake get his spinal column double-leaded.

Ten years should then be given to the study of law. No thorough,
metropolitan editor wants to enter upon the duties of his profession
without knowing the difference between a writ of _mandamus_ and other
styles of profanity. He should thoroughly understand the entire system of
American jurisprudence, so that in case a _certiorari_ should break out in
his neighborhood he would know just what to do for it.

The student will, by this time, begin to see what is required of him and
enter with great zeal upon the further study of his profession.

He will now enter upon a theological course of ten years and fit himself
thoroughly to speak intelligently of the various creeds and religions of
the world. Ignorance or the part of an editor is almost a crime, and when
he closes a powerful editorial with the familiar quotation, "It is the
early bird that catches the worm," and attributes it to St. Paul instead
of Deuteronomy, it makes me blush for the profession.

The last ten years may be profitably devoted to the acquisition of a
practical knowledge of cutting cordwood, baking beans, making shirts,
lecturing, turning double handsprings, being shot out of a catapult at a
circus, learning how to make a good adhesive paste that will not sour in
hot weather, grinding scissors, punctuating, capitalization, condemnation,
syntax, plain sewing, music and dancing, sculpting, etiquette, prosody, how
to win the affections of the opposite sex and evade a malignant case of
breach of promise, the ten commandments, every man his own tooter on the
flute, croquet, rules of the prize ring, rhetoric, parlor magic,
calisthenics, penmanship, how to run a jack from the bottom of the pack
without getting shot, civil engineering, decorative art, kalsomining,
bicycling, base ball, hydraulics, botany, poker, international law,
high-low-jack, drawing and painting, faro, vocal music, driving, breaking
team, fifteen ball pool, how to remove grease spots from last year's
pantaloons, horsemanship, coupling freight cars, riding on a rail, riding
on a pass, feeding threshing machines, how to wean a calf from the parent
stem, teaching school, bull-whacking, plastering, waltzing, vaccination,
autopsy, how to win the affections of your wife's mother, every man his
own washerwoman, or how to wash underclothes so they will not shrink,
etc., etc.

But time forbids anything like a thorough list of what a young man should
study in order to fully understand all that he may be called upon to
express an opinion about in his actual experience as a journalist. There
are a thousand little matters which every editor should know; such, for
instance, as the construction of roller composition. Many newspaper men
can write a good editorial on Asiatic cholera, but their roller
composition is not fit to eat.

With the course of study that I have mapped out, the young student would
emerge from the college of journalism at the age of 95 or 96, ready to
take off his coat and write an article on almost any subject. He would be
a little giddy at first, and the office boy would have to see that he went
to bed at a proper time each night, but aside from that, he would be a
good man to feed a waste paper basket.

Actual experience is the best teacher in this peculiarly trying
profession. I hope some day to attend a press convention where the order
of exercise will consist of five-minute experiences from each one present
It would be worth listening to.

My own experience was a little peculiar. It was my intention at first to
practice law, when I went to the Rocky Mountains, although I had been
warned by the authorities not to do so. Still, I did practice in a
surreptitious kind of a way, and might have been practicing yet if my
client hadn't died. When you have become attached to a client and respect
and like him, and then when, without warning, like a bolt of electricity
from a clear sky, he suddenly dies and takes the bread right out of your
mouth, it is rough.

Then I tried the practice of criminal law, but my client got into the
penitentiary, where he was no use to me financially or politically.
Finally, when the judge was in a hurry, he would appoint me to defend the
pauper criminals. They all went to the penitentiary, until people got to
criticising the judge, and finally they told him that it was a shame to
appoint me to defend an innocent man.

My first experience in journalism was in a Western town, in which I was a
total stranger. I went there with thirty-five cents, but I had it
concealed in the lining of my clothes so that no one would have suspected
it if they had met me. I had no friends, and I noticed that when I got off
the train the band was not there to meet me. I entered the town just as
any other American citizen would. I had not fully decided whether to
become a stage robber or a lecturer on phrenology. At that time I got a
chance to work on a morning paper. It used to go to press before dark, so
I always had my evenings to myself and I liked that part of it first-rate.
I worked on that paper a year and might have continued if the proprietors
had not changed it to an evening paper.

Then a company incorporated itself and started a paper, of which I took
charge. The paper was published in the loft of a livery stable. That is
the reason they called it a stock company. You could come up the stairs
into the office or you could twist the tail of the iron-gray mule and take
the elevator.

It wasn't much of a paper, but it cost $16,000 a year to run it, and it
came out six days in the week, no matter what the weather was. We took the
Associated Press news by telegraph part of the time and part of the time
we relied on the Cheyenne morning papers, which we got of the conductor on
the early morning freight. We got a great many special telegrams from
Washington in that way, and when the freight train got in late, I had to
guess at what congress was doing and fix up a column of telegraph the best
I could. There was a rival evening paper there, and sometimes it would
send a smart boy down to the train and get hold of our special telegrams,
and sometimes the conductor would go away on a picnic and take our
Cheyenne paper with him.

All these things are annoying to a man who is trying to supply a long felt
want. There was one conductor, in particular, who used to go away into the
foot-hills shooting sage hens and take our cablegrams with him. This threw
too much strain on me. I could guess at what congress was doing and make
up a pretty readable report, but foreign powers and reichstags and crowned
heads and dynasties always mixed me up. You can look over what congress
did last year and give a pretty good guess at what it will do this year,
but you can't rely on a dynasty or an effete monarchy in a bad state of
preservation. It may go into executive session or it may go into
bankruptcy.

Still, at one time we used to have considerable local news to fill up
with. The north and middle parks for a while used to help us out when the
mining camps were new. Those were the days when it was considered
perfectly proper to kill off the board of supervisors if their action was
distasteful. At that time a new camp generally located a cemetery and
wrote an obituary; then the boys would start out to find a man whose name
would rhyme with the rest of the verse. Those were the days when the
cemeteries of Colorado were still in their infancy and the song of the
six-shooter was heard in the land.

Sometimes the Indians would send us in an item. It was generally in the
obituary line. With the Sioux on the north and the peaceful Utes on the
south, we were pretty sure of some kind of news during the summer. The
parks used to be occupied by white men winters and Indians summers. Summer
was really the pleasantest time to go into the parks, but the Indians had
been in the habit of going there at that season, and they were so clannish
that the white men couldn't have much fun with them, so they decided they
would not go there in the summer. Several of our best subscribers were
killed by the peaceful Utes.

There were two daily and three weekly papers published in Laramie City av
that time. There were between two and three thousand people and our local
circulation ran from 150 to 250, counting dead-heads. In our prospectus we
stated that we would spare no expense whatever in ransacking the universe
for fresh news, but there were times when it was all we could do to get
our paper out on time. Out of the express office, I mean.

One of the rival editors used to write his editorials for the paper in the
evening, jerk the Washington hand-press to work them off, go home and
wrestle with juvenile colic in his family until daylight and then deliver
his papers on the street. It is not surprising that the great mental
strain incident to this life made an old man of him, and gave a tinge of
extreme sadness to the funny column of his paper.

In an unguarded moment, this man wrote an editorial once that got all his
subscribers mad at him, and the same afternoon he came around and wanted
to sell his paper to us for $10,000. I told him that the whole outfit
wasn't worth ten thousand cents.

"I know that," said he, "but it is not the material that I am talking
about. It is the good will of the paper."

We had a rising young horsethief in Wyoming in those days, who got into
jail by some freak of justice, and it was so odd for a horsethief to get
into jail that I alluded to it editorially. This horsethief had
distinguished himself from the common, vulgar horsethieves of his time, by
wearing a large mouth--a kind of full-dress, eight-day mouth. He rarely
smiled, but when he did, he had to hold the top of his head on with both
hands. I remember that I spoke of this in the paper, forgetting that he
might criticise me when he got out of jail. When he did get out again, he
stated that he would shoot me on sight, but friends advised me not to have
his blood on my hands, and I took their advice, so I haven't got a
particle of his blood on either of my hands.

For two or three months I didn't know but he would drop into the office
any minute and criticise me, but one day a friend told me that he had been
hung in Montana. Then I began to mingle in society again, and didn't have
to get in my coal with a double barrel shot gun any more.

After that I was always conservative in relation to horsethieves until we
got the report of the vigilance committee.

Wrestling with the Mazy.

Very soon now I shall be strong enough on my cyclone leg to resume my
lessons in waltzing. It is needless to say that I look forward with great
pleasure to that moment. Nature intended that I should glide in the mazy.
Tall, lithe, bald-headed, genial, limber in the extreme, suave, soulful,
frolicsome at times, yet dignified and reserved toward strangers, light on
the foot--on my own foot, I mean--gentle as a woman at times, yet
irresistible as a tornado when insulted by a smaller, I am peculiarly
fitted to shine in society. Those who have observed my polished brow, when
under a strong electric light, say they never saw a man shine so in
society as I do.

My wife taught me how to waltz. She would teach me on Saturdays and repair
her skirts during the following week. I told her once that I thought I was
too brainy to dance. She said she hadn't noticed that, but she thought I
seemed to run too much to legs. My wife is not timid about telling me
anything that she thinks will be for my good. When I make a mistake she is
perfectly frank with me, and comes right to me and tells me about it, so
that I won't do so again.

I had just learned how to reel around a ballroom to a little waltz music,
when I was blown across the State of Mississippi in September last by a
high wind, and broke one of my legs which I use in waltzing. When this
accident occurred I had just got where I felt at liberty to choose a
glorious being with starry eyes and fluffy hair, and magnificently modeled
form, to steer me around the rink to the dreamy music of Strauss. One
young lady, with whom I had waltzed a good deal, when she heard that my
leg was broken, began to attend every dancing party she could hear of,
although she had declined a great many previous to that. I asked her how
she could be so giddy and so gay when I was suffering. She said she was
doing it to drown her sorrow, but her little brother told me on the quiet
that she was dancing while I was sick because she felt perfectly safe. A
friend of mine says I have a pronounced and distinctly original manner of
waltzing, and that he never saw anybody, with one exception, who waltzed
as I did, and that was Jumbo. He claimed that either one of us would be a
good dancer if he could have the whole ring to himself. He said that he
would like to see Jumbo and me waltz together if he were not afraid that I
would step on Jumbo and hurt him. You can see what a feeling of jealous
hatred it arouses in some small minds when a man gets so that he can
mingle in good society and enjoy himself.

[Illustration: WALTZING WITH JUMBO.]

I could waltz more easily if the rules did not require such a constant
change of position. I am sedentary in my nature, slow to move about, so
that it takes a lady of great strength of purpose to pull me around on
time.

Anecdotes of the Stage.

Years ago, before Laramie City got a handsome opera house, everything in
the theatrical and musical line of a high order was put on the stage of
Blackburn's Hall. Other light dramas on the stage, and thrilling murders
in the audience, used to occur at Alexander's Theater, on Front street.
Here you could get a glass of Laramie beer, made of glucose, alkali water,
plug tobacco, and Paris green, by paying two bits at the bar, and, as a
prize, you drew a ticket to the olio, specialties, and low gags of the
stage. The idea of inebriating a man at the box office, so that he will
endure such a sham, is certainly worthy of serious consideration. I have
seen shows at Alexander's, and also at McDaniel's, in Cheyenne, however,
where the bar should have provided an ounce of chloroform with each ticket
in order to allay the suffering.

Here you could sit down in the orchestra and take the chances of getting
hit when the audience began to shoot at the pianist, or you could go up
into the boxes and have a quiet little conversation with the timid
beer-jerkers. The beer-jerker was never too proud to speak to the most
humble, and if she could sell a grub-staker for $5 a bottle of real Piper
Heidsick, made in Cheyenne and warranted to remove the gastric coat, pants
and vest from a man's stomach in two minutes, she felt pleased and proud.

A room-mate of mine, whose name I will not give, simply because he was and
still is the best fellow in the United States, came home from the
"theater" one night with his hair parted in the middle. He didn't wear it
that way generally, so it occasioned talk in social circles. He still has
a natural parting of the hair about five inches long, that he acquired
that night. He said it was accidental so far as he was concerned, but
unless the management could keep people from shooting the holders of
reserved seats between the acts or any other vital spot, he would withdraw
his patronage. And he was right about it. I think that any court in the
land would protect a man who had purchased a seat in good faith, and with
his hat on and both feet on the back of the seat in front of him, sits
quietly in said seat, smoking a Colorado Maduro cigar and watching the
play.

Several such accidents occurred at the said theater. Among them was a
little tableau in which Joe Walker and Centennial Bob took the leading
parts. Bob went to the penitentiary, and Joe went to his reward with one
of his lungs in his coat pocket. There was a little difference between
them as to the regularity of a "draw" and "show down," so Bob went home
from the theater and loaded a double-barrel shot-gun with a lot of
scrap-iron, and, after he had introduced the collection into Joe's front
breadth, the latter's system was so lacerated that it wouldn't retain
ground feed.

There were other little incidents like that which occurred in and around
the old theater, some growing out of the lost love of a beer-jerker, some
from an injudicious investment in a bob-tail flush that never got ripe
enough to pick, and some from the rarified mountain air, united with an
epidemic known as _mania rotguti_.

A funny incident of the stage occurred not long ago to a friend of mine,
who is traveling with a play in which a stage cow appears. He is using
what is called a profile cow now, which works by machinery. Last winter
this cow ran down while in the middle of the stage, and forgot her lines.
The prompter gave the string a jerk in order to assist her. This broke the
cow in two, and the fore-quarters walked off to the left into one
dressing-room, while the behind-quarters and porter-house steak retired to
the outer dressing-room. The audience called for an _encore_; but the cow
felt as though she had made a kind of a bull of the part, and would not
appear. Those who may be tempted to harshly criticise this last remark,
are gently reminded that the intense heat of the past month is liable to
effect anyone's mind. Remember, gentle reader, that your own brain may
some day soften also, and then you will remember how harsh you were toward
me.

Prior to the profile cow, the company ran a wicker-work cow, that was
hollow and admitted of two hired-men, who operated the beast at a moderate
salary. These men drilled a long time on what they called a heifer
dance--a beautiful spectacular, and highly moral and instructive quadruped
clog, sirloin shuffle, and cow gallop, to the music of a piano-forte. The
rehearsals had been crowned with success, and when the cow came on the
stage she got a bouquet, and made a bran mash on one of the ushers.

She danced up and down the stage, perfectly self-possessed, and with that
perfect grace and abandon which is so noticeable in the self-made cow.
Finally she got through, the piano sounded a wild Wagnerian bang, and the
cow danseuse ambled off. She was improperly steered, however, and ran her
head against a wing, where she stopped in full view of the audience. The
talent inside of the cow thought they had reached the dressing-room and
ran against the wall, so they felt perfectly free to converse with each
other. The cow stood with her nose jammed up against the wing, wrapped in
thought, Finally, from her thorax the audience heard a voice say:

"Jim, you blamed galoot, that ain't the step we took at rehearsal no
more'n nuthin'. If you're going to improvise a new cow duet, I wish you
wouldn't take the fore-quarters by surprise next time."

It is not now known what the reply was, for just then the prompter came on
the stage, rudely twisted the tail of the cow, rousing her from her
lethargy, and harshly kicking her in the pit of the stomach, he drove her
off the stage, The audience loudly called for a repetition, but the cow
refused to come in.

George the Third.

George III was born in England June 4, 1738, and ran for king in 1760. He
was a son of Frederick, Prince of Wales, and held the office of king for
sixty years. He was a natural born king and succeeded his grandfather,
George II. Look as you will a-down the long page of English history, and
you will not fail to notice the scarcity of self-made kings. How few of
them were poor boys and had to skin along for years with no money, no
influential friends and no fun.

Ah, little does the English king know of hard times and carrying two or
three barrels of water to a tired elephant in order that he may get into
the afternoon performance without money. When he gets tired of being
prince, all he has to do is just to be king all day at good wages, and
then at night take off his high-priced crown, hang it up on the hat-rack,
put on a soft hat and take in the town.

George III quit being prince at the age of 22 years, and began to hold
down the English throne. He would reign along for a few years, taking it
kind of quiet, and then all at once he would declare war and pick out some
people to go abroad and leave their skeletons on some foreign shore. That
was George's favorite amusement. He got up the Spanish war in two years
after he clome the throne; then he had an American revolution, a French
revolution, an Irish rebellion and a Napoleonic war. He dearly loved
carnage, if it could be prepared on a foreign strand. George always wanted
imported carnage, even if it came higher. It was in 1765, and early in
George's reign, that the American stamp act passed the Legislature and the
Goddess of Liberty began to kick over the dashboard.

George was different from most English kings, morally. When he spit on his
hand and grasped the sceptre, he took his scruples with him right onto the
throne. He was not talked about half so much as other kings before or
since his time. Nine o'clock most always found George in bed, with his
sceptre under the window-sash, so that he could get plenty of fresh air.
As it got along toward 9 o'clock, he would call the hired girl, tell her
to spread a linen lap-robe on the throne till morning, issue a royal ukase
directing her to turn out the cat, and instructing the cook to set the
pancake batter behind the royal stove in the council chamber, then he
would wind the clock and retire. Early in the morning George would be up
and dressed, have all his chores done and the throne dusted off ready for
another hard day's reign.

[Illustration: WRAPPED IN SLUMBER.]

George III is the party referred to in the Declaration of Independence the
present king of Great Britain, and of whom many bitter personal remarks
were made by American patriots. On this side of the water George was not
highly esteemed. If he had come over here to spend the summer with friends
in Boston, during the days of the stamp act excitement, he could have gone
home packed in ice, no doubt, and with a Swiss sunset under each eye.

George's mind was always a little on the bias, and in 1810 he went crazy
for the fifth time. Always before that he had gone right ahead with his
reign, whether he was crazy or not, but with the fifth attack of insanity,
coupled with suggestion of the brain and blind staggers, it was decided to
tie him up in the barn and let someone else reign awhile. The historian
says that blindness succeeded this attack, and in 1811 the Prince of Wales
became regent.

George III died at Windsor in 1820, with the consent of a joint committee
of both houses of congress, at the age of 82 years. He made the longest
run as king, without stopping for feed or water, of any monarch in English
history. Sixty years is a long time to be a monarch and look under the bed
every night for a Nihilist loaded with a cut-glass bomb and Paris green.
Sixty years is a long while to jerk a sceptre over a nation and keep on
the right side, politically, all the time.

George was of an inventive turn of mind, and used to be monkeying with
some kind of a patent, evenings, after he had peeled his royal robes. Most
of his patents related to land, however, and some of the most successful
soil in Massachusetts was patented by George.

He was always trying some scheme to make a pile of money easy, so that he
wouldn't have to work; but he died poor and crazy at last, in England. He
was not very smart, but he attended to business all the time, and did not
get up much of a reputation as a moral leper. He said that as king of
Great Britain and general superintendent of Cork he did not aim to make
much noise, but he desired to attract universal attention by being so
moral that he would be regarded as eccentric by other crowned heads.

The Cell Nest.

To the Members of the Academy of Science, at Wrin Prairie, Wisconsin:

_Gentlemen:_--I beg leave to submit herewith my microscopic report on
the several sealed specimens of proud flesh and other mementoes taken
from the roof of Mr. Flannery's mouth. As Mr. Flannery is the mayor of
Erin Prairie, and therefore has a world-wide reputation, I deemed it
sufficiently important to the world at large, and pleasing to Mr.
Flannery's family, to publish this report in the medical journals of the
country, and have it telegraphed to the leading newspapers at their
expense. Knowing that the world at large is hungry to learn how the
laudable pus of an eminent man appears under the microscope, and what a
pleasure it must be to his family to read the description after his
death, I have just opened a new box of difficult words and herewith
transmit a report which will be an ornament not only to the scrap-book
of Mr. Flannery's immediate family after his death, but a priceless boon
to the reading public at large.

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