Remarks by Bill Nye

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Just then that end of the rink erupted in a manner so forthwith and so
_tout ensemble_ that I had to push it back in place with my person. I
never saw anything done with less delay or less languor.

The audience went wild with enthusiasm, and I responded to the encore by
writing my name in the air with my skates.

This closed the first seance, and my trainer took me in the dressing-room
to attend a consultation of physicians. After the rink carpenter had
jacked up the floor a little I went out again. I had no fears about my
ability to perform the mechanical part assigned me, but I was still
worried over the question of whether it would or would not be of lasting
benefit to mankind.

Those who have closely scrutinized my frame in repose have admitted that I
am fearfully and wonderfully made. Students of the human frame say that
they never saw such a wealth of looseness and limberness lavished upon one
person. They claim that nature bestowed upon me the hinges and joints
intended for a whole family, and therefore when I skate the air seems to
be perfectly lurid with limbs. I presume that this is true; though I have
so little leisure while skating in which to observe the method itself, the
plot or animus of the thing, as it were, that my opinion would be of
little value to the scientist.

I am led to believe that the roller skate is certainly a great civilizer
and a wonderful leveler of mankind. If we so skate that when the summons
comes to seek our ward in the general hospital, where each shall heal his
busted cuticle within the walls where rinkists squirm, we go not like the
moral wreck, morally paralyzed, but like a hired man taking his medicine,
and so forth--we may skate with perfect impunity, or anyone else to whom
we may be properly introduced by our cook.

No More Frontier.

The system of building railroads into the wilderness, and then allowing
the wilderness to develop afterward, has knocked the essential joy out of
the life of the pioneer. At one time the hardy hewer of wood and drawer of
water gave his lifetime willingly that his son might ride in the
"varnished cars." Now the Pullman palace car takes the New Yorker to the
threshold of the sea, or to the boundary line between the United States
and the British possessions.

It has driven out the long handled frying pan and the flapjack of twenty
years ago, and introduced the condensed milk and canned fruit of commerce.
Along the highways, where once the hopeful hundreds marched with long
handled shovel and pick and pan, cooking by the way thin salt pork and
flapjacks and slumgullion, now the road is lined with empty beer bottles
and peach cans that have outlived their usefulness. No landscape can be
picturesque with an empty peach can in the foreground any more than a lion
would look grand in a red monogram horse blanket and false teeth.

[Illustration]

The modern camp is not the camp of the wilderness. It wears the
half-civilized and shabby genteel garments of a sawed-off town. You know
that if you ride a day you will be where you can get the daily papers and
read them under the electric light. That robs the old canyons of their
solemn isolation and peoples each gulch with the odor of codfish balls and
civilization. Civilization is not to blame for all this, and yet it seems
sad.

Civilization could not have done all this alone. It had to call to its aid
the infernal fruit can that now desolates the most obscure trail in the
heart of the mountains. You walk over chaos where the "hydraulic" has
plowed up the valley like a convulsion, or you tread the yielding path
across the deserted dump, and on all sides the rusty, neglected and
humiliated empty tin can stares at you with its monotonous, dude-like
stare.

An old timer said to me once: "I've about decided, Bill, that the West is
a matter of history. When we cooked our grub over a sage brush fire we
could get fat and fight Indians, but now we fill our digesters with the
cold pizen and pewter of the canned peach; we go to a big tavern and stick
a towel under our chins and eat pie with a fork and heat up our carkisses
with antichrist coal, and what do we amount to? Nuthin! I used to chase
Injuns all day and eat raw salt pork at night, bekuz I dassent build a
fire, and still I felt better than I do now with a wad of tin-can solder
in my stummick and a homesick feeling in my weather-beaten breast.

"No, we don't have the fun we used to. We have more swarrees and sciatica
and one bloomin' thing and another of that kind, but we don't get one
snort of pure air and appetite in a year. They're bringin' in their blamed
telephones now and malaria and aigue and old sledge, and fun might as well
skip out. There ain't no frontier any more. All we've got left is the
old-fashioned trantler joos and rhumatiz of '49."

Behind the red squaw's cayuse plug,
The hand-car roars and raves,
And pie-plant pies are now produced
Above the Indian graves.
I hear the oaths of pioneers,
The caucus yet to be,
The first low hum where soon will
The fuzzy bumble bee.

A Letter of Regrets.

My dear Princess Beatrice--I received your kind invitation to come up to
Whippingham on the 23d inst. and see you married, but I have not been able
to get there. The weather has been so hot this month, that, to tell you
the truth, Beatrice, I haven't been going anywhere to speak of. At first I
thought I would go anyhow, and even went so far as to pick out a nice
corner bracket to take along for a wedding present. Not so much for its
intrinsic value, of course, but so you would have something with my name
to it on a card that you could show to those English dudes, and let them
know that you had influential friends, even in America. But when I thought
what a long, hard trip it would be, and how I would probably mash that
bracket on the cars before I got half way there, I gave it up.

I am not personally acquainted with your inamorato, if that's all right,
never having met him in our set; but I understand you have done well, and
that your husband is a rising young man of good family, and that he will
never allow you to put your hands into dishwater. I hope this is true and
that he does not drink. Rum has certainly paralyzed more dukes and such
things than war has. I attribute this to the fact that princes and dukes
are generally more reckless about exposing themselves to the demon rum
than to the rude alarums and one thing another of war.

If you keep a girl I hope you will get a good one who knows her business.
A green girl in the house of a newly-married princess is a great source of
annoyance. A friend of mine who got married last winter got a girl whose
mind had been eaten by cut-worms and she had not discovered it. All the
faculty that had been spared her was that power of the mind which enabled
her to charge $3 a week. She lubricated the buckwheat pancake griddle for
a week with soap grease and a dash of castor oil, and when she was
discharged she wept bitterly because capital with the iron heel ground the
poor servant girl into the dust.

Probably you will take a little tour after the wedding is over. They are
doing that way a good deal in Boston this season. I thought you would like
a pointer in the very lum-tumest thing to do, and so I write this. So long
as you have the means to do this thing right, I think you ought to do so.
You may never be married again, princess, and now is the time to paint the
British Isles red.

You can also get more concessions from your husband now, while he is a
little rattled, and temporarily knocked silly by the pomp and pageant of
marrying into your family, and if you work it right you can maintain this
supremacy for years. Treat him with a gentle firmness, and do not weep on
his bosom if you detect the aroma of beer and bologna sausage on his young
breath. Bologna and royalty do not seem to harmonize first-rate, but
remember you can harass your husband if you choose, so that he will fall
to even lower depths than bologna and Milwaukee beer. Do not aggravate him
when he comes home tired, but help him do the chores and greet him with a
smile.

I'd just as soon tell you, Beatrice, that this smile racket is not
original with me. I read it in a paper. This paper went on to say that a
young wife should always greet her husband with a smile on his return. I
showed the article to my wife and suggested that it was a good scheme, and
hoped she would try it on me sometime. She said if I would like to change
off awhile, and take my smile when I got home instead of taking it down
town, we would make the experiment. The trouble with the average woman of
the age in which we live, Beatrice, is that she is above her business. She
tries to be superior to her husband, and in many instances she succeeds.
That is the bane of wedded life. Do not strive to be superior to your
husband, Beatrice. If you do, it is good-bye, John.

Treat him well at all times, whether he treats you well or not; then when
your mother gets tired of reigning and wants to come down and spend the
hot weather with you, she will be kindly greeted by her son-in-law.

Do not allow the fact that you belong to the royal family to interfere
with your fun, Beatrice. If you want to wear a Mother Hubbard dress on the
throne during hot weather, or mash a mosquito with your mother's sceptre,
do so. Conventionality is a humbug and a nuisance, and I'd just as soon
tell you right here that if I could have gone to your wedding and worn a
linen coat and a perspiration, I would have gone; but to stand around
there all day in a tight black suit of clothes, in a mixed crowd of dukes,
and counts, and princes of high degree, most of whom are total strangers
to me, is more than I can stand.

I wish you would give my love to your mother and tell her just how it was.
Make it as smooth as you can and break it to her gently. Tell her that the
royal family is spreading out so that I can't leave my work every time one
of its members gets married. Remember me to the Waleses, the Darmstadts,
Princess Irene and Victoria, Mr. and Mrs. Prince Alexander of Bulgaria,
also Prince Francis of Battenberg and the Countess Erbach Schomberg. They
will all be there probably, and so will Lord Latham and Lord Edgcumbe. I
know just how Edgcumbe will snort around there when he finds that I can't
be there. Give my kind regards to any other lords, dukes, duchesses,
dowagers or marchionesses who may inquire for me, and tell them all that I
will be in London next year if the Prince of Wales will drop me a line
stating that the moral tone of the city is such that it would be safe for
me to come.

[Illustration]

Venice.

We arrived in Venice last evening, latitude 45 deg. 25 min, N., longitude
12 deg. 19 min. E.

Venice is the home of the Venetian, and also where the gondola has its
nest and rears its young. It is also the headquarters for the paint known
as Venetian red. They use it in painting the town on festive occasions.
This is the town where the Merchant of Venice used to do business, and the
home of Shylock, a broker, who sheared the Venetian lamb at the corner of
the Rialto and the Grand Canal. He is now no more. I couldn't even find an
old neighbor near the Rialto who remembered Shylock. From what I can learn
of him, however, I am led to believe that he was pretty close in his
deals, and liked to catch a man in a tight place and then make him squirm.
Shylock, during the great panic in Venice, many years ago, it is said, had
a chattel mortgage on more lives than you could shake a stick at. He would
loan a small amount to a merchant at three per cent, a month, and secure
it on a pound of the merchant's liver, or by a cut-throat mortgage on his
respiratory apparatus. Then, when the paper matured, he would go up to the
house with a pair of scales and a pie knife and demand a foreclosure.

Venice is one of the best watered towns in Europe. You can hardly walk a
block without getting your feet wet, unless you ride in a gondola.

The gondola is a long, slim hack without wheels and is worked around
through the damp streets by a brunette man whose breath should be a sad
framing to us all. He is called the gondolier. Sometimes he sings in a low
tone of voice and in a foreign tongue. I do not know where I have met so
many foreigners as I have here in Europe, unless it was in New York, at
the polls. Wherever I go, I hear a foreign tongue. I do not know whether
these people talk in the Italian language just to show off or not. Perhaps
they prefer it. London is the only place I have visited where the Boston
dialect is used. London was originally settled by adventurers from Boston.
The blood of some of the royal families of Massachusetts may be found in
the veins of London people.

Wealthy young ladies in Venice do not run away with the coachman. There
are no coaches, no coachmen and no horses in Venice. There are only four
horses in Venice and they are made of copper and exhibited at St Mark's as
curiosities.

The Accademia delle Belle Arti of Venice is a large picture store where I
went yesterday to buy a few pictures for Christmas presents. A painting by
Titian, the Italian Prang, pleased me very much, but I couldn't beat down
the price to where it would be any object for me to buy it. Besides, it
would be a nuisance to carry such a picture around with me all over the
Alps, up the Rhine and through St. Lawrence county. I finally decided to
leave it and secure something less awkward to carry and pay for.

The Italians are quite proud of their smoky old paintings. I have often
thought that if Venice would run less to art and more to soap, she would
be more apt to win my respect. Art is all right to a certain extent, but
it can be run in the ground. It breaks my heart to know how lavish nature
has been with water here, and yet how the Venetians scorn to investigate
its benefits. When a gondolier gets a drop of water on him, he swoons.
Then he lies in a kind of coma till another gondolier comes along to
breathe in his face and revive him.

She Kind of Coaxed Him.

I never practiced law very much, but during the brief period that my
sheet-iron sign was kissed by the Washoe zephyr, I had several odd
experiences. I'm sure that lawyers who practice for forty years,
especially on the frontier or in a new country, could write a large book
that would make mighty interesting reading.

One day I was figuring up how much a man could save in ten years, paying
forty dollars a month rent, and taking in two dollars and fifty cents per
month, when a large man with a sad eye and an early purple tumor on the
side of his head, came in and asked me if my name was Nye. I told him it
was and asked him to take a chair and spit on the stove a few times, and
make himself entirely at home.

He did so.

After answering in a loud, tremulous tone of voice that we were having
rather a backward spring, he produced a red cotton handkerchief and took
out of it a deed which he submitted to my ripe and logical legal mind.

I asked him if that was his name that appeared in the body of the deed as
grantor. He said it was. I then asked him why his wife had not signed it,
as it seemed to be the homestead, and her name appeared in the instrument
with that of her husband, but her signature wasn't at the foot, though his
name was duly signed, witnessed and acknowledged.

"Well," said he, "there's where the gazelle comes in." He then took a bite
off the corner of a plug of tobacco about as big as a railroad land grant,
and laid two twenty dollar gold pieces on the desk near my arm. I took
them and tapped them together like the cashier of the Bank of England,
and, disguising my annoyance over the little episode, told him to go on.

"Well," said the large man, fondling the wen which nestled lovingly in his
faded Titian hair, "my wife has conscientious scruples against signing
that deed. We have been married about a year now, but not actively for the
past eleven months. I'm kind of _ex-officio_ husband, as you might say.
After we'd been married about a month a little incident occurred which
made a riffle, as you might say, in our domestic tide. I was division
master on the U.P., and one night I got an order to go down towards
Sidney and look at a bridge. Of course I couldn't get back till the next
evening. So I sighed and switched off to the superintendent's office,
expecting to go over on No. 4 and look at the bridge. At the office they
told me that I needn't go till Tuesday, so I strolled up town and got home
about nine o'clock, went in with a latch key, just as a mutual friend went
out through the bed-room window, taking a sash that I paid two dollars
for. I didn't care for the sash, because he left a pair of pantaloons
worth twelve dollars and some silver in the pockets, but I thought it was
such odd taste for a man to wear a sash without his uniform.

"Well, as I had documentary evidence against my wife, I told her she could
take a vacation. She cried a good deal, but it didn't count I suffered a
good deal, but tears did not avail. It takes a good deal of damp weather
to float me out of my regular channel. She spent the night packing her
trousseau, and in the morning she went away. Now, I could get a divorce and
save all this trouble of getting her signature, but I'd rather not tell
this whole business in court, for the little woman seems to be trying to
do better, and if it wasn't for her blamed old hyena of a mother, would
get along tip-top. She's living with her mother now and if a lawyer would
go to the girl and tell her how it is, and that I want to sell the
property and want her signature, in place of getting a divorce, I believe
she'd sign. Would you mind trying it?"

[Illustration: "COAXING."]

I said if I could get time I would go over and talk with her and see what
she said. So I did. I got along pretty well, too. I found the young woman
at home, and told her the legal aspects of the case. She wouldn't admit
any of the charges, but after a long parley agreed to execute the deed and
save trouble. She came to my office an hour later, and signed the
instrument I got two witnesses to the signature and had just put the
notarial seal on it when the girl's mother came in. She asked her daughter
if she had signed the deed and was told that she had. She said nothing,
but smiled in a way that made my blood run cold. If a woman were to smile
on me that way every day, I should certainly commit some great crime.

I was just congratulating myself on the success of the business, and was
looking at the two $20 gold pieces and trying to get acquainted with them,
as it were, after the two women had gone away; when they returned with the
husband and son-in-law at the head of the procession. He looked pale and
careworn to me. He asked me in a low voice if I had a deed there, executed
by his wife. I said yes. He then asked me if I would kindly destroy it. I
said I would. I would make deeds and tear them up all day at $40 apiece. I
said I liked the conveyancing business very much, and if a client felt
like having a grand, warranty deed debauch, I was there to furnish the raw
material.

I then tore up the deed and the two women went quietly away. After they
had gone, my client, in an absent-minded way, took out a large quid that
had outlived its usefulness, laid it tenderly on the open page of Estey's
Pleadings, and said:

"You doubtless think I am a singular organization, and that my ways are
past finding out. I wish to ask you if I did right a moment ago?" Here he
took out another $20 and put it under the paper weight. "When I went down
stairs I met my mother-in-law. She always looked to me like a firm woman,
but I did not think she was so unswerving as she really was. She asked me
in a low, musical voice to please destroy the deed, and then she took one
of them Smith & Wesson automatic advance agents of death out from under
her apron and kind of wheedled me into saying I would. Now, did I do
right? I want a candid, legal opinion, and I'm ready to pay for it."

I said he did perfectly right.

Answering an Invitation.

Hudson, Wis., January 19, 1886.

Dear friend.--I have just received your kind and cordial invitation to
come to Washington and spend several weeks there among the eminent men of
our proud land. I would be glad to go as you suggest, but I cannot do so
at this time. I am passionately fond of mingling with the giddy whirl of
good society. I hope you will not feel that my reason for declining your
kind invitation is that I feel myself above good society. I assure you I
do not.

Nothing pleases me better than to dress up and mingle among my fellow-men,
with a sprinkling here and there of the other sex. It is true that the
most profitable study for mankind is man, but we should not overlook
woman. Woman is now seeking to be emancipated. Let us put our great,
strong arms around her and emancipate her. Even if we cannot emancipate
but one, we shall not have lived entirely for naught.

I am told by those upon whom I can rely that there are hundreds of
attractive young women throughout our joyous land who have arrived at
years of discretion and yet who have never been emancipated. I met a woman
on the cars last week who is lecturing on this subject, and she told me
all about it. Now, the question at once presents itself, how shall we
emancipate woman unless we go where she is? We must go right into society
and take her by the hand and never let go of her hand till she is properly
emancipated. Not only must she be emancipated, but she must be emancipated
from her present thralldom. Thralldom of this kind is liable to break out
in any community, and those who are now in perfect health may pine away in
a short time and flicker.

My course, while mingling in society's mad whirl, is to first open the
conversation with a young lady by leading her away to the conservatory,
where I ask her if she has ever been the victim of thralldom and whether
or not she has ever been ground under the heel of the tyrant man. I then
time her pulse for thirty minutes, so as to strike a good average. The
emancipation of woman is destined at some day to become one of our leading
industries.

You also ask me to kindly lead the German while there. I would cheerfully
do so, but owing to the wobbly eccentricity of my cyclone leg, it would be
sort of a broken German. But I could sit near by and watch the game with a
furtive glance, and fan the young ladies between the acts, and converse
with them in low, earnest, passionate tones. I like to converse with
people in whom I take an interest. I was conversing with a young lady one
evening at a recherche ball in my far away home in the free and unfettered
West, a very brilliant affair, I remember, under the auspices of Hose
Company No. 2, I was talking in a loud and earnest way to this liquid-eyed
creature, a little louder than usual, because the music was rather forte
just then, and the base viol virtuoso was bearing on rather hard at that
moment. The music ceased with a sudden snort. And so did my wife, who was
just waltzing past us. If I had ceased to converse at the same time that
the music shut off, all might have been well, but I did not.

Your remark that the president and cabinet would be glad to see me this
winter is ill-timed.

There have been times when it would have given me much pleasure to visit
Washington, but I did not vote for Mr. Cleveland, to tell the truth, and I
know that if I were to go to the White House and visit even for a few
days, he would reproach me and throw it up to me. It is true I did not
pledge myself to vote for him, but still I would hate to go to a man's
house and eat his popcorn and use his smoking tobacco after I had voted
against him and talked about him as I have about Cleveland.

No, I can't be a hypocrite. I am right out, open and above board. If I
talk about a man behind his back, I won't go and gorge myself with his
victuals. I was assured by parties in whom I felt perfect confidence that
Mr. Cleveland was a "moral leper," and relying on such assurances from men
in whom I felt that I could trust, and not being at that time where I
could ask Mr. Cleveland in person whether he was or was not a moral leper
as aforesaid, I assisted in spreading the report that he had been exposed
to moral leprosy, and as near as I could learn, he was liable to come down
with it at any time.

So that even if I go to Washington I shall put up at a hotel and pay my
bills just as any other American citizen would. I know how it is with Mr.
Cleveland at this time. When the legislature is in session there, people
come in from around Buffalo with their butter and eggs to sell, and stay
overnight with the president. But they should not ride a free horse to
death. I may not be well educated, but I am high strung till you can't
rest Groceries are just as high in Washington as they are in Philadelphia.

I hope that you will not glean from the foregoing that I have lost my
interest in national affairs. God forbid. Though not in the political
arena myself, my sympathies are with those who are. I am willing to assist
the families of those who are in the political arena trying to obtain a
precarious livelihood thereby. I was once an official under the Federal
government myself, as the curious student of national affairs may learn if
he will go to the Treasury Department at Washington, D.C., and ask to see
my voucher for $9.85, covering salary as United States commissioner for
the Second Judicial District of Wyoming for the year 1882. It was at that
time that a vile contemporary characterized me as "a corrupt and venal
Federal official who had fattened upon the hard-wrung taxes of my fellow
citizens and gorged myself for years at the public crib." This was unjust
I was not corrupt I was not venal. I was only hungry!

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