And on his airy race,
Its tingles beat to redder heat
The rapture of his face:--
The colder, keener is the air,
The less he cares a feather.
But, there! he's gone! and I gaze on
The wintriest of weather!
Ah, boy! still speeding o'er the track
Where none returns again,
To Sigh for you, or cry for you,
Or die for you were vain.--
And so, speed on! the while I pray
All nipping frosts forsake you--
Ride still ahead of grief, but may
All glad things overtake you!
Her Tired Hands
[Illustration]
On board a western train the other day I held in my bosom for over
seventy-five miles the elbow of a large man whose name I do not know. He
was not a railroad hog or I would have resented it. He was built wide
and he couldn't help it, so I forgave him.
He had a large, gentle, kindly eye, and when he desired to spit, he went
to the car door, opened it and decorated the entire outside of the
train, forgetting that our speed would help to give scope to his
remarks.
[Illustration]
Naturally as he sat there by my side, holding on tightly to his ticket
and evidently afraid that the conductor would forget to come and get it,
I began to figure out in my mind what might be his business. He had
pounded one thumb so that the nail was black where the blood had settled
under it. This might happen to a shoemaker, a carpenter, a blacksmith or
most anyone else. So it didn't help me out much, though it looked to me
as though it might have been done by trying to drive a fence-nail
through a leather hinge with the back of an axe, and nobody but a farmer
would try to do that. Following up the clue, I discovered that he had
milked on his boots and then I knew I was right. The man who milks
before daylight, in a dark barn, when the thermometer is down to 28
degrees below and who hits his boot and misses the pail, by reason of
the cold and the uncertain light and the prudishness of the cow, is a
marked man. He cannot conceal the fact that he is a farmer unless he
removes that badge. So I started out on that theory and remarked that
this would pass for a pretty hard winter on stock.
[Illustration]
The thought was not original with me, for I have heard it expressed by
others either in this country or Europe. He said it would.
"My cattle has gone through a whole mowful o' hay sence October and
eleven ton o' brand. Hay don't seem to have the goodness to it thet it
hed last year, and with their new _pro_-cess griss mills they jerk all
the juice out o' brand, so's you might as well feed cows with excelsior
and upholster your horses with hemlock bark as to buy brand."
"Well, why do you run so much to stock? Why don't you try diversified
farming, and rotation of crops?"
"Well, probably you got that idee in the papers. A man that earns big
wages writing Farm Hints for agricultural papers can make more money
with a soft lead pencil and two or three season-cracked idees like
that'n I can carrying of 'em out on the farm. We used to have a feller
in the drugstore in our town that wrote such good pieces for the _Rural
Vermonter_ and made up such a good condition powder out of his own head,
that two years ago we asked him to write a nessay for the annual meeting
of the Buckwheat Trust, and to use his own judgment about choice of
subject. And what do you s'pose he had selected for a nessay that took
the whole forenoon to read?"
"What subject, you mean?"
"Yes."
"Give it up!"
"Well, he'd wrote out that whole blamed intellectual wad on the subject
of 'The Inhumanity of Dehorning Hydraulic Rams.' How's that?"
"That's pretty fair."
"Well, farmin' is like runnin' a paper in regards to some things. Every
feller in the world will take and turn in and tell you how to do it,
even if he don't know a blame thing about it. There ain't a man in the
United States to-day that don't secretly think he could run airy one if
his other business busted on him, whether he knows the difference
between a new milch cow and a horse hayrake or not. We had one of these
embroidered night-shirt farmers come from town better'n three years ago.
Been a toilet soap man and done well, and so he came out and bought a
farm that had nothing to it but a fancy house and barn, a lot of medder
in the front yard and a southern aspect. The farm was no good. You
couldn't raise a disturbance on it. Well, what does he do? Goes and gits
a passle of slim-tailed, yeller cows from New Jersey and aims to handle
cream and diversified farming. Last year the cuss sent a load of cream
over and tried to sell it at the new creamatory while the funeral and
hollercost was goin' on. I may be a sort of a chump myself, but I read
my paper and don't get left like that."
"What are the prospects for farmers in your State?"
"Well, they are pore. Never was so pore, in fact, sence I've ben there.
Folks wonder why boys leaves the farm. My boys left so as to get
protected, they said, and so they went into a clothing-store, one of
'em, and one went into hardward and one is talking protection in the
Legislature this winter. They said that farmin' was gittin' to be like
fishin' and huntin', well enough for a man that has means and leisure,
but they couldn't make a livin at it, they said. Another boy is in a
drug store, and the man that hires him says he is a royal feller."
"Kind of a castor royal feller," I said, with a shriek of laughter.
He waited until I had laughed all I wanted to and then he said:
[Illustration]
"I've always hollered for high terriff in order to hyst the public debt,
but now that we've got the national debt coopered I wish they'd take a
little hack at mine. I've put in fifty years farmin'. I never drank
licker in any form. I've worked from ten to eighteen hours a day, been
economical in cloze and never went to a show more'n a dozen times in my
life, raised a family and learned upward of two hundred calves to drink
out of a tin pail without blowing all their vittles up my sleeve. My
wife worked alongside o' me sewin' new seats on the boys' pants,
skimmin' milk and even helpin' me load hay. For forty years we toiled
along to-gether and hardly got time to look into each others' faces or
dared to stop and get acquainted with each other. Then her health
failed. Ketched cold in the spring house, prob'ly skimmin' milk and
washin' pans and scaldin' pails and spankin' butter. Any how, she took
in a long breath one day while the doctor and me was watchin' her, and
she says to me, 'Henry,' says she, 'I've got a chance to rest,' and she
put one tired, wore-out hand on top of the other tired, wore-out hand,
and I knew she'd gone where they don't work all day and do chores all
night.
"I took time to kiss her then. I'd been too busy for a good while
previous to that, and then I called in the boys. After the funeral it
was too much for them to stay around and eat the kind of cookin' we had
to put up with, and nobody spoke up around the house as we used to. The
boys quit whistlin' around the barn and talked kind of low by themselves
about going to town and gettin' a job.
"They're all gone now and the snow is four feet deep on mother's grave
up there in the old berryin' ground."
Then both of us looked out of the car window quite a long while without
saying anything.
"I don't blame the boys for going into something else long's other
things paysbetter; but I say--and I say what I know--that the man who
holds the prosperity of this country in his hands, the man that actually
makes money for other people to spend, the man that eats three good,
simple, square meals a day and goes to bed at nine o'clock, so that
future generations with good blood and cool brains can go from his farm
to the Senate and Congress and the While House--he is the man that gets
left at last to run his farm, with nobody to help him but a hired man
and a high protective terriff. The farms in our State is mortgaged for
over seven hundred million dollars. Ten of our Western States--I see by
the papers--has got about three billion and a half mortgages on their
farms, and that don't count the chattel mortgages filed with the town
clerks on farm machinery, stock, waggins, and even crops, by gosh! that
ain't two inches high under the snow. That's what the prospects is for
farmers now. The Government is rich, but the men that made it, the men
that fought perarie fires and perarie wolves and Injuns and potato-bugs
and blizzards, and has paid the war debt and pensions and everything
else and hollered for the Union and the Republican party and free
schools and high terriff and anything else that they was told to, is
left high and dry this cold winter with a mortgage of seven billions and
a half on the farms they have earned and saved a thousand times over."
"Yes; but look at the glory of sending from the farm the future
President, the future Senator and the future member of Congress."
"That looks well on paper, but what does it really amount to? Soon as a
farmer boy gits in a place like that he forgets the soil that produced
him and holds his head as high as a holly-hock. He bellers for
protection to everybody but the farmer, and while he sails round in a
highty-tighty room with a fire in it night and day, his father on the
farm has to kindle his own fire in the morning with elm slivvers, and he
has to wear his own son's lawn-tennis suit next to him or freeze to
death, and he has to milk in an old gray shawl that has held that member
of Congress when he was a baby, by gorry! and the old lady has to
sojourn through the winter in the flannel that was wore at the riggatter
before he went to Congress.
"So I say, and I think that Congress agrees with me. Damn a farmer,
anyhow!"
He then went away.
[Illustration]
Ezra House
Come listen, good people, while a story I do tell,
Of the sad fate of one which I knew so passing well;
He enlisted at McCordsville, to battle in the south,
And protect his country's union; his name was Ezra House.
He was a young school-teacher, and educated high
In regards to Ray's arithmetic, and also Alegbra.
He give good satisfaction, but at his country's call
He dropped his position, his Alegbra and all.
"It's Oh, I'm going to leave you, kind scholars," he said--
For he wrote a composition the last day and read;
And it brought many tears in the eyes of the school,
To say nothing of his sweet-heart he was going to leave so soon.
"I have many recollections to take with me away,
Of the merry transpirations in the school-room so gay;
And of all that's past and gone I will never regret
I went to serve my country at the first of the outset!"
He was a good penman, and the lines that he wrote
On that sad occasion was too fine for me to quote,--
For I was there and heard it, and I ever will recall
It brought the happy tears to the eyes of us all.
[Illustration]
And when he left, his sweetheart she fainted away,
And said she could never forget the sad day
When her lover so noble, and gallant and gay,
Said "Fare you well, my true love!" and went marching away.
He hadn't gone for more than two months
When the sad news come--"he was in a skirmish once,
And a cruel rebel ball had wounded him full sore
In the region of the chin, through the canteen he wore."
But his health recruited up, and his wounds they got well;
But while he was in battle at Bull Run or Malvern Hill,
The news come again, so sorrowful to hear--
"A sliver from a bombshell cut off his right ear."
But he stuck to the boys, and it's often he would write,
That "he wasn't afraid for his country to fight."
But oh, had he returned on a furlough, I believe
He would not, to-day, have such cause to grieve.
For in another battle--the name I never heard--
He was guarding the wagons when an accident occurred,--
A comrade, who was under the influence of drink,
Shot him with a musket through the right cheek, I think.
But his dear life was spared, but it hadn't been for long
Till a cruel rebel colonel came riding along,
And struck him with his sword, as many do suppose,
For his cap-rim was cut off, and also his nose.
But Providence, who watches o'er the noble and the brave,
Snatched him once more from the jaws of the grave;
And just a little while before the close of the war,
He sent his picture home to his girl away so far.
And she fell into decline, and she wrote in reply,
"She had seen his face again and was ready to die";
And she wanted him to promise, when she was in her tomb,
He would only visit that by the light of the moon.
But he never returned at the close of the war,
And the boys that got back said he hadn't the heart;
But he got a position in a powder-mill, and said
He hoped to meet the doom that his country denied.
"Oh, Wilhelmina, Come Back!"
PERSONAL--Will the young woman who edited the gravy department and
corrected proof at our pie foundry for two days and then jumped the
game on the evening that we were to have our clergyman to dine with
us, please come back, or write to 32 Park Row, saying where she
left the crackers and cheese?
[Illustration]
Come back, Wilhelmina, and be our little sunbeam once more. Come back
and cluster around our hearthstone at so much per cluster.
If you think best we will quit having company at the house, especially
people who do not belong to your set.
We will also strive, oh, so hard, to make it pleasanter for you in every
way. If we had known four or five years ago that children were
offensive to you, it would have been different. But it is too late now.
All we can do is to shut them up in a barn and feed them through a
knot-hole. If they shriek loud enough to give pain to your throbbing
brow, let no one know and we will overcome any false sentiment we may
feel towards them and send them to the Tombs.
Since you went away we can see how wicked and selfish we were and how
little we considered your comfort. We miss your glad smile, also your
Tennessee marble cake and your slat pie. We have learned a valuable
lesson since you went away, and it is that the blame should not have
rested on one alone. It should have been divided equally, leaving me to
bear half of it and my wife the other half.
Where we erred was in dividing up the blame on the basis of tenderloin
steak or peach cobbler, compelling you to bear half of it yourself. That
will not work, Wilhelmina. Blame and preserves do not divide on the same
basis. We are now in favor of what may be called a sliding scale. We
think you will like this better.
We also made a grave mistake in the matter of nights out. While young, I
formed the wicked and pernicious habit of having nights out myself. I
panted for the night air and would go a long distance and stay out a
long time to get enough of it for a mess and then bring it home in a
paper bag, but I can see now that it is time for me to remain indoors
and give young people like yourself a chance, Wilhelmina.
So, if I can do anything evenings while you are out that will assist
you, such as stoning raisins or neighboring windows, command me. I am no
cook, of course, but I can peel apples or grind coffee or hold your
head for you when you need sympathy. I could also soon learn to do the
plain cooking, I think, and friends who come to see us after this have
agreed to bring their dinners.
There is no reason why harmony should not be restored among us and the
old sunlight come back to our roof tree.
Another thing I wish to write before I close this humiliating personal.
I wish to take back any harsh and bitter words about your singing. I
said that you sang like a shingle-mill, but I was mad when I said it,
and I wronged you. I was maddened by hunger and you told me that mush
and milk was the proper thing for a brain worker, and you refused to
give me any dope on my dumpling. Goaded to madness by this I said that
you sang like a shingle-mill, but it was not my better, higher nature
that spoke. It was my grosser and more gastric nature that asserted
itself, and I now desire to take it back. You do not sing like a
shingle-mill; at least so much as to mislead a practiced ear.
Your voice has more volume, and when your upper register is closed, is
mellower than any shingle-mill I ever heard.
Come back, Wilhelmina. We need you every hour.
After you went away we tried to set the bread as we had seen you do it,
but it was not a success. The next day it come off the nest with a
litter of small, sallow rolls which would easily resist the action of
acids.
If you cannot come back will you please write and tell me how you are
getting along and how you contrive to insert air-holes into home-made
bread?
[Illustration: A HINT of SPRING.]
'Twas but a hint of Spring--for still
The atmosphere was sharp and chill--
Save where the genial sunshine smote
The shoulders of my overcoat,
And o'er the snow beneath my feet
Laid spectral fences down the street.
My shadow even seemed to be
Elate with some new buoyancy,
And bowed and bobbed in my advance
With trippingest extravagance,
And when a bird sang out somewhere,
It seemed to wheel with me, and stare.
Above I heard a rasping stir--
And on the roof the carpenter
Was perched, and prodding rusty leaves
From out the choked and dripping eaves--
And some one, hammering about,
Was taking all the windows out.
Old scraps of shingles fell before
The noisy mansion's open door;
And wrangling children raked the yard,
And labored much, and laughed as hard
And fired the burning trash I smelt
And sniffed again--so good I felt!
[Illustration: A Treat Ode]
"Scurious-like," said the treetoad,
"I've twittered fer rain all day;
And I got up soon,
And hollered till noon--
But the sun hit blazed away,
Till I jest clumb down in a crawfish-hole
Weary at heart, and sick at soul!
"Dozed away fer an hour,
And I tackled the thing agin;
And I sung, and sung,
Till I knowed my lung
Was jest about to give in;
And then, thinks I, ef it don't rain now,
There're nothin' in singin' anyhow.
"Once in a while some farmer
Would come a driven' past
And he'd hear my cry,
And stop and sigh--
Till I jest laid back, at last,
And I hollered rain till I thought my throat
Would bust wide open at ever' note!
"But I _fetched_ her!--O I _fetched_ her!--
'Cause a little while ago,
As I kindo' set
With one eye shet,
And a-singin' soft and low,
A voice drapped down on my fevered brain
Sayin',--'Ef you'll jest hush I'll rain!'"
"Our Wife"
[Illustration]
The story opens in 1877, when, on an April morning, the yellow-haired
"devil" arrived at the office of the Jack Creek _Pizenweed_, at 7
o'clock, and found the editor in. It was so unusual to find the editor
in at that hour that the boy whistled in a low contralto voice, and
passed on into the "news room," leaving the gentlemanly, genial and
urbane editor of the _Pizenweed_ as he had found him, sitting in his
foundered chair, with his head immersed in a pile of exchanges on the
table and his venerable Smith & Wesson near by, acting as a
paper-weight. The gentlemanly, genial and urbane editor of the
_Pizenweed_ presented the appearance of a man engaged in sleeping off a
long and aggravated case of drunk. His hat was on the back of his head,
and his features were entirely obscured by the loose papers in which
they nestled.
Later on, Elijah P. Beckwith, the foreman, came in, and found the
following copy on the hook, marked "Leaded Editorial," and divided it up
into "takes" for the yellow-haired devil and himself:
"In another column of this issue will be found, among the legal notices,
the first publication of a summons in an action for divorce, in which
our wife is plaintiff and we are made defendant. While generally
deprecating the practice of bringing private matters into public through
the medium of the press, we feel justified in this instance, inasmuch as
the summons sets forth, as a cause of action, that we are, and have
been, for the space of ten years, a confirmed drunkard without hope of
recovery, and totally unwilling to provide for and maintain our said
wife.
"That we have been given to drink, we do not, at this time, undertake to
deny or in any way controvert, but that we cannot quit at any time, we
do most earnestly contend.
"In 1867, on the 4th day of July, we married our wife. It was a joyful
day, and earth had never looked to us so fair or so desirable as a
summer resort as it did that day. The flowers bloomed, the air was fresh
and exhilarating, the little birds and the hens poured forth their
respective lays. It was a day long to be remembered, and it seemed as
though we had never seen Nature get up and hump herself to be so
attractive as she did on that special morning--the morning of all
mornings--the morning on which we married our wife.
"Little did we then dream that after ten years of varying fortune we
would to-day give utterance to this editorial, or that the steam
power-press of the _Pizenweed_ would squat this legal notice for
divorce, _a vinculo et thoro_, into the virgin page of our paper. But
such is the case. Our wife has abandoned us to our fate, and has seen
fit to publish the notice in what we believe to be the spiciest paper
published west of the Missouri River. It was not necessary that the
notice should be published. We were ready at any time to admit service,
provided that plaintiff would serve it while we were sober. We cannot
agree to remain sober after ten o'clock a. m. in order to give people a
chance to serve notices on us. But in this case plaintiff knew the value
of advertising, and she selected a paper that goes to the better classes
all over the Union. When our wife does anything she does it right.
"For ten years our wife and we have trudged along together. It has been
a record of errors and failures on our part; a record of heroic devotion
and forbearance on the part of our wife. It is over now, and with
nothing to remember that is not soaked full of bitterness and wrapped up
in red flannel remorse, we go forth to-day and herald our shame by
publishing to the world the fact, that as husband, we are a depressing
failure, while as a red-eyed and a rum-soaked ruin and all-around
drunkard, we are a tropical triumph. We print this without egotism, and
we point to it absolutely without vain glory.
"Ah, why were we made the custodian of this fatal gift, while others
were denied? It was about the only talent we had, but we have not
wrapped it up in a napkin. Sometimes we have put a cold, wet towel on
it, but we have never hidden it under a bushel. We have put it out at
three per cent a month, and it has grown to be a thirst that is worth
coming all the way from Omaha to see. We do not gloat over it. We do not
say all this to the disparagement of other bright, young drinkers, who
came here at the same time, and who had equal advantages with us. We do
not wish to speak lightly of those whose prospects for filling a
drunkard's grave were at one time even brighter than ours. We have
simply sought to hold our position here in the grandest galaxy of
extemporaneous inebriates in the wild and woolly West. We do not wish to
vaunt our own prowess, but we say, without fear of successful
contradiction, that we have done what we could.
"On the fourth page of this number will be found, among other
announcements, the advertisement of our wife, who is about to open up
the old laundry at the corner of Third and Cottonwood streets, in the
Briggs building. We hope that our citizens will accord her a generous
patronage, not so much on her husband's account, but because she is a
deserving woman, and a good laundress. We wish that we could as safely
recommend every advertiser who patronizes these columns as we can our
wife.
"Unkind critics will make cold and unfeeling remarks because our wife
has decided to take in washing, and they will look down on her, no
doubt, but she will not mind it, for it will be a pleasing relaxation to
wash, after the ten years of torch-light procession and Mardi Gras
frolic she has had with us. It is tiresome, of course, to chase a pillow
case up and down the wash-board all day, but it is easier and
pleasanter than it is to run a one-horse Inebriate Home for ten years
on credit.
"Those who have read the _Pizenweed_ for the past three years will
remember that it has not been regarded as an outspoken temperance organ.
We have never claimed that for it. We have simply claimed that, so far
as we are personally concerned, we could take liquor or we could let it
alone. That has always been our theory. We still make that claim. Others
have said the same thing, but were unable to do as they advertised. We
have been taking it right along, between meals for ten years. We now
propose, and so state in the prospectus, that we will let it alone. We
leave the public to judge whether or not we can do what we claim."
[Illustration]