A Would-be Hostelry
BILL NYE STOPS AT A PLACE WHERE TWO ROADS FORK
HIS MOURNFUL PILGRIMAGE THROUGH DESOLATE WILDS IN COMPANY WITH THE SOULFUL HOOSIER POET – A TALE OF GLOOM WITHOUT A RAY OF HOPE
We are moving about over the country, James Whitcomb Riley and I, in the capacity of a moral and spectacular show, I attend to the spectacular part of the business. That is more in my line.
I am writing this at an imitation hotel where the roads fork. I will call it the Fifth Avenue Hotel because the hotel at a railroad junction is generally called the Fifth Avenue, or the Gem City House, or the Palace Hotel. I stopped at an inn some years since called the Palace, and I can truly say that if it had ever been a palace it was very much run down when I visited it.
Just as the fond parent of a white-eyed, two-legged freak of nature loves to name his mentally-diluted son Napoleon, and for the same reason that a prominent horse owner in Illinois last year socked my name on a tall, buckskin-colored colt that did not resemble me, intellectually or physically, a colt that did not know enough to go around a barbed-wire fence, but sought to sift himself through it into an untimely grave, so this man has named his sway-backed wigwam the Fifth Avenue Hotel.
It is different from the Fifth Avenue in many ways. In the first place there is not so much travel and business in its neighborhood. As I said before, this is where two railroads fork. In fact, that is the leading industry here. The growth of the town is naturally slow, but it is a healthy growth. There is nothing in the nature of dangerous or wild-cat speculation in the advancement of this place, and while there has been no noticeable or rapid advance in the principal business, there has been no falling off at all, and these roads are forking as much to-day as they did before the war, while the same three men who were present for the first glad moment are still here to witness its operation.
Sometimes a train is derailed, as the papers call it, and two or three people have to remain over, as we did, all night. It is at such a time that the Fifth Avenue Hotel is the scene of great excitement. A large codfish, with a broad and sunny smile, and his bosom full of rock salt, is tied in the creek to freshen and fit himself for the responsible position of floor manager of the codfish ball.
A pale chambermaid, wearing a black jersey with large pores in it, through which she is gently percolating, now goes joyously up the stairs to make the little post-office lock-box rooms look ten times worse than they ever did before. She warbles a low refrain as she nimbly knocks loose the venerable dust of centuries, and sets it afloat throughout the rooms. All is bustle about the house.
Especially the chambermaid.
We were put into the guest's chamber here. It has two atrophied beds made up of pains and counterpanes.
This last remark conveys to the reader the presence of a light, joyous feeling which is wholly assumed on my part.
The door of our room is full of holes where locks have been wrenched off in order to let the coroner in. Last night I could imagine that I was in the act of meeting, personally, the famous people who have tried to sleep here and who moaned through the night and who died while waiting for the dawn.
I have no doubt in the world but there is quite a good-sized delegation from this hotel of guests who hesitated about committing suicide, because they feared to tread the sidewalks of perdition, but who became desperate at last and resolved to take their chances, and they have never had any cause to regret it.
We washed our hands on door-knob soap, wiped them on a slippery elm court-plaster, that had made quite a reputation for itself under the non-de-plume of "Towel," tried to warm ourselves at a pocket inkstand stove, that gave out heat like a dark lantern and had a deformed elbow at the back of it.
The chambermaid is very versatile, and waits on the table while not engaged in agitating the overworked mattresses and puny pillows upstairs. In this way she imparts the odor of fried pork to the pillow cases and kerosene to the pie.
She has a wild, nervous and apprehensive look in her eye as though she feared that some Herculean guest might seize her in his great, strong arms and bear her away to a justice of the peace and marry her. She certainly cannot fully realize how thoroughly secure she is from such a calamity. She is just as safe as she was forty years ago, when she promised her aged mother that she would never elope with anyone.
Still, she is sociable at times and converses freely with me at the table, as she leans over my shoulder, pensively brushing the crumbs into my lap with a general utility towel which accompanies her in her various rambles through the house, and she asks which we would rather have – "tea or eggs?"
This afternoon we will pay our bill, in accordance with a life-long custom of ours, and go away to permeate the busy haunts of men. It will be sad to tear ourselves away from the Fifth Avenue Hotel at this place; still, there is no great loss without some small gain, and at our next hotel we may not have to chop our own wood and bring it up-stairs when we want to rest. The landlord of a hotel who goes away to a political meeting and leaves his guests to chop their own wood, and then charges them full price for the rent of a boisterous and tempest-tossed bed, will never endear himself to those with whom he is thrown in contact.
We leave at 2:30 this afternoon, hoping that the two railroads may continue to fork here just the same as though we had remained.
Bill Nye's Hornets
Last fall I desired to add to my rare collection a large hornet's nest. I had an enbalmed tarantula and her porcelain lined nest, and I desired to add to these the gray and airy home of the hornet. I procured one of the large size after cold weather and hung it in my cabinet by a string. I forgot about it until this spring. When warm weather came, something reminded me of it. I think it was a hornet. He jogged my memory in some way and called my attention to it. Memory is not located where I thought it was. It seemed as though whenever he touched me he awakened a memory – a warm memory with a red place all around it.
Then some more hornets came and began to rake up old personalities. I remember that one of them lit on my upper lip. He thought it was a rosebud. When he went away it looked like a gladiolus bulb. I wrapped a wet sheet around it to take out the warmth and reduce the swelling so that I could go through the folding-doors and tell my wife about it.
Hornets lit all over me and walked around on my person. I did not dare to scrape them off, because they are so sensitive. You have to be very guarded in your conduct toward a hornet.
I remember once while I was watching the busy little hornet gathering honey and June bugs from the bosom of a rose, years ago. I stirred him up with a club, more as a practical joke than anything else, and he came and lit on my sunny hair – that was when I wore my own hair – and he walked around through my gleaming tresses quite awhile, making tracks as large as a watermelon all over my head. If he hadn't run out of tracks my head would have looked like a load of summer squashes. I remember I had to thump my head against the smoke house in order to smash him, and I had to comb him out with a fine comb and wear a waste paper basket two weeks for a hat.
Much has been said of the hornet, but he has an odd, quaint way after all, that is forever new.
A Tragedy
Out where the blue waves come and go,
Out where the zephyrs kiss the strand,
Down where the damp tides ebb and flow,
Where the ocean monkeys with the sand,
William, the hungry, rustles for his meal,
Slim William, the eldest, gathers the eel.
Up where the johnny jump-ups smile,
Up where the green hills meet the sky,
Where, out from her window for many a mile,
She watches the blue sea dimpling lie,
The wife of the eelist, with vizage grim,
Sits in the gloaming and watches for him.
Down in the moist and moaning sea,
Down where the day can never come,
With staring eyes that can never see
And lips that will ever continue dumb,
With eels in his breast, in a large wet wave,
William is filling a watery grave.
Up where the catnip is breathing hard,
Up where the tansy is flecked with dew,
Where the vesper soft as the onion peels
Wakens the echoes the twilight through,
The new-made widow still watches the shore
And sits there and waits, as I said before.
They come and tell her the pitiful tale,
With trembling voice and tear-dimmed eye,
They watch her cheek grow slightly pale,
Yet wonder at the calm reply:
"All our tears are but idle, gentlemen,
Go bring in the eels and set him again."
The Bronco Cow
BILL NYE UNDERTAKES TO MILK HER WHEN THE SIGN IS NOT RIGHT – DISASTROUS RESULTS
When I was young and used to roam around over the country, gathering water-melons in the dark of the moon, I used to think I could milk anybody's cow, but I do not think so now. I do not milk a cow now unless the sign is right, and it hasn't been right for a good many years.
The last cow I tried to milk was a common cow, born in obscurity; kind of a self-made cow. I remember her brow was low, but she wore her tail high and she was haughty, oh, so haughty.
I made a common-place remark to her, one that is used in the very best of society, one that need not have given offense anywhere. I said "so" – and she "soed". Then I told her to "histe" – and she histed. But I thought she overdid it. She put too much expression in it.
Just then I heard something crash through the window of the barn and fall with a dull, sickening thud on the outside.
The neighbors came to see what it was that caused the noise. They found that I had done it in getting through the window.
I asked the neighbors if the barn was still standing. They said it was. Then I asked if the cow was injured much. They said she seemed to be quite robust. Then I requested them to go in and calm the cow a little and see if they could get my plug hat off her horns.
I am buying all my milk now of a milk-man. I select a gentle milk-man who will not kick and I feel as though I could trust him. Then if he feels as though he could trust me, it is all right.
Autumn Thoughts
There can be nothing sadder than the solemn hush of nature that precedes the death of the year. The golden glory of autumn, with the billowy bronze and velvet azure of the skies above the royal robes of oak and maple, bespeak the closing hours of nature's teeming life and the silent farewell to humanity's gauze underwear.
Thus while nature dons her regal robe of scarlet and gold in honor of the farewell benefit to autumn, the sad-eyed poet hies away to a neighboring clothes line, and the hour of nature's grand blowout dons the flaming flannels of his friend out of respect for the hectic flush of the dying year.
Leaves have their time to fall, and so has the price of coal. And yet how sadly at variance with decaying nature is the robust coal market.
Another glorious summer with its wealth of pleasant memories is stored away among the archives of our history. Another gloomy winter is upon us. These wonderful colors that flame across the softened sky of Indian summer like the gory banner of royal conqueror, come but to warn us that in a few short weeks the water pipe will be bursted in the kitchen and the decorated washbowl be broken.
We flit through the dreamy hours of summer like swift-winged bumble bees amid the honeysuckle and pumpkin blossoms, storing away, perhaps, a little glucose honey and buckwheat pancakes for the future, but all at once, like a newspaper thief in the night, the king of frost and ripe mellow chilblains is upon us, and we crouch beneath the wintry blast and hump our spinal column up into the crisp air like a Texas steer that has thoughtlessly swallowed a raw cactus.
Life is one continued round of alternative joys and sorrows. To-day we are on the top wave of prosperity and warming ourselves in the glad sunlight of plenty, and to-morrow we are cast down and depressed financially, and have to stand off the washer-woman for our clean shirt or stay at home from the opera.
The November sky already frowns down upon us, and its frozen tears begin to fall. The little birds have hushed their little lay. So has the fatigued hen. Only a little while, and the yawning chasm in the cold, calm features of the Thanksgiving turkey will be filled with voluptuous stuffing and then sewed up. The florid features of the polygamous gobbler will be wrapped in sadness, and cranberry pie will be a burden, for the veal cutlet goeth to its long home, and the ice cream freezer is broken in the woodhouse.
Oh, time! thou baldheaded pelican with the venerable corncutter and the second hand hour-glass, thou playest strange pranks upon the children of men. No one would think, to look at thy bilious countenance and store teeth, that in thy bony bosom lurked such eccentric schemes.
The chubby boy, whose danger signal hangs sadly through the lattice-work of his pants, knows that Time, who waits for no man, will one day, if we struggle heroically on, give him knowledge and suspenders, and a solid girl, and experience and soft white mustache and eventually a low grave in the valley beneath the sighing elms and the weeping willow, where, in the misty twilight of the year, noiselessly upon his breast shall fall the deaf leaf, while the silent tear of the gray autumnal sky will come and sink into the yellow grass above his head.
Bill Nye.
Bill Nye's Advice Bag
ANXIOUS QUESTIONS ANSWERED
PRESIDENT CLEVELAND'S CHILLING NEGLECT OF AN EDITOR DENOUNCED – THE WOMAN IN THE SLEEPING COACH – CALM REASONING DEALT OUT
ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS
"Ghoulish Glee," Bucyrus, O., writes: "For two years I have been sending a copy of my paper, the 'Palladium and Observer' to President Cleveland. Although I have criticised his administration editorially several times, I have done so with the best of motives and certainly for his good. If he was angry with me for this, he surely has never so expressed himself to me, but last August I sent him a bill for his paper covering two years and over, and he has not answered my letter up to this date. Will you answer this through the columns of the Daily News telling me what I had better do, and so that others who may be in the same fix can understand what your advice would be in such a case?"
Stop his paper. By all means deprive him of the paper. You should have done so before. Then you will feel perfectly free to criticise his administration to the bitter end.
Nothing startles a president any more than to shut off a paper that he has become attached to. Mr. Cleveland will go out and paw around in the wet grass in front of the white house, and finally he will go in, wondering what has become of the Palladium and Observer. In a week or two he will remit and tell you to continue sending the paper. Do not criticise his administration too severely till you see whether he is going to remit or not.
Early Rose, Mankato, Minn., writes: "Is it proper to mark passages in a book of poems loaned to one by a young man in whom one feels an interest, or should one be content with simply expressing one's admiration of certain passages in the book?"
I think the latter plan would be preferable, Rose. I am sure that young ladies make a great mistake when they mark the earnest and impassioned passages in a book of poems belonging to another. I once loaned a book of poems written by a gentleman named Swinburne. In this book Mr. Swinburne had several times expressed himself as being violently in love with all the works of nature, especially those people who differed with him in the matter of sex. He wrote so fluently and so earnestly regarding the matter of love that I loaned the book to a young lady, hoping that she would take this as a vicarious expression of my sentiments. It was a costly book, and so when it came back with Mr. Swinburne's sentiments emphasized by means of a blue pencil, and his earnest thoughts underscored with a crochet hook, punctuated with tears, and stabbed with a hair-pin, I regretted it very much. I was led to believe, also, by rereading the book, that she was in the habit of perusing it at the breakfast table, and that she was a victim of the omelet habit.
Do not mark a borrowed book unless you have more friends than you can avail yourself of.
Savant, Tailholt, Ind.: You can get Indian arrow-heads now almost anywhere except on the frontier. A good hand-made Indian arrow head is now made in Connecticut, and the prices are not exorbitant. I believe that if you can get manufacturers' rates, delivered on board the cars at New Haven, you can secure enough Indian arrow-heads for $25 to fresco the sides of a house. See that the name of the manufacturer is burned in the shank of each.
You will have no more trouble in securing Indian skulls. The manufacture of Indian skulls has not arrived at that degree of perfection which we hope for it in the future. You can get an Indian skull made of celluloid now that looks quite nice and ghastly, or you can secure a bear's nose made of hard rubber, with pores in it and little drops of perspiration standing out on it. These noses have been used with great success in securing bounty in the New England states, and several counties in Maine have a large stock of rubber bear noses on which they have paid large bounties, and which they would now sell at a great sacrifice.
Aztec pottery excavated from old mounds in the southwest can now be purchased in any large city or made to order at the leading potteries of the country.
Niagarn Plummer, Tutewler's Crossing, Tenn., asks: "Is it proper to use the following expression, which was made in our colored debating society three weeks ago? If you will answer this inquiry you will confer a blessing on two young ladies who's got a bet up on the question. The expression we agree was as follows:
'He's entitled to pay me for them pair of license.'
"I claim that the word 'them' should be 'those,' while my friend Miss Bonesette Jackson says that the sentence is correct. Which is incorrect?"
Where both have done so well it is hard to say which is the more incorrect. I will withhold my opinion till your debating society puts in an evening devoted to the discussion of this question. Please let me know when it will occur, as I would like to be there.
Etiquette, Chicago, Ill., asks: "Will you answer through the columns of the Daily News what remedy you would prescribe for the great nuisance while traveling of being compelled to wait all the forenoon for the female fiend who monopolizes one end of the sleeping car half of the time and the other end of the car the other half. I am a lady, and nothing tends to discourage my efforts in trying to continue such like this constant contact with the average female brute who bolts herself into the ladies' dressing room in a sleeper and remains there all the forenoon calcimining her purple nose and striving to beautify her chaotic features. Do tell us what you would suggest."
That is a question I have been called upon to settle before, but I am still worrying over it. I do not think we ought to fritter away our time on the tariff and other remote matters until we have, once for all, met and settled this vital question which lies so near to every heart.
I have seen a large woman take her teeth in one hand and a shawl-strap full of hair in the other and adjourn to the ladies' dressing room at Camp Douglas and finally emerge therefrom, with a smooch of prepared chalk over each eye, at Winona. All that time half a dozen ladies in the car gnawed their under lips and tried to look happy. I have known a timid young lady to lose her breakfast because this same ogress, with bristles along the back of her neck, as usual moved into the dressing-room and lived there till the train reached its destination and the dining-car was detached.
Some day this dressing-room will be made on the plan of a large concertina, operated by means of clockwork, and after this venerable hyena has laundered herself and primped and beautified and upholstered herself and waxed her mustache, and insulted the plate-glass mirror for an hour or two by constantly compelling it to reflect her features, the walls of the apartment will gradually approach each other, and when that woman is removed she will look like the battle of Gettysburg.