Bill Nye's Chestnuts Old and New

While other young men put on their seal-brown overalls and wrench the laurel wreath and other vegetables from cruel fate, the youth who dangles near the old nest, and eats the hard-earned groceries of his father, shivers on the brink of life's great current and sheds the scalding tear.

THE PLUMAGE OF THE OSTRICH

The ostrich is chiefly valuable for the plumage which he wears, and which, when introduced into the world of commerce, makes the husband almost wish that he were dead.

SOME EARNEST THOUGHTS

Young man, what are you living for? Have you an object dear to you as life, and without the attainment of which you feel that your life will have been a wide, shoreless waste of shadow, peopled by the specters of dead ambitions? Is it your consuming ambition to paddle quietly but firmly up the stream of time with manly strokes, against the current of public opinion, or to linger along the seductive banks, going in swimming, or, careless of the future, gathering shells and tadpoles along the shore?

Have you a distinct idea of a certain position in life which you wish to attain? Have you decided whether you will be a great man, and die in the poor-house, and have a nice comfortable monument after you are dead, for your destitute family to look at, or will you content yourself to plug along through life as a bank president?

These, young men, are questions of moment. They are questions of two moments. They come home to our hearts to-day with terrible earnestness.

You can take your choice in the great battle of life, whether you will bristle up and win a deathless name, and owe almost everybody, or be satisfied with scads and mediocrity.

Why do you linger and fritter away the heyday of life, when you might skirmish around and win some laurels? Many of those who now stand at the head of the nation as statesmen and logicians, were once unknown, unhonored and unsung. Now they saw the air in the halls of Congress, and their names are plastered on the temple of fame.

They were not born great. Some of them only weighed six pounds to start with. But they have rustled. They have peeled their coats and made rome howl.

You can do the same. You can win some laurels, too, if you will brace up and secure them when they are ripe.

Daniel Webster and President Garfield and Dr. Tanner and George Eliot were all, at one time, poor boys. They had to start at the foot of the ladder and toil upward.

They struggled against poverty and public opinion bravely, till they won a name in the annals of history, and secured to their loved ones palatial homes with lightning rods and mortgages on them.

So may you, if you will make the effort. All these things are within your reach. Live temperately on $9 per month. That's the way we got our start. Burn the midnight oil if necessary. Get some true, noble-minded young lady of your acquaintance to assist you. Tell her of your troubles and she will tell you what to do. She will gladly advise you.

Then you can marry her, and she will advise you some more. After that she will lay aside her work any time to advise you. You needn't be out of advice at all unless you want to. She, too, will tell you when you have made a mistake. She will come to you frankly and acknowledge that you have make a jackass of yourself.

CHESTNUT-BURR XXVII – OUR GREAT NATIONAL MOTTO

Billy Root Has an Enquiring Mind – Mr. Root Delighted with His Son's Ambition – A new Translation of Our National Motto.

When Billy Root was a little boy he was of a philosophical and investigating turn of mind, and wanted to know almost everything. He also desired to know it immediately. He could not wait for time to develop his intellect, but he crowded things and wore out the patience of his father, a learned savant, who was president of a livery stable in Chicago.

One day Billy ran across the grand hailing sign, which is generally represented as a tape-worm in the beak of the American eagle, on which is inscribed "E Pluribus Unum." Billy, of course, asked his father what "E Pluribus Unum" meant. He wanted to gather in all the knowledge he could, so that when he came out West he could associate with some of our best men.

"I admire your strong appetite for knowledge, Billy," said Mr. Root; "you have a morbid craving for cold hunks of ancient history and cyclopedia that does my soul good; I am glad, too, that you write to your father to get accurate data for your collection. That is right. Your father will always lay aside his work at any time and gorge your young mind with knowledge that will be as useful to you as a farrow cow. 'E Pluribus Unum' is an old Greek inscription that has been handed down from generation to generation, preserved in brine, and signifies that 'the tail goes with the hide.'"

A GRAVE QUESTION

What becomes of our bodies?" asks a soft-eyed scientist, and we answer in stentorian tones, that they get inside of a red flannel undershirt as the maple turns to crimson and the sassafras to gold. Ask us something difficult, ethereal being.

THOUGHTS

It seems that quince seeds are now largely used by the girls in convincing their bangs to stay bung. That is, the quince seed is manufactured into a mucilage that holds a little flat curl in place a week. In consequence of this, quince seeds have increased in price and decreased in quantity till the girls pay seven prices for them or go without.

If they would adopt our style of bang, much trouble and expense would be avoided. We bang our hair with a damp towel, and it don't bother us again for two weeks. Being the proprietor, in the first place, of a style of hair of the delicate color peculiar to a streak of moonlight, it didn't at any time make much difference whether we did it up in tin foil every night or not, and now that cares like a wild deluge have come upon us thick and fast, we have enlarged our intellectual skating rink and we find, with unalloyed pleasure, that the time we once devoted to parting our pale, consumptive tresses can be entirely devoted to excessive mental effort, and pleasant memories of a well spent life.

CHESTNUT-BURR XVIII – BILL NYE AT A TOURNAMENT

A Tournament with Gloves – Dumb-bells – Horizontal Bars – Analysis of the Boxing-glove – A Clerical Error – My Young Brother's Beauty Preserved.

I have just returned from a little two-handed tournament with the gloves. I have filled my nose with cotton waste so that I shall not soak this sketch in gore as I write.

I needed a little healthful exercise and was looking for something that would be full of vigorous enthusiasm, and at the same time promote the healthful flow of blood to the muscles. This was rather difficult. I tried most everything, but failed. Being a sociable being (joke) I wanted other people to help me exercise or go along with me when I exercised. Some men can go away to a desert isle and have fun with dumb-bells and a horizontal bar, but to me it would seem dull and commonplace after a while, and I would yearn for more humanity.

Two of us finally concluded to play billiards; but we were only amateurs and the owner intimated that he would want the table for Fourth of July, so we broke off in the middle of the first game and I paid for it.

Then a younger brother said he had a set of boxing-gloves in his room, and although I was the taller and had longer arms, he would hold up as long as he could, and I might hammer him until I gained strength and finally got well.

I accepted this offer because I had often regretted that I had not made myself familiar with this art, and also because I knew it would create a thrill of interest and fire me with ambition, and that's what a holloweyed invalid needs to put him on the road to recovery.

The boxing-glove is a large fat mitten, with an abnormal thumb and a string at the wrist by which you tie it on, so that when you feed it to your adversary he cannot swallow it and choke himself. I had never seen any boxing-gloves before, but my brother said they were soft and wouldn't hurt anybody. So we took off some of our raiment and put them on. Then we shook hands. I can remember distinctly yet that we shook hands. That was to show that we were friendly and would not slay each other.

My brother is a great deal younger than I am and so I warned him not to get excited and come for me with anything that would look like wild and ungovernable fury, because I might, in the heat of debate, pile his jaw upon his forehead and fill his ear full of sore thumb. He said that was all right and he would try to be cool and collected.

Then we put our right toes together and I told him to be on his guard. At that moment I dealt him a terrific blow aimed at his nose, but through a clerical error of mine it went over his shoulder and spent itself in the wall of the room, shattering a small holly-wood bracket, for which I paid him $3.75 afterward. I did not wish to buy the bracket because I had two at home, but he was arbitrary about it and I bought it.

We then took another athletic posture, and in two seconds the air was full of poulticed thumb and buckskin mitten. I soon detected a chance to put one in where my brother could smell of it, but I never knew just where it struck, for at that moment I ran up against something with the pit of my stomach that made me throw up the sponge, along with some other groceries, the names of which I cannot now recall.

My brother then proposed that we take off the gloves, but I thought I had not sufficiently punished him, and that another round would complete the conquest, which was then almost within my grasp. I took a bismuth powder and squared myself, but in warding off a left-hander, I forgot about my adversary's right, and ran my nose into the middle of his boxing-glove. Fearing that I had injured him, I retreated rapidly on my elbows and shoulder-blades to the corner of the room, thus giving him ample time to recover. By this means my younger brother's features were saved, and are to-day as symmetrical as my own.

I can still cough up pieces of boxing-gloves, and when I close my eyes I can see calcium lights and blue phosphorescent gleams across the horizon; but I am thoroughly convinced that there is no physical exercise which yields the same amount of health and elastic vigor to the puncher that the manly art does. To the punchee, also, it affords a large wad of glad surprises and nose bleed, which cannot be hurtful to those who hanker for the pleasing nervous shock, the spinal jar, and the pyrotechnic concussion.

That is why I shall continue the exercises after I have practiced with a mule or a cow-catcher two or three weeks, and feel a little more confidence in myself.

CHESTNUT-BURR XXIX – A SOCIAL CURSE – THE MAN WHO INTERRUPTS

The Spirit of the "Red Vigilanter" – The Common Plug Who Thinks Aloud – The Man and his Wife Who Finish Your Story – Common Decency Ought to Rule Conversation.

I do not, as a rule, thirst for the blood of my fellow-man. I am willing that the law should in all ordinary cases take its course, but when we begin to discuss the man who breaks into a conversation and ruins it with his own irrelevant ideas, regardless of the feelings of humanity, I am not a law and order man. The spirit of the "Red Vigilanter" is roused in my breast and I hunger for the blood of that man.

Interrupters are of two classes: First the common plug who thinks aloud, and whose conversation wanders with his so-called mind. He breaks into the saddest and sweetest of sentiment, and the choicest and most tearful of pathos, with the remorseless ignorance that marks a stump-tail cow in a dahlia bed. He is the bull in my china shop, the wormwood in my wine, and the kerosene in my maple syrup. I am shy in conversation, and my unfettered flights of poesy and sentiment are rare, but this man is always near to mar it all with a remark, or a marginal note, or a story, or a bit of politics, ready to bust my beautiful dream and make me wish that his name might be carved on a marble slab in some quiet cemetery, far away.

Dear reader, did you ever meet this man – or his wife? Did you ever strike some beautiful thought and begin to reel if off to your friends, only to be shut off in the middle of a sentence by this choice and banner idiot of conversation? If so, come and sit by me, and you may pour your woes into my ear, and I in turn will pour a few gallons into your listening ear.

I do not care to talk more than my share of the time, but I would be glad to arrive at a conclusion just to see how it would seem. I would be so pleased and so joyous to follow up an anecdote till I had reached the "nub," as it were, to chase argument home to conviction, and to clinch assertion with authority and evidence.

The second class of interrupters is even worse. It consists of the man – and, lam pained to state, his wife also – who see the general drift of your remarks and finish out your story, your gem of thought or your argument. It is very seldom that they do this as you would do it yourself, but they are kind and thoughtful and their services are always at hand. No matter how busy they may be, they will leave their own work and fly to your aid. With the light of sympathy in their eyes, they rush into the conversation, and, partaking of your own zeal, they take the words from your mouth, and cheerfully suck the juice out of your joke, handing back the rind and hoping for reward. That is where they get left, so far as I am concerned. I am almost always ready to repay rudeness with rudeness, and cold preserved gall with such acrid sarcasm as I may be able to secure at the moment. No one will ever know how I yearn for the blood of the interrupter. At night I camp on his trail, and all the day I thirst for his warm life's current. In my dreams I am cutting his scalp loose with a case-knife, while my fingers are twined in his clustering hair. I walk over him and promenade across his abdomen as I slumber. I hear his ribs crack, and I see his tongue hand over his shoulder as he smiles death's mirthful smile.

I do not interrupt a man no more than I would tell him he lied. I give him a chance to win applause or decomposed eggs from the audience, according to what he has to say, and according to the profundity of his profound. All I want is a similar chance and room according to my strength. Common decency ought to govern conversation without its being necessary to hire an umpire armed with a four-foot club, to announce who is at the bat and who is on deck.

It is only once in a week or two that the angel troubles the waters and stirs up the depths of my conversational powers, and then the chances are that some leprous old nasty toad who has been hanging on the brink of decent society for two weeks, slides in with a low kerplunk, and my fair blossom of thought that has been trying for weeks to bloom, withers and goes to seed, while the man with the chilled steel and copper-riveted brow, and a wad of self-esteem on his intellectual balcony as big as an inkstand, walks slowly away to think of some other dazzling gem, and thus be ready to bust my beautiful phantom, and tear out my high-priced bulbs of fancy the next time I open my mouth.

CHESTNUT-BURR XXX – A DISCOURSE ON CATS

Anybody Ought to Be Unhappy Enough Without a Cat-A Tramp Cat – he Only Wanted to be Loved a Little – He Was Too Much Given to Investigation – Mademoiselle Bridget O'Dooley – The Plaintive Voice Ceases.

I am not fond of cats, as a general rule. I never yearned to have one around the house. My idea always was, that I could have trouble enough in a legitimate way without adding a cat to my woes. With a belligerent cook and a communistic laundress, it seems to me most anybody ought to be unhappy enough without a cat.

I never owned one until a tramp cat came to our house one day during the present autumn, and tearfully asked to be loved. He didn't have anything in his make-up that was calculated to win anybody's love, but he seemed contented with a little affection, – one ear was gone, and his tail was bald for six inches at the end, and he was otherwise well calculated to win confidence and sympathy. Though we could not be madly in love with him, we decided to be friends, and give him a chance to win the general respect.

Everything would have turned out all right if the bobtail waif had not been a little given to investigation. He wanted to know more about the great world in which he lived, so he began by inspecting my house. He got into the store-room closet, and found a place where the carpenter had not completed his job. This is a feature of the Laramie artisan's style. He leaves little places in unobserved corners generally, so that he can come back some day and finish it at an additional cost of fifty dollars. This cat observed that he could enter at this point and go all over the imposing structure between the flooring and the ceiling. He proceeded to do so.

We will now suppose that a period of two days has passed. The wide halls and spacious facades of the Nye mansion are still. The lights in the banquet-hall are extinguished, and the ice-cream freezer is hushed to rest in the wood-shed. A soft and tearful yowl, deepened into a regular ring-tail-peeler, splits the solemn night in twain. Nobody seemed to know where it came from. I rose softly and went to where the sound had seemed to well up from. It was not there.

I stood on a piece of cracker in the dining-room a moment, waiting for it to come again. This time it came from the boudoir of our French artist in soup-bone symphonies and pie – Mademoiselle Bridget O'Dooley. I went there and opened the door softly, so as to let the cat out without disturbing the giant mind that had worn itself out during the day in the kitchen, bestowing a dry shampoo to the china.

Then I changed my mind and came out. Several articles of vertu, beside Bridget, followed me with some degree of vigor.

The next time the tramp cat yowled he seemed to be in the recesses of the bath-room. I went down stairs and investigated. In doing so I drove my superior toe into my foot, out of sight, with a door that I encountered. My wife joined me in the search. She could not do much, but she aided me a thousand times by her counsel. If it had not been for her mature advice I might have lost much of the invigorating exercise of that memorable night.

Toward morning we discovered that the cat was between the floor of the children's play-room and the ceiling of the dining-room. We tried till daylight to persuade the cat to come out and get acquainted, but he would not.

At last we decided that the quickest way to get the poor little thing out was to let him die in there, and then we could tear up that portion of the house and get him out. While he lived we couldn't keep him still long enough to tear a hole in the house and get at him.

It was a little unpleasant for a day or two waiting for death to come to his relief, for he seemed to die hard, but at last the unearthly midnight yowl was still. The plaintive little voice ceased to vibrate on the still and pulseless air. Later, we found, however, that he was not dead. In a lucid interval he had discovered the hole in the store-room where he entered, and, as we found afterward a gallon of coal-oil spilled in a barrel of cut-loaf sugar, we concluded that he had escaped by that route.

That was the only time that I ever kept a cat, and I didn't do it then because I was suffering for something to fondle. I've got a good deal of surplus affection, I know, but I don't have to spread it out over a stump-tail orphan cat.

CHESTNUT-BURR XXXI – THE GREAT ORATION OF SPARTACUS

Adapted from the Original – Triumph in Capua – The Oration Begun – Spartacus Tells the Story of His Life – Scenes in the Arena.

It had been a day of triumph in Capua. Lentulus returning with victorious eagles, had aroused the populace with the sports of the amphitheater, to an extent hitherto unknown even in that luxurious city. A large number of people from the rural districts had been in town to watch the conflict in the arena, and to listen with awe and veneration to the infirm and decrepit ring jokes.

The shouts of revelry had died away. The last loiterer had retired from the free-lunch counter, and the lights in the palace of the victor were extinguished. The moon piercing the tissue of fleecy clouds, tipped the dark waters of the Tiber with a wavy, tremulous light. The dark-browed Roman soldier moved on his homeward way, the sidewalk occasionally flying up and hitting him in the back.

No sound was heard save the low sob of some retiring wave, as it told its story to the smooth pebbles of the beach, or the unrelenting boot-jack struck the high board fence in the back yard, just missing the Roman Tom cat in its mad flight, and then all was still as the breast when the spirit has departed. Anon the Roman snore would steal in upon the deathly silence, and then die away like the sough of a summer breeze. In the green-room of the amphitheater a little band of gladiators were assembled. The foam of conflict yet lingered on their lips, the scowl of battle yet hang upon their brows, and the large knobs on their classic profiles indicated that it had been a busy day with them.

There was an embarassing silence of about five minutes, when Spartacus, borrowing a chew of tobacco from Aurelius, stepped forth and thus addressed them:

"Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen: Ye call me chief, and ye do well to call him chief who for twelve long years has met in the arena every shape of man or beast that the broad empire of Rome could furnish, and yet has never lowered his arm. I do not say this to brag, however, but simply to show that I am the star thumper of the entire outfit.

"If there be one among you who can say that ever in public fight or private brawl my actions did belie my words, let him stand forth and say it, and I will spread him around over the arena till the coroner will have to gather him up with blotting paper. If there be three in all your company dare face me on the bloody sands, let them come, and I will construct upon their physiogomy such cupolas, and royal cornices, and Corinthian capitols, and entablatures, that their own mothers would pass them by in the broad light of high noon, unrecognized.

"And yet I was not always thus – a hired butcher – the savage chief of still more savage men.

"My ancestors came from old Sparta, the county seat of Marcus Aurelius county, and settled among the vine-clad hills and cotton groves of Syrsilla. My early life ran quiet as the clear brook by which I sported. Aside from the gentle patter of the maternal slipper on my overalls, everything moved along with me like the silent oleaginous flow of the ordinary goose grease. My boyhood was one long, happy summer day. We stole the Roman muskmelon, and put split sticks on the tail of the Roman dog, and life was one continuous hallelujah.

"When at noon I led the sheep beneath the shade and played the Sweet Bye-and-Bye on my shepherd's flute, there was another Spartan youth, the son of a neighbor, to join me in the pastime. We led our flocks to the same pasture, and together picked the large red ants out of our indestructible sandwiches.

"One evening, after the sheep had been driven into the corral and we were all seated beneath the persimmon tree that shaded our humble cottage, my grand-sire, an old man, was telling of Marathon, and Leuctra, and George Francis Train, and Dr. Mary Walker and other great men, and how a little band of Spartans, under Sitting Bull, had withstood the entire regular army. I did not then know what war was, but my cheek burned, I knew not why, and I thought what a glorious thing it would be to leave the reservation and go on the warpath. But my mother kissed my throbbing temples and bade me go soak my head and think no more of those old tales and savage wars. That very night the Romans landed on our coasts. They pillaged the whole country, burned the agency buildings, demolished the ranch, rode off the stock, tore down the smoke-house, and rode their war horses over the cucumber vines.

"To-day I killed a man in the arena, and when I broke his helmet-clasps and looked upon him, behold! he was my friend. The same sweet smile was on his face that I had known when in adventurous boyhood we bathed in the glassy lake by our Spartan home and he had tied my shirt into 1,752 dangerous and difficult knots.