Bill Nye's Chestnuts Old and New

THE TRUE POET LOVES SECLUSION

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?

A PIE OPENER

A handsome competence is in store for the man who will invent a neat, durable and portable pie opener that will successfully reach the true inwardness of the average, box-toed, Bessemer steel, gooseberry pie which the hired girl casts in her kitchen foundry.

CHESTNUT-BURR XLI – REVELATION IN UTAH

A Vacancy Amongst the Twelve Apostles – The Place Filled by Revelation – How Would this System Work in Politics – There are Drawbacks in this System.

An esteemed and extremely connubial contemporary, says in a recent editorial: "The Latter Day Saints will rejoice to learn that the vacancies which have existed in the quorums ol the twelve apostles and the first seven presidents of seventies are now filled. During the conference recently held, Elder Abram II. Cannon was unanimously chosen to be one of the first seven presidents of seventies, and he was ordained to that office on Monday, October 9. Subsequently! the Lord, by revelation through His servant, President John Taylor, designated by name Brothers George Teasdale and Heber J. Grant, to be ordained to the apostleship, and Brother Seymour B. Young to fill the remaining vacancy in the presidency of the seventies. These brethren were ordained on Monday, October 16, the two apostles, under the hands of the first presidency and twelve, and the other under the hands of the twelve and the presidency of the seventies."

Now, that's a convenient system of politics and civil service. When there is a vacancy, the president, John Taylor, goes into his closet and has a revelation, which settles it all right. If the man appointed vicariously by the Lord is not in every way satisfactory, he may be discharged by the same process. Instead, therefore, of being required to rally a large force of his friends to aid him in getting an appointment, the aspirant arranges solely with the party who runs the revelation business. It will be seen at a glance, therefore, that the man who can get the job of revelating in Zion, has it pretty much his own way. We would not care who made the laws of Utah if we could do its revelating at so much per revelate.

Think of the power it gives a man in a community of blind believers. Imagine, if you please, the glorious possibilities in store for the man who can successfully reveal the word of the Lord in an easy, extemporaneous manner on five minutes' notice.

This prerogative does not confine itself to politics alone. The Impromptu revelator of the Jordan has revelations when he wants to evade the payment of a bill. He gets a divine order also if he desires to marry a beautiful maid or seal the new school ma'am to himself. He has a leverage which he can bring to bear upon the people of his diocese at all times, even more potent than the press, and it does not possess the drawbacks that a newspaper does. You can run an aggressive paper if you want to in this country, and up to the time of the funeral you have a pretty active and enjoyable time, but after the grave has been filled up with the clods of the valley and your widow has drawn her insurance, you naturally ask, "What is the advantage to be gained by this fearless style of journalism?"

Still, even the inspired racket has its drawbacks. Last year a little incident occurred in a Mormon family down in southern Utah, which weighed about nine pounds, and when the ex officio husband, who had been absent two years, returned, he acted kind of wild and surprised, somehow, and as he went through the daily round of his work he could be seen counting his fingers back and forth and looking at the almanac, and adding up little amounts on the side of the barn with a piece of red chalk.

Finally, one of the inspired mob of that part of the vineyard thought it was about time to get a revelation and go down there, so he did so. He sailed up to the de facto husband and quasi parent and solemnly straight ened up some little irregularities as to dates, but the revelation was received with disdain, and the revelator was sent home in an old ore sack and buried in a peach basket.

Sometimes there is, even in Utah, a manifestation of such irreverence and open hostility to the church that it makes us shudder.

THE MODEL SLEEPING-CAR

One of these days they will invent a sleeper with a quart of pure air for each person, instead of only a mouthful. If there could be more pure air, and less mahogany corners on which to bump the system, and the porter received a regular salary instead of mobbing the train with a whisk broom, and garroting the passengers for $1 each, life would be more desirable.

CHESTNUT-BURR XLII – THE TONGUE-DESTROYING FRENCH LANGUAGE

The Rue de la Sitting Bull Difficulty in Getting the Drink, You Want – Paris an Old Town – The Exposition Not Very Enjoyable.

I am going to rest myself by writing a few pages in the language spoken in the United States, for I am tired of the infernal lingo of this God-forsaken country and feel like talking in my own mother tongue and on some other subject than the Exposition. I have very foolishly tried to talk a little of this tongue-destroying French, but my teeth are so loose now that I am going to let them tighten up again before I try it any more.

Day before yesterday it was very warm, and I asked two or three friends to step into a big drug store on the Rue de la Sitting Bull, to get a glass of soda. (I don't remember the names of these streets, so in some cases I give them Wyoming names.) I think the man who kept the place probably came from Canada. Most all the people in Paris are Canadians. He came forward, and had a slight attack of delirium tremens, and said:

"Ze vooly voo a la boomerang?"

I patted the soda fountain and said:

"No, not so bad as that, if you please. Just squeeze a little of your truck into a tumbler, and flavor it to suit the boys. As for myself, I will take about two fingers of bug juice in mine to sweeten my breath."

But he didn't understand me. His parents had neglected his education, no doubt, and got him a job in a drug store. So I said:

"Look here, you frog-hunting, red-headed Communist, I will give you just five minutes to fix up my beverage, and if you will put a little tangle-foot into it I will pay you; otherwise I will pick up a pound weight and paralyze you. Now, you understand. Flavor it with spirituous frumenti, old rye, benzine – bay rum – anything! Parley voo, e pluribus unum, sic semper go braugh! Do you understand that?"

But he didn't understand it, so I had to kill him. I am having him stuffed. The taxidermist who is doing the job lives down on the Rue de la Crazy Woman's Fork. I think that is the name of the Rue that he lives on.

Paris is quite an old town. It is older and wickeder than Cheyenne, I think, but I may be prejudiced against the place. It is very warm here this summer, and there are a good many odors that I don't know the names of. It is a great national congress of rare imported smells. I have detected and catalogued 1,350 out of a possible 1,400.

I have not enjoyed the Exposition so much as I thought I was going to; partly because it has been so infernally hot, and partly because I have been a little homesick. I was very homesick on board ship; very homesick indeed. About all the amusement that we had crossing the wide waste of waters was to go and lean over the ship's railing by the hour, and telescope the duodenum into the æsophagus. I used to stand that way and look down into the dark green depths of old ocean, and wonder what mysterious secrets were hidden beneath the green, cold waves and the wide rushing waste of swirling, foamy waters. I learned to love this weird picture at last, and used to go out on deck every morning and swap my breakfast to this priceless panorama for the privilege of watching it all day.

I can't say that I hanker very much for a life on the ocean wave. I am trying to arrange it so as to go home by land. I think I can make up for the additional expense in food. I bought more condemned sustenance, and turned it over to the Atlantic ocean for inspection, than I have eaten since I came here.

CARVING SCHOOLS

They are agitating the matter of instituting carving schools, in the East, so that the rising generation will be able to pass down through the corridors of time without its lap full of dressing and its bosom laden with gravy and remorse. The students at this school will wear barbed-wire masks while practicing. These masks will be similar to those worn by German students, who slice each other up while obtaining an education.

CHESTNUT-BURR XLIV – ONE TOUCH OF NATURE

Terrible Loss of Children – Strange Sympathy of the Health Officer – The Old Man's Defense of his Boys – He Gives Free Utterance to his Heresies.

Up in Polk county, Wis., not long ago, a man who had lost eight children by diphtheria, while the ninth hovered between life and death with the same disease, went to the health officer of the town and asked aid to prevent the spread of the terrible scourge. The health officer was cool and collected. He did not get excited over the anguish of the father whose last child was at the moment hovering upon the outskirts of immortality. He calmly investigated the matter, and never for a moment lost sight of the fact that he was a town officer and a professed Christian.

"You ask aid, I understand," said he, "to prevent the spread of the disease, and also that the town shall assist you in procuring new and necessary clothing, to replace that which you have been compelled to burn in order to stop the further inroads of diphtheria. Am I right?"

The poor man answered affirmatively.

"May I ask if your boys who died were Christian boys, and whether they improved their gospel opportunities and attended the Sabbath school, or whether they were profane and given over to Sabbath-breaking?"

The bereft father said that his boys had never made a profession of Christianity; that they were hardly old enough to do so, and that they might have missed some gospel opportunities owing to the fact that they were poor, and hadn't clothes fit to wear to Sabbath school. Possibly, too, they had met with wicked companions, and had been taught to swear; he could not say but they might have sworn, although he thought they would have turned out to be good boys had they lived.

"I am sorry that the case is so bad," said the health officer. "I am led to believe that God has seen fit to visit you with affliction in order to express His divine disapproval of profanity, and I cannot help you. It ill becomes us poor, weak worms of the dust to meddle with the just judgments of God. Whether as an individual or as a quasi corporation, it is well to allow the Almighty to work out His great plan of salvation, and to avoid all carnal interference with the works of God."

The old man went back to his desolated home and to the bedside of his only living child. I met him yesterday and he told me all about it.

"I am not a professor of religion," said he, "but I tell you, Mr. Nye, I can't believe that this board of health has used me right. Somehow I ain't worried about my little fellers that is gone. They was little fellers, anyway, and they wasn't posted on the plan of salvation, but they was always kind and they always minded me and their mother. If God is using diphtheria agin perfanity this season they didn't know it. They was too young to know about it and I was too poor to take the papers, so I didn't know it nuther, i just thought that Christ was partial to kids like mine, just the same as He used to be 2,000 years ago when the country was new. I admit that my little shavers never went to Sabbath school much, and I wasn't scholar enough to throw much light onto God's system of retribution, but I told 'em to behave themselves, and they did, and we had a good deal of fun together – me and the boys – and they was so bright, and square, and cute that I didn't see how they could fall under divine wrath, and I don't believe they did.

"I could tell you lots of smart little things that they used to do, Mr. nye, but they wa'n't mean and cussed. They was just frolicky and gay sometimes because they felt good. I don't believe God had it in for'em bekuz they was like other boys, do you? Fer if I thought so it would kind o' harden me and the old lady and make us sour on all creation.

"Mind you, I don't kick because I'm left alone here in the woods, and the sun don't seem to shine, and the birds seems a little backward about singin' this spring, and the house is so quiet, and she is still all the time and cries in the night when she thinks I am asleep. All that is tough, Mr. Nye – tough as old Harry, too – but it's so, and I ain't murmurin', but when the board of health says to me that the Ruler of the Universe is makin' a tower of northern Wisconsin, mowin' down little boys with sore throat because they say 'gosh,' I can't believe it.

"I know that people who ain't familiar with the facts will shake their heads and say that I am a child of wrath, but I can't help it. All I can do is to go up there under the trees where them little graves is, and think how all-fired pleasant to me them little, short lives was, and how every one of them little fellers was when he come, poor as I was, and how I rastled with poor crops and pine stumps to buy cloze for'em, and didn't care a cent for style as long as they was well. That's the kind of heretic I am, and if God is like a father that settles it. he wouldn't wipe out my family just to establish discipline, I don't believe. The plan of creation must be on a bigger scale than that, it seems to me, or else it's more or less a fizzle.

"That board of health is better read than I am. It takes the papers and can add up figures, and do lots of things that I can't do; but when them fellers tell me that they represent the town of Balsam Lake and the Kingdom of Heaven, my morbid curiosity is aroused, and I want to see the stiffykits of election."

HOW TO DEAL WITH THE REVOLVER DIFFICULTY

If revolvers could not be sold for less than $500 a piece, with a guarantee on the part of the vendee, signed by good sureties, that he would support the widows and orphans, you would see more longevity lying around loose, and Western cemeteries would cease to roll up such mighty majorities.

THE FEMALE ARTISTE

Along the dreary pathway of this cloud-environed life of ours there is no joy so pure, no triumph so complete, no success so fraught with rapture, as that of the female artiste who hangs on the flying trapeze by her chilblain and kisses her hand to the perspiring throng.

CHESTNUT-BURR XLV – FUN OF BEING A PUBLISHER

Publishing Is Not All Joy and Johnny jump-ups – A Singular Letter – Plot of a Novel – Algonquin and Sciatica.

Being a publisher is not all sunshine, joy and johnny-jump-ups, although the gentle and tractable reader may at times think so.

A letter was received two years ago by the publishers of this book, on the outside of which was the request to the "P. Master of Chicago to give to the most reliable man in Chicago and oblige."

The P. Master thereupon gave the letter to Messrs. Belford, Clarke & Co., who have sent it to me as a literary curiosity. I want it to go down to posterity, so I put it in this great work. I simply change the names, and where words are too obscure, doctor them up a little:

Butler, Bates county, Mo., Jan., 1886.

I have a novle fresh and pure from the pen, wich i would like to be examined by you. I wish to bring it before the public the ensuing summer. I have wrote a good deal for the press, and always with great success. I wrote once an article on the growth of pie plant wich was copied fur and wide. You may have heard of me through my poem on "The Cold, Damp Sea or the Murmuring Wave and its Sad Kerplunk."

I dashed it off one summer day for the Scabtown Herald.

In it, I enter the fair field of fancy and with exquisite word painting, I lead the reader on and on until he forgets that breakfast is ready, and follows the thrilling career of Algonquin and his own fair-haired Sciatica through page after page of delirious joy and poetic rithum.

In this novle I have wove a woof of possibilities criss-crossed with pictures of my own wild, unfettered fancy, which makes it a work at once truthful and yet sufficiently unnatural to make it egorly sot for by the great reading world.

The plot of the novle is this:

Algonquin is a poor artist, who paints lovely sunsets and things, nights, and cuts cordwood during the day, struggling to win a competence so that he can sue for the hand of Sciatica, the wealthy daughter of a plumber.

She does not love him much, and treats him coldly; but he perseveres till one of his exquisite pictures is egorly snapt up by a wealthy man at $2. The man afterwards turns out to be Sciatica's pa.

He says unkind things of Algonquin, and intimates that he is a better artist in four-foot wood than he is as a sunset man. He says that Algonquin is more of a Michael Angelo in basswood than anywhere else, and puts a wet blanket on Sciataca's love for Algonquin.

Then Sciataca grows colder than ever to Algonquin, and engages herself to a wealthy journalist.

Just as the wedding is about to take place, Algonquin finds that he is by birth an Ohio man. Sciataca repents and marries her first love. He secures the appointment of governor of Wyoming, and they remove to Cheyenne.

Then there are many little oursts of pictureskness and other things that I would like to see in print.

I send also a picture of myself which I would like to have in the book. Tell the artist to tone down the freckles so that the features may be seen by the observer and put on a diamond pin so that it will have an appearance of wealth, which the author of a book generally wears.

It is not wrote very good, but that won't make any difference when it is in print.

When the reading public begins to devour it, and the scads come rolling in, you can deduct enough for to pay your expenses of printing and pressing, and send me the balance by postoffice money order. Please get it on the market as soon as possible, as I need a Swiss muzzlin and some other togs suitable to my position in liturary circles. Yours truly,

Luella Blinker.

A LESSON FROM THE MULE

We may often learn a valuable lesson from the stubborn mule, and guard against the too protuberant use of our own ideas in opposition to other powers against which it is useless to contend. It may be wrong for giant powder to blow the top of a man's head off without cause, but repeated contests have proved that even when giant powder is in the wrong, it is eventually victorious.

CHESTNUT-BURR XLVI – PERFORMANCE OF THE PHOENIX

Mr. Blackburn, the Heavy Villian – Difficulties With the Scenery – The Play in New York – The Military Parade.

At the performance of "The Phoenix" here, the other night, there was a very affecting place where the play is transferred very quickly from a street scene to the elegant apartments of Mr. Blackburn, the heavy villain. The street scene had to be raised out of the way, and the effect of the transition was somewhat marred by the reluctance of the scenery in rolling up out of the way. It got about half way up, and stopped there in an undecided manner, which annoyed the heavy villain a good deal. He started to make some blood-curdling remarks about Mr. Bludsoe, and had got pretty well warmed up when the scenery came down with a bang on the stage.

The artist who pulls up the curtain and fills the hall lamps, then pulled the scene up so as to show the villain's feet for fifteen or twenty minutes, but he couldn't get it any farther. It seemed that the clothes line, by which the elaborate scenery is operated, got tangled up some way, and this caused the delay. After that another effort was made, and this time the street scene rolled up to about the third story of a brick hotel shown in the foreground, and stopped there, while the clarionet and first violin continued a kind of sad tremulo. Then a dark hand, with a wart on one finger and an oriental dollar store ring on another, came out from behind the wings and began to wind the clothes-line carefully around the pole at the foot of the scene. The villain then proceeded with his soliloquy, while the street scene hung by one corner in such a way as to make a large warehouse on the corner of the street stand at an angle of about forty-five degrees.

Laramie will never feel perfectly happy until these little hitches are dispensed with. Supposing that at some place in the play, where the heroine is speaking soft and low to her lover and the proper moment has arrived for her to pillow her sunny head upon his bosom, that street scene should fetch loose, and come down with such momentum as to knock the lovers over into the arms of the bass-viol player. Or suppose that in some death-bed act this same scene, loaded with a telegraph pole at the bottom, should settle down all at once in such a way as to leave the death-bed out on the corner of Monroe and Clark streets, in front of a candy store.

Modern stage mechanism has now reached such a degree of perfection that the stage carpenter does not go up on a step ladder, in the middle of a play, and nail the corner of a scene to a stick of 2x4 scantling, while a duel is going on near the step ladder. In all the larger theaters and opera houses, now, they are not doing that way.

Of course little incidents occur, however, even on the best stages, and where the whole thing works all right. For instance, the other day, a young actor, who was kneeling to a beautiful heiress down East, got a little too far front, and some scenery, which was to come together in the middle of the stage to pianissimo music, shut him outside and divided the tableau in two, leaving the young actor apparently kneeling at the foot of a street lamp, as though he might be hunting for a half a dollar that he had just dropped on the sidewalk.

There was a play in New York, not long ago, in which there was a kind of military parade introduced, and the leader of a file of soldiers had his instructions to march three times around the stage to martial music, and then file off at the left, the whole column, of course, following him. After marching once around, the stage manager was surprised to see the leader deliberately wheel, and walk off the stage, at the left, with the whole battalion following at his heels. The manager went to him and abused him shamefully for his haste, and told him he had a mind to discharge him; but the talented hack driver, who thus acted as the military leader, and who had over-played himself by marching off the stage ahead of time, said:

"Well, confound it, you can discharge me if you want to, but what was a man to do? Would you have me march around three times when my military pants were coming off, and I knew it? Military pride, pomp, parade and circumstance, are all right; but it can be overdone. A military squadron, detachment, or whatever it is, can make more of a parade, under certain circumstances, than is advertised. I didn't want to give people more show than they paid for, and I ask you to put yourself in my place. When a man is paid three dollars a week to play a Roman soldier, would you have him play the Greek slave? No, sir; I guess I know what I'm hired to play, and I'm going to play it. When you want me to play Adam in the Garden of Eden, just give me my fig leaf and salary enough to make it interesting, and I will try and properly interpret the character for you, or refund the money at the door."

FIRMNESS

Firmness is a good thing in its place, but we should early learn that to be firm, we need not stand up against a cyclone till our internal economy is blown into the tops of the neighboring trees. Moral courage is a good thing, but it is useless unless you have a liver to go along with it. Sometimes a man is required to lay down his life for his principles, but the cases where he is expected to lay down his digester on the altar of his belief, are comparatively seldom.