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

This, however, is an error, for the great, throbbing world, with characteristic selfishness, don't care a brass-mounted continental one way or the other. One day this man got a letter with a mourning envelope, and I heaved a sigh of relief, for, thought I, he will now go away and be alone with his great grief. But he did not. He stood up manfully and controlled his emotions through it all; and when he got through he broke into the old silvery laugh.

It seems that his brother in Oregon had run out of yellow envelopes, and had filled the one with the black border unusually full of convulsive mirth.

What a world of bitter disappointment this is anyhow!

Then there is the woman who playfully stands at the general delivery window, and gleefully sticks her fangs out into the subsequent week, and skittishly chides the clerk because he doesn't get her a letter, and he good naturedly tells her as he has done daily for seven years, that he will write her one to-morrow.

Then she reluctantly goes home to get rested so that she can come again and stand there the next day.

Then comes the literary cuss, who takes a weekly paper from Vermont with a patent inside to it. He reads it with the purest unselfishness to me, and points out the fresh, new-laid jokes that one always finds in the enterprising paper with the patent digestion.

He also explains the jokes to me, so that I need not grope along through life in hopeless ignorance of what is going on all about me.

There is a woman, too, who comes to the window and lavishly buys a three-cent stamp, and runs out her tongue, and hangs it over the stamp clerk's shoulder, and lays the stamp back against the glottis and moistens it, and has to run her skinny finger down her turkey gobbler neck to rescue it, and then she pastes it on the upper left-hand corner of the envelope, and asks the clerk to be sure and see that it goes. She then thoughtfully tells him who it is to go to, and gives a short biography of the sendee.

There can be no doubt that some women are more capable of doing certain kinds of business than men are. All classes of business requiring careful and minute explanations and concise and exhaustive directions can be better attended to by this class of women.

They enter joyfully upon the task of shedding collateral information in a way that would appall a man, and when they confide in you, you know that they are not keeping anything back. You almost wish sometimes that they would keep back a little of it and not rob themselvss.

Still, perhaps it is better that this class of women is not trusted with any great amount of business, for life is so brief, so evanescent, and so transitory.

It is but a step from the cradle to the grave anyway, and if a man stands on one leg an hour, and then on the other an hour, listening to extensive information every time he sells a stamp, he will die with his ambitions unfruitioned.

AGRICULTURE AT AN ALTITUDE OF 7500 FEET

I herewith acknowledge the receipt of two bags of cane-seed from the Agricultural Department.

Mr. Le Duc is always thinking of me and evidently knew that I was yearning for some cane-seed. It will grow luxuriantly here on the spinal column of the American continent where winter lingers in the lap of spring till after the Fourth of July.

William says that this breed of sugar-cane "originated in Minnesota, and is claimed to have been the result of accidental hybridization."

I shall not allow anything of this kind myself if I can by the most tireless watchfulness avoid it. Accidental hybridization is what is demoralizing the sugar-cane of the whole country.

I shall plant this seed in drills two feet apart, mulching with rich top-dressing of retired gum boots and dead cats. I will then wait till the plant has germinated and appears above the surface, when I shall remove the boots and dead cats and rub the plants with a Turkish towel to promote a healthy circulation.

Then next fall while others who have sneered at me and called me a horny-handed buckwheater from the rural districts, are running up heavy bills for groceries, I will go out into my molasses orchard and pick a milk pan full of granulated sugar from my trees, or shell out enough maple sugar for breakfast at a slight cost and with the blessed consciousness that I did it all myself.

William is going to send me some more seeds that he thinks will do well in this tropical climate. If he could send me something that would be more hardy, like the early Swedish lemon-squeezer, or the mammoth custard-pie plant, or the Northern Spy cucumber tree, my reports to the department would be more cheerful than they are, but where plants have to wear their heavy California underclothes all through August they get discouraged and prefer to bloom in the sweet fields of Eden.

Last year I tried the hot-bed process, but it was not a signal success. This summer I shall use the hot-bed as an ice cream freezer. It wanted to act in that capacity last summer, but I had a freezer that did very well, so I foolishly used the hot-bed to assist the plants, although I know of several days in midsummer when my cabbage-plants had to get out of that hot-bed and run up and down the garden walk to keep their feet from freezing.

THE GENTLE YOUTH FROM LEADVILLE

In addition to the other attractions about the depot, the old museum of curiosities from the Rocky Mountains has been re-opened. I like to go down and listen to the remarks of the overland passenger relative to these articles. There are two stuffed coyotes chained to the door, one on each side, and it amuses me to see a solicitous parent nearly yank his little son to pieces for going so near these ferocious animals. The coyotes look very life-like, and show their teeth a good deal, but it breaks a man all up when he finds that their digestive apparatus has been replaced with sawdust and plaster of Paris.

After a coyote gets to padding himself out with baled hay and cotton so as to look plump, he loses his elasticity of spirits, and we cease to respect him. Sometimes a tourist asks if these coyotes are prairie dogs.

A few days ago a man from Michigan, who has been here two weeks and wears a large buckskin patch where it will do the most good, and who is very bitter in his remarks about "tenderfeet," was standing at the depot, when a young man, evidently from a theological seminary, came along from the train whistling, "What a friend we have in Jesus." He walked up to the Michigan man, who began to look fierce, and timidly asked if he would tell him all about the coyote.

The Michigan man, who never had seen a live coyote in his life, volunteered to tell him some of the finest decorated lies, with Venetian blinds and other trimmings to them, while the young man stood there in open-mouthed wonder, with daylight visible between his legs as high as the fifth rib. I never saw such a picture of rapt attention in my life. As he became more interested, the Michigan man warmed up to his work and lied to this guileless youth till the perspiration rolled down his face. As the train started out, the delegate to the Young Men's Christian Association asked the Michigan man for his address. "I want the address of some good earnest liar," he said, "one who can lie by the day, or by the job, and endure the strain. I want a man to enter the field for the championship of America. Any communication you may wish to make will reach me at Leadville, Colorado. I have been in the Rocky Mountains ever since I was three years old, and have lived for weeks with no other diet but coyote on toast and raw Michigan man." He waved his hand at the M. man, and said: "If I don't see you again, hello!" and he was gone.

How many such little episodes we experience on our journey to the tomb!

A SNIDE JOURNALIST

Recent occurrences here have seemed to absolutely demand that something be said relative to newspaper-men.

During my residence here I have been brought face to face with more fraud journalists than ever before, and I am forced to lift up my voice against it. I have met the ordinary-tramp who is pleased and happy if he be allowed to eat cold-grub and sleep beneath the twinkling stars, but the newspaper-tramp is meaner, more self assumed and has brighter prospects for perdition than all the rest. He stands out ahead of the rank and file of tramps as a kind of Major-General tramp, fearless and self reliant.

He feels the nobility of the profession of journalism, and indeed it is a calling of which its followers may well be proud, but the snide representative of the press is too proud. He puts on too many frills.

Perhaps I am too easily picked up in this manner, but I cannot help sympathizing with deserving newspaper men who lack many of the comforts of life. I have been there. I know what it is to battle with a cold world and wrestle with hunger. But now in the midst of prosperity, my heart goes out for these vagrants in such a way that just as I begin to get affluent, I find some subject for my charity, and I have to begin over again.

On Monday last a young man with a hopeful light in his eye, alighted from the eastern-bound train, and going into the Thornburg House, registered his name, at least we will play that it was his name, for no one else has since called in to claim it.

We will call him Brown as a matter of convenience. His front name, as I afterward learned, was Ward. I might say that, in putting this report together, another Ward has been heard from, but I leave that for the docile reader to do as he or she may see fit.

Mr. Brown then proceeded to get acquainted with the people of Laramie and be sociable. He was not so reticent as some prominent newspaper men are, but seemed to be the rollicking, jovial kind. He said that he was the travelling correspondent of the Salt Lake Tribune and also represented the Louisville Courier-Journal.

I wondered at the time what in the name of all that was handsome, the Courier-Journal wanted to pay a man and send him to the front for, with Laramie City as his objective point. Bye-and-bye he crossed my path and made himself known. Said he knew me by reputation, and then I began to get alarmed. I was afraid he was a detective. But he wasn't. I drew him out on the subject of Harry Watterson. He knew blank. Knew him well. Had slept with him. He and Hank had been drunk together several times.

Then I felt proud. He was an intimate friend of a great man, and sitting there talking with an unsophisticated youth like me just as naturally as life. It sounds like a book. I asked him up to my office, and made him sit in my best chair – the one with the four good legs – while I took the foundered one. I told him to make himself perfectly free with the luxuriant furniture of the office, and invited him to spit on the floor whenever it came handy. I told him that I knew great men didn't want to feel hampered while chewing tobacco, and that I wanted my guests to feel at ease.

He then took his knife, cut off a piece of tobacco, about the size of a paper weight, threw it back till it struck the gable-end of his mouth with a hollow thud, and proceeded to unroll the most gorgeous panorama of falsehoods that I ever listened to. Casually, while putting the fresco work on my floor, he took out a letter from Watterson, and showed it to me. Watterson writes about the same kind of a copper-plate hand that I do.

I wanted to take the letter and make a plaster cast of it, but Mr. Brown said Hank wouldn't like it. The letter went on in a free and easy way to joke Brown about looking too often on the maddening bowl, and then asked him to be a correspondent for the C. J.

The next day I came down town thinking about how easy it was for any one, by a straightforward, honest course, to rise in the world, and get acquainted with prominent men. Bye and bye I met the Sheriff. He asked me if I didn't want to go up to the jail and take a last look at my journalistic friend. I went up. Brown lay there in an easy position on an old blanket, in one of the cells.

The surroundings seemed to be in perfect harmony with the general appearance of Mr. Brown. He had taken off the large satin arrangement which served partly as a necktie, and partly to throw the public off its guard in relation to his shirt. The shirt was there, slightly disfigured, but still in the ring. It was the same shirt that he had started out in life with. He had outgrown it, and it looked feeble, but it was evidently determined to stay by Mr. Brown.

I looked at him and then broke into tears. Large $2.00 sobs convulsed my frame. I told him that he had basely imposed upon me, and led me to believe that he was a Republican, and now he had removed the mask as it were, and I could see that he was a Democrat. With these stone walls and iron grates, and that soiled shirt, I could no longer doubt.

I left him, resolving that hereafter I would not be betrayed by appearances. He will drift away into the mighty, surging mass of humanity, and we shall forget it. Perhaps, when the Governor of Maine holds a mass meeting and re-union at Augusta, he will be there. But he will drop out of my horizon like the memory of a red-headed girl, and I shall go on my way until some other newspaper man with a letter from Whitelaw Reid, or George Washington, or Noah, or some other prominent man, comes along, and then I shall, no doubt, open up to his view the same untold wealth of confidence and generous trust.

Those who are looking anxiously every mail for a copy of the Louisville Courier-Journal or the Salt Lake Tribune, containing a long letter about their town, will be disappointed. They will never come. Through the long visita of years and down through the mellow softened atmosphere of the Sweet Bye and Bye I hear the low, sad refrain, and it is refraining, "Never More." Instead of the merry prattle of Mr. Brown amid the loud echo of his expectorations as they fall with a startling crash upon the marble floor of my office, I only hear the rattle of the cast iron "come-alongs" and the tearful "Never More."

HE WAS BLIND

While engaged the other day in writing a little ode to the liver pad, I heard a slight noise, and on looking toward the door I saw a boy with his hat in his hand standing on one leg and thoughtfully scratching it with the superior toe of the other foot.

I asked the freckled youth what I could do for him, and he said that there was a man at the foot of the stairs who wished to see me. I asked him then why in the name of a great republic and a free people he didn't see me. Then I told the boy that there was no admission fee; that it was the regular afternoon matinee, and it was a free show.

The frank and manly little feilow then came forward and told me that the man was blind.

It was not intended as a joke. It was a horrible reality, and pretty soon a man into whose sightless orbs the cheerful light of day had not entered for many years came up the stairs and into the office.

I said: "Ah, sir, I see that you are a poor, blind man. You cannot see the green grass and waving trees. While others see the pleasant fields and lovely landscape you wander on year after year in the hopeless gloom. Poor man. Do you not at times yearn for immortality and pine to be among the angels where the light of a glorious eternity will enter upon your sightless vision like a beautiful dream?"

This was a little sentiment that I had committed to memory, being an extract from the Youth's Companion.

He wiped away three or four scalding tears with his sleeve and said that he did. He was getting means, he said, to enable him to go to New York, where he was going to have his eyes taken out and refilled. He also intended to have the cornea filed down and a new crystal put in.

I asked him how much he thought it would cost. He said he thought it could be arranged so that $1,000 would pay the bill. At first I started to draw a check for that amount, and then I thought I would try him with a dollar first.

He took the dollar and walked sadly away.

It always makes me feel bad when I see a fellow creature who is doomed with uncertain steps and sightless eyes to tread his weary way through life, and I cannot be happy when I know that such misery is abroad in the land. I thought how much I had to be thankful for, how fortunate I had been to have all my senses and my bright and beautiful intellect, that I wouldn't take $400 for.

Then I wandered out to a saloon on A street to get a cigar. The blind man was there. He had just poured out about six fingers of Jamaica rum and was setting them up for the boys. I thought I would stand in with the arrangement, so I leaned up against the bar in very classic style and took two cigars at twenty-five cents apiece.

When he came to pay for the goods he shoved out the dollar I gave him, which I recognized, because it was a pewter dollar, and a very inferior pewter dollar at that.

The bartender kicked like a roan cow, and while the excitement was at its height I stole away to where I could be alone with my surging thoughts.

The blind man is still in town, but he is not succeeding very well. Unfortunately he has told several large openfaced lies and the feeling of pity for him has petered out, if I may be allowed that expression.

When he is sober he is going to have his eyes operated on at New York, and when he is drunk he is going to have them attended to in San Francisco. This gives the general appearance of insincerity to his remarks, and the merciless public yearns for him to pack his night shirt, like the Arabs and silently steal away.

THOUGHTS OF THE MELLOW PREVIOUSLY

It is the evening of St. Valentine's Day, and I am thinking of the long ago. St. Valentine's Day is nothing now but a blessed memory. Another landmark has been left behind in our onward march toward the great hereafter. We come upon the earth, battle a little while with its joy? and its griefs, and then we pass away to give place to other actors on the mighty stage.

Only a few short years ago what an era St. Valentine's Day was to me.

Now I still get valentines, but they are different and they affect me differently.

They are not of so high an order of merit artistically, and the poetry is more impudent and less on the turtle-dove order.

Some may be neglected on St. Valentine's Day, but I am not. I never go away by myself and get mad because I have been overlooked. I generally get valentines enough to paper a large hall.

I file them away carefully and sell them back to the dealer for next year. Then the following St. Valentine's Day I love to look at the familiar features of those I have received in the years agone.

One of these blessed valentines I have learned to love as I do my life. I received it first in 1870. It represents a newspaper reporter with a nose on him like the woman's suffrage movement. It is a large, enthusiastic nose of a bright bay color, with bias folds of the same, shirred with dregs of wine. How well I know that nose. The reporter is represented in tight green pants and orange coat. The vest is scarlet and the necktie is maroon, shot with old gold.

The picture represents the young journalist as a little bit disposed to be brainy. The intellect is large and abnormally prominent. It hangs out over the deep-set eyes like the minority juror on the average panel.

I can not help contrasting this dazzling five-cent valentine with the delicate little poem in pale blue and Torchon lace which I received in the days of yore from the redheaded girl with the wart on her thumb. With little of genuine pleasure have fame and fortune to offer us compared with that of sitting behind the same school desk with the Bismarck blonde of the school and with her alternately masticating the same hunk of spruce gum!

I sometimes chew gum nowadays to see if it will bring back the old pleasant sensations, but it don't. The teacher is not watching me now. There is too little restraint, and the companion too who then assisted in operating the gum business, and used to spit on her slate with such elegance and abandon, and wipe it thoughtfully off with her apron, she too is gone. One summer day when the little birds were pouring forth their lay, and the little lambs were frisking on the green sward, and yanking their tails athwart the ambient air, she lit out for the great untried West with a grasshopper sufferer. The fluff and bloom of existence for her too is gone. She bangs eternal punishment out of thirteen consecutive children near Ogallalla, Nebraska, and wears out her sweet girlish nature working up her husband's underclothes into a rag carpet. It seems tough, but such is life.

MY TOMBSTONE MINE

Camp on Alder Gulch, June 18, 1880

The general feeling of expectation and suspense which is the natural result of recent mineral discoveries near to any mining town, is still prevalent. If possible it is on the increase, and all the prevailing indications of profound mystery are visible everywhere. There is a general air of knowing something that other people do not. Almost every man is hugging to his bosom a ponderous secret which is slowly crushing him, while all his fellow men are trying to hold down the same secret.

Occasionally a man comes to me, takes my ear and wrapping it around his arm two or three times so that I can't get away, he tells me that he knows where there is the richest thing in America. Only he and his wife and another man and his wife know where this wonderful wealth is to be found.

He asks me to come into it so that capital will then be interested. I agree to it and on the way to the camp I overtake the able-bodied men of Wyoming, all of whom are trying in their poor, weak way to keep the same secret.

Such is life.

Sometimes I think that perhaps I had better give up mining. I do not seem to get the hang of the thing, somehow. All the claims I get hold of are rich in nothing but assessments, while less deserving men catch on to the bonanzas.

Once I located a vein which showed what I called good indications of a permanent vein, staked it out under the United States law and went to work on it. I paid out $11 for sharpening picks alone, in going down ten feet to hold it. It was mighty hard quartz, but the lead grew wider and better defined all the time till I got down ten feet and had an assay.

The assayer said that I had struck a marble quarry, but it was very inferior marble after all. Besides I found afterward that it was owned by Jay Gould and some other tender feet from New York.

Then I relocated the claim and called it The Marble-Top Cemetery Lode, and went away. Probably if I had gone down on it, the ore would have shown free milling tombstones and Power's Greek slaves and all that kind of business, but I felt kind of depressed all the time while I was at work on it. There was a kind of "Hark from the tombs a doleful sound," air about the whole mine.

Cummins City still booms. Building lots have gone up to $100 each. This for a place where a few weeks ago the song of the coyote was heard in the land, and where the valley of the river, and bald sides of the rugged mountains were unscarred, is a good showing.

The magical power of a mineral excitement to transform the bleak prairie and the rocky canyon into a thriving village at once, is something to command our admiration and wonder.

Two months ago, I might say, the little village of Cummins City was nothing but a little caucus of prairie dogs, and a ward meeting of woodticks.

Now look at it. Opera houses, orphan asylums, hurdy-gurdies, churches, barber shops, ice-cream saloons, dog-fights, musical soirees, spruce gum, bowling-allies, salvation, and three card monte. Everything in fact that the heart of man could yearn after.

As you drive up Euclid Avenue, you smell the tropical fragrance of frying bacon, and hear the recorder of the district murmuring with a profane murmur because his bread won't raise. Here and there along the river bank, like a lot of pic-nickers, the guileless miners are panning pounded quartz, or submitting their socks to the old process for freeing them from decomposed quartzite, and nonargentiferous clayite. Flying from the dome of the opera house is a red flannel shirt, while a pair of corpulent drawers of the same ruddy complexion, is gathering all the clear, bracing atmosphere of that locality.

As a picturesque tower on the roof of the Grand Central, the architect has erected a minaret or donjon keep, which is made to represent a salt barrel. So true to life is this new and unique design, that sometimes the cattle which roam up and down Euclid Avenue, climb up on the mansard roof of the Grand Central, and lick the salt off the donjon keep, and fall over the battlements into the moated culverin, or stick their feet through the roof and rattle the pay gravel into the custard pie and cottage pudding.