Bill Nye and Boomerang. Or, The Tale of a Meek-Eyed Mule, and Some Other Literary Gems - Bill Nye 5 стр.


Brigadier-General Colorow owns considerable stock in some of the best North Park mines. Occasionally, he goes out to the Park to see how these mines are panning out. Then the miners, out of respect for his feelings, leave the mines and come into town to see what is the latest news from the front. Some of the miners have neglected to come in at times when the General was visiting the mines. They are there yet. I have a mine out there but I am getting along first-rate without it, and I have been thinking that when the General celebrates his silver wedding, I will send up this mine to his residence, wrapped up in a clean napkin, with his monogram worked on it.

DIARY OF A SAUCY YOUNG THING

It may be wrong to publish the contents of a diary, but the following notes in a new diary found yesterday, are too good to lose:

Jan. 1, 1877. To-day is New Year's day. Last night was Sunday night. I remember it distinctly. George and I watched the old year out and the new year in. George is awful kind-hearted. He has quit using tobacco on my account. He hasn't taken a chew this year.

Jan. 3. I didn't get time to write anything yesterday.

Jan. 4. This is Thursday. Day after to-morrow will be Saturday, and the next day will be Sunday.

Jan. 8. George was here last evening. I found some tobacco in his overcoat. Can he be deceiving me? O what false hearts men have! We had popcorn last evening. George and I ate a milk-pan full. He says popcorn seems to supply a want long felt. I don't know where he heard that.

Jan. 9. Another long week before the blessed rest and quiet of the Sabbath. I met George yesterday near the postoffice, and he didn't laugh as he once laughed. I wonder what makes him so sad. Maybe it's going without tobacco, or perhaps it's a boil. O what a world of woe!

Jan. 10. George is trying to raise a moustache. It looks like a Norwegian's eyebrow. It is genuine camel's hair. George's mother treats him unkindly, because he has pearl powder on his coat sleeves Monday morning. Four more days and the peace and quiet of the Sabbath will be here. I am a great admirer of Sunday.

Jan. 11. To-day is Thursday. O pshaw, I can't keep a diary.

KILLING OFF THE JAMES' BOYS

Now that a terrible mortality has again broken out among the James' boys, it is but justice to a family who have received so many gratuitous obituary notices, to say that the James' boys are still alive and enjoying a reasonable amount of health and strength.

Although the papers are generally agreed upon the statement that they are more or less dead, yet in a few days the telegraph will announce their death again. They are dying on every hand. Hardly a summer zephyr stirs the waving grass that it does not bear upon its wings the dying groan of the James' boys. Every blast of winter howls the requiem of a James' boy. James' boys have died in Texas and in Minnesota, in New England and on the Pacific coast. They have been yielding up the ghost whenever they had a leisure moment. They would rob a bank or a printing office, or some other place where wealth is known to be stored, and then they would die. When business was very active one of the brothers would stay at home and attend to work while the other would go and lay down his life.

Whenever the yellow fever let up a little the Grim Destroyer would go for a James' boy, and send him to his long home.

The men who have personally and individually killed the James' boys from time to time, contemplate holding a grand mass meeting and forming a new national party. This will no doubt be the governing party next year.

Let us institute a reform. Let us ignore the death of every plug who claims to be a James' boy, unless he identifies himself. Let us examine the matter and see if the trade mark is on every wrapper or blown in the bottle, before we fill the air with woe and bust the broad canopy of heaven wide open with our lamentations over the untimely death of the James' boys. If we succeed in standing them off while they live we can afford to control our grief and silently battle with our emotions when they are still in death, until we know we are snorting and bellowing over the correct corpse.

A RELIC

The Hutchinson family gave a concert last evening at the Methodist church, according to advertisement, and were greeted with a fair house. The entertainment did not awaken very loud applause, nor very much of it. The songs were not new. Many of them I had almost forgotten, but they were trotted out last evening and driven around the track in pretty fair time.

The fresh little quartette entitled, "Tommy, don't Go," was brought forward during the entertainment. I could see that this song has failed very much since I last met it. Its teeth are falling out, and it is getting very bald-headed. It will probably make two or three more grand farewell concerts and then it will be found dead in its bed some morning before breakfast.

"Silver Threads Among the Gold" was omitted from the programme.

The old melodeon that I remember was rickety and out of repair when I was a prattling infant, was on the stage last evening. It is about the size of a mouth organ, but the tone is not as clear. It is getting wheezy, and a short breath shows that it is beginning to feel the infirmities of age. The pumping arrangement makes more noise than the music, and something is the matter with the exhaust pipe. But when the old man opened the throttle and gave her sand, she would make a good deal of racket for such a little thing. After the concert was over, Mr. Hutchinson rolled up the melodeon in his pocket handkerchief and took it home.

Take the entertainment up one side and down the other, I was not much tickled with it. For those who like to drift back into the musty centuries gone by, and shake hands with the skeletons of forgotten ages, it is all right; but the time has come when a troupe cannot travel upon anything but true merit, and the public require that those who ask for money shall give some kind of an equivalent.

SOME REASONS WHY I CAN'T BE AN INDIAN AGENT

I see by the Western press that my name has been suggested to the Secretary of the Interior as a suitable one for the appointment of Indian Agent at the Uncompahgre Agency to succeed Berry; and, while I must express my grateful acknowledgment for the apparent faith and childlike confidence reposed in me by the people of Colorado, I must gently but firmly decline the proffered distinction.

In the first place, my other duties will not admit of it. My time is very much occupied at present in my journalistic work, and should there be a falling off in my chaste and picturesque contributions to the press, the great surging world of literature would be surprised and grieved.

Again, I could not entirely lay aside this class of work anyway, even were I to accept the position, and as I cannot write without being wrapped in the most opaque gloom and perfect calm I would be annoyed, I know, by the war-whoops of the savage when he got to playing croquet in the front yard, and whenever he got to shooting at me through the window while I was composing a poem, I am perfectly positive that I would get restless and the divine afflatus would cease to give down.

The true poet loves seclusion and soothing rest. That is the secret of his even numbers and smooth cadences. Look at Dryden, and Walt Whitman, and Milton, and Burns, and the Sweet Singer of Michigan. What could any of them have done with the house full of children of the forest who were hankering for a fresh pail of gore for lunch?

Further than this, I have not that gentle magnetic power over the untutored savage that some have. I am agitated all the time by a nervous dread that if I go near him I may lose my self-command and kill him. I would lose my temper some day when I felt irritable, I'm afraid, and shoot into a drove of them and mangle them horribly if they refused to dig the potatoes, or got rebellious and wouldn't do the fall plowing.

Further than this, I have not that gentle magnetic power over the untutored savage that some have. I am agitated all the time by a nervous dread that if I go near him I may lose my self-command and kill him. I would lose my temper some day when I felt irritable, I'm afraid, and shoot into a drove of them and mangle them horribly if they refused to dig the potatoes, or got rebellious and wouldn't do the fall plowing.

Then I would have to hunt up a suitable military post 200 or 300 miles away and stay there till the popular feeling in the tribe had cooled down a little.

Then, again, the Utes would invite me to attend the regular social hops during the winter, and I wouldn't know what to do, for it would be bad policy to refuse, and yet I don't know the first figure of the war-dance. I dance like a club-footed camel, anyway, and when I got mixed up in the scalp-dance the floor-manager would get mad at me probably, and chop some large irregular notches in me with a broad-ax.

Then their costumes are so low-necked and so exceedingly dress, and everything is so all-fired decolette, whatever that is. I would probably insist on wearing a liver-pad on a chilblain, and they wouldn't dance with me all the evening, and I would be a wall-flower, and they would call me a perfect dud, and would laugh at the way my liver-pad was cut, and I would go home and cry myself to sleep over the whole miserable affair.

So that perhaps it would be just as well to plug along as I am and not get ambitious. The life of the ostensible humorist may not be so fraught with untrammeled nature and sylvan retreats, and wild, picturesque canons, and bosky dells, and things of that kind, but it is cheering and comforting to put your hand on the top of your head and feel that it is still on deck, and, although wealth may not come pouring in upon you in such an irresistible torrent as you may desire, you know that if you can get enough to eat from day to day, and dodge the Vigilance Committee and the celluloid pie, you are comparatively safe.

Besides all this, I am afraid I am not in proper spiritual shape to go among the Indians., Suppose that on some softened, mellow, autumnal day they were all clustered about me with the bacon grease and war paint on every childlike countenance, and while I stood there in the midst of all the autumn splendor with the woods clothed in all the gorgeous apparel of the deceased year, telling them of the beauties of industry, and peace, and the glad unfettered life of the buckwheat promoter, or while I read a passage of Scripture to them and was explaining it, and they were looking up into my face with their great fawnlike eyes, all at once one of them should playfully shoot my wife all the wife I had, too or my hired girl! The chances are about even that I would throw down the Bible and fly into an ungovernable rage and swear, and be just as harsh, and rude, and unreasonable as I could be. Then, after I had hammered the immortal soul out of the entire tribe, and my wrath had spent itself, I would probably bitterly regret it all.

O it's of no use. I can't accept the position. I've been in the habit of swearing at the spring poet and the "constant reader" too long, and I know just as well as any one how it unfits me for every walk of life that requires meekness and gentle Christian forbearance.

THE PICNIC SNOOZER'S LAMENT

Gently lay aside the picnic,
For its usefulness is o'er,
And the winter style of misery
Stands and knocks upon your door.

Lariat the lonely oyster
Drifting on some foreign shore;
Zion needs him in her business
She can use him o'er and o'er.

Bring along the lonely oyster,
With the winter style of gloom,
And the supper for the pastor,
With its victims for the tomb.

Cast the pudding for the pastor,
With its double iron door;
It will gather in the pastor
For the bright and shining shore.

Put away the little picnic
Till the coming of the spring;
Useless now the swaying hammock
And the idle picnic swing.

Put away the pickled spider
And the cold-pressed picnic fly,
And the decorated trousers
With their wealth of custard pie.

BILLIOUS NYE AND BOOMERANG IN THE GOLD MINES

Whenever the cares of life weigh too heavily upon me, and the ennui which comes to those who have more wealth than they know what to do with settles down upon me, and I get weary of civilization, I like to load up my narrow-gauge mule Boomerang and take a trip into the mountains. I call my mule Boomerang because I never know where he is going to strike. He is a perpetual surprise to me in this respect. A protracted acquaintance with him, however, has taught me to stand in front of him when I address him, for the recoil of Boomerang is very disastrous. Boomerang is very much below the medium height, with a sad, faraway look in his eye. He has an expression of woe and disappointment and gloom, because life has been to him a series of blasted hopes and shattered ambitions.

In his youth he yearned to be the trick-mule of a circus, and though he fitted himself for that profession, he finds himself in the decline of life with his bright anticipations nothing but a vast and robust ruin. About all the relaxation he has is to induce some trusting stranger to caress his favorite chilblain, and then he kicks the confiding stranger so high that he can count the lamp-posts on the streets of the New Jerusalem. When Boomerang and I visit a mining camp the supplies of giant powder and other combustibles are removed to some old shaft and placed under a strong guard. In one or two instances where this precaution was not taken the site of the camp is now a desolate, barren waste, occupied by the prairie-dog and the jack-rabbit. When Boomerang finds a nitro-glycerine can in the heart of a flourishing camp, and has room to throw himself, he can arrange a larger engagement for the coroner than any mule I ever saw.

There is a new camp in the valley of the Big Laramie River, near the dividing line between Wyoming and Colorado. A few weeks ago the murmur of the rapid river down the canon and the cheerful solo of the cayote alone were heard. Now several hundred anxious excited miners are prospecting for gold, and the tent-town grows apace. Up and down the sides of the river and over the side of the mountain every little way a notice greets the eye announcing that "the undersigned claim 1,500 feet in length by 300 feet in width upon" the lode known as the Pauper's Dream, or the Blue Tail Fly, or the Blind Tom, or the Captain Kidd, or the Pigeon-Toed Pete, with all the dips, spurs, angles, gold and silver bearing rock or earth therein contained.

I have a claim further on in the North Park of Colorado. I have always felt a little delicate about working it, because heretofore several gentlemen from the Ute reservation on White River have claimed it. They are the same parties who got into a little difficulty with Agent Meeker and killed him. Of course these parties are not bona fide citizens of the United States, and therefore cannot hold my claim under the mining law; but I have not as yet raised the point with them. Whenever they would go over into the park for rest and recreation, I would respect their feelings and withdraw. I didn't know but they might have some private business which they did not wish me to overhear, so I came away.

Once I came away in the night. It is cooler travelling in the night, and does not attract so much attention. Last summer Antelope and his band came over into the park and told the miners that he would give them "one sleep" to get out of there. I told him that I didn't care much for sleep anyhow, and I would struggle along somehow till I got home. I told him that my constitution would stand it first-rate without rest, and I felt as though my business in town might be suffering in my absence. So I went home. The mine is there yet, but I would sell it very reasonably very reasonably indeed. I do not apprehend any trouble from the Indians, but I have lost my interest in mines to some extent, The Indians are not all treacherous and bloodthirsty as some would suppose. Only the live ones are that way. Wooden Indians are also to be relied upon.

Назад Дальше