SURE CURE FOR BILIOUSNESS
Whenever I get bilious and need exercise, I go over to the south end of town and vicariously hoe radishes for an hour or two till the pores are open, and I feel that delightful languor and the chastened sense of hunger and honesty which comes to the man who is not afraid to toil.
CHESTNUT-BURR VIII – IN AN UNGUARDED MOMENT BILL NYE IS CAPTURED BY A POLITICAL SIREN
Decoyed by Honeyed Words He Essays to Purify Politics – The Inevitable Delegation from Irving Hall – An Unreserved Statement of Campaign Expenses – Some Items of a Momentous Canvass Disclosed.
I have only just returned from the new-made grave of a little boomlet of my own. Yesterday I dug a little hole in the back yard and buried in it my little boom, where the pie-plant will cast its cooling shadows over it and the pinch-bug can come and carol above it at eventide.
A few weeks ago a plain man came to me and asked me my name. Refreshing my memory by looking at the mark on my linen, I told him promptly who I was. He said he had resided in New York for a long time and felt the hour had now arrived for politics in this city to be purified. Would I assist him in this great work? If so, would I appoint a trysting place where we could meet and tryst? I suggested the holy hush and quiet of lower Broadway or the New York end of the East River bridge at 6 o'clock; but he said no, we might be discovered. So we agreed to meet at my house. There he told me that his idea was to run me for the State Senate this fall, not because he had any political axe to grind, but because he wanted to see old methods wiped out and the will of the people find true and unfettered expression.
"And, sir," I asked, "what party do you represent?"
"I represent those who wish for purity, those who sigh for the results of unbought suffrages, these who despise old methods and yearn to hear the unsmothered voice of the people."
"Then you are Mr. Vox Populi himself, perhaps?"
"No, my name is Kargill, and I am in dead earnest. I represent the party of purity in New York."
"And why did you not bring the party with you? Then you and I and my wife and this party you speak of could have had a game of whist together," said I with an air of inimitable drollery.
But he seemed to be shocked by my trifling manner, and again asked me to be his standard-bearer. Finally I said reluctantly that I would do so, for I have always said that I would never shrink from my duty in case I should become the victim of political preferment.
In Wyoming I had several times accepted the portfolio of justice of the peace, and so I knew what it was to be called forth by the wild and clamorous appeals of my constituents and asked to stand up for principle, to buckle on the armor of true patriotism and with drawn sword and overdrawn salary to battle for the right.
In running for office in Wyoming our greatest expense and annoyance arose from the immense distances we had to travel in order to go over one county. Many a day I have traveled during an exciting canvass from daylight till dark without meeting a voter. But here was a Senatorial district not larger than a joint school district, and I thought that the expense of making a canvass would be comparatively small.
That was where I made a mistake. On the day after Mr. Lucifer Kargill had entered my home and with honeyed words made me believe that New York had been, figuratively speaking, sitting back on her haunches for fifty years waiting for me to come along and be a standard-bearer, a man came to my house who said he had heard that I was looking toward the Senate, and that he had come to see me as the representative of Irving Hall. I said that I did not care a continental for Irving Hall, so far as my own campaign was concerned, as I intended to do all my speaking in the school-houses.
He said that I did not understand him. What he wanted to know was, what percentage of my gross earnings at Albany would go into the Irving Hall sinking fund, provided that organization indorsed me? I said that I was going into this campaign to purify politics, and that I would do what was right toward Irving Hall, in order to be placed in a position where I could get in my work as a purifier.
We then had a long talk upon what he called the needs of the hour. He said that I would make a good candidate, as I had no past. I was unknown and safe. Besides, he could see that I had the elements of success, for I had never expressed any opinion about anything, and had never antagonized any of the different wings of the party by saying anything that people had paid any attention to. He said also that he learned I had belonged to all the different parties, and so would be familiar with the methods of each. He then asked me to sign a pledge and after I had done so he shook hands with me and went away.
The next day I was waited upon by the treasurers of eleven chowder clubs, the financial secretary of the Shanty Sharpshooters and Goat Hill Volunteers. A man also came to obtain means for burying a dead friend. I afterward saw him doing so to some extent. He was burying his friend beneath the solemn shadow of a heavy mahogany-colored mustache, of which he was the sole proprieter.
I was waited upon by delegations from Tammany, the County Democracy and the Jeffersonian Simplicity Chub. Everybody seemed to have dropped his own business in order to wait upon me, I became pledged to every one on condition that I should be elected. It makes me shudder now to think what I may have signed. I paid forty odd dollars for the privilege of voting for a beautiful child, and thus lost all influence with every other parent in the contest. I voted for the most popular young lady and heard afterward that she regarded me only as a friend. I had a biography and portrait of myself printed in an obscure paper that claimed a large circulation, and the first time the forms went into the press a loose screw fell out on the machinery, caught in the forehead of my portrait and peeled back the scalp so that it dropped over the eye like a prayer rag hanging out of the window.
I had paid a boy three dollars to scatter these papers among the neighbors, but I met him as he came out of the office and made it five dollars if he would put them in the bosom of the moaning tide.
I give below a rough draft of expenses, not including; some of the items referred to above:
Yesterday I tried to find the red-nosed man who first asked me to go into the standard-bearer business, in order to withdraw my name, but I could not find him in the directory. I therefore take this means of saying, as I said to my assignee last evening, that if a public office be a public bust, I might just as well bust now and have it over.
To-morrow I will sell out my residence, a cane voted to me as the most popular man in the State; also an assortment of political pulls, a little loose in the handles, but otherwise all right. I will close out at the same time five hundred torches, three hundred tin helmets, nine transparencies and one double-leaded editorial, entitled "Dinna Ye Hear the Slogan?"
VIRTUE ITS OWN REWARD
A noble, generous-hearted man in Cheyenne lost $250, and an honest chambermaid found it in his room. The warm heart of the man swelled with gratitude, and seemed to reach out after all mankind, that he might in some way assist them with the $250 which was lost, and was found again. So he fell on the neck of the chambermaid, and while his tears took the starch out of her linen collar, he put his hand in his pocket and found her a counterfeit twenty-five cent scrip. "Take this," he said, between his sobs, "Virtue is its own reward. Do not use it unwisely, put it into Laramie County bonds, where thieves cannot corrupt, nor moths break through and gnaw the corners off."
A GOOD PAINTING FOR THE CAPITOL
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.
CHESTNUT-BURR IX – BILL NYE DESCANTS UPON YOUNG IVES'S IDEAS IN FINANCE
Mr. Ives's Earnest Desire Not to Tell a Lie or Anything Else – Blighted Powers of Recalling the Past Put Him Alongside the Gentle Gould Himself – Touching Letter Received from a Patron of His Road.
The present age may be regarded as the age of investigation. This morbid curiosity on the part of the American people to know how large fortunes are acquired is a healthy sign, and the desire of the press, as well as the people, to investigate the parlor magic and funny business by which a man can buy two millions of dollars' worth of stock in the Aurora Borealis without paying for it, stick a quill in it and inflate the stock to twenty millions, then borrow thirty-five millions on the new stock by booming it, make an assignment, bust and slide a fifty-pound ledger up his sleeve, is most gratifying.
For the benefit and entertainment of those who still believe that the Sunday paper is not an engine of destruction, and for the consideration of those who may have been kept away from church on this summer Sabbath morning by sickness or insomnia, let us turn for a moment to the thoughtful scrutiny of Mr. Henry S. Ives, the young Napoleon of Wall street.
In the first place, Mr. Ives has done nothing new. Starting out, no doubt, with Mr. Gould as his model, he has kept up the imitation even to the loss of memory and blighted powers of recalling the past during an investigation. (I use Mr. Gould's name simply as an illustration – for I have no special antipathy toward Mr. Gould.) Personally we are friendly. He made his money by means of his comatose memory and flabby integrity, while I made mine by means of earnest, honest toil, and a lurid imagination.
But in the case of Mr. Ives, the gentle, polite failure to remember, the earnest desire not to tell a lie or anything else, the courteous and unobtrusive effort to avoid being too positive about anything that would assist anybody in ascertaining anything – all, all remind the close student of Mr. Jay Gould. The conversation during the investigation for one day ran something like this:
"Mr. Ives, did you in making your assignment turn over all the books connected with your business?"
"Do you mean my library?"
"No; the books of account, the daybook, cash book, ledger, etc., etc."
"Oh!"
"I ask if you turned over all such books on the date of your assignment?"
"I could hardly tell that. At least, I would only swear on information and belief."
"Well, to the best of your knowledge and belief, did you turn over those books at that time?"
"I think I did, but I am not positive as to the date?"
"What makes you think you did?"
"Because I did frequently turn the books over, in order to see how they looked on the other side."
"Mr. Ives, we find that several of the more important books connected with your office and the firm of Henry S. Ives & Co. are missing. Do you know where they are?"
"No, I do not,"
"Were they in your office prior to your assignment?"
"Yes, they were there, according to the best of my knowledge and belief, up to the time that they were not there."
"Have you any idea, Mr. Ives, where those books are now?"
"No sir; only in a general way?"
"How do you mean in a general way?"
"Well, I mean that I know only in what might be called a general way."
"Well, Mr. Ives, will you state then, in a general way, where those books are now?"
"Yes, sir; they are elsewhere."
"What makes you say they are elsewhere, Mr. Ives?"
"Because they are not there."
"Well, now, will you tell us whether you removed those books from the office of IH. S. Ives & Co. or not?"
"Do you ask me to answer that question personally?"
"Yes."
"Do you wish a verbal answer or would you rather have it in writing?"
"Answer orally."
"Well, then, I did not, to my knowledge."
"Would you have been apt to know of it if you had taken them away yourself?"
"Well, only in a general way."
"Would you have known about it if any one else had taken them away?"
"I think I would but I might not. There was a great deal of passing along our street, and they may have been taken while I was looking out of the window, waiting till the crowds rolled by."
And so Mr. Ives continued to shed information upon the inquiring mind in a courteous and opaque manner that must have endeared him to all.
Mr. Ives has in no transaction shown himself so thoroughly shrewd as he did when he swapped a doubtful reputation for a large sum of money. The only wonder is that there were so many men who wanted to invest in that kind of goods. He did a shrewd thing, but he will not be able to profit by it.
Success, however, should only be measured by the content it brings with it. While Henry S. Ives was lighting his mighty financial battles and winning for himself the title of the Young Napoleon of Wall street, dwelling in a little palace lined with ivory and gold, but cursed by the consuming desire to be rich, and forgetful, like Mr. Gould, how full of calm and soothing content is the following simple letter, written by a man who undertook last year to inaugurate a Shakesperian revival in southern Ohio:
Cincinnati, O., Aug. 3, 1886.
Mr. Henry S. Ives, New York, N. Y.
Dear Sir: I have just arrived in this city after a long and debilitating but rather enjoyable trip over your line, and I now take pen in hand to thank you for the use of your roadbed from Indianapolis to this place. It is a good road, and I was surprised to find it well ballasted and furnished with cool retreats and shady culverts every few miles wherein a man could rest.
It is a good route for the poor but pampered tragedian to take, and water-melons grow close to the fence. I have traveled over many other roads since the new and pernicious law, but nowhere have I found watermelons more succulent or less coy and secretive than on your justly celebrated line. I also notice with pleasure that green corn is still susceptible, and wild paw paws are growing in the summer sun.
I thought I saw you go by in your special car just north of the first trestle outside of town, but you went by so fast that I could not tell definitely till too late. Please excuse me for not speaking to you as you passed by. Success on the stage has not taught me to forget or ignore my friends whenever I am thrown in contact with them.
People write me that New York State is rapidly settling up, and that property is advancing rapidly in every direction. Is this so? Advancing rapidly in every direction is, I suppose, one of the most difficult feats known to calisthenics. I have tried it myself, years ago, but now I do not practice it, having quit drinking altogether.
I hope you will let me know any time that I can be of use to you, either in mowing weeds or gathering nuts that have ripened and fallen off your track. I enjoy, especially in the autumn when the hectic of the dying year has flooded the forests with its multiplied glories, and the cricket sings his sleepy song to the tired heart, and the locust lifts its lawn-mower voice in the boughs of the poplar, to go nutting along a prolific railroad track.
I would be glad, also, if you have not secured anyone else, to assist you in herding your stock on Wall street. Railroad stock frequently runs down and gets the hollow horn for lack of care during the winter months.
Always feel free to call on me at any time that I can be of service to you.
Yours truly,
A – B – .
The moral to be drawn from the career of Napoleon Bonaparte Ives is that they who make haste to be rich may not be innocent. As Gen. McClellan once said, there can be no better incentive to integrity than the generous approval accorded to honesty by those who are honest. All other kinds of approval are not worth struggling for. Money will buy a certain kind of applause, but it is the kind that turns to scorn when justice begins to get in her fine work.
And life itself is brief. Storied urn and animated bust may succeed well in society, but they cannot soothe the dull cold ear of death. Freckled granite and prevaricating marble may perpetuate the fraud of a lifetime, but they do not always indicate success.
For myself I would rather have more sincere and honest friends through life, and afterwards content myself with a plainer tomb.
Not many miles from the costly mausoleum of a great millionaire a sign-board by the roadside reads:
This way to Foley's Grove!
Enjoy life while you live, for
You'll be along time dead.
While I do not fully indorse this sentiment, there is food in it for earnest thought.
THE ANTI-CLINKER BASE-BURNER BEE
I have noticed bees very closely indeed, during my life. In fact I have several times been thrown into immediate juxtaposition with them, and have had a great many opportunities to observe their ways, and I am free to say that I have not been so forcibly struck with the difference in their size as the noticeable difference in their temperature. I remember at one time sitting by a hive watching the habits of the bees, and thinking how industrious they were, and what a wide difference there is between the toilsome life of the little insect, and the enervating, aimless, idle and luxurious life of the newspaper man, when an impulsive little bee lit in my hair. He seemed to be feverish. Wherever he settled down he seemed to leave a hot place. I learned afterward that it was a new kind of bee called the anti-clinker base-burner bee.
CHESTNUT-BURR X – A FEW REMARKS ON OUR HOSTELRY SYSTEM AS IT NOW PREVAILS
Why a man in a Soft Hat is not always Welcome – The Hotel Clerk and his Frigidity Apparatus – The Hotel Hog and his Habits – how he may be Headed Off – Drolleries of Shrewd Bonifaces.
America has made many gigantic strides, aside from those made at the battle of Bull Run, and her people spend much of their time pointing with pride to her remarkable progress; but we are prone to dwell too much upon our advantages as a summer resort, and our adroit methods of declining the Presidency before we are asked, while we forget some of our more important improvements, like the Elevated Railway and the American Hotel.
Let us, for a moment, look at the great changes that have been wrought in hotels during the past century. How marked has been the improvement and how wonderful the advancement. Everything has been changed. Even the towels have been changed.
Electric bells, consisting of a long and alert wire with an overcoat button at one end and a reticent boy at the other, have taken the place of the human voice and a low-browed red-elm club. Where once we were compelled to fall down a dark, narrow staircase, now we can go down the elevator or wander down the wrong stairway and ourselves in the laundry.
Where once we were mortified by being compelled to rise at table, reach nine feet and stab a porous pancake with our fork, meantime wiping the milk gravy out of a large yellow bowl with our coat-tails, now we can hire a tall, lithe gentleman in a full-dress suit to pass us the pancakes.
Even the bar-rooms of American hotels are changed. Once the bartender waited till his customer ran all his remarks into one long, hoarse word, with a hiccough on the end, and then he took him by the collar and threw him out into the cold and chaotic night. Now the bartender gradually rises on the price of drinks till his customer is frozen out, and while he is gone to the reading-room to borrow some more money the chemist moves the bar somewhere else, and when the guest returns he finds a barber-shop where he thought he left a bar-room.
One hundred years, on their swift pinions, have borne away the big and earnest dinner bell, and the sway-backed hair trunk that surprised a man so when he sat down upon it to consider what clothes he would put on first.
All these evidences of our crude, embryotic existence are gone, and in their places we have electric bells, and Saratoga trunks wherein we may conceal our hotel room and still have space left for our clothes.
It is very rare now that we see a United States senator snaking a two-year old Mambrino hair trunk up three flights of stairs to his room in order to secure the labor vote. Men, as well as hotels and hotel soap, have changed. Where once a cake of soap would only last a few weeks, science has come in and perfected a style of pink soap, flavored with vanilla, that will last for years, and a new slippery-elm towel that is absolutely impervious to moisture. Hand in hand, this soap and towel go gaily down the corridors of time, welcoming the coming and speeding the parting guest, jumping deftly out of the hands of the aristocracy into the hands of a receiver, but always calm, smooth and latherless.
Nature did not fit me to be the successful guest at a hotel. I can see why it is so. I do not know how to impress a hotel. I think all the way up from the depot, as I change hands with my hot-handled and heavy bag, how I will stride up to the counter and ask for the room that is generally given to Mr. Blaine; but when I get there I fall up against a cold wave, step back into a large india-rubber cuspidor, and my overtaxed valise bursts open. While the porter and I gather up my collars and gently press them in with our feet, the clerk decides that he hasn't got such a room as I would want.
I then go to another hotel and succeed in getting a room, which commands a view of a large red fire-escape, a long sweep of undulating eaves-trough and a lightning rod – usually No. 7 5/8s, near the laundry chimney and adjoining the baggage elevator.
After I have remained at the hotel several days and paid my bill whenever I have been asked to do so, and shown that I did not eat much and that I was willing to carry up my own coal, the proprietor relents and puts me in a room that is below timber line, and though it is a better room, I feel all the time as though I had driven out the night-watchman, for the bed is still warm, and knowing that he must be sleeping out in the cold hall all night as he patiently watches the hotel, I cannot sleep until three or four o'clock in the morning, and then I have to get up while the chambermaid makes my bed for the day.
I try hard when I enter a hotel to assume an air of arrogance and defiance, but I am all the time afraid that there is some one present who is acquainted with me.
Another thing that works against me is my apparel. In a strange hotel a man will do better, if he has fifty dollars only, and desires to remain two weeks, to go and buy a fifty-dollar suit of clothes with his money, taking his chances with the clerk, than to dress like a plain American citizen, and expect to be loved, on the grounds that he will pay his board.
But there is now a prospect for reform in this line, a scheme by which a man's name and record as a guest will be his credentials. When this plan becomes thoroughly understood and adopted, a modest man with money, who prefers to wear a soft hat, will not have to sleep in the Union depot, solely on the ground that the night clerk is opposed to a soft hat.
This scheme, to be brief, consists of a system of regular reports from tables and rooms, which reports are epitomized at the office and interchangeable with other hotels, on the principle of the R. G, Dun Commercial Agency. The guest is required to sign his order at the table or give the number of his room, whether the hotel is run on the European plan or not, and these orders in the aggregate, coming from head waiters, porters, chambermaids and bell-boys, make up a man's standing on a scale of from A to Z.
For instance, we will say a five-dollar-per-day house can afford to feed a man for a dollar a meal. The guest orders two dollars' worth, sticks his mustache into just enough of it to spoil it for stew or giblet purposes, and then goes to his room. Here he puts up the fire-escape rope for a clothes-line, does a week's washing, and hanging it out upon the improvised clothesline, he lights a strong pipe, puts his feet on the pillow-shams, and reads "As in a Looking Glass" while his wash is drying. When that man goes away he leaves a record at the hotel which confronts him at every hotel wherever he goes. As soon as he writes his name, the clerk, who has read it wrong side up just a little before he got it down, tells him that he is very sorry, but that the house is full, and people are sleeping on cots in the hall, and the proprietor himself has to sleep on the sideboard. The large white Suffolk hog, who has been in the habit of inaugurating a rain of terror and gravy in the dining-room and stealing the soap from the wash-room, just simply because he could out trump the clerk on diamonds, will thus have to go to the pound, where he belongs, and quiet, every day people, who rely on their integrity more than they do on their squeal, will get a chance.
A great many droll characters and bright, shrewd men are met with among hotel proprietors wherever you go. "The Fat Contributor" was lecturing once in the State of Kentucky, and had occasion to take dinner at a six-bit hotel. After the meal Mr. Griswold stepped up to the counter, took out a bale of bank notes, which he had received for his lecture the evening before, and asked what might be the damage.
"Three dollars," said the blue grass gentleman, who had buttoned his collar with a tenpenny nail, while he looked at "Gris" with a pained expression.
"Yes, but a man ought to be able to board here a week for three dollars. The whole house didn't cost more than forty or forty-five dollars. What's your idea in charging me three dollars for a wad of hominy and a piece of parched pork?"
"Well, sir," said the urbane landlord, as he put out the fire at a. distance of twenty feet by emptying his salivary surplus on it, "I need the money?"
The frankness and open, candid manner of the man won Mr. Griswold, and he asked him if he thought three dollars would be enough. The landlord said he could get along with that. Then Griswold opened his valise and took out a large brunette bottle of liniment marked "for external use." He passed it over to the landlord, and told him that he would find this stuff worked as well on the inside as it did on the outside. In a few moments the liniment of the "Fat Contributor" and the lineaments of the landlord had merged into each other, and a friendly feeling sprang up between the two men which time has never effaced. I have often thought of this, and wondered why it is that hotel men are not more open and cordial with their guests. Many a time I have paid a large bill grudgingly when I would have done it cheerfully if the landlord had told me he was in need.
I had intended to speak at some length on the new rope law, by which every man is made his own vigilance committee; but I feel that I am already encroaching on the advertising space, and so will have to omit it. In conclusion, I will say that the American hotels are far preferable to those we have in Paris in many ways, and not only outstrip those of England and the Continent, even as a corps de ballet outstrips a toboggan club, but they seem to excel and everlastingly knock the ancient hotels of Carthage, Rome and Tie Siding silly.