Remarks by Bill Nye

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Street Cars and Curiosities.

There is an institution in Boston which the Pilgrim Fathers did not
originate. That is the street car. There is a street car parade all day
on Washington street, and a red-light procession most of the night.

People told me that I could get into a car and go anywhere I wanted to. I
tried it. There was a point in Boston, I learned, where there were some
more relics that I hadn't seen. Parties told me where I could find some
more fragments of the Mayflower, and an old chair in which Josiah Quincy
had sat down to think. There were also a few more low price flint-lock
guns and tomahawks that no man who visited Boston could afford to miss.
Besides, there was said to be the lock that used to be on the door of a
room in which General Washington had a good notion to write his farewell
address. All these things were in the collection which I started out to
find, and there were others, also.

For instance, there was a specimen of the lightning that Franklin caught
in his demijohn out of the sky, and still in a good state of preservation;
also some more clothes in which he was baptized, more swords of Bunker
Hill, and a little shirt which John Hancock put on as soon as he was born.
Hancock was a perfect gentleman from his birth, and it is said that the
first thing he did was to excuse himself for a moment and then put on this
shirt. His manners were certainly very agreeable, and he was very much
polished.

I heard, too, that there was an acorn from the tree in which Benedict
Arnold had his nest while he was hatching treason. I did not believe it,
but I had an idea I could readily discover the fraud if I could only see
the acorn, for I am a great historian and researcher from away back. I was
told that in this collection there was a suspender button shed by Patrick
Henry during his memorable speech in which he raised up to his full height
on his hind feet and permitted the war to come in _italics_, also in SMALL
CAPS and in LARGE CAPS!!! with three astonishers on the end.

So I wanted to find this place, and as I had plenty of means I decided to
ride in a street car. Therefore, I aimed my panic price cane at the driver
of a cream-colored car with a blue stomach, and remarked, "Hi, there!"
Before I go any further, and in order to avoid ambiguity, let me say that
it was the car that had the blue stomach. He (the driver) twisted the
brake and I went inside, clear to the further end, and sat down by the
side of a young woman who filled the whole car with sunshine. I was so
happy that I gave the conductor half a dollar and told him to keep the
change. If by chance she sees this, I hope she still remembers me. Pretty
soon a very fat woman came into the car and aimed for our quarter. She
evidently intended to squat between this fair girl and myself. But ah,
thought I to myself in a low tone of voice, I will fool thee. So I shoved
my person along in the seat toward the sweet girl of the Bay State. The
corpulent party, whose name I did not learn, had in the meantime backed up
to where she had detected a slight vacancy, and where I had seen fit to
place myself. At that moment she heaved a sigh of relief, and, assisted by
the motion of the car, which just then turned a corner, she sat down in my
lap and nestled in my bosom like a tired baby elephant.

[Illustration: PATRICK HENRY.]

Dear reader, if I were to tell you that the crystal of my watch was picked
out from under my shoulder blades the next day, you would not believe it,
would you? I will not strain your faith in me by making the statement, but
that was the heaviest woman I ever held.

While all this was going on I lost track of my location. The car began to
squirm around all over Boston, and finally the conductor came back and
wanted more money. I said no, I would get off and try a dark red car with
a green stomach for a while. So I did I rode on that till I had seen a
great deal of new scenery, and then I asked the conductor if he passed
Number Clankety Clank, Blank street. He said he did not, but if I would go
down two blocks further and take a maroon car with a plaid stomach it
would take me to the corner of "What-do-you-call-it and What's-his-name
streets," where, if I took a seal brown car with squshed huckleberry
trimmings it would take me to where I wanted to go. So I tried it. I do
not know just where I missed my train, but when I found the seal brown car
with scrunched huckleberry trimmings it was going the other way, and as it
was late I went into a cafe and refreshed myself. When I came out I
discovered that it was too late to see the collection, even if I could
find it, for at 6 o'clock they take the relics in and put them into a
refrigerator till morning.

[Illustration: TAKING A PRIZE.]

I was now weary and somewhat disappointed, so I desired to get back to my
headquarters, wherein I could rest and where I could lock myself up in my
room, so no prize fat woman could enter. I hailed one of those sawed-off
landaus, consisting of two wheels, one door behind, and a bill for two
bits. I told the college graduate on the box where I wanted to go, gave
him a quarter and got in. I sat down and heaved a chaste sigh. The sigh
was only half hove when the herdic backed up to my destination, which was
about 300 feet from where I got in, as the crow flies.

When I go to Boston again, I am going in charge of the police.

The street railway system of Boston is remarkably perfect. Fifty cars pass
a given point on Washington street in an hour, and yet there are no
blockades. You can take one of those cars, if you are a stranger, and you
can get so mixed up that you will never get back, and all for five cents.
I felt a good deal like the man who was full and who stepped on a man who
was not full. The sober man was mad, and yelled out: "See here; condemn
it, can't you look where you're walking?" "Betcher life," says the
inebriate, "but trouble is to walk where I'm lookin'."

The Poor Blind Pig.

I have just been over to the Falls of Minnehaha. In fact I have been quite
a tourist and summer resorter this season, having saturated my system with
nineteen different styles of mineral water in Wisconsin alone, and tried
to win the attention of nineteen different styles of head waiters at these
summer hotels. I may add in passing that the summer hotels of Wisconsin
and Minnesota have been crowded full the past season and more room will
have to be added before another season comes around.

The motto of the summer hotel seems to be, "Unless ye shall have feed the
waiter, behold ye shall in no wise be fed." Many waiters at these places,
by a judicious system of blackmail and starvation, have reduced the guest
to a sad state.

[Illustration: THE MAN WHO FEES THE WAITEE.]

The mineral water of Wisconsin ranks high as a beverage. Many persons are
using it during the entire summer in place of rum.

The water of Waukesha does not appear to taste of any mineral, although an
analysis shows the presence of several kinds of groceries in solution. The
water at Palmyra Springs also tastes like any other pure water, but at
Kankanna, on the Fox River, they have a style of mineral water which is
different. Almost as soon as you taste it you discover that it is
extremely different. Colonel Watrous, of the Milwaukee _Sunday Telegraph_,
took some of it. I saw him afterward. He looked depressed, and told me
that he had been deceived. Several Kankanna people had told him that this
was living water, He had discovered otherwise. He hated to place his
confidence in people and then find it misplaced.

A favorite style of Kankanna revenge is to drink a quart of this water,
and then, on meeting an enemy, to breathe on him and wither him. One
breath produces syncope and blind staggers. Two breaths induce coma and
metallic casket for one.

Minnehaha is not mineral water. It is just plain water, giving itself away
day after day like a fresh young man in society. If you want pure water
you get it at the spring near the foot of the fall, and if you want it
flavored, with something that will leave a blazed road the whole length of
your alimentary canal, you go to the "blind pig," a few rods away from the
falls.

The blind pig draws many people toward the falls through sympathy. To be
blind must indeed be a sad plight. Let us pause and reflect on this
proposition.

By good fortune I have had a chance to watch the rum problem in all its
phases this summer. Beginning in Maine, where the most ingenious methods
of whipping the devil around the stump are adopted, then going through
northern Iowa and tasting her exhilarating pop, and at last paying ten
cents to see the blind pig at Minnehaha, I feel like one who has wrestled
with the temperance problem in a practical way, and I have about decided
that a high license is about the only way to make the sale of whisky
odious. Prohibition is too abrupt in its methods, and one generation can
hardly wipe out the appetite for liquor that has been planted and fostered
by fifty preceding generations.

For fear that a few of my lady readers do not know what the Minnehaha
blind pig looks like, and that they may be curious about it, I will just
say that it is a method of evading the law, and consists of a dumb waiter,
wherein, if you pay ten cents, you get a glass of stimulants without the
annoyance of conversation. Many ladies who visit the falls, and who have
heard incidentally about the blind pig, express a desire to see the poor
little thing, but their husbands generally persuade them to refrain.

Minnehaha is a beautiful waterfall. It is not so frightfully large and
grand as Niagara, but it is very fine, and if the State of Minnesota would
catch the man who nails his signs on the trees around there, and choke him
to death near the falls on a pleasant day, a large audience wold attend
with much pleasure, I believe that the fence-board advertiser is not only,
as a rule, wicked, but he also lacks common sense. Who ever bought a liver
pad or a corset because he read about it on a high board fence? No one.
Who ever purchased a certain kind of pill or poultice because the name of
that pill or poultice was nailed on a tree to disfigure a beautiful
landscape? I do not believe that any sane human being ever did so. If
everyone feels as I do about it, people would rather starve to death for
pills and freeze to death in a perfect wilderness of liver pads than buy
of the man who daubs the fair face of nature with names of his alleged
goods.

I saw a squaw who seemed to belong in the picture of the poetic little
waterfall. I did not learn her name. It was one of these long, corduroy
Sioux names, that hang together with hyphens like a lot of sausage. The
salaried humorist of the party said he never sausage a name before.

Translated into our tongue it meant
The-swift-daughter-of-the-prairie-blizzard-that-gathers-the-huckleberry-on
-the-run-and-don't-you-forget-it.

Daniel Webster.

I presume that Daniel Webster was as good an off-hand speaker as this
country has ever produced. Massachusetts has been well represented in
Congress since that time, but she has had few who could successfully
compete with D. Webster, Esq., attorney and counsellor-at-law, Boston,
Mass.

I have never met Mr. Webster, but I have seen a cane that he used to wear,
and since that time I have felt a great interest in him. It was a heavy
winter cane, and was presented to him as a token of respect.

This reminds me of the inscription on a grave stone in the 280-year-old
churchyard at LaPointe, on Lake Superior, where I was last week. It shows
what punctuation has done for a lost and undone race. I copy the
inscription exactly as it appears:

[Illustration:
LOUIS ROC DE DEAU
SHOT
----
AS A MARK OF
ESTEEM BY HIS
BROTHER]

Daniel Webster had one of the largest and most robust brains that ever
flourished in our fair land. It was what we frequently call a teeming
brain, one of those four-horse teeming brains, as it were. Mr. Webster
wore the largest hat of any man then in Congress, and other senators and
representatives used to frequently borrow it to wear on the 2nd of
January, the 5th of July, and after other special occasions, when they had
been in executive session most all night and endured great mental strain.
This hat matter reminds me of an incident in the life of Benjamin F.
Butler, a man well known in Massachusetts even at the present time.

One evening, at a kind of reception or some such dissipation as that,
while Jim Nye was in the Senate, the latter left his silk hat on the
lounge with the opening turned up, and while he was talking with someone
else, Mr. Butler sat down in the hat with so much expression that it was a
wreck. Everyone expected to see James W. Nye walk up and smite Benjamin F.
Butler, but he did not do so. He looked at the chaotic hat for a minute,
more in sorrow than in anger, and then he said:

"Benjamin, I could have told you that hat wouldn't fit you before you
tried it on."

Daniel Webster's brain was not only very large, but it was in good order
all the time. Sometimes Nature bestows large brains on men who do not rise
to great prominence. Large brains do not always indicate great
intellectual power. These brains are large but of an inferior quality. A
schoolmate of mine used to wear a hat that I could put my head and both
feet into with perfect ease. I remember that he tied my shirt one day
while I was laying my well-rounded limbs in the mill pond near my
childhood's home.

I was mad at the time, but I could not lick him, for he was too large. All
I could do was to patiently untie my shirt while my teeth chattered, then
fling a large, three-cornered taunt in his teeth and run. He kept on
poking fun at me, I remember, till I got dressed, and alluded
incidentally, to my small brain and abnormal feet. This stung my sensitive
nature, and I told him that if I had such a wealth of brain as he had, and
it was of no use to think with, I would take it to a restaurant and have
it breaded. Then I went away.

But we were speaking of Webster. Many lawyers of our day would do well to
read and study the illustrious example of Daniel Webster. He did not sit
in court all day with his feet on the table and howl, "We object," and
then down his client for $50, just because he had made a noise. I employed
a lawyer once to bring suit for me to recover quite a sum of money due me.
After years of assessments and toilsome litigation, we got a judgment. He
said to me that he was anxious to succeed with the case mainly because he
knew I Wanted to vindicate myself. I said yes, that was the idea exactly.
I wanted to be vindicated.

So he gave me the vindication and took the judgment as a slight
testimonial of his own sterling worth. When I want to be vindicated again
I will do it with one of those self-cocking vindicators that you can carry
in a pocket.

Looking over this letter, I am amazed to see the amount of valuable
information relative to the life of Mr. Webster that I have succeeded in
using. There are, of course, some minor details of Mr. Webster's life
which I have omitted, but nothing of real importance. The true history of
Mr. Webster is epitomized here, and told in a pleasing and graceful
manner, a style that is at once accurate and just and still elegant,
chaste and thoroughly refined, while at the same time there are little
gobs of sly humor in it that are real cute.

[Illustration]

Two Ways of Telling It.

I remember one sunny day in summer, we were sitting in the Boomerang
office, I and the city editor, and he was speaking enviously of my salary
of $150 per month as compared with his of $80, and I had just given him
the venerable minstrel witticism that of course my salary was much larger
than his, but he ought not to forget that he got his.

Just then there was a revolver shot at the foot of our stairs, and then
another. The printers rushed into the stairway from the composing room,
and to save time I ran out on the balcony that hung over the sidewalk and
which gave me a bird's-eye view of the murder. The next issue of the paper
contained an account about like this:

Cold-Blooded Murder.--Yesterday, between 12 and 1 o'clock, in front of
this office on Second street, James McKeon, in a manner almost wholly
unprovoked, shot James Smith, commonly known as Windy Smith. Smith died at
2 o'clock this morning of his wounds. Windy Smith was not a bad man, but,
as his nickname would imply, he was a kind of noisy, harmless fellow, and
McKeon, who is a gambler and professional bad man, can give no good reason
for the killing. There is a determined effort on foot to lynch the
murderer.

This account was brief, but it seemed to set forth the facts pretty
clearly, I thought, and I felt considerably chagrined when I saw an
account of the matter latter on, as written up by the prosecuting
attorney. I may be inaccurate as to dates and some other points of detail,
but, as nearly as I can remember, his version of the matter was like this:

THE TERRITORY OF WYOMING, }
COUNTY OF ALBANY. } ss.

In Justice's Court, before E.W. Nye, Esq., Justice of the Peace.

The Territory of Wyoming, plt'ff.}
vs. } Complaint.
James McKeon, def't. }

The above named defendant, James McKeon, is accused of the crime of
murder, for that he, the said defendant, James McKeon, at the town of
Laramie City, in the County of Albany and Territory of Wyoming, and on the
13th day of July, Anno Domini 1880, then and there being, he, the said
defendant, James McKeon, did wilfully, maliciously, feloniously, wickedly,
unlawfully, criminally, illegally, unjustly, premeditatedly, coolly and
murderously, by means of a certain deadly weapon commonly called a Smith &
Wesson revolver, or revolving pistol, so constructed as to revolve upon
itself and to be discharged by means of a spring and hammer, and with six
chambers thereto, and known commonly as a self-cocker, the same loaded
with gun-powder and leaden bullets, and in the hands of him, the said
defendant, James McKeon, level at, to, upon, by, contiguous to and against
the body of one James Smith, commonly called Windy Smith, in the peace of
the commonwealth then and there being, and that by means of said deadly
weapon commonly called a Smith & Wesson revolver, or revolving pistol, so
constructed as to revolve upon itself and to be discharged by means of a
spring or hammer, and with six chambers thereto and known commonly as a
self-cocker, the same loaded with gunpowder and leaden bullets and in the
hands of him the said defendant, James McKeon, held at, to, upon, by,
contiguous to and against the body of him, the said James Smith, commonly
called Windy Smith, he, the said James McKeon, did wilfully, maliciously,
feloniously, wickedly, fraudulently, virulently, unlawfully, criminally,
illegally, brutally, unjustly, premeditatedly, coolly and murderously, of
his malice aforethought with the deadly weapon aforesaid held in the right
hand of him, the said defendant, James McKeon, to, at, against, etc., the
body of him, the said James Smith, commonly called Windy Smith, he, the
said defendant, James McKeon, at the said town of Laramie City, in the
said County of Albany, and in the heretofore enumerated Territory of
Wyoming, and on the hereinbefore mentioned 13th day of July, Anno Domini
1880, did inflict to, at, upon, by, contiguous to, adjacent to, adjoining,
over and against the body of him, the said James Smith, commonly called
Windy Smith, one certain deadly, mortal, dangerous and painful wound,
to-wit: Over, against, to, at, by, upon, contiguous to, near, adjacent to
and bisecting the intestines of him, the said James Smith, commonly called
Windy Smith, by reason of which he, the said James Smith, commonly called
Windy Smith, did in great agony linger, and lingering did die, on the 14th
day of July, Anno Domini 1880, at 2 o'clock in the forenoon of said day,
contrary to the statutes in such case made and provided, and against the
peace and dignity of the Territory of Wyoming.

I am now convinced that although the published account was correct, it was
not as full as it might have been. Perhaps the tendency of modern
journalism is to epitomize too much. In the hurry of daily newspaper work
and the press of matter upon our pages, very likely we are fatally brief,
and sacrifice rhetorical beauty to naked and goose-pimply facts.

All About Menials.

The subject of meals, lunch-counters, dining-cars and buffet-cars came up
the other day, incidentally. I had ordered a little breakfast in the
buffet-car, not so much because I expected to get anything, but because I
liked to eat in a car and have all the other passengers glaring at me. I
do not know which affords me the most pleasure--to sit for a photograph
and be stabbed in the cerebellum with a cast-iron prong, to be fed in the
presence of a mixed company of strangers, or to be called on without any
preparation to make a farewell speech on the gallows.

However, I got my breakfast after awhile. The waiter was certainly the
most worthless, trifling, half-asleep combination of Senegambian stupidity
and poor white trash indolence and awkwardness that I ever saw. He brought
in everything except what I wanted, and then wound up by upsetting the
little cream pitcher in my lap. He did not charge for the cream. He threw
that in.

So all the rest of the journey I was trying to eradicate a cream dado from
my pantaloons. It made me mad, because those pantaloons were made for me
by request Besides, I haven't got pantaloons to squander in that way. To
some a pair of pantaloons, more or less, is nothing, but it is much to me.

[Illustration: SHOWING HIS INMOST THOUGHT.]

There was a porter on the same train who was much the same kind of
furniture as the waiter. He slept days and made up berths all night.
Truly, he began making up berths at Jersey City, and when he got through,
about daylight, it was time to begin to unmake them again. All night long
I could hear him opening and shutting the berths like a concertina. He
sang softly to himself all night long:

"You must camp a little in the wilderness
And then we'll all go home."

He played his own accompaniment on the berths.

When in repose he was generally asleep with a whisk broom in one hand and
the other hand extended with the palm up, waiting for a dividend to be
declared.

He generally slept with his mouth open, so that you could read his inmost
thoughts, and when I complained to him about the way my bunk felt, he said
he was sorry, and wanted to know which cell I was in.

I rode, years ago, over a new stage line for several days. It was through
an almost trackless wilderness, and the service hadn't been "expedited"
then. It was not a star route, anyhow. The government seemed to think that
the man who managed the thing ought not to expect help so long as he had
been such a fool asterisk it.

(Five minutes intermission for those who wish to be chloroformed.)

The stage consisted of a buckboard. It was one of the first buckboards
ever made, and the horse was among the first turned out, also. The driver
and myself were the passengers.

When it got to be about dinner time, I asked him if we were not pretty
near the dinner station. He grunted. He hadn't said a word since we
started. He was a surly, morose and taciturn man. I was told that he had
been disappointed in love. A half-breed woman named No-Wayno had led him
to believe that she loved him, and that if it had not been for her husband
she would gladly have been the driver's bride. So the driver assassinated
the disagreeable husband of No-Wayno. Then he went to the ranch to claim
his bride, but she was not there. She had changed her mind, and married a
cattle man, who had just moved on to the range with a government mule and
a branding iron, intending to slowly work himself into the stock business.

So this driver was a melancholy man. He only made one remark to me during
that long forty-mile drive through the wilderness. About dinner time he
drove the horse under a quaking asp tree, tied a nose bag of oats over its
head and took a wad of bread and bacon from his greasy pocket. The bacon
and bread had little flakes of smoking tobacco all over it, because he
carried his grub and tobacco in the same pocket. For a moment he
introduced one corner of the bacon and bread in among his whiskers. Then
he made the only remark that he uttered while we were together. He said:

"Pardner, dinner is now ready in the dining-car."

A Powerful Speech.

I once knew a man who was nominated by his fellow citizens for a certain
office and finally elected without having expended a cent for that
purpose. He was very eccentric, but he made a good officer. When he heard
that he was nominated, he went up, as he said, into the mountains to do
some assessment work on a couple of claims. He got lost and didn't get his
bearings until a day or two after election. Then he came into town hungry,
greasy and ragged, but unpledged.

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