Remarks by Bill Nye

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I see by your picture that you have got one of them pleated coats with a
belt around it, and short pants. They make you look as you did when I used
to spank you in years gone by, and I feel the same old desire to do it now
that I did then. Old and feeble as I am, it seems to me as though I could
spank a boy that wears knickerbocker pants buttoned onto a Garabaldy waist
and a pleated jacket. If it wasn't for them cute little camel's hair
whiskers of yours I would not believe that you had grown to be a large,
expensive boy, grown up with thoughts. Some of the thoughts you express in
your letters are far beyond your years. Do you think them yourself, or is
there some boy in the school that thinks all the thoughts for the rest?

Some of your letters are so deep that your mother and I can hardly grapple
with them. One of them, especially, was so full of foreign stuff that you
had got out of a bill of fare, that we will have to wait till you come
home before we can take it in. I can talk a little Chippewa, but that is
all the foreign language I am familiar with. When I was young we had to
get our foreign languages the best we could, so I studied Chippewa without
a master. A Chippewa chief took me into his camp and kept me there for
some time while I acquired his language. He became so much attached to me
that I had great difficulty in coming away. I wish you would write in the
United States dialect as much as possible, and not try to paralize your
parents with imported expressions that come too high for poor people.

Remember that you are the only boy we've got, and we are only going
through the motions of living here for your sake. For us the day is
wearing out, and it is now way long into the shank of the evening. All we
ask of you is to improve on the old people. You can see where I fooled
myself, and you can do better. Read and write, and sifer, and polo, and
get nolledge, and try not to be ashamed of your uncultivated parents.

When you get that checkered little sawed-off coat on, and that pair of
knee panties, and that poker-dot necktie, and the sassy little boys holler
"rats" when you pass by, and your heart is bowed down, remember that, no
matter how foolish you may look, your parents will never sour on you.

Your Father.

Twombley's Tale.

My name is Twombley, G.O.P. Twombley is my full name and I have had a
checkered career. I thought it would be best to have my career checked
right through, so I did so.

My home is in the Wasatch Mountains. Far up, where I can see the long,
green, winding valley of the Jordan, like a glorious panorama below me, I
dwell. I keep a large herd of Angora goats. That is my business. The
Angora goat is a beautiful animal--in a picture. But out of a picture he
has a style of perspiration that invites adverse criticism.

Still, it is an independent life, and one that has its advantages, too.

When I first came to Utah, I saw one day, in Salt Lake City, a young girl
arrive. She was in the heyday of life, but she couldn't talk our language.
Her face was oval; rather longer than it was wide, I noticed, and, though
she was still young, there were traces of care and other foreign
substances plainly written there.

She was an emigrant, about seventeen years of age, and, though she had
been in Salt Lake City an hour and a half, she was still unmarried.

She was about the medium height, with blue eyes, that somehow, as you
examined them carefully in the full, ruddy light of a glorious September
afternoon, seemed to resemble each other. Both of them were that way,

I know not what gave me the courage, but I stepped to her side, and in a
low voice told her of my love and asked her to be mine.

She looked askance at me. Nobody ever did that to me before and lived to
tell the tale. But her sex made me overlook it. Had she been any other sex
that I can think of, I would have resented it. But I would not strike a
woman, especially when I had not been married to her and had no right to
do so.

I turned on my heel and I went away. I most always turn on my heel when I
go away. If I did not turn on my own heel when I went away, whose heel
would a lonely man like me turn upon?

Years rolled by. I did nothing to prevent it. Still that face came to me
in my lonely hut far up in the mountains. That look still rankled in my
memory. Before that my memory had been all right. Nothing had ever rankled
in it very much. Let the careless reader who never had his memory rankle
in hot weather, pass this by. This story is not for him.

After our first conversation we did not meet again for three years, and
then by the merest accident. I had been out for a whole afternoon, hunting
an elderly goat that had grown childish and irresponsible. He had wandered
away, and for several days I had been unable to find him. So I sought for
him till darkness found me several miles from my cabin. I realized at once
that I must hurry back, or lose my way and spend the night in the
mountains. The darkness became more rapidly obvious. My way became more
and more uncertain.

Finally I fell down an old prospect shaft. I then resolved to remain where
I was until I could decide what was best to be done. If I had known that
the prospect shaft was there, I would have gone another way. There was
another way that I could have gone, but it did not occur to me until too
late.

I hated to spend the next few weeks in the shaft, for I had not locked up
my cabin when I left it, and I feared that someone might get in while I
was absent and play on the piano. I had also set a batch of bread and two
hens that morning, and all of these would be in sad knead of me before I
could get my business into such shape that I could return.

I could not tell accurately how long I had been in the shaft, for I had no
matches by which to see my watch. I also had no watch.

All at once, someone fell down the shaft. I knew that it was a woman,
because she did not swear when she landed at the bottom. Still, this could
be accounted for in another way. She was unconscious when I picked her up.

I did not know what to do, I was perfectly beside myself, and so was she.
I had read in novels that when a woman became unconscious people generally
chafed her hands, but I did not know whether I ought to chafe the hands of
a person to whom I had never been introduced.

I could have administered alcoholic stimulants to her but I had neglected
to provide myself with them when I fell down the shaft. This should be a
warning to people who habitually go around the country without alcoholic
stimulants.

Finally she breathed a long sigh and murmured, "where am I?" I told her
that I did not know, but wherever it might be, we were safe, and that
whatever she might say to me, I would promise her, should go no farther.

Then there was a long pause.

To encourage further conversation I asked her if she did not think we had
been having a rather backward spring. She said we had, but she prophesied
a long, open fall.

Then there was another pause, after which I offered her a seat on an old
red empty powder can. Still, she seemed shy and reserved. I would make a
remark to which she would reply briefly, and then there would be a pause
of a little over an hour. Still it seemed longer.

Suddenly the idea of marriage presented itself to my mind. If we never got
out of the shaft, of course an engagement need not be announced. No one
had ever plighted his or her troth at the bottom of a prospect shaft
before. It was certainly unique, to say the least. I suggested it to her.

She demurred to this on the ground that our acquaintance had been so
brief, and that we had never been thrown together before. I told her that
this would be no objection, and that my parents were so far away that I
did not think they would make any trouble about it.

She said that she did not mind her parents so much as she did the violent
temper of her husband.

I asked her if her husband had ever indulged in polygamy. She replied that
he had, frequently. He had several previous wives. I convinced her that in
the eyes of the law, and under the Edmunds bill, she was not bound to him.
Still she feared the consequences of his wrath.

Then I suggested a desperate plan. We would elope!

I was now thirty-seven years old, and yet had never eloped. Neither had
she. So, when the first streaks of rosy dawn crept across the soft,
autumnal sky and touched the rich and royal coloring on the rugged sides
of the grim old mountains, we got out of the shaft and eloped.

On Cyclones.

I desire to state that my position as United States Cyclonist for this
Judicial District is now vacant. I resigned on the 9th day of September,
A.D. 1884.

I have not the necessary personal magnetism to look a cyclone in the eye
and make it quail. I am stern and even haughty in my intercourse with men,
but when a Manitoba simoon takes me by the brow of my pantaloons and
throws me across Township 28, Range 18, West of the 5th Principal
Meridian, I lose my mental reserve and become anxious and even taciturn.
For thirty years I had yearned to see a grown up cyclone, of the
ring-tail-puller variety, mop up the green earth with huge forest trees
and make the landscape look tired. On the 9th day of September, A.D. 1884,
my morbid curiosity was gratified.

As the people came out into the forest with lanterns and pulled me out of
the crotch of a basswood tree with a "tackle and fall," I remember I told
them I didn't yearn for any more atmospheric phenomena. The old desire for
a hurricane that would blow a cow through a penitentiary was satiated. I
remember when the doctor pried the bones of my leg together, in order to
kind of draw my attention away from the limb, he asked me how I liked the
fall style of Zephyr in that locality.

I said it was all right, what there was of it. I said this in a tone of
bitter irony.

Cyclones are of two kinds, viz: the dark maroon cyclone; and the iron gray
cyclone with pale green mane and tail. It was the latter kind I frolicked
with on the above-named date.

My brother and I were riding along in the grand old forest, and I had just
been singing a few bars from the opera of "Whoop 'em Up, Lizzie Jane,"
when I noticed that the wind was beginning to sough through the trees.
Soon after that, I noticed that I was soughing through the trees also, and
I am really no slouch of a sougher, either, when I get started.

The horse was hanging by the breeching from the bough of a large butternut
tree, waiting for some one to come and pick him.

[Illustration: WAITING TO BE PICKED.]

I did not see my brother at first, but after a while he disengaged himself
from a rail fence and came where I was hanging, wrong end up, with my
personal effects spilling out of my pockets. I told him that as soon as
the wind kind of softened down, I wished he would go and pick the horse.
He did so, and at midnight a party of friends carried me into town on a
stretcher. It was quite an ovation. To think of a torchlight procession
coming way out there into the woods at midnight, and carrying me into town
on their shoulders in triumph! And yet I was once only a poor boy!

It shows what may be accomplished by anyone if he will persevere and
insist on living a different life.

The cyclone is a natural phenomenon, enjoying the most robust health. It
may be a pleasure for a man with great will power and an iron constitution
to study more carefully into the habits of the cyclone, but as far as I am
concerned, individually, I could worry along some way if we didn't have a
phenomenon in the house from one year's end to another.

As I sit here, with my leg in a silicate of soda corset, and watch the
merry throng promenading down the street, or mingling in the giddy
torchlight procession, I cannot repress a feeling toward a cyclone that
almost amounts to disgust.

The Arabian Language.

The Arabian language belongs to what is called the Semitic or Shemitic
family of languages, and, when written, presents the appearance of a
general riot among the tadpoles and wrigglers of the United States.

The Arabian letter "jeem" or "jim," which corresponds with our J,
resembles some of the spectacular wonders seen by the delirium tremons
expert. I do not know whether that is the reason the letter is called jeem
or jim, or not.

The letter "sheen" or "shin," which is some like our "sh" in its effect,
is a very pretty letter, and enough of them would make very attractive
trimming for pantalets or other clothing. The entire Arabic alphabet, I
think, would work up first-rate into trimming for aprons, skirts, and so
forth.

Still it is not so rich in variety as the Chinese language. A Chinaman who
desires to publish a paper in order to fill a long felt want, must have a
small fortune in order to buy himself an alphabet. In this country we get
a press, and then, if we have any money left, we lay it out in type; but
in China the editor buys himself an alphabet and then regards the press as
a mere annex. If you go to a Chinese type maker and ask him to show you
his goods, he will ask you whether you want a two or a three story
alphabet.

The Chinese compositor spends most of his time riding up and down the
elevator, seeking for letters and dusting them off with a feather duster.
In large and wealthy offices the compositor sits at his case with the copy
before him, and has five or six boys running from one floor to another,
bringing him the letters of this wild and peculiar alphabet.

Sometimes they have to stop in the middle of a long editorial and send
down to Hong Kong and have a letter cast specially for that editorial.

Chinese compositors soon die from heart disease, because they have to run
up stairs and down so much in order to get the different letters needed.

One large publisher tried to have his case arranged in a high building
without floors, so that the compositor could reach each type by means of a
long pole, but one day there was a slight earthquake shock that spilled
the entire alphabet out of the case, all over the floor, and although that
was ninety-seven years ago last April, there are still two bushels of pi
on the floor of that office. The paper employs rat printers, and as they
have been engaged in assorting and distributing this mass of pi, it is
called rat pi in China, and the term is quite popular.

When the editor underscores a word, the Chinese compositor charges $9
extra for italicizing it. This is nothing more than fair, for he may have
to go all over the empire, and climb twenty-seven flights of stairs to
find the necessary italics. So it is much more economical in China to use
body type mostly in setting up a paper, and the old journalist will avoid
caps and italics, unless he is very wealthy.

Arabian literature is very rich, and more especially so in verse. How the
Arabian poets succeeded so well in writing their verse in their own
language, I can hardly understand. I find it very difficult to write
poetry which will be greedily snapped up and paid for, even when written
in the English language, but if I had to paw around for an hour to get a
button-hook for the end of the fourth line, so that it would rhyme with
the button-hook in the second line of the same verse, I believe it would
drive me mad.

The Arabian writer is very successful in a tale of fiction. He loves to
take a tale and re-write it for the press by carefully expunging the
facts. It is in lyric and romantic writing that he seems to excel.

The Arabian Nights is the most popular work that has survived the harsh
touch of time. Its age is not fully known, and as the author has been dead
several hundred years, I feel safe in saying that a number of the
incidents contained in this book are grossly inaccurate.

It has been translated several times with more or less success by various
writers, and some of the statements contained in the book are well worthy
of the advanced civilization, and wild word painting incident to a heated
presidential campaign.

Verona.

We arrived in Verona day before yesterday. Most every one has heard of the
Two Gentlemen of Verona. This is the place they came from. They have never
returned. Verona is not noted for its gentlemen now. Perhaps that is the
reason I was regarded as such a curiosity when I came here.

[Illustration: THE ODORS OF VERONA.]

Verona is a good deal older town than Chicago, but the two cities have
points of resemblance after all. When the southern simoon from the stock
yards is wafted across the vinegar orchards of Chicago, and a load of
Mormon emigrants get out at the Rock Island depot and begin to move around
and squirm and emit the fragrance of crushed Limburger cheese, it reminds
one of Verona.

The sky is similar, too. At night, when it is raining hard, the sky of
Chicago and Verona is not dissimilar. Chicago is the largest place,
however, and my sympathies are with her. Verona has about 68,000 people
now, aside from myself. This census includes foreigners and Indians not
taxed.

Verona has an ancient skating rink, known in history as the amphitheatre,
It is 404-1/2 feet by 516 in size, and the wall is still 100 feet high in
places. The people of Verona wanted me to lecture there, but I refrained.
I was afraid that some late comers might elbow their way in and leave one
end of the amphitheatre open and then there would be a draft. I will speak
more fully on the subject of amphitheatres in another letter. There isn't
room in this one.

Verona is noted for the Capitular library, as it is called. This is said
to be the largest collection of rejected manuscripts in the world. I stood
in with the librarian and he gave me an opportunity to examine this
wonderful store of literary work. I found a Virgil that was certainly over
1,600 years old. I also found a well preserved copy of "Beautiful Snow." I
read it. It was very touching indeed. Experts said it was 1,700 years old,
which is no doubt correct. I am no judge of the age of MSS. Some can look
at the teeth of a literary production and tell within two weeks how old it
is, but I can't. You can also fool me on the age of wine. My rule used to
be to observe how old I felt the next day and to fix that as the age of
the wine, but this rule I find is not infallible. One time I found myself
feeling the next day as though I might be 138 years old, but on
investigation we found that the wine was extremely new, having been made
at a drug store in Cheyenne that same day.

[Illustration: THE NEXT MORNING.]

Looking these venerable MSS. over, I noticed that the custom of writing
with a violet pencil on both sides of the large foolscap sheet, and then
folding it in sixteen directions and carrying it around in the pocket for
two or three centuries, is not a late American invention, as I had been
led to suppose. They did it in Italy fifteen centuries ago. I was
permitted also to examine the celebrated institutes of Gaius. Gaius was a
poor penman, and I am convinced from a close examination of his work that
he was in the habit of carrying his manuscript around in his pocket with
his smoking tobacco. The guide said that was impossible, for smoking
tobacco was not introduced into Italy until a comparatively late day.
That's all right, however. You can't fool me much on the odor of smoking
tobacco.

The churches of Verona are numerous, and although they seem to me a little
different from our own in many ways, they resemble ours in others. One
thing that pleased me about the churches of Verona was the total absence
of the church fair and festival as conducted in America. Salvation seems
to be handed out in Verona without ice cream and cake, and the odor of
sancity and stewed oysters do not go inevitably hand in hand. I have
already been in the place more than two days and I have not yet been
invited to help lift the old church debt on the cathedral. Perhaps they
think I am not wealthy, however. In fact there is nothing about my dress
or manner that would betray my wealth. I have been in Europe now six weeks
and have kept my secret well. Even my most intimate traveling companions
do not know that I am the Laramie City postmaster in disguise.

The cathedral is a most imposing and massive pile. I quote this from the
guide book. This beautiful structure contains a baptismal font cut out of
one solid block of stone and made for immersion, with an inside diameter
of ten feet. A man nine feet high could be baptized there without injury.
The Venetians have a great respect for water. They believe it ought not to
be used for anything else but to wash away sins, and even then they are
very economical about it.

[Illustration]

There is a nice picture here by Titian. It looks as though it had been
left in the smoke house 900 years and overlooked. Titian painted a great
deal. You find his works here ever and anon. He must have had all he could
do in Italy in an early day, when the country was new. I like his pictures
first rate, but I haven't found one yet that I could secure at anything
like a bed rock price.

A Great Upheaval.

I have just received the following letter, which I take the liberty of
publishing, in order that good may come out of it, and that the public
generally may be on the watch:

William Nye, Esq.--

_Dear Sir:_ There has been a great religious upheaval here, and great
anxiety on the part of our entire congregation, and I write to you, hoping
that you may have some suggestions to offer that we could use at this time
beneficially.

All the bitter and irreverent remarks of Bob Ingersoll have fallen
harmlessly upon the minds of our people. The flippant sneers and wicked
sarcasms of the modern infidel, wise in his own conceit, have alike passed
over our heads without damage or disaster. These times that have tried
men's souls have only rooted us more firmly in the faith, and united us
more closely as brothers and sisters.

We do not care whether the earth was made in two billion years or two
minutes, so long as it was made and we are satisfied with it. We do not
care whether Jonah swallowed the whale or the whale swallowed Jonah. None
of these things worry us in the least. We do not pin our faith on such
little matters as those, but we try to so live that when we pass on beyond
the flood we may have a record to which we may point with pride.

But last Sabbath our entire congregation was visibly moved. People who had
grown gray in this church got right up during the service and went out,
and did not come in again. Brothers who had heard all kinds of infidelity
and scorned to be moved by it, got up, and kicked the pews, and slammed
the doors, and created a young riot.

For many years we have sailed along in the most peaceful faith, and
through joy or sorrow we came to the church together to worship. We have
laughed and wept as one family for a quarter of a century, and an humble
dignity and Christian style of etiquette have pervaded our incomings and
our outgoings.

That is the reason why a clear case of disorderly conduct in our church
has attracted attention and newspaper comment. That is the reason why we
want in some public way to have the church set right before we suffer from
unjust criticism and worldly scorn.

It has been reported that one of the brothers, who is sixty years of age,
and a model Christian, and a good provider, rose during the first prayer,
and, waving his plug hat in the air, gave a wild and blood-curdling whoop,
jumped over the back of his pew, and lit out. While this is in a measure
true, it is not accurate. He did do some wild and startling jumping, but
he did not jump over the pew. He tried to, but failed. He was too old.

It has also been stated that another brother, who has done more to build
up the church and society here than any other one man of his size, threw
his hymn book across the church, and, with a loud wail that sounded like
the word "Gosh!" hissed through clenched teeth, got out through the window
and went away. This is overdrawn, though there is an element of truth in
it, and I do not try to deny it.

There were other similar strong evidences of feeling throughout the
congregation, none of which had ever been noticed before in this place.
Our clergyman was amazed and horrified. He tried to ignore the action of
the brethren, but when a sister who has grown old in our church, and been
such a model and example of rectitude that all the girls in the county
were perfectly discouraged about trying to be anywhere near equal to her;
when she rose with a wild snort, got up on the pew with her feet, and
swung her parasol in a way that indicated that she would not go home till
morning, he paused and briefly wound up the services.

Of course there were other little eccentricities on the part of the
congregation, but these were the ones that people have talked about the
most, and have done us the most damage abroad.

Now, my desire is that through the medium of the press you will state that
this great trouble which has come upon us, by reason of which the ungodly
have spoken lightly of us, was not the result of a general tendency to
dissent from the statements made by our pastor, and therefore an
exhibition of our disapproval of his doctrines, but that the janitor had
started a light fire in the furnace, and that had revived a large nest of
common, streaked, hot-nosed wasps in the warm air pipe, and when they came
up through the register and united in the services, there was more or less
of an ovation.

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