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

Next set up desirable candidate, unless you can get candidate to set them up himself, slug the standing galley, oil the cross-head, upset the tripod, loosen the crown sheet a little, so that the obvious duplex will work easily in the lallygag eccentric, and turn on steam.

Should the box in which the lower case candidates are stored get hot, sponge off and lubricate with castor oil, antifat and borax in equal parts.

Keep this song in a cool place.

(Air —Rally Round the Flag, Boys.)Oh, we'll gather from the hillsides,We'll gather from the glen,Shouting the battle cry of…,And we'll round up our voters,Our brave and trusty men,Shouting the battle cry of…ChorusOh, our candidate forever,Te doodle daddy a,Down with old…,Turn a foodie diddy a,And we'll whoop de dooden do,Fal de adden adden a,And don't you never forget it.Oh, we'll meet the craven foeOn the fall election day,Shouting the battle cry of…,And we'll try to let him knowThat we're going to have our way,Shouting the battle cry of,ChorusOh, our candidate forever, etc.Oh, we're the people's friends,As all can plainly see,Shouting the battle cry of…,And we'll whoop de dooden doo,With our big majority,And don't you never forget it.ChorusOh, our candidate forever, etc.

SITTING ON ON A VENERABLE JOKE

Near St. Paul, on the Sioux City road, I met the ever-present man from Leadville again.

I had met him before on every division of every railroad that I had traveled over, but I nodded to him, and he began to tell me all about Leadville.

He saw that I looked sad, and he cheered me up with little prehistoric jokes that an antiquarian had given him years ago. Finally he said:

"Leadville is mighty cold; it has such an all fired altitude, The summer is very short and unreliable, and the winter long and severe.

"An old miner over in California gulch got off a pretty good joke about the climate there. A friend asked him about the seasons at Leadville, and he said that there they had nine months winter and three months late in the fall."

Then he looked around to see me fall to pieces with mirth, but I restrained myself and said:

"You will please excuse me for not laughing at that joke. I cannot do it. It is too sacred.

"Do you think I would laugh at the bones of the Pilgrim Fathers, where are they? or burst into wild hilarity over the grave of Noah and his family?

"No, sir; their age and antiquity protect them. That is the way with your Phoenician joke.

"Another reason why I cannot laugh at it is this: I am not a very easy and extemporaneous laughter, anyway. I am generally shrouded in gloom, especially when I am in hot pursuit of a wild and skittish joke for my own use. It takes a good, fair, average joke that hasn't been used much to make me laugh easy, and besides, I have used up the fund of laugh that I had laid aside for that particular joke. It has, in fact, overdrawn some now, and is behind.

"I do not wish to intrench on the fund that I have concluded to offer as a purse for young jokes that have never made it in three minutes.

"I want to encourage green jokes, too, that have never trotted in harness before, and, besides, I must insist on using my scanty fund of laugh on jokes of the nineteenth century. I have got to draw the line somewhere.

"If I were making a collection of antique jokes of the vintage of 1400 years B. C., or arranging and classifying little bon-mots of the time of Cleopatra or King Solomon, I would give you a handsome sum for this one of yours, but I am just trying to worry along and pay expenses, and trying to be polite to every one I meet, and laughing at lots of things that I don't want to laugh at, and I am going to quit it.

"That is why I have met your little witticism with cold and heartless gravity."

A HAIRBREADTH ESCAPE

To-day I got shaved at a barber-shop, where I begged the operator to kill me and put me out of my misery.

I have been accustomed to gentle care and thoughtfulness at home, and my barber at Laramie handles me with the utmost tenderness. I was, therefore, poorly prepared to meet the man who this morning filled my soul with woe.

I know that I have not deserved this, for while others have berated the poor barber and swore about his bad breath and never-ending clatter and his general heartlessness, I have never said anything that was not filled with child-like trust and hearty good will toward him.

I have called the attention of the public to the fact that sometimes customers had bad breath and were restless and mean while being operated on, and then when they are all fixed up nicely, they put their hats on and light a cigar and hold up their finger to the weary barber and tell him that they will see him more subsequently.

Now, however, I feel differently.

This barber no doubt had never heard of me. He no doubt thought I was an ordinary plug who didn't know anything about luxury.

I shall mark a copy of this paper and send it to him.

Then while he is reading it I will steal up behind him with a pick handle and kill him. I want him to be reading this when I kill him, because it will assist the coroner in arriving at the immediate cause of his death.

The first whiff I took of this man's breath, I knew that he was rum's maniac.

He had the Jim James in an advanced stage. Now, I don't object to being shaved by a barber who is socially drunk, but when the mad glitter of the maniac is in his eye and I can see that he is debating the question of whether he will cut my head off and let it drop over the back of the chair or choke me to death with a lather brush, it makes me nervous and fidgetty.

This man made up his mind three times that he would kill me, and some one came in just in time to save me.

His chair was near a window, and there was a hole in the blind, so that when he was shaving the off side of my face he would turn my head over in such a position that I could look up into the middle of the sun. My attention had never before been called to the appearance of the sun as it looks to the naked eye, and I was a good deal surprised.

The more I looked into the very center of the great orb of day the more I was filled with wonder at the might and power that could create it. I began to pine for death immediately, so that I could be far away among the heavenly bodies, and in a land where no barber with the delirium triangles can ever enter.

This barber held my head down so that the sun could shine into my darkened understanding, until I felt that my brain had melted and was floating around and swashing about in my skull like warm butter.

His hand was very unsteady, too. I lost faith in him on the start when he cut off a mole under my chin and threw it into the spittoon. I did not care very particularly for the mole, and did not need it particularly, but at the same time I had not decided to take it off at that time. In fact I had worn it so long that I had become attached to it. It had also become attached to me.

That is why I could not restrain my tears when the barber cut it off and then stepped back to the other end of the room to see how I looked without it.

MYSELF, DR. TALMAGE, AND OTHER DIVINES

September 5, 1880

I am beginning to-day to keep a diary. It is not an agreeable task, but I feel that the wild, glad bursts of unfettered thought which surge through my ponderous mind ought to be embalmed in eligible characters, and passed down to posterity.

The thought may arise in the mind of the reader that this is taking a low and contemptible advantage of a posterity that never in word or deed ever harmed me; but I care not. Other able men have perpetrated their diaries upon me when I was not in a condition to help myself, and now that I can hand down and transmit to nations yet unborn, the same great heritage unimpaired, there is a sweet consciousness of a revenge that has been fully glutted.

To day I have been to church. I do not speak of it as remarkable at all, for wherever I am, whether at home or abroad, my first thought is, where will I find a sanctuary?

The minister was quite classical and he pumped the congregation so full of heathen mythology that he came very near forgetting that he had a word to say on behalf of Christianity as the advance agent of Zion.

I do not wish to say one word that would sound like irreverence toward the cause which this man undertook to represent; but I want to jot down a little thought or two relative to this exponent, so that I may be placed squarely upon the record.

I have often thought when I have watched this class of ministers, with one hand resting in a graceful and negligent posture on the altar rail, while the self-conscious Demosthenes reeled off a 4th of July prayer to the miserable, wretched and undone sinners before him, how God has said that He is a jealous God; and I have wondered if these prayers, arranged with great care to meet the criticism of the worshippers, and with an off-hand disregard to the feelings of the Almighty that is very cool and very refreshing indeed, whether they ever lay hold of the throne of grace or not, and whether they ever lift up mankind or make the world better.

Speaking of divines, reminds me of the very pleasant trip I had over the Union Pacific on my way east with Brother Talmage. I call him Brother Tannage because he called me brother occasionally. He no doubt thought that in different walks of life, perhaps, but working in the same direction, we were both laboring to make the world better.

Brother Talmage, General Crook, myself and two or three other eminent men together occupied the sleeper Boise City. Brother Talmage and I one day were seized with the same irresistable desire, at the same moment, to change our shirts. He was a little nearer the wash-room than I was, so he got there first, and we stood up together smiling at each other sweetly, with a clean shirt in our hands, and didn't know exactly how to express ourselves.

I was the first to speak. I told the Doctor that it was of no consequence particularly, and I would wait. He said no, I must not wait for him, and insisted so cordially on my coming in there that we went in together and tackled the mysteries of our toilet at the same time.

It was pretty tough on me, for I had been accustomed while peeling off a damp shirt to go through a few little vocal exercises and dance around on one leg and howl.

Going from the mountains of Wyoming down into the tropical heat of Nebraska made me perspire a good deal, and nothing but the firm and irresistible restraint thrown about me by an eminent divine kept me from swearing.

But the Doctor did not get mad. When he shoved his bald head into his shirt a large smile was on his face, and when it emerged at the top and he waved his arms above his head and struggled to climb up into the shirt, so that he could look out over the battlements, he was still smiling. He was not only smiling, but he was smiling a good deal. Those who have seen Dr. Talmage smile know now he throws his whole soul into it.

If I could jam my head up through a wilderness of shirt and starch and saw off my windpipe as I looked out over the billowy, buttonless mass, and still smile, as Dr. Talmage does, I would give all my broad possessions in a moment.

This offer will hold good up to the 15th.

We got quite sociable and cordial toward the close, and I got the Doctor to reach up as far as he could on my spinal column and bring down the refractory end of a suspender, then I retaliated by going down into his true inwardness after a collar button that had dropped into oblivion.

While he was smiling with that glad, free smile of his, which he takes along with him instead of baggage, he told me a pretty good thing on the editor of the Herald of Salt Lake. He told it to me in confidence, he said, because he knew he could rely on a newspaper man. Then he laughed and seemed to think it was a good joke.

It seems that when Dr. Talmage was in Salt Lake, the Tribune published what purported to be an interview between a reporter of that paper and the Brooklyn divine.

Shortly afterward, and while Dr. T. was in San Francisco, he received a letter from the editor of the Herald and a marked copy of the paper, giving the Doctor a very flattering notice. In his letter the editor said: "I enclose a clipping from the Tribune purporting to be an interview between yourself and a reporter of that paper; will you be kind enough to write me whether it is or is not genuine?"

The Doctor looked the clipping carefully over, and as it was nothing but a blood-curdling account of the merits of Day's Kidney pad, he had no hesitancy in pronouncing the alleged interview a fraud. Still he never wrote the editor of the Herald, and he no doubt still wonders why it is that Dr. Talmage don't come forward and state the facts, so that the Gentile Tribune may be shown up.

The Doctor says that too much care cannot be used by the editor who wields the shears not to get his editorials mixed up with patent medicine advertisements.

FINE-CUT AS A MEANS OF GRACE

The amateur tobacco chewer many times through lack of consideration allows himself to be forced into very awkward and unpleasant positions. As a fair sample of the perils to which the young and inexperienced masticator of the weed is subjected, the following may be given:

A few Sabbaths ago a young man who was attending divine worship up on Piety Avenue, concluded, as the sermon was about one-half done and didn't seem to get very exciting, that he would take a chew of tobacco. He wasn't a handsome chewer, and while he was sliding the weed out of his pocket and getting it behind his handkerchief and working it into his mouth, he looked as though he might be robbing a blind woman of her last copper. Then when he got it into his mouth and tried to look pious and anxious about the welfare of his never dying soul, the chew in his mouth felt as big as a Magnolia ham. Being new in the business, the salivary glands were so surprised that they began to secrete at a remarkable rate. The young man got alarmed. He wanted to spit. His eyes began to hang out on his cheek, and still the salivary glands continued to give down. He thought about spitting in his handkerchief or his hat, but neither seemed to answer the purpose. He was getting wild. He thought of swallowing it, but he knew that his stomach wasn't large enough.

In his madness he resolved that he would let drive down the aisle when the pastor looked the other way. He waited till the divine threw his eyes toward heaven and then he shut his eyes and turned loose. An old gentleman about three pews down the aisle yawned at that moment and threw his open hand out into the aisle in such a manner as to catch the contribution without any loss to speak of. He did not put his hand out for that purpose and did not seem to want it, but he got it all right.

He seemed to feel hurt about something. He looked like a man who has suddenly lost faith in humanity and become soured, as it were. Some who sat near him said he swore. Anyway, he lost the thread of the discourse. That part of the sermon he now says is a blank to him. It is several blanks. He called upon blank to everlastingly blank such a blankety blank blank, idiotic blank fool as the young man was.

Meantime the young man has quit the use of tobacco. He did not know at first whether to swear off or kill himself. The other day he said: "Only two weeks ago I stood up and said proudly I amateur. To-day, praise be to redeeming grace, I am not a chewer." (This joke for the first few days will have to be watered very carefully and wrapped in a California blanket, for it is not strong at all. However, if it can be worked through the cold weather it is no slouch of a joke.)

THE WEATHER AND SOME OTHER THINGS

Sometimes I wish that Wyoming had more vegetation and less catarrh, more bloom and summer and fragrance and less Christmas and New Year's through the summer.

I like the clear, bracing air of 7,500 feet above the civilized world, but I get weary of putting on and taking off my buffalo overcoat for meals all through dog days. I yearn for a land where a man can take off his ulster and overshoes while he delivers a Fourth of July oration, without flying into the face of Providence and dying of pneumonia.

Perhaps I am unreasonable, but I can't help it. I have my own peculiar notions, and I am not to blame for them.

As I write these lines I look out across the wide sweep of brownish gray plains dotted here and there with ranches and defunct buffalo craniums, and I see shutting down over the sides of the abrupt mountains, and meeting the foothills, a white mist which melts into the gray sky. It is a snow storm in the mountains.

I saw this with wonder and admiration for the first two or three million times. When it became a matter of daily occurrence as a wonder or curiosity, it was below mediocrity. Last July a snow storm gathered one afternoon and fell among the foothills and whitened the whole line to within four or five miles of town, and it certainly was a peculiar freak of nature, but it convinced me that whatever enterprises I might launch into here I would not try to raise oranges and figs until the isothermal line should meet with a change of heart.

I have just been reading Colonel Downey's poem. It is very good what there is of it, but somehow we lay aside the Congressional Record wishing that there had been more of it.

Just as we get interested and carried away with it, having read the first five or six thousand words, it comes to an abrupt termination.

I have often wished that I could write poetry. It would do me a heap of good. I would like to write a little book of poems with a blue cover and beveled edges and an index to it. It would tickle me pretty near to death.

But I can't seem to do it. When I write a poem and devote a good deal of study and thought to it, and get it to suit me, the great seething mass of humanity, regardless of my feelings, get down on the grass and yell and hoot and kick up the green sward, and whoop at the idea of calling that poetry. It hurts me and grieves me, and has a tendency to sour my disposition, so that when a really deserving poet comes to the front I haven't the good nature and sweetness of disposition to enter dispassionately upon the subject and say a kind word where I ought to, but I will say of Colonel Downey's poem that it certainly has great depth and width and length, and as you go on, it seems to broaden out and extend farther on and cover more ground and take in more territory and branch out and widen and lay hold of great tracts of thought and open up new fields and fresh pastures and make homestead claims and enter large desert land tracts and prove up under the timber culture act and the bounty land act and throw open the Indian reservation to settlement.

The matter of decorating the Capitol with sacred subjects is one which would receive the hearty approval of all the people of the country, and I often wish that the Colonel had alluded to it in his poem.

I have some curiosity to know what his ideas are on that point.

I, for one, would be glad to see appropriate paintings of scriptural subjects decorating the walls of our national capitol, and have often been on the verge of offering to do it at my own expense.

A cheerful painting to adorn the walls back of the Speaker's desk, would be a study by some great artist, representing Sampson mashing the Philistines with the jawbone of an ass.

It would be historical and also symbolical; but principally symbolical.

Then another painting might be executed representing Balaam's ass delivering a speech on the Indian question. It would take first rate, and when visitors from abroad made a flying trip to Washington during the summer, and missed seeing Wade Hampton, and felt disappointed, they could go and see Balaam's ass, and go home with their curiosity gratified.

I have seen a very spirited painting somewhere; I think it was at the Louvre, or the Vatican, or Fort Collins, by either Michael Angelo, or Raphael, or Eli Perkins, which represented Joseph presenting a portion of his ulster overcoat to Potiphar's wife, and lighting out for the Cairo and Palestine 11 o'clock train, with a great deal of earnestness. This would be a good painting to hang on the walls of the Capitol, dedicated to Ben Hill and some other Congressional soiled doves.

Then there are some simpler subjects which might be worked up and hung in the Congressional nursery to please the children till the session closed for the day, and their miscellaneous dads came to carry them home.

I could think of lots of nice subjects for a painter to paint, or a sculptor to sculp, if I were to give my attention to it# But I haven't the time.

THE PARABLE OF THE UNJUST STEWARD

Now there was a certain rich man in those days, who kept a large inn on the American plan.

And the hegira from other lands over against Kabzul and Eder, and Breckinridge and Kinah, and Georgetown and Dimmonah, and Kedesh and Roaring Forks, and Hador and Ithnan, and the Gunnison country and Ziph, and Telem and Silver Cliff, Beoloth and Hadattah, and even beyond Hazar – Gadah and Buena Vista, was exceedingly simultaneous.

And throughout the country roundabout was there never before an hegira that seemed to hegira with the same hegira with which this hegira did hegira.

And behold the inn was overrun day by day with pilgrims who journeyed thither with shekels and scrip and pieces of silver.

And the inn-keeper said unto himself, "Go to;" and he was very wroth, insomuch that he tore his beard and swore a large, dark-blue oath about the size of a man's hand.

For behold the inn-keeper gat not the shekels, and he wist not why it was.

Now, it was so that in the inn was one Keno-El-Pharo, the steward, and he stood behind the tablets wherein the pilgrims did write the names of themselves and their wives and their sons and their daughters.

And Keno-El-Pharo wore purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day, and he drank the wines of one Mumm, and they were extra dry, and so even was Keno-El-Pharo from the rising of the sun until the going down thereof.

And behold one day the inn-keeper took a large tumble even unto himself, and also unto the racket of Keno-El-Pharo the son of Ahaz Ben Bunko.

And he said unto Keno, "Give an account of thy stewardship that thou mayest be no longer steward."

And Keno-El-Pharo cried with a loud voice and wept and fell down and rose up and went unto his place.

And he looked into the mirror, and patted the soap lock on his brow and he saw that he was fair to look: upon.

But he was exceedingly sorrowful and he said, What shall I do? for my lord taketh away the stewardship, and verily it was a good thing to have.

Alas! I know not what to do. I cannot get a position as mining expert, and to beg I am ashamed. I am resolved what I will do. And he smiled unto himself, and the breadth of the smile was even six cubits from one end thereof even unto the other.

So he called unto himself one of his lord's debtors, and he said, How much owest thou my lord?

And he said, Even for seven days food and lodging at $3.50 per day, together with my reckoning at the bar, amounting to thirty pieces of silver of the denomination known as the dollar even of our dads.

And the steward said unto him, Take thy bill quickly and write fifteen.

And it was so. And he said unto another, How much owest thou my lord?

And he answered him and said, fifty pieces of silver.

And the steward said unto him, take thy bill and write twenty-five.

And it was so.

And behold these two guests of the inn were solid with Keno El-Pharo from that hour.

And when Keno-El-Pharo received the Oriental grand bounce from the inn-keeper, the guests of the inn, to whom Keno had shown mercy, procured him a pass over the road, and they whiled away the hours with Keno-El-Pharo, and he did teach them some pleasant games; and when the even was come he went his way unto Kansas City, and they with whom he had abode wot not how it was, for they were penniless.

And Keno-El-Pharo abode long in the land over against St. Louis, and he was steward in one of the great inns for many years, and he wore good clothes day by day and waxed fat, and he rested his stomach on the counter, and he said to himself, ha! ha!