Anatomy.
The word anatomy is derived from two Greek spatters and three polywogs,
which, when translated, signify “up through” and “to cut,” so that anatomy
actually, when translated from the original wappy-jawed Greek, means to
cut up through. That is no doubt the reason why the medical student
proceeds to cut up through the entire course.
[Illustration: STUDYING ANATOMY.]
Anatomy is so called because its best results are obtained from the
cutting or dissecting of organism. For that reason there is a growing
demand in the neighborhood of the medical college for good second-hand
organisms. Parties having well preserved organisms that they are not
actually using, will do well to call at the side door of the medical
college after 10 P.M.
The branch of the comparative anatomy which seeks to trace the unities of
plan which are exhibited in diverse organisms, and which discovers, as far
as may be, the principles which govern the growth and development of
organized bodies, and which finds functional analogies and structural
homologies, is denominated philosophical or transcendental anatomy. (This
statement, though strictly true, is not original with me.)
Careful study of the human organism after death, shows traces of
functional analogies and structural homologies in people who were supposed
to have been in perfect health all their lives Probably many of those we
meet in the daily walks of life, many, too, who wear a smile and outwardly
seem happy, have either one or both of these things. A man may live a
false life and deceive his most intimate friends in the matter of
anatomical analogies or homologies, but he cannot conceal it from the
eagle eye of the medical student. The ambitious medical student makes a
specialty of true inwardness.
The study of the structure of animals is called zootomy. The attempt to
study the anatomical structure of the grizzly bear from the inside has not
been crowned with success. When the anatomizer and the bear have been
thrown together casually, it has generally been a struggle between the two
organisms to see which would make a study of the structure of the other.
Zootomy and moral suasion are not homogeneous, analogous, nor indigenous.
Vegetable anatomy is called phytonomy, sometimes. But it would not be safe
to address a vigorous man by that epithet. We may call a vegetable that,
however, and be safe.
Human anatomy is that branch of anatomy which enters into the description
of the structure and geographical distribution of the elements of a human
being. It also applies to the structure of the microbe that crawls out of
jail every four years just long enough to whip his wife, vote and go back
again.
Human anatomy is either general, specific, topographical or surgical.
Those terms do not imply the dissection and anatomy of generals,
specialists, topographers and surgeons, as they might seem to imply, but
really mean something else. I would explain here what they actually do
mean if I had more room and knew enough to do it.
Anatomists divide their science, as well as their subjects, into
fragments. Osteology treats of the skeleton, myology of the muscles,
angiology of the blood vessels, splanchology the digestive organs or
department of the interior, and so on.
People tell pretty tough stories of the young carvists who study anatomy
on subjects taken from life. I would repeat a few of them here, but they
are productive of insomnia, so I will not give them.
I visited a matinee of this kind once for a short time, but I have not
been there since. When I have a holiday now, the idea of spending it in
the dissecting-room of a large and flourishing medical college does not
occur to me.
I never could be a successful surgeon, I fear. While I have no hesitation
about mutilating the English, I have scruples about cutting up other
nationalities. I should always fear, while pursuing my studies, that I
might be called upon to dissect a friend, and I could not do that. I
should like to do anything that would advance the cause of science, but I
should not want to form the habit of dissecting people, lest some day I
might be called upon to dissect a friend for whom I had a great
attachment, or some creditor who had an attachment for me.
[Illustration]
Mr. Sweeney's Cat.
Robert Ormsby Sweeney is a druggist of St. Paul, and though a recent
chronological record reveals the fact that he is a direct descendant of a
sure-enough king, and though there is mighty good purple, royal blood in
his veins that dates back where kings used to have something to do to earn
their salary, he goes right on with his regular business, selling drugs at
the great sacrifice which druggists will make sometimes in order to place
their goods within the reach of all.
As soon as I learned that Mr. Sweeney had barely escaped being a crowned
head, I got acquainted with him and tried to cheer him up, and I told him
that people wouldn't hold him in any way responsible, and that as it
hadn't shown itself in his family for years he might perhaps finally wear
it out.
He is a mighty pleasant man to meet, anyhow, and you can have just as much
fun with him as you could with a man who didn't have any royal blood in
his veins. You could be with him for days on a fishing trip and never
notice it at all.
But I was going to speak more in particular about Mr. Sweeney's cat. Mr.
Sweeney had a large cat, named Dr. Mary Walker, of which he was very fond.
Dr. Mary Walker remained at the drug store all the time, and was known all
over St. Paul as a quiet and reserved cat. If Dr. Mary Walker took in the
town after office hours, nobody seemed to know anything about it. She
would be around bright and cheerful the next morning and attend to her
duties at the store just as though nothing whatever had happened.
One day last summer Mr. Sweeney left a large plate of fly-paper with water
on it in the window, hoping to gather in a few quarts of flies in a
deceased state. Dr. Mary Walker used to go to this window during the
afternoon and look out on the busy street while she called up pleasant
memories of her past life. That afternoon she thought she would call up
some more memories, so she went over on the counter and from there jumped
down on the window-sill, landing with all four feet in the plate of
fly-paper.
At first she regarded it as a joke, and treated the matter very lightly,
but later on she observed that the fly-paper stuck to her feet with great
tenacity of purpose. Those who have never seen the look of surprise and
deep sorrow that a cat wears when she finds herself glued to a whole sheet
of fly-paper, cannot fully appreciate the way Dr. Mary Walker felt. She
did not dash wildly through a $150 plate-glass window, as some cats would
have done. She controlled herself and acted in the coolest manner, though
you could have seen that mentally she suffered intensely. She sat down a
moment to more fully outline a plan for the future. In doing so, she made
a great mistake. The gesture resulted in glueing the fly-paper to her
person in such a way that the edge turned up behind in the most abrupt
manner, and caused her great inconvenience.
[Illustration: AT FIRST SHE REGARDED IT AS A JOKE.]
Some one at that time laughed in a coarse and heartless way, and I wish
you could have seen the look of pain that Dr. Mary Walker gave him.
Then she went away. She did not go around the prescription case as the
rest of us did, but strolled through the middle of it, and so on out
through the glass door at the rear of the store. We did not see her go
through the glass door, but we found pieces of fly-paper and fur on the
ragged edges of a large aperture in the glass, and we kind of jumped at
the conclusion that Dr. Mary Walker had taken that direction in retiring
from the room.
Dr. Mary Walker never returned to St. Paul, and her exact whereabouts are
not known, though every effort was made to find her. Fragments of flypaper
and brindle hair were found as far west as the Yellowstone National Park,
and as far north as the British line, but the doctor herself was not
found. My own theory is, that if she turned her bow to the west so as to
catch the strong easterly gale on her quarter, with the sail she had set
and her tail pointing directly toward the zenith, the chances for Dr. Mary
Walker's immediate return are extremely slim.
[Illustration]
The Heyday of Life.
There will always be a slight difference in the opinions of the young and
the mature, relative to the general plan on which the solar system should
be operated, no doubt. There are also points of disagreement in other
matters, and it looks as though there always would be.
To the young the future has a more roseate hue. The roseate hue comes
high, but we have to use it in this place. To the young there spreads out
across the horizon a glorious range of possibilities. After the youth has
endorsed for an intimate friend a few times, and purchased the paper at
the bank himself later on, the horizon won't seem to horizon so
tumultuously as it did aforetime. I remember at one time of purchasing
such a piece of accommodation paper at a bank, and I still have it. I
didn't need it any more than a cat needs eleven tails at one and the same
time. Still the bank made it an object for me, and I secured it. Such
things as these harshly knock the flush and bloom off the cheek of youth,
and prompt us to turn the strawberry box bottom side up before we purchase
it.
Youth is gay and hopeful, age is covered with experience and scars where
the skin has been knocked off and had to grow on again. To the young a
dollar looks large and strong, but to the middle-aged and the old it is
weak and inefficient.
When we are in the heyday and fizz of existence, we believe everything;
but after awhile we murmur: “What's that you are givin' us,” or words of
like character. Age brings caution and a lot of shop-worn experience,
purchased at the highest market price. Time brings vain regrets and wisdom
teeth that can be left in a glass of water over night.
Still we should not repine. If people would repine less and try harder to
get up an appetite by persweating in someone's vineyard at so much per
diem, it would be better. The American people of late years seem to have a
deeper and deadlier repugnance for mannish industry, and there seems to be
a growing opinion that our crops are more abundant when saturated with
foreign perspiration. European sweat, if I may be allowed to use such a
low term, is very good in its place, but the native-born Duke of Dakota,
or the Earl of York State should remember that the matter of perspiration
and posterity should not be left solely to the foreigner.
There are too many Americans who toil not, neither do they spin. They
would be willing to have an office foisted upon them, but they would
rather blow their so-called brains out than to steer a pair of large
steel-gray mules from day to day. They are too proud to hoe corn, for fear
some great man will ride by and see the termination of their shirts
extending out through the seats of their pantaloons, but they are not too
proud to assign their shattered finances to a friend and their shattered
remains to the morgue.
Pride is all right if it is the right kind, but the pride that prompts a
man to kill his mother, because she at last refuses to black his boots any
more, is an erroneous pride. The pride that induces a man to muss up the
carpet with his brains because there is nothing left for him to do but to
labor, is the kind that Lucifer had when he bolted the action of the
convention and went over to the red-hot minority.
Youth is the spring-time of life. It is the time to acquire information,
so that we may show it off in after years and paralyze people with what we
know. The wise youth will “lay low” till he gets a whole lot of knowledge,
and then in later days turn it loose in an abrupt manner. He will guard
against telling what he knows, a little at a time. That is unwise. I once
knew a youth who wore himself out telling people all he knew from day to
day, so that when he became a bald-headed man he was utterly exhausted and
didn't have anything left to tell anyone. Some of the things that we know
should be saved for our own use. The man who sheds all his knowledge, and
don't leave enough to keep house with, fools himself.
They Fell.
Two delegates to the General Convocation of the Sons of Ice Water were
sitting in the lobby of the Windsor, in the city of Denver, not long ago,
strangers to each other and to everybody else. One came from Huerferno
county, and the other was a delegate from the Ice Water Encampment of
Correjos county.
From the beautiful billiard hall came the sharp rattle of ivory balls, and
in the bar-room there was a glitter of electric light, cut glass, and
French plate mirrors. Out of the door came the merry laughter of the giddy
throng, flavored with fragrant Havana smoke and the delicate odor of lemon
and mirth and pine apple and cognac.
The delegate from Correjos felt lonely, and he turned to the Ice Water
representative from Huerferno:
“That was a bold and fearless speech you made this afternoon on the demon
rum at the convocation.”
“Think so?” said the sad Huerferno man.
“Yes, you entered into the description of rum's maniac till I could almost
see the red-eyed centipedes and tropical hornets in the air. How could you
describe the jimjams so graphically?”
“Well, you see, I'm a reformed drunkard. Only a little while ago I was in
the gutter.”
“So was I.”
“How long ago?”
“Week ago day after to-morrow.”
“Next Tuesday it'll be a week since I quit.”
“Well, I swan!”
“Ain't it funny?”
“Tolerable.”
“It's going to be a long, cold winter; don't you think so?”
“Yes, I dread it a good deal.”
“It's a comfort, though, to know that you never will touch rum again.”
“Yes, I am glad in my heart to-night that I am free from it. I shall never
touch rum again.”
When he said this he looked up at the other delegate, and they looked into
each other's eyes earnestly, as though each would read the other's soul.
Then the Huerferno man said:
“In fact, I never did care much for rum.”
Then there was a long pause.
Finally the Correjos man ventured: “Do you have to use an antidote to cure
the thirst?”
“Yes, I've had to rely on that a good deal at first. Probably this vain
yearning that I now feel in the pit of the bosom will disappear after
awhile.”
“Have you got any antidote with you?”
“Yes, I've got some up in 232-1/2. If you'll come up I'll give you a
dose.”
“There's no rum in it, is there?”
“No.”
Then they went up the elevator. They did not get down to breakfast, but at
dinner they stole in. The man from Huerferno dodged nervously through the
archway leading to the dining-room as though he had doubts about getting
through so small a space with his augmented head, and the man from
Correjos looked like one who had wept his eyes almost blind over the woe
that rum has wrought in our fair land.
When the waiter asked the delegate from Correjos for his dessert order,
the red-nosed Son of Ice Water said: “Bring me a cup of tea, some pudding
without wine sauce, and a piece of mince pie. You may also bring me a
corkscrew, if you please, to pull the brandy out of the mince pie with.”
Then the two reformed drunkards looked at each other, and laughed a
hoarse, bitter and joyous laugh.
At the afternoon session of the Sons of Ice Water, the Huerferno delegate
couldn't get his regalia over his head.
Second Letter to the President.
To the President.--I write this letter not on my own account, but on
behalf of a personal friend of mine who is known as a mugwump. He is a
great worker for political reform, but he cannot spell very well, so he
has asked me to write this letter. He knew that I had been thrown among
great men all my life, and that, owing to my high social position and fine
education, I would be peculiarly fitted to write you in a way that would
not call forth disagreeable remarks, and so he has given me the points and
I have arranged them for you.
In the first place, my friend desires me to convey to you, Mr. President,
in a delicate manner, and in such language as to avoid giving offense,
that he is somewhat disappointed in your Cabinet. I hate to talk this way
to a bran-new President, but my friend feels hurt and he desires that I
should say to you that he regrets your short-sighted policy. He says that
it seems to him there is very little in the course of the administration
so far to encourage a man to shake off old party ties and try to make men
better. He desires to say that after conversing with a large number of the
purest men, men who have been in both political parties off and on for
years and yet have never been corrupted by office, men who have left
convention after convention in years past because those conventions were
corrupt and endorsed other men than themselves for office, he finds that
your appointment of Cabinet officers will only please two classes, viz:
Democrats and Republicans.
[Illustration: WORKING FOR REFORM.]
Now, what do you care for an administration which will only gratify those
two old parties? Are you going to snap your fingers in disdain at men who
admit that they are superior to anybody else? Do you want history to
chronicle the fact that President Cleveland accepted the aid of the pure
and highly cultivated gentlemen who never did anything naughty or
unpretty, and then appointed his Cabinet from men who had been known for
years as rude, naughty Democrats?
My friend says that he feels sure you would not have done so if you had
fully realized how he felt about it. He claims that in the first week of
your administration you have basely truckled to the corrupt majority. You
have shown yourself to be the friend of men who never claimed to be truly
good.
If you persist in this course you will lose the respect and esteem of my
friend and another man who is politically pure, and who has never smirched
his escutcheon with an office. He has one of the cleanest and most
vigorous escutcheons in that county. He never leaves it out over night
during the summer, and in the winter he buries it in sawdust. Both of
these men will go back to the Republican party in 1888 if you persist in
the course you have thus far adopted. They would go back now if the
Republican party insisted on it.
Mr. President, I hate to write to you in this tone of voice, because I
know the pain it will give you. I once held an office myself, Mr.
President, and it hurt my feelings very much to have a warm personal
friend criticise my official acts.
The worst feature of the whole thing, Mr. President, is that it will
encourage crime. If men who never committed any crime are allowed to earn
their living by the precarious methods peculiar to manual labor, and if
those who have abstained from office for years, by request of many
citizens, are to be denied the endorsement of the administration, they
will lose courage to go on and do right in the future. My friend desires
to state vicariously, in the strongest terms, that both he and his wife
feel the same way about it, and they will not promise to keep it quiet any
longer. They feel like crippling the administration in every way they can
if the present policy is to be pursued.
He says he dislikes to begin thus early to threaten a President who has
barely taken off his overshoes and drawn his mileage, but he thinks it may
prevent a recurrence of these unfortunate mistakes. He claims that you
have totally misunderstood the principles of the mugwumps all the way
through. You seem to regard the reform movement as one introduced for the
purpose of universal benefit. This was not the case. While fully endorsing
and supporting reform, he says that they did not go into it merely to kill
time or simply for fun. He also says that when he became a reformer and
supported you, he did not think there were so many prominent Democrats who
would have claims upon you. He can only now deplore the great national
poverty of offices and the boundless wealth of raw material in the
Democratic party from which to supply even that meagre demand.
He wishes me to add, also, that you must have over-estimated the zeal of
his party for civil service reform. He says that they did not yearn for
civil service reform so much as many people seem to think.
I must now draw this letter to a close. We are all well with the exception
of colds in the head, but nothing that need give you any uneasiness. Our
large seal-brown hen last week, stimulated by a rising egg market,
over-exerted herself, and on Saturday evening, as the twilight gathered,
she yielded to a complication of pip and softening of the brain and
expired in my arms. She certainly led a most exemplary life and the forked
tongue of slander could find naught to utter against her.
Hoping that you are enjoying the same great blessing and that you will
write as often as possible without waiting for me, I remain,
Very respectfully yours,
Bill Nye.
[Dictated Letter.]
Milling in Pompeii.
While visiting Naples, last fall, I took a great interest in the wonderful
museum there, of objects that have been exhumed from the ruins of Pompeii.
It is a remarkable collection, including, among other things, the
cumbersome machinery of a large woolen factory, the receipts, contracts,
statements of sales, etc., etc., of bankers, brokers, and usurers. I was
told that the exhumist also ran into an Etruscan bucket-shop in one part
of the city, but, owing to the long, dry spell, the buckets had fallen to
pieces.
The object which engrossed my attention the most, however, was what seems
to have been a circular issued prior to the great volcanic vomit of 79
A.D., and no doubt prior even to the Christian era. As the date is torn
off however, we are left to conjecture the time at which it was issued. I
was permitted to make a copy of it, and with the aid of my hired man, I
have translated it with great care.
Office of Lucretius & Procalus,
Dealers In
Flour, Bran, Shorts, Middlings, Screenings, Etruscan Hen Feed, and Other
Choice Bric-A-Brac.
_Highest Cash Price Paid for Neapolitan Winter Wheat and Roman Corn
Why haul your Wheat through the sand to Herculaneum when we pay the same
price here?_
Office and Mill, Via VIII, Near the Stabian Gate, Only Thirteen Blocks
From the P.O., Pompeii.
Dear Sir: This circular has been called out by another one issued last
month by Messrs. Toecorneous & Chilblainicus, alleged millers and wheat
buyers of Herculaneum, in which they claim to pay a quarter to a half-cent
more per bushel than we do for wheat, and charge us with docking the
farmers around Pompeii a pound per bushel more than necessary for cockle,
wild buck-wheat, and pigeon-grass seed. They make the broad statement that
we have made all our money in that way, and claim that Mr. Lucretius, of
our mill, has erected a fine house, which the farmers allude to as the
“wild buckwheat villa.”
[Illustration: TWO OLD ROMANS.]
We do not, as a general rule, pay any attention to this kind of stuff; but
when two snide romans, who went to Herculaneum without a dollar and drank
stale beer out of an old Etruscan tomato-can the first year they were
there, assail our integrity, we feel justified in making a prompt and
final reply. We desire to state to the Roman farmers that we do not test
their wheat with the crooked brass tester that has made more money for
Messrs. Toecorneous & Chilblainicus than their old mill has. We do not do
that kind of business. Neither do we buy a man's wheat at a cash price and
then work off four or five hundred pounds of XXXX Imperial hog feed on him
in part payment. When we buy a man's wheat we pay him in money. We do not
seek to fill him up with sour Carthagenian cracked wheat and orders on the
store.
We would also call attention to the improvements that we have just made in
our mill. Last week we put a handle in the upper burr, and we have also
engaged one of the best head millers in Pompeii to turn the crank
day-times. Our old head miller will oversee the business at night, so that
the mill will be in full blast night and day, except when the head miller
has gone to his meals or stopped to spit on his hands.
The mill of our vile contemporaries at Herculaneum is an old one that was
used around Naples one hundred years ago to smash rock for the Neapolitan
road, and is entirely out of repair. It was also used in a brick-yard here
near Pompeii; then an old junk man sold it to a tenderfoot from Jerusalem
as an ice-cream freezer. He found that it would not work, and so used it
to grind up potato bugs for blisters. Now it is grinding ostensible flour
at Herculaneum.
We desire to state to the farmers about Pompeii and Herculaneum that we
aim to please. We desire to make a grade of flour this summer that will
not have to be run through the coffee mill before it can be used. We will
also pay you the highest price for good wheat, and give you good weight.
Our capacity is now greatly enlarged, both as to storage and grinding. We
now turn out a sack of flour, complete and ready for use, every little
while. We have an extra handle for the mill, so that in case of accident
to the one now in use, we need not shut down but a few moments. We call
attention to our XXXX Git-there brand of flour. It is the best flour in
the market for making angels' food and other celestial groceries. We fully
warrant it, and will agree that for every sack containing whole kernels of
corn, corncobs, or other foreign substances, not thoroughly pulverized, we
will refund the money already paid, and show the person through our mill.
[Illustration: ANCIENT ROMAN MILLER.]
We would also like to call the attention of farmers and housewives around
Pompeii to our celebrated Dough Squatter. It is purely automatic in its
operation, requiring only two men to work it. With this machine two men
will knead all the bread they can eat and do it easily, feeling thoroughly
refreshed at night. They also avoid that dark maroon taste in the mouth so
common in Pompeii on arising in the morning.
To those who do not feel able to buy one of these machines, we would say
that we have made arrangements for the approaching season, so that those
who wish may bring their dough to our mammoth squatter and get it treated
at our place at the nominal price of two bits per squat. Strangers calling
for their squat or unsquat dough, will have to be identified.
Do not forget the place, Via VIII, near Stabian gate.
Lucretius & Peocalus,
Dealers in choice family flour, cut feed and oatmeal with or without
clinkers in it. Try our lumpless bran for indigestion.
Broncho Sam.
Speaking about cowboys, Sam Stewart, known from Montana to Old Mexico as
Broncho Sam, was the chief. He was not a white man, an Indian, a greaser
or a negro, but he had the nose of an Indian warrior, the curly hair of an
African, and the courtesy and equestrian grace of a Spaniard. A wide
reputation as a “broncho breaker” gave him his name.
To master an untamed broncho and teach him to lead, to drive and to be
safely-ridden was Sam's mission during the warm weather when he was not
riding the range. His special delight was to break the war-like heart of
the vicious wild pony of the plains and make him the servant of man.
I've seen him mount a hostile “bucker,” and, clinching his italic legs
around the body of his adversary, ride him till the blood would burst from
Sam's nostrils and spatter horse and rider like rain. Most everyone knows
what the bucking of the barbarous Western horse means. The wild horse
probably learned it from the antelope, for the latter does it the same
way, i.e., he jumps straight up into the air, at the same instant
curving his back and coming down stiff-legged, with all four of his feet
in a bunch. The concussion is considerable.
I tried it once myself. I partially rode a roan broncho one spring day,
which will always be green in my memory. The day, I mean, not the broncho.
It occupied my entire attention to safely ride the cunning little beast,
and when he began to ride me I put in a minority report against it.
I have passed through an earthquake and an Indian outbreak, but I would
rather ride an earthquake without saddle or bridle than to bestride a
successful broncho eruption. I remember that I wore a large pair of
Mexican spurs, but I forgot them until the saddle turned. Then I
remembered them. Sitting down on them in an impulsive way brought them to
my mind. Then the broncho steed sat down on me, and that gave the spurs an
opportunity to make a more lasting impression on my mind.
To those who observed the charger with the double “cinch” across his back
and the saddle in front of him like a big leather corset, sitting at the
same time on my person, there must have been a tinge of amusement; but to
me it was not so frolicsome.
There may be joy in a wild gallop across the boundless plains, in the
crisp morning, on the back of a fleet broncho; but when you return with
your ribs sticking through your vest, and find that your nimble steed has
returned to town two hours ahead of you, there is a tinge of sadness about
it all.
Broncho Sam, however, made a specialty of doing all the riding himself. He
wouldn't enter into any compromise and allow the horse to ride him.
In a reckless moment he offered to bet ten dollars that he could mount and
ride a wild Texas steer. The money was put up. That settled it. Sam never
took water. This was true in a double sense. Well, he climbed the
cross-bar of the corral-gate, and asked the other boys to turn out their
best steer, Marquis of Queensbury rules.
As the steer passed out, Sam slid down and wrapped those parenthetical
legs of his around that high-headed, broad-horned brute, and he rode him
till the fleet-footed animal fell down on the buffalo grass, ran his hot
red tongue out across the blue horizon, shook his tail convulsively,
swelled up sadly and died.
It took Sam four days to walk back.
A ten-dollar bill looks as large to me as the star spangled banner, some
times; but that is an avenue of wealth that had not occurred to me.
I'd rather ride a buzz-saw at two dollars a day and found.
[Illustration: A BRONCO ERUPTION.]
How Evolution Evolves.
The following paper was read by me in a clear, resonant tone of voice,
before the Academy of Science and Pugilism at Erin Prairie, last month,
and as I have been so continually and so earnestly importuned to print it
that life was no longer desirable, I submit it to you for that purpose,
hoping that you will print my name in large caps, with astonishers at the
head of the article, and also in good display type at the close:
Some Features Of Evolution.
No one could possibly, in a brief paper, do the subject of evolution full
justice. It is a matter of great importance to our lost and undone race.
It lies near to every human heart, and exercises a wonderful influence
over our impulses and our ultimate success or failure. When we pause to
consider the opaque and fathomless ignorance of the great masses of our
fellow men on the subject of evolution, it is not surprising that crime is
rather on the increase, and that thousands of our race are annually
filling drunkards' graves, with no other visible means of support, while
multitudes of enlightened human beings are at the same time obtaining a
livelihood by meeting with felons' dooms.
These I would ask in all seriousness and in a tone of voice that would
melt the stoniest heart: “Why in creation do you do it?” The time is
rapidly approaching when there will be two or three felons for each doom.
I am sure that within the next fifty years, and perhaps sooner even than
that, instead of handing out these dooms to Tom, Dick and Harry as
formerly, every applicant for a felon's doom will have to pass through a
competitive examination, as he should do.
It will be the same with those who desire to fill drunkards' graves. The
time is almost here when all positions of profit and trust will be
carefully and judiciously handed out, and those who do not fit themselves
for those positions will be left in the lurch, whatever that may be.
It is with this fact glaring me in the face that I have consented to
appear before you to-day and lay bare the whole hypothesis, history, rise
and fall, modifications, anatomy, physiology and geology of evolution. It
is for this that I have poured over such works as Huxley, Herbert Spencer,
Moses in the bulrushes, Anaxagoras, Lucretius and Hoyle. It is for the
purpose of advancing the cause of common humanity and to jerk the rising
generation out of barbarism into the dazzling effulgence of clashing
intellects and fermenting brains that I have sought the works of
Pythagoras, Democritus and Epluribus. Whenever I could find any book that
bore upon the subject of evolution, and could borrow it, I have done so
while others slept.
That is a matter which rarely enters into the minds of those who go easily
and carelessly through life. Even the general superintendent of the
Academy of Science and Pugilism here in Erin Prairie, the hotbed of a free
and untrammeled, robust democracy, does not stop to think of the midnight
and other kinds of oil that I have consumed in order to fill myself full
of information and to soak my porous mind with thought. Even the O'Reilly
College of this place, with its strong mental faculty, has not informed
itself fully relative to the great effort necessary before a lecturer may
speak clearly, accurately and exhaustingly of evolution.
And yet, here in this place, where education is rampant, and the idea is
patted on the back, as I may say; here in Erin Prairie, where progress and
some other sentiments are written on everything; here where I am
addressing you to-night for $2 and feed for my horse, I met a little child
with a bright and cheerful smile, who did not know that evolution
consisted in a progress from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous.
So you see that you never know where ignorance lurks. The hydra-headed
upas tree and bete noir of self-acting progress, is such ignorance as
that, lurking in the very shadow of magnificent educational institutions
and hard words of great cast. Nothing can be more disagreeable to the
scientist than a bete noir. Nothing gives him greater satisfaction than to
chase it up a tree or mash it between two shingles.
For this reason, as I said, it gives me great pleasure to address you on
the subject of evolution, and to go into details in speaking of it. I
could go on for hours as I have been doing, delighting you with the
intricacies and peculiarities of evolution, but I must desist. It would
please me to do so, and you would no doubt remain patiently and listen,
but your business might suffer while you were away, and so I will close,
but I hope that anyone now within the sound of my voice, and in whose
breast a sudden hunger for more light on this great subject may have
sprung up, will feel perfectly free to call on me and ask me about it or
immerse himself in the numerous tomes that I have collected from friends,
and which relate to this matter.
In closing I wish to say that I have made no statements in this paper
relative to evolution which I am not prepared to prove; and, if anything,
I have been over-conservative. For that reason I say now, that the person
who doubts a single fact as I have given it to-night, bearing upon the
great subject of evolution, will have to do so over my dumb remains.
And a man who will do that is no gentleman. I presume that many of these
statements will be snapped up and sharply criticised by other theologians
and many of our foremost thinkers, but they will do well to pause before
they draw me into a controversy, for I have other facts in relation to
evolution, and some personal reminiscences and family history, which I am
prepared to introduce, if necessary, together with ideas that I have
thought up myself. So I say to those who may hope to attract notice and
obtain notoriety by drawing me into a controversy, beware. It will be to
your interest to beware!
Hours With Great Men.
I presume that I could write an entire library of personal reminiscences
relative to the eminent people with whom I have been thrown during a busy
life, but I hate to do it, because I always regarded such things as sacred
from the vulgar eye, and I felt bound to respect the confidence of a
prominent man just as much as I would that of one who was less before the
people. I remember very well my first meeting with General W.T. Sherman.
I would not mention it here if it were not for the fact that the people
seem so be yearning for personal reminiscences of great men, and that is
perfectly right, too.
It was since the war that I met General Sherman, and it was on the line of
the Union Pacific Railway, at one of those justly celebrated
eating-houses, which I understand are now abandoned. The colored waiter
had cut off a strip of the omelette with a pair of shears, the scorched
oatmeal had been passed around, the little rubber door mats fried in
butter and called pancakes had been dealt around the table, and the
cashier at the end of the hall had just gone through the clothes of a
party from Vermont, who claimed a rebate on the ground that the waiter had
refused to bring him anything but his bill. There was no sound in the
dining-room except the weak request of the coffee for more air and
stimulants, or perhaps the cry of pain when the butter, while practicing
with the dumb-bells, would hit a child on the head; then all would be
still again.
General Sherman sat at one end of the table, throwing a life-preserver to
a fly in the milk pitcher.
We had never met before, though for years we had been plodding along
life's rugged way--he in the war department, I in the postoffice
department. Unknown to each other, we had been holding up opposite corners
of the great national fabric, if you will allow me that expression.
I remember, as well as though it were but yesterday, how the conversation
began. General Sherman looked sternly at me and said:
“I wish you would overpower that butter and send it up this way.”
“All right,” said I, “if you will please pass those molasses.”
That was all that was said, but I shall never forget it, and probably he
never will. The conversation was brief, but yet how full of food for
thought! How true, how earnest, how natural! Nothing stilted or false
about it. It was the natural expression of two minds that were too great
to be verbose or to monkey with social, conversational flapdoodle.
[Illustration: AN ENCOUNTER WITH THE BUTTER.]
I remember, once, a great while ago, I was asked by a friend to go with
him in the evening to the house of an acquaintance, where they were going
to have a kind of musicale, at which there was to be some noted pianist,
who had kindly consented to play a few strains, I did not get the name of
the professional, but I went, and when the first piece was announced I saw
that the light was very uncertain, so I kindly volunteered to get a lamp
from another room. I held that big lamp, weighing about twenty-nine
pounds, for half an hour, while the pianist would tinky tinky up on the
right hand, or bang, boomy to bang down on the bass, while he snorted and
slugged that old concert grand piano and almost knocked its teeth down its
throat, or gently dawdled with the keys like a pale moonbeam shimmering
through the bleached rafters of a deceased horse, until at last there was
a wild jangle, such as the accomplished musician gives to an instrument to
show the audience that he has disabled the piano, and will take a slight
intermission while it is sent to the junk shop.
With a sigh of relief I carefully put down the twenty-nine pound lamp, and
my friend told me that I had been standing there like liberty enlightening
the world, and holding that heavy lamp for Blind Tom.
I had never seen him before, and I slipped out of the room before he had a
chance to see me.
Concerning Coroners.
I am glad to notice that in the East there is a growing disfavor in the
public mind for selecting a practicing physician for the office of
coroner. This matter should have attracted attention years ago. Now it
gratifies me to notice a finer feeling on the part of the people, and an
awakening of those sensibilities which go to make life more highly prized
and far more enjoyable.
I had the misfortune at one time to be under the medical charge of a
coroner who had graduated from a Chicago morgue and practiced medicine
along with his inquest business with the most fiendish delight. I do not
know which he enjoyed best, holding the inquest or practicing on his
patient and getting the victim ready for the quest.
One day he wrote out a prescription and left it for me to have filled. I
was surprised to find that he had made a mistake and left a rough draft of
the verdict in my own case and a list of jurors which he had made in
memorandum, so as to be ready for the worst. I was alarmed, for I did not
know that I was in so dangerous a condition. He had the advantage of me,
for he knew just what he was giving me, and how long human life could be
sustained under his treatment. I did not.
That is why I say that the profession of medicine should not be allowed to
conflict with the solemn duties of the coroner. They are constantly
clashing and infringing upon each other's territory. This coroner had a
kind of tread-softly-bow-the-head way of getting around the room that made
my flesh creep. He had a way, too, when I was asleep, of glancing
hurriedly through the pockets of my pantaloons as they hung over a chair,
probably to see what evidence he could find that might aid the jury in
arriving at a verdict. Once I woke up and found him examining a draft that
he had found in my pocket. I asked him what he was doing with my funds,
and he said that he thought he detected a draft in the room and he had
just found out where it came from.
After that I hoped that death would come to my relief as speedily as
possible. I felt that death would be a happy release from the cold touch
of the amateur coroner and pro tem physician. I could look forward with
pleasure, and even joy, to the moment when my physician would come for the
last time in his professional capacity and go to work on me officially.
Then the county would be obliged to pay him, and the undertaker could take
charge of the fragments left by the inquest.
The duties of the physician are with the living, those of the coroner with
the dead. No effort, therefore, should be made to unite them. It is in
violation of all the finer feelings of humanity. When the physician
decides that his tendencies point mostly toward immortality and the names
of his patients are nearly all found on the moss-covered stones of the
cemetery, he may abandon the profession with safety and take hold of
politics. Then, should his tastes lead him to the inquest, let him
gravitate toward the office of coroner; but the two should not be united.
No man ought to follow his fellow down the mysterious river that defines
the boundary between the known and the unknown, and charge him
professionally till his soul has fled, and then charge a per diem to the
county for prying into his internal economy and holding an inquest over
the debris of mortality. I therefore hail this movement with joy and wish
to encourage it in every way. It points toward a degree of enlightenment
which will be in strong contrast with the darker and more ignorant epochs
of time, when the practice of medicine was united with the profession of
the barber, the well-digger, the farrier, the veterinarian or the coroner.
Why, this physician plenipotentiary and coroner extraordinary that I have
referred to, didn't know when he got a call whether to take his morphine
syringe or his venire for a jury. He very frequently went to see a patient
with a lung tester under one arm and the revised statutes under the other.
People never knew when they saw him going to a neighbor's house, whether
the case had yielded to the coroner's treatment or not. No one ever knew
just when over-taxed nature would yield to the statutes in such case made
and provided.
When the jury was impanelled, however, we always knew that the medical
treatment had been successfully fatal.
Once he charged the county with an inquest he felt sure of, but in the
night the patient got delirious, eluded his nurse, the physician and
coroner, and fled to the foot-hills, where he was taken care of and
finally recovered.
The experiences of some of the patients who escaped from this man read
more like fiction than fact. One man revived during the inquest, knocked
the foreman of the jury through the window, kicked the coroner in the
stomach, fed him a bottle of violet ink, and, with a shriek of laughter,
fled. He is now traveling under an assumed name with a mammoth circus,
feeding his bald head to the African lion twice a day at $9 a week and
found.
[Illustration]
Down East Rum.
Rum has always been a curse to the State of Maine. The steady fight that
Maine has made, for a century past, against decent rum, has been worthy of
a better cause.
Who hath woe? who hath sorrow and some more things of that kind? He that
monkeyeth with Maine rum; he that goeth to seek emigrant rum.
In passing through Maine the tourist is struck with the ever-varying
styles of mystery connected with the consumption of rum.
In Denver your friend says: “Will you come with me and shed a tear?” or
“Come and eat a clove with me.”
In Salt Lake City a man once said to me: “William, which would you rather
do, take a dose of Gentile damnation down here on the corner, or go over
across the street and pizen yourself with some real old Mormon Valley tan,
made last week from ground feed and prussic acid?” I told him that I had
just been to dinner, and the doctor had forbidden my drinking any more,
and that I had promised several people on their death beds never to touch
liquor, and besides, I had just taken a large drink, so he would have to
excuse me.
But in Maine none of these common styles of invitation prevail. It is all
shrouded in mystery. You give the sign of distress to any member in good
standing, pound three times on the outer gate, give two hard kicks and one
soft one on the inner door, give the password, “Rutherford B. Hayes,” turn
to the left, through a dark passage, turn the thumbscrew of a mysterious
gas fixture 90 deg. to the right, holding the goblet of the encampment
under the gas fixture, then reverse the thumbscrew, shut your eyes, insult
your digester, leave twenty-five cents near the gas fixture, and hunt up
the nearest cemetery, so that you will not have to be carried very far.
If a man really wants to drink himself into a drunkard's grave, he can
certainly save time by going to Maine. Those desiring the most prompt and
vigorous style of jim-jams at cut rates will do well to examine Maine
goods before going elsewhere. Let a man spend a week in Boston, where the
Maine liquor law, I understand, is not in force, and then, with no warning
whatever, be taken into the heart of Maine; let him land there a stranger
and a partial orphan, with no knowledge of the underground methods of
securing a drink, and to him the world seems very gloomy, very sad, and
extremely arid.
At the Bangor depot a woman came up to me and addressed me. She was rather
past middle age, a perfect lady in her manners, but a little full.
I said: “Madam, I guess you will have to excuse me. You have the
advantage. I can't just speak your name at this moment. It has been now
thirty years since I left Maine, a child two years old. So people have
changed. You've no idea how people have grown out of my knowledge. I don't
see but you look just as young as you did when I went away, but I'm a poor
hand to remember names, so I can't just call you to mind.”
She was perfectly ladylike in her manner, but a little bit drunk. It is
singular how drunken people will come hundreds of miles to converse with
me. I have often been alluded to as the “drunkard's friend.” Men have been
known to get intoxicated and come a long distance to talk with me on some
subject, and then they would lean up against me and converse by the hour.
A drunken man never seems to get tired of talking with me. As long as I am
willing to hold such a man up and listen to him, he will stand and tell me
about himself with the utmost confidence, and, no matter who goes by, he
does not seem to be ashamed to have people see him talking with me.
[Illustration: THAT BUTTONHOLE.]
I once had a friend who was very much liked by every one, so he drifted
into politics. For seven years he tried to live on free whiskey and
popular approval, but it wrecked him at last. Finally he formed the habit
of meeting me every day and explaining it to me, and giving me free
exhibitions of a breath that he had acquired at great expense. After he
got so feeble that he could not walk any more, this breath of his used to
pull him out of bed and drag him all over town. It don't seem hardly
possible, but it is so. I can show you the town yet.
He used to take me by the buttonhole when he conversed with me. This is a
diagram of the buttonhole.
If I had a son I would warn him against trying to subsist solely on
popular approval and free whiskey. It may do for a man engaged solely in
sedentary pursuits, but it is not sufficient in cases of great muscular
exhaustion. Free whiskey and popular approval on an empty stomach are
highly injurious.
Railway Etiquette.
Many people have traveled all their lives and yet do not know how to
behave themselves when on the road. For the benefit and guidance of such,
these few crisp, plain, horse-sense rules of etiquette have been framed.
In traveling by rail on foot, turn to the right on discovering an
approaching train. If you wish the train to turn out, give two loud toots
and get in between the rails, so that you will not muss up the right of
way. Many a nice, new right of way has been ruined by getting a pedestrian
tourist spattered all over its first mortgage.
On retiring at night on board the train, do not leave your teeth in the
ice-water tank. If every one should do so, it would occasion great
confusion in case of wreck. It would also cause much annoyance and delay
during the resurrection. Experienced tourists tie a string to their teeth
and retain them during the night.
If you have been reared in extreme poverty, and your mother supported you
until you grew up and married, so that your wife could support you, you
will probably sit in four seats at the same time, with your feet extended
into the aisles so that you can wipe them off on other people, while you
snore with your mouth open clear to your shoulder blades.
If you are prone to drop to sleep and breathe with a low death rattle,
like the exhaust of a bath tub, it would be a good plan to tie up your
head in a feather bed and then insert the whole thing in the linen closet;
or, if you cannot secure that, you might stick it out of the window and
get it knocked off against a tunnel. The stockholders of the road might
get mad about it, but you could do it in such a way that they wouldn't
know whose head it was.
Ladies and gentlemen should guard against traveling by rail while in a
beastly state of intoxication.
In the dining car, while eating, do not comb your moustache with your
fork. By all means do not comb your moustache with the fork of another. It
is better to refrain altogether from combing the moustache with a fork
while traveling, for the motion of the train might jab the fork into your
eye and irritate it.
If your desert is very hot and you do not discover it until you have
burned the rafters out of the roof of your mouth, do not utter a wild yell
of agony and spill your coffee all over a total stranger, but control
yourself, hoping to know more next time.
In the morning is a good time to find out how many people have succeeded
in getting on the passenger train, who ought to be in the stock car.
Generally, you will find one male and one female. The male goes into the
wash room, bathes his worthless carcass from daylight until breakfast
time, walking on the feet of any man who tries to wash his face during
that time. He wipes himself on nine different towels, because when he gets
home, he knows he will have to wipe his face on an old door mat. People
who have been reared on hay all their lives, generally want to fill
themselves full of pie and colic when they travel.
The female of this same mammal, goes into the ladies' department and
remains there until starvation drives her out. Then the real ladies have
about thirteen seconds apiece in which to dress.
If you never rode in a varnished car before, and never expect to again,
you will probably roam up and down the car, meandering over the feet of
the porter while he is making up the berths. This is a good way to let
people see just how little sense you had left after your brain began to
soften.
In traveling, do not take along a lot of old clothes that you know you
will never wear.
B. Franklin, Deceased.
Benjamin Franklin, formerly of Boston, came very near being an only child.
If seventeen children had not come to bless the home of Benjamin's
parents, they would have been childless. Think of getting up in the
morning and picking out your shoes and stockings from among seventeen
pairs of them. Imagine yourself a child, gentle reader, in a family where
you would be called upon, every morning, to select your own cud of spruce
gum from a collection of seventeen similar cuds stuck on a window sill.
And yet B. Franklin never murmured or repined. He desired to go to sea,
and to avoid this he was apprenticed to his brother James, who was a
printer. It is said that Franklin at once took hold of the great
Archimedean lever, and jerked it early and late in the interests of
freedom. It is claimed that Franklin at this time invented the deadly
weapon known as the printer's towel. He found that a common crash towel
could be saturated with glue, molasses, antimony, concentrated lye, and
roller composition, and that after a few years of time and perspiration it
would harden so that the “Constant Reader” or “Veritas” could be stabbed
with it and die soon.
[Illustration: A DEADLY ONSLAUGHT.]
Many believe that Franklin's other scientific experiments were productive
of more lasting benefit to mankind than this, but I do not agree with
them.
This paper was called the _New England Courant_. It was edited jointly by
James and Benjamin Franklin, and was started to supply a long-felt want.
Benjamin edited a part of the time and James a part of the time. The idea
of having two editors was not for the purpose of giving volume to the
editorial page, but it was necessary for one to run the paper while the
other was in jail. In those days you couldn't sass the king, and then,
when the king came in the office the next day and stopped his paper, and
took out his ad., you couldn't put it off on “our informant” and go right
along with the paper. You had to go to jail, while your subscribers
wondered why their paper did not come, and the paste soured in the tin
dippers in the sanctum, and the circus passed by on the other side.
[Illustration: STOPPING HIS PAPER.]
How many of us to-day, fellow journalists, would be willing to stay in
jail while the lawn festival and the kangaroo came and went? Who, of all
our company, would go to a prison cell for the cause of freedom while a
double-column ad. of sixteen aggregated circuses, and eleven congresses of
ferocious beasts, fierce and fragrant from their native lair, went by us?
At the age of 17, Ben got disgusted with his brother, and went to
Philadelphia and New York, where he got a chance to “sub” for a few weeks,
and then got a regular “sit.” Franklin was a good printer, and finally got
to be a foreman. He made an excellent foreman, sitting by the hour in the
composing room and spitting on the stone, while he cussed the make-up and
press work of the other papers. Then he would go into the editorial rooms
and scare the editors to death with a wild shriek for more copy. He knew
just how to conduct himself as a foreman, so that strangers would think he
owned the paper.
In 1730, at the age of 24, Franklin married and established the
_Pennsylvania Gazette_. He was then regarded as a great man, and most
everyone took his paper. Franklin grew to be a great journalist, and
spelled hard words with great fluency. He never tried to be a humorist in
any of his newspaper work, and everybody respected him.
Along about 1746 he began to study the construction and habits of
lightning, and inserted a local in his paper, in which he said that he
would be obliged to any of his readers who might notice any new or odd
specimens of lightning, if they would send them into the _Gazette_ office
by express for examination. Every time there was a thunder storm, Franklin
would tell the foreman to edit the paper, and, armed with a string and an
old fruit jar, he would go out on the hills and get enough lightning for a
mess.
[Illustration: “HOW'S TRADE?”]
In 1753 Franklin was made postmaster-general of the colonies. He made a
good postmaster-general, and people say there were less mistakes in
distributing their mail than there has ever been since. If a man mailed a
letter in those days, old Ben Franklin saw that it went where it was
addressed.
Franklin frequently went over to England in those days, partly on
business, and partly to shock the king. He used to delight in going to the
castle with his breeches tucked in his boots, figuratively speaking, and
attract a good deal of attention. It looked odd to the English, of course,
to see him come into the royal presence, and, leaving his wet umbrella up
against the throne, ask the king: “How's trade?” Franklin never put on any
frills, but he was not afraid of a crowned head. He used to say,
frequently, that to him a king was no more than a seven spot.
He did his best to prevent the Revolutionary war, but he couldn't do it,
Patrick Henry had said that the war was inevitable, and given it
permission to come, and it came. He also went to Paris and got acquainted
with a few crowned heads there. They thought a good deal of him in Paris,
and offered him a corner lot if he would build there and start a paper.
They also promised him the county printing, but he said no, he would have
to go back to America, or his wife might get uneasy about him.
Franklin wrote “Poor Richard's Almanac” in 1732-57, and it was republished
in England. Benjamin Franklin had but one son, and his name was William.
William was an illegitimate son, and, though he lived to be quite an old
man, he never got over it entirely, but continued to be but an
illegitimate son all his life. Everybody urged him to do differently, but
he steadily refused to do so.
Life Insurance as a Health Restorer.
Life insurance is a great thing. I would not be without it. My health is
greatly improved since I got my new policy. Formerly I used to have a
seal-brown taste in my mouth when I arose in the morning, but that has
entirely disappeared. I am more hopeful and happy, and my hair is getting
thicker on top. I would not try to keep house without life insurance. Last
September I was caught in one of the most destructive cyclones that ever
visited a republican form of government. A great deal of property was
destroyed and many lives were lost, but I was spared. People who had no
insurance were mowed down on every hand, but aside from a broken leg I was
entirely unharmed.
[Illustration: PROTECTED BY LIFE INSURANCE.]
I look upon life insurance as a great comfort, not only to the
beneficiary, but to the insured, who very rarely lives to realize anything
pecuniarily from his venture. Twice I have almost raised my wife to
affluence and cast a gloom over the community in which I lived, but
something happened to the physician for a few days so that he could not
attend to me, and I recovered. For nearly two years I was under the
doctor's care. He had his finger on my pulse or in my pocket all the time.
He was a young western physician, who attended me on Tuesdays and Fridays.
The rest of the week he devoted his medical skill to horses that were
mentally broken down. He said he attended me largely for my society. I
felt flattered to know that he enjoyed my society after he had been thrown
among horses all the week that had much greater advantages than I.
My wife at first objected seriously to an insurance on my life, and said
she would never, never touch a dollar of the money if I were to die, but
after I had been sick nearly two years, and my disposition had suffered a
good deal, she said that I need not delay the obsequies on that account.
But the life insurance slipped through my fingers somehow, and I
recovered.
In these days of dynamite and roller rinks, and the gory meat-ax of a new
administration, we ought to make some provision for the future.
The Opium Habit.
I have always had a horror of opiates of all kinds. They are so seductive
and so still in their operations. They steal through the blood like a wolf
on the trail, and they seize upon the heart at last with their white fangs
till it is still forever.
Up the Laramie there is a cluster of ranches at the base of the Medicine
Bow, near the north end of Sheep Mountain, and in sight of the glittering,
eternal frost of the snowy range. These ranches are the homes of the young
men from Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Ohio, and now there are several
“younger sons” of Old England, with herds of horses, steers and sheep,
worth millions of dollars. These young men are not of the kind of whom the
metropolitan ass writes as saying “youbetcherlife,” and calling everybody
“pardner.” They are many of them college graduates, who can brand a wild
Maverick or furnish the easy gestures for a Strauss waltz.
They wear human clothes, talk in the United States language, and have a
bank account. This spring they may be wearing chaparajos and swinging a
quirt through the thin air, and in July they may be at Long Branch, or
coloring a meerschaum pipe among the Alps.
Well, a young man whom we will call Curtis lived at one of these ranches
years ago, and, though a quiet, mind-your-own-business fellow, who had
absolutely no enemies among his companions, he had the misfortune to incur
the wrath of a tramp sheep-herder, who waylaid Curtis one afternoon and
shot him dead as he sat in his buggy. Curtis wasn't armed. He didn't dream
of trouble till he drove home from town, and, as he passed through the
gates of a corral, saw the hairy face of the herder, and at the same
moment the flash of a Winchester rifle. That was all.
A rancher came into town and telegraphed to Curtis' father, and then a
half dozen citizens went out to help capture the herder, who had fled to
the sage brush of the foot-hills.
They didn't get back till toward daybreak, but they brought the herder
with them, I saw him in the gray of the morning, lying in a coarse gray
blanket, on the floor of the engine house. He was dead.
I asked, as a reporter, how he came to his death, and they told me--opium!
I said, did I understand you to say “ropium?” They said no, it was opium.
The murderer had taken poison when he found that escape was impossible.
I was present at the inquest, so that I could report the case. There was
very little testimony, but all the evidence seemed to point to the fact
that life was extinct, and a verdict of death by his own hand was
rendered.
It was the first opium work I had ever seen, and it aroused my curiosity.
Death by opium, it seems, leaves a dark purple ring around the neck. I did
not know this before. People who die by opium also tie their hands
together before they die. This is one of the eccentricities of opium
poisoning that I have never seen laid down in the books. I bequeath it to
medical science. Whenever I run up against a new scientific discovery, I
just hand it right over to the public without cost.
Ever since the above incident, I have been very apprehensive about people
who seem to be likely to form the opium habit. It is one of the most
deadly of narcotics, especially in a new country. High up in the pure
mountain atmosphere, this man could not secure enough air to prolong life,
and he expired. In a land where clear, crisp air and delightful scenery
are abundant, he turned his back upon them both and passed away. Is it not
sad to contemplate?
More Paternal Correspondence.
My dear son.--I tried to write to you last week, but didn't get around to
it, owing to circumstances. I went away on a little business tower for a
few days on the cars, and then when I got home the sociable broke loose in
our once happy home.
While on my commercial tower down the Omehaw railroad buying a new
well-diggin' machine of which I had heard a good deal pro and con, I had
the pleasure of riding on one of them sleeping-cars that we read so much
about.
I am going on 50 years old, and that's the first time I ever slumbered at
the rate of forty-five miles per hour, including stops.
I got acquainted with the porter, and he blacked my boots in the night
unbeknownst to me, while I was engaged in slumber. He must have thought
that I was your father, and that we rolled in luxury at home all the time,
and that it was a common thing for us to have our boots blacked by
menials. When I left the car this porter brushed my clothes till the hot
flashes ran up my spinal column, and I told him that he had treated me
square, and I rung his hand when he held it out toards me, and I told him
that at any time he wanted a good, cool drink of buttermilk, to just
holler through our telephone. We had the sociable at our house last week,
and when I got home your mother set me right to work borryin' chairs and
dishes. She had solicited some cakes and other things. I don't know
whether you are on the skedjule by which these sociables are run or not.
The idea is a novel one to me.
The sisters in our set, onct in so often, turn their houses wrong side out
for the purpose of raising four dollars to apply on the church debt. When
I was a boy we worshiped with less frills than they do now. Now it seems
that the debt is a part of the worship.
Well, we had a good time and used up 150 cookies in a short time. Part of
these cookies was devoured and the balance was trod into our all-wool
carpet. Several of the young people got to playing Copenhagen in the
setting-room and stepped on the old cat in such a way as to disfigure him
for life. They also had a disturbance in the front room and knocked off
some of the plastering.
So your mother is feeling slim and I am not very chipper myself. I hope
that you are working hard at your books so that you will be an ornament to
society. Society is needing some ornaments very much. I sincerely hope
that you will not begin to monkey with rum. I should hate to have you with
a felon's doom or fill a drunkard's grave. If anybody has got to fill a
drunkard's grave, let him do it himself. What has the drunkard ever done
for you, that you should fill his grave for him?
[Illustration: ROUGH ON THE OLD CAT.]
I expect you to do right, as near as possible. You will not do exactly
right all the time, but try to strike a good average. I do not expect you
to let your studies encroach, too much on your polo, but try to unite the
two so that you will not break down under the strain. I should feel sad
and mortified to have you come home a physical wreck. I think one physical
wreck in a family is enough, and I am rapidly getting where I can do the
entire physical wreck business for our neighborhood.
I see by your picture that you have got one of them pleated coats with a
belt around it, and short pants. They make you look as you did when I used
to spank you in years gone by, and I feel the same old desire to do it now
that I did then. Old and feeble as I am, it seems to me as though I could
spank a boy that wears knickerbocker pants buttoned onto a Garabaldy waist
and a pleated jacket. If it wasn't for them cute little camel's hair
whiskers of yours I would not believe that you had grown to be a large,
expensive boy, grown up with thoughts. Some of the thoughts you express in
your letters are far beyond your years. Do you think them yourself, or is
there some boy in the school that thinks all the thoughts for the rest?
Some of your letters are so deep that your mother and I can hardly grapple
with them. One of them, especially, was so full of foreign stuff that you
had got out of a bill of fare, that we will have to wait till you come
home before we can take it in. I can talk a little Chippewa, but that is
all the foreign language I am familiar with. When I was young we had to
get our foreign languages the best we could, so I studied Chippewa without
a master. A Chippewa chief took me into his camp and kept me there for
some time while I acquired his language. He became so much attached to me
that I had great difficulty in coming away. I wish you would write in the
United States dialect as much as possible, and not try to paralize your
parents with imported expressions that come too high for poor people.
Remember that you are the only boy we've got, and we are only going
through the motions of living here for your sake. For us the day is
wearing out, and it is now way long into the shank of the evening. All we
ask of you is to improve on the old people. You can see where I fooled
myself, and you can do better. Read and write, and sifer, and polo, and
get nolledge, and try not to be ashamed of your uncultivated parents.
When you get that checkered little sawed-off coat on, and that pair of
knee panties, and that poker-dot necktie, and the sassy little boys holler
“rats” when you pass by, and your heart is bowed down, remember that, no
matter how foolish you may look, your parents will never sour on you.
Your Father.
Twombley's Tale.
My name is Twombley, G.O.P. Twombley is my full name and I have had a
checkered career. I thought it would be best to have my career checked
right through, so I did so.
My home is in the Wasatch Mountains. Far up, where I can see the long,
green, winding valley of the Jordan, like a glorious panorama below me, I
dwell. I keep a large herd of Angora goats. That is my business. The
Angora goat is a beautiful animal--in a picture. But out of a picture he
has a style of perspiration that invites adverse criticism.
Still, it is an independent life, and one that has its advantages, too.
When I first came to Utah, I saw one day, in Salt Lake City, a young girl
arrive. She was in the heyday of life, but she couldn't talk our language.
Her face was oval; rather longer than it was wide, I noticed, and, though
she was still young, there were traces of care and other foreign
substances plainly written there.
She was an emigrant, about seventeen years of age, and, though she had
been in Salt Lake City an hour and a half, she was still unmarried.
She was about the medium height, with blue eyes, that somehow, as you
examined them carefully in the full, ruddy light of a glorious September
afternoon, seemed to resemble each other. Both of them were that way,
I know not what gave me the courage, but I stepped to her side, and in a
low voice told her of my love and asked her to be mine.
She looked askance at me. Nobody ever did that to me before and lived to
tell the tale. But her sex made me overlook it. Had she been any other sex
that I can think of, I would have resented it. But I would not strike a
woman, especially when I had not been married to her and had no right to
do so.
I turned on my heel and I went away. I most always turn on my heel when I
go away. If I did not turn on my own heel when I went away, whose heel
would a lonely man like me turn upon?
Years rolled by. I did nothing to prevent it. Still that face came to me
in my lonely hut far up in the mountains. That look still rankled in my
memory. Before that my memory had been all right. Nothing had ever rankled
in it very much. Let the careless reader who never had his memory rankle
in hot weather, pass this by. This story is not for him.
After our first conversation we did not meet again for three years, and
then by the merest accident. I had been out for a whole afternoon, hunting
an elderly goat that had grown childish and irresponsible. He had wandered
away, and for several days I had been unable to find him. So I sought for
him till darkness found me several miles from my cabin. I realized at once
that I must hurry back, or lose my way and spend the night in the
mountains. The darkness became more rapidly obvious. My way became more
and more uncertain.
Finally I fell down an old prospect shaft. I then resolved to remain where
I was until I could decide what was best to be done. If I had known that
the prospect shaft was there, I would have gone another way. There was
another way that I could have gone, but it did not occur to me until too
late.
I hated to spend the next few weeks in the shaft, for I had not locked up
my cabin when I left it, and I feared that someone might get in while I
was absent and play on the piano. I had also set a batch of bread and two
hens that morning, and all of these would be in sad knead of me before I
could get my business into such shape that I could return.
I could not tell accurately how long I had been in the shaft, for I had no
matches by which to see my watch. I also had no watch.
All at once, someone fell down the shaft. I knew that it was a woman,
because she did not swear when she landed at the bottom. Still, this could
be accounted for in another way. She was unconscious when I picked her up.
I did not know what to do, I was perfectly beside myself, and so was she.
I had read in novels that when a woman became unconscious people generally
chafed her hands, but I did not know whether I ought to chafe the hands of
a person to whom I had never been introduced.
I could have administered alcoholic stimulants to her but I had neglected
to provide myself with them when I fell down the shaft. This should be a
warning to people who habitually go around the country without alcoholic
stimulants.
Finally she breathed a long sigh and murmured, “where am I?” I told her
that I did not know, but wherever it might be, we were safe, and that
whatever she might say to me, I would promise her, should go no farther.
Then there was a long pause.
To encourage further conversation I asked her if she did not think we had
been having a rather backward spring. She said we had, but she prophesied
a long, open fall.
Then there was another pause, after which I offered her a seat on an old
red empty powder can. Still, she seemed shy and reserved. I would make a
remark to which she would reply briefly, and then there would be a pause
of a little over an hour. Still it seemed longer.
Suddenly the idea of marriage presented itself to my mind. If we never got
out of the shaft, of course an engagement need not be announced. No one
had ever plighted his or her troth at the bottom of a prospect shaft
before. It was certainly unique, to say the least. I suggested it to her.
She demurred to this on the ground that our acquaintance had been so
brief, and that we had never been thrown together before. I told her that
this would be no objection, and that my parents were so far away that I
did not think they would make any trouble about it.
She said that she did not mind her parents so much as she did the violent
temper of her husband.
I asked her if her husband had ever indulged in polygamy. She replied that
he had, frequently. He had several previous wives. I convinced her that in
the eyes of the law, and under the Edmunds bill, she was not bound to him.
Still she feared the consequences of his wrath.
Then I suggested a desperate plan. We would elope!
I was now thirty-seven years old, and yet had never eloped. Neither had
she. So, when the first streaks of rosy dawn crept across the soft,
autumnal sky and touched the rich and royal coloring on the rugged sides
of the grim old mountains, we got out of the shaft and eloped.
On Cyclones.
I desire to state that my position as United States Cyclonist for this
Judicial District is now vacant. I resigned on the 9th day of September,
A.D. 1884.
I have not the necessary personal magnetism to look a cyclone in the eye
and make it quail. I am stern and even haughty in my intercourse with men,
but when a Manitoba simoon takes me by the brow of my pantaloons and
throws me across Township 28, Range 18, West of the 5th Principal
Meridian, I lose my mental reserve and become anxious and even taciturn.
For thirty years I had yearned to see a grown up cyclone, of the
ring-tail-puller variety, mop up the green earth with huge forest trees
and make the landscape look tired. On the 9th day of September, A.D. 1884,
my morbid curiosity was gratified.
As the people came out into the forest with lanterns and pulled me out of
the crotch of a basswood tree with a “tackle and fall,” I remember I told
them I didn't yearn for any more atmospheric phenomena. The old desire for
a hurricane that would blow a cow through a penitentiary was satiated. I
remember when the doctor pried the bones of my leg together, in order to
kind of draw my attention away from the limb, he asked me how I liked the
fall style of Zephyr in that locality.
I said it was all right, what there was of it. I said this in a tone of
bitter irony.
Cyclones are of two kinds, viz: the dark maroon cyclone; and the iron gray
cyclone with pale green mane and tail. It was the latter kind I frolicked
with on the above-named date.
My brother and I were riding along in the grand old forest, and I had just
been singing a few bars from the opera of “Whoop 'em Up, Lizzie Jane,”
when I noticed that the wind was beginning to sough through the trees.
Soon after that, I noticed that I was soughing through the trees also, and
I am really no slouch of a sougher, either, when I get started.
The horse was hanging by the breeching from the bough of a large butternut
tree, waiting for some one to come and pick him.
[Illustration: WAITING TO BE PICKED.]
I did not see my brother at first, but after a while he disengaged himself
from a rail fence and came where I was hanging, wrong end up, with my
personal effects spilling out of my pockets. I told him that as soon as
the wind kind of softened down, I wished he would go and pick the horse.
He did so, and at midnight a party of friends carried me into town on a
stretcher. It was quite an ovation. To think of a torchlight procession
coming way out there into the woods at midnight, and carrying me into town
on their shoulders in triumph! And yet I was once only a poor boy!
It shows what may be accomplished by anyone if he will persevere and
insist on living a different life.
The cyclone is a natural phenomenon, enjoying the most robust health. It
may be a pleasure for a man with great will power and an iron constitution
to study more carefully into the habits of the cyclone, but as far as I am
concerned, individually, I could worry along some way if we didn't have a
phenomenon in the house from one year's end to another.
As I sit here, with my leg in a silicate of soda corset, and watch the
merry throng promenading down the street, or mingling in the giddy
torchlight procession, I cannot repress a feeling toward a cyclone that
almost amounts to disgust.
The Arabian Language.
The Arabian language belongs to what is called the Semitic or Shemitic
family of languages, and, when written, presents the appearance of a
general riot among the tadpoles and wrigglers of the United States.
The Arabian letter “jeem” or “jim,” which corresponds with our J,
resembles some of the spectacular wonders seen by the delirium tremons
expert. I do not know whether that is the reason the letter is called jeem
or jim, or not.
The letter “sheen” or “shin,” which is some like our “sh” in its effect,
is a very pretty letter, and enough of them would make very attractive
trimming for pantalets or other clothing. The entire Arabic alphabet, I
think, would work up first-rate into trimming for aprons, skirts, and so
forth.
Still it is not so rich in variety as the Chinese language. A Chinaman who
desires to publish a paper in order to fill a long felt want, must have a
small fortune in order to buy himself an alphabet. In this country we get
a press, and then, if we have any money left, we lay it out in type; but
in China the editor buys himself an alphabet and then regards the press as
a mere annex. If you go to a Chinese type maker and ask him to show you
his goods, he will ask you whether you want a two or a three story
alphabet.
The Chinese compositor spends most of his time riding up and down the
elevator, seeking for letters and dusting them off with a feather duster.
In large and wealthy offices the compositor sits at his case with the copy
before him, and has five or six boys running from one floor to another,
bringing him the letters of this wild and peculiar alphabet.
Sometimes they have to stop in the middle of a long editorial and send
down to Hong Kong and have a letter cast specially for that editorial.
Chinese compositors soon die from heart disease, because they have to run
up stairs and down so much in order to get the different letters needed.
One large publisher tried to have his case arranged in a high building
without floors, so that the compositor could reach each type by means of a
long pole, but one day there was a slight earthquake shock that spilled
the entire alphabet out of the case, all over the floor, and although that
was ninety-seven years ago last April, there are still two bushels of pi
on the floor of that office. The paper employs rat printers, and as they
have been engaged in assorting and distributing this mass of pi, it is
called rat pi in China, and the term is quite popular.
When the editor underscores a word, the Chinese compositor charges $9
extra for italicizing it. This is nothing more than fair, for he may have
to go all over the empire, and climb twenty-seven flights of stairs to
find the necessary italics. So it is much more economical in China to use
body type mostly in setting up a paper, and the old journalist will avoid
caps and italics, unless he is very wealthy.
Arabian literature is very rich, and more especially so in verse. How the
Arabian poets succeeded so well in writing their verse in their own
language, I can hardly understand. I find it very difficult to write
poetry which will be greedily snapped up and paid for, even when written
in the English language, but if I had to paw around for an hour to get a
button-hook for the end of the fourth line, so that it would rhyme with
the button-hook in the second line of the same verse, I believe it would
drive me mad.
The Arabian writer is very successful in a tale of fiction. He loves to
take a tale and re-write it for the press by carefully expunging the
facts. It is in lyric and romantic writing that he seems to excel.
The Arabian Nights is the most popular work that has survived the harsh
touch of time. Its age is not fully known, and as the author has been dead
several hundred years, I feel safe in saying that a number of the
incidents contained in this book are grossly inaccurate.
It has been translated several times with more or less success by various
writers, and some of the statements contained in the book are well worthy
of the advanced civilization, and wild word painting incident to a heated
presidential campaign.
Verona.
We arrived in Verona day before yesterday. Most every one has heard of the
Two Gentlemen of Verona. This is the place they came from. They have never
returned. Verona is not noted for its gentlemen now. Perhaps that is the
reason I was regarded as such a curiosity when I came here.
[Illustration: THE ODORS OF VERONA.]
Verona is a good deal older town than Chicago, but the two cities have
points of resemblance after all. When the southern simoon from the stock
yards is wafted across the vinegar orchards of Chicago, and a load of
Mormon emigrants get out at the Rock Island depot and begin to move around
and squirm and emit the fragrance of crushed Limburger cheese, it reminds
one of Verona.
The sky is similar, too. At night, when it is raining hard, the sky of
Chicago and Verona is not dissimilar. Chicago is the largest place,
however, and my sympathies are with her. Verona has about 68,000 people
now, aside from myself. This census includes foreigners and Indians not
taxed.
Verona has an ancient skating rink, known in history as the amphitheatre,
It is 404-1/2 feet by 516 in size, and the wall is still 100 feet high in
places. The people of Verona wanted me to lecture there, but I refrained.
I was afraid that some late comers might elbow their way in and leave one
end of the amphitheatre open and then there would be a draft. I will speak
more fully on the subject of amphitheatres in another letter. There isn't
room in this one.
Verona is noted for the Capitular library, as it is called. This is said
to be the largest collection of rejected manuscripts in the world. I stood
in with the librarian and he gave me an opportunity to examine this
wonderful store of literary work. I found a Virgil that was certainly over
1,600 years old. I also found a well preserved copy of “Beautiful Snow.” I
read it. It was very touching indeed. Experts said it was 1,700 years old,
which is no doubt correct. I am no judge of the age of MSS. Some can look
at the teeth of a literary production and tell within two weeks how old it
is, but I can't. You can also fool me on the age of wine. My rule used to
be to observe how old I felt the next day and to fix that as the age of
the wine, but this rule I find is not infallible. One time I found myself
feeling the next day as though I might be 138 years old, but on
investigation we found that the wine was extremely new, having been made
at a drug store in Cheyenne that same day.
[Illustration: THE NEXT MORNING.]
Looking these venerable MSS. over, I noticed that the custom of writing
with a violet pencil on both sides of the large foolscap sheet, and then
folding it in sixteen directions and carrying it around in the pocket for
two or three centuries, is not a late American invention, as I had been
led to suppose. They did it in Italy fifteen centuries ago. I was
permitted also to examine the celebrated institutes of Gaius. Gaius was a
poor penman, and I am convinced from a close examination of his work that
he was in the habit of carrying his manuscript around in his pocket with
his smoking tobacco. The guide said that was impossible, for smoking
tobacco was not introduced into Italy until a comparatively late day.
That's all right, however. You can't fool me much on the odor of smoking
tobacco.
The churches of Verona are numerous, and although they seem to me a little
different from our own in many ways, they resemble ours in others. One
thing that pleased me about the churches of Verona was the total absence
of the church fair and festival as conducted in America. Salvation seems
to be handed out in Verona without ice cream and cake, and the odor of
sancity and stewed oysters do not go inevitably hand in hand. I have
already been in the place more than two days and I have not yet been
invited to help lift the old church debt on the cathedral. Perhaps they
think I am not wealthy, however. In fact there is nothing about my dress
or manner that would betray my wealth. I have been in Europe now six weeks
and have kept my secret well. Even my most intimate traveling companions
do not know that I am the Laramie City postmaster in disguise.
The cathedral is a most imposing and massive pile. I quote this from the
guide book. This beautiful structure contains a baptismal font cut out of
one solid block of stone and made for immersion, with an inside diameter
of ten feet. A man nine feet high could be baptized there without injury.
The Venetians have a great respect for water. They believe it ought not to
be used for anything else but to wash away sins, and even then they are
very economical about it.
[Illustration]
There is a nice picture here by Titian. It looks as though it had been
left in the smoke house 900 years and overlooked. Titian painted a great
deal. You find his works here ever and anon. He must have had all he could
do in Italy in an early day, when the country was new. I like his pictures
first rate, but I haven't found one yet that I could secure at anything
like a bed rock price.
A Great Upheaval.
I have just received the following letter, which I take the liberty of
publishing, in order that good may come out of it, and that the public
generally may be on the watch: