Remarks by Bill Nye

B >> Bill Nye >> Remarks

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

Lucretia soon after this began to be restless. He would come to my
casement and lift up his voice, and howl into the bosom of the silent
night. At first I thought that he had found some one in distress, or
wanted to get me out of doors and save my life. I went out several nights
in a weird costume that I had made up of garments belonging to different
members of my family. I dressed carefully in the dark and stole out to
kill the assassin referred to by Lucretia, but he was not there. Then the
faithful animal would run up to me and with almost human, pleading eyes,
bark and run away toward a distant alley. I immediately decided that some
one was suffering there. I had read in books about dogs that led their
masters away to the suffering and saved people's lives; so, when Lucretia
came to me with his great, honest eyes and took little mementoes out of
the calf of my leg, and then galloped off seven or eight blocks, I
followed him in the chill air of night and my Mosaic clothes. I wandered
away to where the dog stopped behind a livery stable, and there, lying in
a shuddering heap on the frosty ground, lay the still, white features of a
soup bone that had outlived its usefulness.

On the way back, I met a physician who had been up town to swear in an
American citizen who would vote twenty-one years later, if he lived. The
physician stopped me and was going to take me to the home of the
friendless, when he discovered who I was.

[Illustration: EXCITING PUBLIC CURIOSITY.]

You wrap a tall man, with a William H. Seward nose, in a flannel robe, cut
plain, and then put a plug hat and a sealskin sacque and Arctic overshoes
on him, and put him out in the street, under the gaslight, with his trim,
purple ankles just revealing themselves as he madly gallops after a
hydrophobia infested dog, and it is not, after all, surprising that
people's curiosity should be a little bit excited.

After I had introduced myself to the physician and asked him for a cigar,
explaining that I could not find any in the clothes I had on, I asked him
about Lucretia Borgia. I told the doctor how Lucretia seemed restless
nights and nervous and irritable days, and how he seemed to be almost a
mental wreck, and asked him what the trouble was.

He said it was undoubtedly "insomnia." He said that it was a bad case of
it, too. I told him I thought so myself. I said I didn't mind the insomnia
that Lucretia had so much as I did my own. I was getting more insomnia on
my hands than I could use.

He gave me something to administer to Lucretia. He said I must put it in a
link of sausage and leave the sausage where it would appear that I didn't
want the dog to get it, and then Lucretia would eat it greedily.

I did so. It worked well so far as the administration of the remedy was
concerned, but it was fatal to my little, high strung, yearnful dog. It
must have contained something of a deleterious character, for the next
morning a coarse man took Lucretia Borgia by the tail and laid him where
the violets blow. Malignant insomnia is fast becoming the great foe to the
modern American dog.

Along Lake Superior.

I have just returned from a brief visit to Duluth. After strolling along
the Bay of Naples and watching old Vesuvius vomit red-hot mud, vapor and
other campaign documents, Duluth is quite a change. The ice in the bay at
Duluth was thirty-eight inches in depth when I left there the last week in
March, and we rode across it with the utmost impunity. By the time these
lines fall beneath the eye of the genial, courteous and urbane reader, the
new railroad bridge across the bay, over a mile and a half long, will have
been completed, so that you may ride from Chicago to Duluth over the
Northwestern and Omaha railroads with great comfort. I would be glad to
digress here and tell about the beauty of the summer scenery along the
Omaha road, and the shy and beautiful troutlet, and the dark and silent
Chippewa squawlet and her little bleached out pappooselet, were it not for
the unkind and cruel thrusts that I would invoke from the scenery cynic
who believes that a newspaper man's opinions may be largely warped with a
pass.

Duluth has been joked a good deal, but she stands it first-rate and takes
it good naturedly. She claims 16,000 people, some of whom I met at the
opera house there. If the rest of the 16,000 are as pleasant as those I
conversed with that evening, Duluth must be a pleasant place to live in.
Duluth has a very pleasant and beautiful opera house that seats 1,000
people. A few more could have elbowed their way into the opera house the
evening that I spoke there, but they preferred to suffer on at home.

Lake Superior is one of the largest aggregations of fresh wetness in the
world, if not the largest. When I stop to think that some day all this
cold, cold water will have to be absorbed by mankind, it gives me a cramp
in the geographical center.

Around the west end of Lake Superior there is a string of towns which
stretches along the shore for miles under one name or another, all waiting
for the boom to strike and make the northern Chicago. You cannot visit
Duluth or Superior without feeling that at any moment the tide of trade
will rise and designate the point where the future metropolis of the
northern lakes is to be. I firmly believe that this summer will decide it,
and my guess is that what is now known as West Superior is to get the
benefit. For many years destiny has been hovering over the west end of
this mighty lake, and now the favored point is going to be designated.
Duluth has past prosperity and expensive improvements in her favor, and in
fact the whole locality is going to be benefited, but if I had a block in
West Superior with a roller rink on it, I would wear my best clothes every
day and claim to be a millionaire in disguise. Ex-President R. B. Hayes
has a large brick block in Duluth, but he does not occupy it. Those who go
to Duluth hoping to meet Mr. Hayes will be bitterly disappointed.

The streams that run into Lake Superior are alive with trout, and next
summer I propose to go up there and roast until I have so thoroughly
saturated my system with trout that the trout bones will stick out through
my clothes in every direction and people will regard me as a beautiful
toothpick holder.

Still there will be a few left for those who think of going up there. All
I will need will be barely enough to feed Albert Victor and myself from
day to day. People who have never seen a crowned head with a peeled nose
on it are cordially invited to come over and see us during office hours.
Albert is not at all haughty, and I intend to throw aside my usual reserve
this summer also--for the time. P. Wales' son and I will be far from the
cares that crowd so thick and fast on greatness. People who come to our
cedar bark wigwam to show us their mosquito bites, will be received as
cordially as though no great social chasm yawned between us.

Many will meet us in the depths of the forest and go away thinking that we
are just common plugs of whom the world wots not; but there is where they
will fool themselves.

Then, when the season is over, we will come back into the great maelstrom
of life, he to wait for his grandmother's overshoes and I to thrill
waiting millions from the rostrum with my "Tale of the Broncho Cow." And
so it goes with us all. Adown life's rugged pathway some must toil on from
daylight to dark to earn their meagre pittance as kings, while others are
born to wear a swallow-tail coat every evening and wring tears of genuine
anguish from their audiences.

They tell some rather wide stories about people who have gone up there
total physical wrecks and returned strong and well. One man said that he
knew a young college student, who was all run down and weak, go up there
on the Brule and eat trout and fight mosquitoes a few months, and when he
returned to his Boston home he was so stout and well and tanned up that
his parents did not know him. There was a man in our car who weighed 300
pounds. He seemed to be boiling out through his clothes everywhere. He was
the happiest looking man I ever saw. All he seemed to do in this life was
to sit all day and whistle and laugh and trot his stomach, first on one
knee and then on the other.

He said that he went up into the pine forests of the Great Lake region a
broken-down hypochondriac and confirmed consumptive. He had been measured
for a funeral sermon three times, he said, and had never used either of
them. He knew a clergyman named Brayley who went up into that region with
Bright's justly celebrated disease. He was so emaciated that he couldn't
carry a watch. The ticking of the watch rattled his bones so that it made
him nervous, and at night they had to pack him in cotton so that he
wouldn't break a leg when he turned over. He got to sleeping out nights on
a bed of balsam and spruce boughs and eating venison and trout.

When he came down in the spring, he passed through a car of lumbermen and
one of them put a warm, wet quid of tobacco in his plug hat for a joke.
There were a hundred of these lumbermen when the preacher began, and when
the train got into Eau Claire there were only three of them well enough to
go around to the office and draw their pay.

This is just as the story was given to me and I repeat it to show how
bracing the climate near Superior is. Remember, if you please, that I do
not want the story to be repeated as coming from me, for I have nothing
left now but my reputation for veracity, and that has had a very hard
winter of it.

I Tried Milling.

I think I was about 18 years of age when I decided that I would be a
miller, with flour on my clothes and a salary of $200 per month. This was
not the first thing I had decided to be, and afterward changed my mind
about.

I engaged to learn my profession of a man called Sam Newton, I believe; at
least I will call him that for the sake of argument. My business was to
weigh wheat, deduct as much as possible on account of cockle, pigeon grass
and wild buckwheat, and to chisel the honest farmer out of all he would
stand. This was the programme with Mr. Newton; but I am happy to say that
it met with its reward, and the sheriff afterward operated the mill.

On stormy days I did the book-keeping, with a scoop shovel behind my ear,
in a pile of middlings on the fifth floor. Gradually I drifted into doing
a good deal of this kind of brain work. I would chop the ice out of the
turbine wheel at 5 o'clock A.M., and then frolic up six flights of stairs
and shovel shorts till 9 o'clock P.M.

By shoveling bran and other vegetables 16 hours a day, a general knowledge
of the milling business may be readily obtained. I used to scoop middlings
till I could see stars, and then I would look out at the landscape and
ponder.

I got so that I piled up more ponder, after a while, than I did middlings.

One day the proprietor came up stairs and discovered me in a brown study,
whereupon he cursed me in a subdued Presbyterian way, abbreviated my
salary from $26 per month to $18 and reduced me to the ranks.

Afterward I got together enough desultory information so that I could
superintend the feed stone. The feed stone is used to grind hen feed and
other luxuries. One day I noticed an odor that reminded me of a hot
overshoe trying to smother a glue factory at the close of a tropical day.
I spoke to the chief floor walker of the mill about it, and he said "dod
gammit" or something that sounded like that, in a course and brutal
manner. He then kicked my person in a rude and hurried tone of voice, and
told me that the feed stone was burning up.

He was a very fierce man, with a violent and ungovernable temper, and,
finding that I was only increasing his brutal fury, I afterward resigned
my position. I talked it over with the proprietor, and both agreed that it
would be best. He agreed to it before I did, and rather hurried up my
determination to go.

[Illustration: HE MADE IT AN OBJECT FOR ME TO GO.]

I rather hated to go so soon, but he made it an object for me to go, and I
went. I started in with the idea that I would begin at the bottom of the
ladder, as it were, and gradually climb to the bran bin by my own
exertions, hoping by honesty, industry, and carrying two bushels of wheat
up nine flights of stairs, to become a wealthy man, with corn meal in my
hair and cracked wheat in my coat pocket, but I did not seem to accomplish
it.

Instead of having ink on my fingers and a chastened look of woe on my
clear-cut Grecian features, I might have poured No. 1 hard wheat and
buckwheat flour out of my long taper ears every night, if I had stuck to
the profession. Still, as I say, it was for another man's best good that I
resigned. The head miller had no control over himself and the proprietor
had rather set his heart on my resignation, so it was better that way.

Still I like to roll around in the bran pile, and monkey in the cracked
wheat. I love also to go out in the kitchen and put corn meal down the
back of the cook's neck while my wife is working a purple silk Kensington
dog, with navy blue mane and tail, on a gothic lambrequin.

I can never cease to hanker for the rumble and grumble of the busy mill,
and the solemn murmur of the millstones and the machinery are music to me.
More so than the solemn murmur of the proprietor used to be when he came
in at an inopportune moment, and in that impromptu and extemporaneous
manner of his, and found me admiring the wild and beautiful scenery. He
may have been a good miller, but he had no love for the beautiful. Perhaps
that is why he was always so cold and cruel toward me. My slender, willowy
grace and mellow, bird-like voice never seemed to melt his stony heart.

Our Forefathers.

Seattle, W.T., December 12.--I am up here on the Sound in two senses. I
rode down to-day from Tacoma on the Sound, and to-night I shall lecture at
Frye's Opera House.

Seattle is a good town. The name lacks poetic warmth, but some day the man
who has invested in Seattle real estate will have reason to pat himself on
the back and say "ha ha," or words to that effect. The city is situated on
the side of a large hill and commands a very fine view of that world's
most calm and beautiful collection of water, Puget Sound.

I cannot speak too highly of any sheet of water on which I can ride all
day with no compunction of digestion. He who has tossed for days upon the
briny deep, will understand this and appreciate it; even if he never
tossed upon the angry deep, if it happened to be all he had, he will be
glad to know that the Sound is a good piece of water to ride on. The
gentle reader who has crossed the raging main and borrowed high-priced
meals of the steamship company for days and days, will agree with me that
when we can find a smooth piece of water to ride on we should lose no time
in crossing it.

In Washington Territory the women vote. That is no novelty to me, of
course, for I lived in Wyoming for seven years where women vote, and I
held office all the time. And still they say that female voters are poor
judges of men, and that any pleasing $2 adonis who comes along and asks
for their suffrages will get them.

Not much!!!

Woman is a keen and correct judge of mental and moral worth. Without
stopping to give logical reasons for her course, perhaps, she still
chooses with unerring judgment at the polls.

Anyone who doubts this statement, will do well to go to the old poll books
in Wyoming and examine my overwhelming majorities--with a powerful
magnifier.

I have just received from Boston a warm invitation to be present in that
city on Forefathers' day, to take part in the ceremonies and join in the
festivities of that occasion.

Forefathers, I thank you! Though this reply will not reach you for a long
time, perhaps, I desire to express to you my deep appreciation of your
kindness, and, though I can hardly be regarded as a forefather myself, I
assure you that I sympathize with you.

Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to be with you on this day of
your general jubilee and to talk over old times with you.

One who has never experienced the thrill of genuine joy that wakens a man
to a glad realization of the fact that he is a forefather, cannot
understand its full significance. You alone know how it is yourself, you
can speak from experience.

In fancy's dim corridors I see you stand, away back in the early dawn of
our national day, with the tallow candle drooping and dying in its socket,
as you waited for the physician to come and announce to you that you were
a forefather.

Forefathers; you have done well. Others have sought to outdo you and wrest
the laurels from your brow, but they did not succeed. As forefathers you
have never been successfully scooped.

I hope that you will keep up your justly celebrated organization. If a
forefather allows his dues to get in arrears, go to him kindly and ask him
like a brother to put up. If he refuses to do so, fire him. There is no
reason why a man should presume upon his long standing as a forefather to
become insolent to other forefathers who are far his seniors. As a rule, I
notice it is the young amateur forefather who has only been so a few days,
in fact, who is arrogant and disobedient.

I have often wished that we could observe Forefathers' day more generally
in the West. Why we should allow the Eastern cities to outdo us in this
matter while we hold over them in other ways, I cannot understand. Our
church sociables and homicides in the West will compare favorably with
those of the effeter cities of the Atlantic slope. Our educational
institutions and embezzlers are making rapid strides, especially our
embezzlers. We are cultivating a certain air of refinement and haughty
reserve which enables us at times to fool the best judges. Many of our
Western people have been to the Atlantic seaboard and remained all summer
without falling into the hands of the bunko artist. A cow gentleman friend
of mine who bathed his plump limbs in the Atlantic last summer during the
day, and mixed himself up in the mazy dance at night, told me on his
return that he had enjoyed the summer immensely, but that he had returned
financially depressed.

"Ah," said I, with an air of superiority which I often assume while
talking to men who know more than I do, "you fell into the hands of the
cultivated confidence man?"

"No, William," he said sadly, "worse than that. I stopped at a seaside
hotel. Had I gone to New York City and hunted up the gentlemanly bunko man
and the Wall street dealer in lamb's pelts, as my better judgment
prompted, I might have returned with funds. Now I am almost insolvent. I
begin life again with great sorrow, and the same old Texas steer with
which I went into the cattle industry five years ago."

But why should we, here in the West, take readily to all other
institutions common to the cultured East and ignore the forefather
industry? I now make this public announcement, and will stick to it, viz:
I will be one of ten full-blooded American citizens to establish a branch
forefather's lodge in the West, with a separate fund set aside for the
benefit of forefathers who are no longer young. Forefathers are just as
apt to become old and helpless as anyone else. Young men who contemplate
becoming forefathers should remember this.

In Acknowledgement.

To The Metropolitan Guide Publishing Co., New York.

Gentlemen.--I received the copy of your justly celebrated "Guide to rapid
Affluence, or How to Acquire Wealth Without Mental Exertion," price
twenty-five cents. It is a great boon.

I have now had this book sixteen weeks, and, as I am wealthy enough, I
return it. It is not much worn, and if you will allow me fifteen cents for
it, I would be very grateful. It is not the intrinsic value of the fifteen
cents that I care for so much, but I would like it as a curiosity.

The book is wonderfully graphic and thorough in all its details, and I was
especially pleased with its careful and useful recipe for ointments. One
style of ointment spoken of and recommended by your valuable book, is
worthy of a place in history. I made some of it according to your formula.
I tried it on a friend of mine. He wore it when he went away, and he has
not as yet returned. I heard, incidentally, that it adhered to him. People
who have examined it say that it retains its position on his person
similar to a birthmark.

Your cement does not have the same peculiarity. It does everything but
adhere. Among other specialties it effects a singular odor. It has a
fragrance that ought to be utilized in some way. Men have harnessed the
lightning, and it seems to me that the day is not far distant when a man
will be raised up who can control this latent power. Do you not think that
possibly you have made a mistake and got your ointment and cement formula
mixed? Your cement certainly smells like a corrupt administration in a
warm room.

Your revelations in the liquor manufacture, and how to make any mixed
drink with one hand tied, is well worth the price of the book. The chapter
on bar etiquette is also excellent. Very few men know how to properly
enter a bar-room and what to do after they arrive. How to get into a
bar-room without attracting attention, and how to get out without police
interference, are points upon which our American drunkards are lamentably
ignorant. How to properly address a bar tender, is also a page that no
student of good breeding could well omit.

I was greatly surprised to read how simple the manufacture of drinks under
your formula is. You construct a cocktail without liquor and then rob
intemperance of its sting. You also make all kinds of liquor without the
use of alcohol, that demon under whose iron heel thousands of our sons and
brothers go down to death and delirium annually. Thus you are doing a good
work.

You also unite aloes, tobacco and Rough on Rats, and, by a happy
combination, construct a style of beer that is non-intoxicating.

No one could, by any possible means, become intoxicated on your justly
celebrated beer. He would not have time. Before he could get inebriated he
would be in the New Jerusalem.

Those who drink your beer will not fill drunkards' graves. They will close
their career and march out of this life with perforated stomachs and a
look of intense anguish.

Your method of making cider without apples is also frugal and
ingenious. Thousands of innocent apple worms annually lose their lives
in the manufacture of cider. They are also, in most instances, wholly
unprepared to die. By your method, a style of wormless cider is
constructed that would not fool anyone. It tastes a good deal like
rain water that was rained about the first time that any raining was
ever done, and was deprived of air ever since.

[Illustration: HOW TO WIN AFFECTION.]

The closing chapter on the subject of "How to win the affections of the
opposite sex at sixty yards," is first-rate. It is wonderful what triumph
science and inventions have wrenched from obdurate conditions! Only a few
years ago, a young man had to work hard for weeks and months in order to
win the love of a noble young woman. Now, with your valuable and scholarly
work, price twenty-five cents, he studies over the closing chapter an hour
or two, then goes out into society and gathers in his victim. And yet I do
not grudge the long, long hours I squandered in those years when people
were in heathenish darkness. I had no book like yours to tell me how to
win the affections of the opposite sex. I could only blunder on, week
after week and yet I do not regret it. It was just the school I needed. It
did me good.

Your book will, no doubt, be a good thing for those who now grope, but I
have groped so long that I have formed the habit and prefer it. Let me go
right on groping. Those who desire to win the affections of the opposite
sex at one sitting, will do well to send two bits for your great work, but
I am in no hurry. My time is not valuable.

Preventing a Scandal.

Boys should never be afraid or ashamed to do little odd jobs by which to
acquire money. Too many boys are afraid, or at least seem to be
embarrassed when asked to do chores, and thus earn small sums of money. In
order to appreciate wealth we must earn it ourselves. That is the reason I
labor. I do not need to labor. My parents are still living, and they
certainly would not see me suffer for the necessities of life. But life in
that way would not have the keen relish that it would if I earned the
money myself.

Sawing wood used to be a favorite pastime with boys twenty years ago. I
remember the first money I ever earned was by sawing wood. My brother and
myself were to receive $5 for sawing five cords of wood. We allowed the
job to stand, however, until the weather got quite warm, and then we
decided to hire a foreigner who came along that way one glorious summer
day when all nature seemed tickled and we knew that the fish would be apt
to bite. So we hired the foreigner, and while he sawed, we would bet with
him on various "dead sure things" until he got the wood sawed, when he
went away owing us fifty cents.

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