CHAPTER I.

BILL NYE'S CHESTNUTS OLD AND NEW

With New Illustrations From Original Sketches, Photographs, Memoranda,

and Authentic Sources, by Williams, Opper, and Hopkins.

NEW YORK

JOHN W. LOVELL COMPANY

1888

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CHESTNUTS OLD AND NEW.

<b>CHESTNUT-BURR</b>. I.--THE SHAKESPEARE-BACON PUZZLE WRESTLED WITH

CONSCIENTIOUSLY.

_Why Bill favors the Claims of Bill Shakespeare--His Handwriting

skillfully touched upon--Its Likeness to Horace Greeley's--Difference

between Shakespeare and Bacon--A kind Lift for the Yeomanry._

|Trusting that it will not in any way impair the sale of Mr. Donnelly's

book, I desire to offer here a few words in favor of the theory that

William Shakespeare wrote his own works and thought his own thinks. The

time has fully arrived when we humorists ought to stand by each other.

I do not undertake to stand up for the personal character of

Shakespeare, but I say that he wrote good pieces, and I don't care who

knows it. It is doubtless true that at the age of eighteen he married a

woman eight years his senior, and that children began to cluster about

their hearthstone in a way that would have made a man in a New York flat

commit suicide. Three little children within fourteen months, including

twins, came to the humble home of the great Bard, and he began to go

out and climb upon the haymow to do his writing. Sometimes he would stay

away from home for two or three weeks at a time, fearing that when he

entered the house some one would tell him that he was again a parent.

Yet William Shakespeare knew all the time that he was a great man, and

that some day he would write pieces to speak. He left Stratford at the

age of twenty-one and went to London, where he attracted very little

attention, for he belonged to the Yeomanry, being a kind of dramatic

Horace Greeley, both in the matter of clothes and penmanship. Thus it

would seem that while Sir Francis Bacon was attending a business college

and getting himself familiar with the whole-arm movement, so as to be

able to write a free, cryptogamous hand, poor W. Shakespeare was slowly

thinking the hair off his head, while ever and anon he would bring out

his writing materials and his bright ready tongue, and write a sonnet on

an empty stomach.

Prior to leaving Stratford he is said to have dabbled in the poaching

business in a humble way on the estates of Sir Thomas Lucy, since

deceased, and that he wrote the following encomium or odelet in a free,

running hand, and pinned it on the knight's gate:=

````O, deer Thomas Lucy,

````Your venison's juicy,

````Juicy is your venison;

````Hence I append my benison.=

```The rose is red; the violet's blue;

```The keeper is a chump and so are you,

```Which is why I remark and my language is plain,

```Yours truly,

````High Low Jack

`````And the Game.=

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Let me now once more refer to the matter of the signature. Much has

been said of Mr. Shakespeare's coarse, irregular and vulgar penmanship,

which, it is claimed, shows the ignorance of its owner, and hence his

inability to write the immortal plays. Let us compare the signature

of Shakespeare with that of Mr. Greeley, and we notice a wonderful

similarity. There is the same weird effort in both cases to

out-cryptogam Old Cryptogamous himself, and enshrine immortal thought

and heaven-born genius in a burglar-proof panoply of worm fences, and

a chirography that reminds the careful student of the general direction

taken in returning to Round Knob, N. C., by a correspondent who visited

the home of a moonshiner, with a view toward ascertaining the general

tendency of homebrewed whisky to fly to the head.

If we judge Shakespeare by his signature, not one of us will be safe.

Death will wipe out our fame with a wet sponge. John Hancock in one

hundred years from now will be regarded as the author of the Declaration

of Independence, and Compendium Gaskell as the author of the Hew York

_Tribune_.

I have every reason to believe that while William Shakespeare was

going about the streets of London, poor but brainy, erratic but smart,

baldheaded but filled with a nameless yearning to write a play with

real water and a topical song in it, Francis Bacon was practicing on his

signature, getting used to the full-arm movement, spoiling sheet

after sheet of paper, trying to make a violet swan on a red woven wire

mattress of shaded loops without taking his pen off the paper, and

running the rebus column of a business college paper.

Poets are born, not made, and many of them are born with odd and even

disagreeable characteristics. Some men are born poets, while it is true

that some acquire poetry while others have poetry thrust upon them.

Poetry is like the faculty, if I may so denominate it, of being able to

voluntarily move the ears. It is a gift. It cannot be taught to others.

So Shakespeare, with all his poor penmanship, with his proneness to

poach, with his poverty and his neglect of his wife and his children,

could write a play wherein the leading man and the man who played the

bass drum in the orchestra did not claim to have made the principal

part.

Shakespeare did not want his plays published. He wanted to keep them out

of the press in order to prevent their use at spelling schools in the

hands of unskilled artists, and so there was a long period of time

during which the papers could not get hold of them for publication.

During this time Francis Bacon was in public life. He and Shakespeare

had nothing in common. Both were great men, but Bacon's sphere was

different from Shakespeare's, While Bacon was in the Senate, living high

and courting investigation, Shakespeare had to stuff three large pillows

into his pantaloons and play Falstaff at a one-night stand.

Is it likely that Bacon, breathing the perfumed air of the capitol and

chucking the treasury girls under the chin ever and anon, hungered for

the false joys of the under-paid and underscored dramatist? Scarcely!

That is one reason win I prefer to take the side of Shakespeare rather

than the side of Bacon.

Mr. Donnelly's book shows keen research, and preserves the interest all

the way through, for the reader is impressed all along with the idea

that there is a hen on, if I may be permitted to coin a phrase; but so

far my sympathies and kind regards go with Shakespeare. He was one of

the Yeoman of Stratford, and his early record was against him; but

where do poets usually come from? Do they first breathe in the immortal

sentiments which, in after years, enable their names to defy the front

teeth of oblivion while stopping at one of our leading hotels? Did Burns

soak his system with the flavor and the fragrance of the Scotch heather

while riding on an elevated train? Did any poet ever succeed in getting

up close to Nature's great North American heart by studying her habits

at a twenty-five dollar german? I trow not. Moreover, every one who

studies the history of our great poets and orators will trow likewise.

Lord Tennyson wrote better things before he tried to divide his

attention between writing poetry and being a Lord. So I say that from

our yeomanry frequently spring the boys whose rare old rural memories

float in upon and chasten and refine their after-lives even when fame

comes, and fills them full of themselves and swells their aching heads

as they swoop gayly across the country in a special ear.

I do not go so far as some of the friends of Shakespeare, and say that

while he was a lovely character and a great actor, that Bacon was a ham.

I do not say that, for Bacon had his good points.

The thing that has done more to injure Shakespeare in the eyes of the

historian than aught else, perhaps, was his seeming neglect of his wife.

But we should consider both sides of the question before we pass

judgment. The Hathaways were queer people, and Anne was unusually so.

Her father snubbed her in his will just as her husband did, which shows

that Mrs. Shakespeare was not highly esteemed even by her parents. The

brief notice which Anne received in these two wills means a good deal,

for there is nothing quite so thoroughly unanswerable as a probate snub.

Shakespeare in his own will gave to his wife his second-best bed, and

that was all. When we remember that it was a bed that sagged in the

middle, and that it operated by means of a bed-cord which had to be

tightened and tuned up twice a week, and that the auger-holes in the

bedstead seemed ever to mutely appeal for more powder from Persia's

great powder magazine, we will be forced to admit that William did not

passionately love his wife.

I know that Shakespeare has been severely criticised by the press for

leaving his family at Stratford while he himself lived in London, only

visiting home occasionally; but I am convinced that he found they could

live cheaper in that way. Help in the house was very high at that time

in London, and the intelligence offices were doing a very large business

without giving very much intelligence. Friends of his told him that it

was not only impossible to get enough help in the homes of London,

but that there was hardly enough servants to prevent a panic in the

Employment Bureaus. Seven, offices were in fact compelled to shut down

for a half day at a time, one using the limited stock in the forenoon

and the other in the afternoon.

Shakespeare was a perfect gentleman, having been made so by the Herald's

College, which invested his father with coat armor. This coat armor

made a gentleman of the elder Shakespeare, and as William's mother was

already a gentleman under the code, William became one also both on his

father's and on his mother's side. Of course all this is mere detail and

is dull and uninteresting; but I refer to it to show that those who

have read things in Shakespeare's works that they did not like, and who,

therefore, say that he was no gentleman, do the great Bard an injustice.

I think I like Shakespeare's expurgated poems best, and I often wish

that he had confined himself entirely to that kind. If I had a son who

seemed to lean toward poesy and felt like twanging his lyre now and

then, I would advise him to write expurgated poems exclusively.

I do not say that Shakespeare was the author of his own works, and it

would not look well in me to set up my opinion in opposition to that of

scholars, experts and savants who have had more advantages than I have,

for I would never take advantage of any one; but I say that somehow the

impression has crept into the papers that he was a pretty good little

play-writer, and I am glad that Mr. Childs has had a testimonial made

and sent over to England that will show an appreciation, at least, of

his ability to keep before the people.

It will be noticed by the alert and keen-scented littérateur that I have

carefully avoided treading on the tail of Mr. Donnelly's cipher. Being

rather a poor mathematician anyway, I will not introduce the cipher at

this time, but I will say that although the whole thing happened about

three hundred years ago, and has now nearly passed out of my mind, to

the best of my recollection Shakespeare, though he was the son of a

buckwheater, and though he married his wife with a poetic license, and

though he left his family at Stratford rather than take them to live

in a London flat, wrote the most of his plays with the assistance of an

expurgator who was out of the city most all of the time.

I cannot show Shakespeare's ready wit better at this time than by

telling of his first appearance on the stage as I remember it. He came

quietly before the footlights with a roll of carpet under one arm and a

tack hammer under the other. In those days it was customtomary to nail

down stage carpets, and while doing so "Shake," as we all called him

then, knocked the nail off his left thumb, whereupon he received an

ovation from the audience. Some men would have been rattled and would

have "called up," as we say, but Shakespeare was always ready to please

his friends or respond to an encore; so putting his right thumb up

against a large painted rock in a mountain scene, he obliged by knocking

off the other thumb-nail.

Shakespeare wrote the poem called "Venus and Adonis," during the absence

of his expurgator, and sent it to the editor of the Stratford _Appeal_,

who deadheaded the paper to him for a year and told him that he wished

he would write up any other gossip that might come to his knowledge in

that part of the country, especially if it promised to be spicy.

Shakespeare was one of the few Englishmen who never visited this country

for two weeks, for the purpose of writing an eight pound book on his

impressions of America.

<b>CHESTNUT-BURR</b> II--HOW THE GLORIOUS FOURTH WAS CELEBRATED AT WHALEN'S

GROVE LAST YEAR.

_An Oration by a Self-Made Man which had Bones in it--Suggestions of

Deep Interest to Taxpayers--Freedom as it Suggests Itself to a Hickory

Township Man--Our Duties to a Common Country._

|There were patriotic remarks and greased-pig exercises at Whalen's

Grove last year on the Fourth, all of which, according to the Sandy Mush

_Record-Statesman_, passed off with marked success. From the opening

prayer to the base-ball contest and greased-pole doings, everything was

harmonious, and the receipts were satisfactory. Col. L. Forsyth Heeley

acted as marshal of the day, wearing a maroon sash, and mounted on his

well-known horse, Mambrino King. A serious accident in the early morning

was happily averted by Col. Heeley's coolness and self-possession.

A lady from Lower Hominy, whose name could not be ascertained, while

actively engaged in listening to the band, and holding her young child

so that it could get a good view of the sun, became entangled in her

train, which had worked around in front, and while recovering herself

Col. L. Forsyth Heeley came down the street in advance of the fire

laddies. The horse was rearing high in the air, and going sideways with

a squeaking sound, which seemed to be caused by the friction between

his second and third stomach. His mouth was wide open, and his fiery-red

gums could be seen as far as the eye could reach. Almost every one

thought there would be a holocaust; but at that trying instant, as if by

magic, Col. Heeley decided to go down the other street.

Our fire ladies made a fine appearance, in their new, hot uniforms, and

were not full during the parade, as was stated by the Hickory township

_World_.

Everybody seemed to feel an interest in patriotism, with the exception

of an old party from a distance, who opened the exercises by cutting a

large watermelon and distributing it with a lavish hand among himself.

He then went to sleep in the corner of a fence, where he would have been

greatly pestered by flies if he had found out about it in time.

After a pleasant and courteous prayer by rev. Mr. Meeks, in which he

laid before the Lord a national policy which he felt certain would make

a great hit, our Glee Club sang=

````Oh, say can you see, etc.=

Judge Larraby read the Declaration of Independence in a rich dark red

voice, and a self-made man from Hickory township delivered the following

impromptu address, the manuscript of which he kindly furnished to the

_Record-Statesman_:

"_Fellow Citizens:_ This is the anniversary of the day when freedom

towards all and malice towards none first got a foothold in this

country. And we are now to celebrate that day. I say that on that day

Tireny and uzurpation got a set-back that they will never recover from.

We then paved the way for the poor, oppressed foreigner, so that he

could come to our shores and take liberties with our form of government.

To be a foreigner here in America to-day is one of the sweetest boons.

If I could be just what I would like to be, I would be an oppressed

foreigner, landing on pur shores, free from the taxation and

responsibility of government, with no social demands made on me, with

nothing in my possession but a hearty Godspeed from both political

parties, and a strong yearning for freedom. Oh, why was I not born an

alien, that both parties wouldn't dast to reproach; an alien that can

come here and find a government already established, with no flies on

to it; a government of the people, by the people and for the people?

(Fire-crackers and applause.)

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"On the day that Button Gwinnett put his name to the statement that all

men was created more or less equal, the spot on which we now stand was a

howling wilderness. Where yonder lemonade-stand now stands and realizes

a clean profit of forty-seven dollars and thirty-five cents on an

investment of six dollars and fifty cents, the rank thistle nodded in

the wynd, and the wild fox dag his hole unscared. If you do not believe

this I refer you to the principal of our public school, who is to-day

assisting in the band, and who is now in the act of up-ending his alto

horn to pour out about a teacupful of liquid melody that he had left

over from the last tune.

"And why is this? Why are we to-day a free people, with a surplus in

the treasury that nobody can get at? (Loud applause and squeal from

a grass-fed horse tied to a tree who is being kicked by a red

two-year-old, owned by the Pathmaster of Road District 3.)

"Why are our resources so great that they almost equal our liabilities?

Why is everything done to make it pleasant for the rich man and every

inducement held ont for the poor man to accumulate more and more

poverty? Why is it that so much is said about the tariff by men who do

not support their families? Why is it that when we vote for a president

of the United States, we have to take our choice between a statesmanlike

candidate with great ability and proclivities for grand larceny--why

is it that we are given our choice between this kind of a man and what

Virgil refers to in his 'Childe Harold' as a chump? (Cheers and cries

of 'That's so' from a man who is riveted to the spot by means of a new

pitch-plank on which he is sitting and which will not permit him to move

out of the sun.)

"One hundred years ago the tastes of our people were simple. Now it

takes so much simplicity to keep Congress going that the people don't

get a chance at it. A century ago common, home-made rum was the only

relaxation known to a plain but abstemious people. Now it takes a man

with a mighty good memory to recall the names of some of the things he

has drunk when his wife asks him about it on the following morning. I

claim to have a good memory of names and things generally, but if you

want to get me mixed up and have fun with me, you can do it that way.

"But, fellow-citizens, how can we best preserve the blessing of freedom

and fork it over unimpaired to our children? How can we enchance the

blood-bought right, which is inherent in every human being, of the

people, for the people and by the people, where tyrant foot hath never

trod nor bigot forged a chain, for to look back from our country's

glorious natal day or forward to a glorious, a happy and a prosperous

future with regard to purity of the ballot and free speech. I say for

one we cannot do otherwise. (Prolonged applause.)

"I would rather have my right hand cleave to the roof of my mouth than

to utter a sentiment that I would regret; but I say that as a people,

as a nation or as an inalienable right which no man can gainsay or

successfully controvert, not for political purposes, and yet I am often

led to inquire whither are we drifting, not only as a people and as a

nation, but as a country and as a joint school district, No. 6, where

we now stand, and when we are paying a school teacher this summer

twenty-two dollars a month to teach the children, little prattling

children, during the hot summer weather, how many feet of intestines

there are in the human body and what is best to do for it? Last winter

we paid thirty-four dollars per month to a man who opened the school

with prayer and then made a picture of the digestive organs on the

blackboard. And still we wonder that politics is corrupt.

"I tell you that the seeds of vice and wickedness is often sowed at

school in the minds of the young by teachers who are paid a large salary

to do far different. What do you think of a man who would open a school

with prayer and then converse freely about the alimentary canal? Such

a man would lead a life of the deepest infamy if he had the least

encouragement.

"So I say, fellow-citizens, that we must guard against the influences

of the public schools as a nation, for the people, of the people, and by

the people. Education is often a blessing in disguise, but we should not

pry into things that the finite mind has no business with. How much

was Galileo ahead in the long run for going out of his sphere? He was

boycotted from morning till night and died poor. Look at Demosthenes.

Look at Diogenes. They pried into science, and both of them was poor

providers and have since died. Of course their names are frequently used

in debating schools, and some claim that this is big pay for what they

went through; but I say give me a high-stepping horse, the bright smile

of dear ones who are not related to me in any way, the approval of the

admiring throng, a large woolly dog that will do as I tell him, a modest

little home and unlimited credit at the store, and I do not care how

much B. will have to use off from the diameter of a given grindstone,

for which he paid an undivided one-fifteenth.

"I know that this is regarded as a queer doctrine by what is called our

more Advanced Thinkers but I say let every man who pants for fame select

his own style of pant and go ahead. I bid him a most hearty godspeed and

hope he will do well.

"But what makes me mad is for a man to come to me and dictate what I

shall pant for. This is called intolerance by people who can afford

to use words of that size. Intolerance is a thing that makes me tired.

Whether it's religious, political or social intolerance, I dislike it

very much. People that think I will enjoy voting for a yaller dog

that had been picked out for me, or that I will be tickled to death to

indorse the religious dogmas of an effete monicky with my eyes shot,

don't know me. I say, let every man rely solely on his own thinker, and

damned be he who first cries hold, enough! I am not a profane man, but I

quote from a poem in using the above quotation.

"But again. In closing, let me say that we owe it to our common country

to be peaceable citizens and pay our taxes without murmuring. The time

to get in our fine work is on the valuation, and it is too late to kick

after that. Let us cultivate a spirit of lofty patriotism, but believe

nothing just to oblige others. I used to be a great believer in anything

that was submitted for my approval. That was what kept me back. Now, if

a man like Jay Gould says he is not feeling so well as he did, I make

him show me his tongue.

"We are here to-day to celebrate the birthday of American freedom, as

I understand it, and I am here to say that whatever may be said

against our refinement and our pork, our style of freedom is sought for

everywhere. It is a freedom that will stand any climate and I hear it

very highly spoken of wherever I go.

"I am here to state that, as boy and man, I have been a constant user of

American freedom for over fifty years, and I can truly say that I feel

no desire to turn back; also that there will be a grand, free-for-all

scuffle for a greased pig on the vacant lot south of the church at seven

o'clock, after which fireworks will be served to those who desire to

remain."

And thus did the Fourth of July pass with all its glories in Whalen's

Grove in the year of our independence the 110th.

ENCOURAGING GREEN JOKES.

|I want to encourage green jokes, that have never trotted in harness

before, and, besides, I must insist on using my scanty fund of laugh on

jokes of the nineteenth century. I have got to draw the line somewhere.

<b>CHESTNUT-BURR</b> III--BILL NYE FINDS COLOROW FULL OF ODD TRAITS.

_A Copper-complexioned Gentleman of Few Words--A Generous Offer of "Two

Sleeps" that was Promptly Accepted--A Speech from Colorow that Proved

Fatal to Ills Hapless Stenographer._

|The recent ruction on the part of William H. Colorow, Duke of Rawhide

Buttes and heir presumptive to the throne of Yellow Jacket Park, brings

the Indian once more to our notice and teaches us that eternal vigilance

is the price of government land on the frontier.

Sig. Colorow is of Indian parentage and his lineage, such as it is, is

very long. His ancestors run back as far as the earliest dawn of the

Christian era. They claimed the land extending in a southerly direction

from the North Pole, and seemed to ignore the fact that it had been sold

for taxes. The Indian has always been in favor of representation without

taxation, and Colorow has believed in a community of grub, allowing the

white man to retain a controlling interest in common, wet-browed toil.

He has always been willing to divide his bread with the pale face. He

has offered, time and again, to give the white man the bread that was

sweetened with honest sweat, while he took his plain. He says that to

prefer bread that tastes of perspiration shows a depraved taste.

Colorow has for years been a terror to the people of northwestern

Colorado, eastern Utah and southern Wyoming. Every spring it used to be

his custom to stroll into North Park and prospect for prospectors. Once

he came to call on me. He had been there longer than I had and so, of

course, it was nothing more than etiquette that he should call on me.

He seemed to enjoy his call very much. I could not think of anything to

say, though generally I am of a bright and happy disposition. After I

had asked him how his mother was, I could not think of anything else to

interest him. Finally I thought of Capt. John Smith and how he amused

a hostile band by showing them his compass and new suspenders. I had

no compass, but I had a new watch which I carried in a buckskin

watch-pocket, and I thought I would show him the sweep-second and

fly-back and let him see the wheels go round.

When Colorow is captured, if the United States of America has no use for

that watch, I would be glad to have it returned to me at No. 32, Park

Row, New York.

Colorow is a man of few words. I will never forget what he said to me

when he went away. He held up two fingers and said in a voice that did

not seem to waver:

"Meboe so, two sleeps more, you get out."

I sometimes think that when a man says very little we are more apt

to take an interest in what he says. It was so in his case. I got to

thinking over his remark after he had gone and I decided to accept of

his generous offer.

He had given me two sleeps; but I do not require much sleep anyway, and

when I got to thinking about Colorow and his restless manner while he

was my ghost I could not sleep so well as I had formerly, and so I have

been doing the most of my sleeping since that in a more thickly settled

country. I remember I was so restless that last night that I walked

feverishly about. I walked feverishly about twenty-five miles, I judge,

in a northerly direction.

I left a small but growing mine there at that time in charge of the

Utes, and I hope they used it judiciously.

The Ute nation is divided into two sections--viz., the Southern Utes,

who have been pretty generally friendly, and the Northern or White

River Utes, who break out into fits of emotional insanity whenever their

ponies got their bellies full of grass.

My policy--one which, I regret to say, has never been adopted by the

government--is to hire a sufficient number of armed herders to take the

entire grand remnant sale of Indian tribes out on the plains and watch

them all summer, rounding them up and counting them every morning and

evening to see that they are all there. Through the day they might be

kept busy pulling up the "pizen-weed" which grows all over the grazing

grounds of the West, and thus they would get plenty of fresh air and at

the same time do good in a modest way. But this scheme for "Utelizing"

the Utes is a hundred years ahead of the age, and so I do not expect

that it will meet with the indorsement of a sluggish administration.

There are, however, two sides to the Indian question, viz., a right and

a wrong side. That is why the Indian question wears so well.

One of the great wrongs incident to the matter is the great delay in

officially reaching the War Department in such a way as to attract the

eye of the speaker. By the time a courier can get in to a telegraph

station and wire the governor of a state, who notifies the

Adjutant-General to write a dictated letter with his trenchent

typewriter, apprising the commander of the department, who is at Coney

Island or Carlsbad, with no typewriter nearer than fifteen miles, who

wires the governor to make active inquiries about the matter, and by the

time the governor has sent a committee, who go to within fifty miles of

the scene of hostilities, and return at the end of six weeks to report

that they do not know whether there has been an outbreak or not, and

then when a ranchman is really killed, and reputable eye-witnesses, who

were personally acquainted with deceased, and will swear that they have

no interest in the result of the outbreak, come in and make a written

and grammatical request for troops, and the War Department gets

thoroughly rested, the Indians have gone home, washed the gore off their

hands, and resumed their quiet humdrum life. Like trying to treat a man

in Liverpool for softening of the brain by applying the mind cure per

cable from New York, the remedy is too remote from the disease.

[Illustration: 0037]

Indians are quick and impulsive in the matter of homicide. They are

slow to grapple with anything of a humorous nature, and all the humorous

lecturers who have been on the Ute lecture course have lost money, but

in the holocaust line, or general arson, torture and massacre business,

they act with astonishing rapidity. As a race, they regard this entire

land as their own, just as the mosquitoes claim New Jersey, simply

because they were there first.

The Indians see that the property is improving, and so they feel more

and more wealthy and arrogant. They claim that they will never give up

their rights unless they get hard up, and even then it will not count.

They always have a mental reservation in these matters, which they

prefer to the reservation provided by the government.

Indians naturally dislike to see these lands in the possession of

wealthy men whose sons earn a precarious livelihood by playing lawn

tennis.

Colorow once made a short speech to his troops, which was taken down at

the time by a gentleman who was present and who was collecting material

for a new third reader for our common schools.

Colorow claimed that it was incorrect, and the notes were found

afterward on the stenographer's body. It is about as ticklish business

to report an Indian speech as it is to poultice a boil on the person of

the Ameer of Cabul.

In closing Colorow said: "Warriors, our sun is set. We are most of us

out on third base, and we have no influence with the umpire.

"Once I could stand on the high ground and one shout would fill the

forest with warriors. Now the wailing wind catches up my cry and bears

it away like the echo of our former greatness, and I hear a low voice

murmur, 'Rats.'

"Whisky and refinement have filled our land with sorrow. The white man

crossed the dark waters in his large canoe and filled the forest with

churches and railroad accidents.

"The Indian loves not to make money and own aldermen for which he has

no use. He loves his wives and his children and intrusts them with the

responsibility of doing all his work. The white man comes to us with

honeyed words and says if we will divide our lands with him he will give

us a present; and when we give him a county and a half he gives us a red

collar-button and a blue book, in which he has written in his strange

and silent language, 'When this you see, remember me.' Our warriors are

weak and have the hearts of women. They care not for the war-path or the

chase. Most of them want to go on the stage. Once my warriors went with

me at a moment's warning to clean out the foe. They slept in the swamps

with the rattlesnakes at night and fought like wolves in the daytime.

Now my warriors will not go on the warpath without a valise, and some of

them want to carry their dinner.

"Some day, like the fall of a mighty oak in the forest, Colorow will

fall to the earth and he will rise no more. You will be scattered to

the four winds of heaven, and you will go no more to battle. Some of you

will starve to death, while others will go to New York and wear a long

linen duster, with the price of cut-rate tickets down the back. Some

of you will die with snakes in your moccasins, and others will go to

Jerusalem to help rob the Dead wood coach.

"Warriors, I thank you for your kind attention and appreciation. The

regular outbreak will begin to-morrow evening at early candle-light.

The massacre will open with a song and dance."

Colorow dresses plainly in a coat of paint and a gun.

AWKWARDNESS OF CARRYING WHISKY ABOUT.

|Whisky is more bulky and annoying to carry about, in the coat-tail

pocket than a plug of tobacco; but there have been cases where it was

successfully done. I was shown yesterday a little corner that would hold

six or eight bushels. It was in the wash-room of a hotel, and was about

half full. So were the men who came there, for before night the entire

place was filled with empty whisky bottles of every size, shape and

smell.

THE RIGHT SORT OF BOY.

|I am always sorry to see a youth get irritated and pack up his clothes

in the heat of debate, and leave the home nest. His future is a little

doubtful, and it is hard to prognosticate whether he will fracture

limestone for the streets of a great city, or become President of the

United States; but there is a beautiful and luminous life ahead of him

in comparison with that of the boy who obstinately refuses to leave

the home nest. The boy who cannot summon the moral courage some day

to uncoil the tendrils of his heart from the clustering idols of the

household, to grapple with outrageous fortune, ought to be taken by the

ear and led away out into the great untried realm of space.

<b>CHESTNUT-BURR</b> IV--BILL NYE PAYS A BRIEF VISIT TO A PROFESSIONAL STAR

READER.

_How His Past Was Raked Up and His Future Predicted--Interesting

Information for One Dollar--He is Warned to Beware of Certain Bad Men--A

Delicate Point of Etiquette--Are Astrologists Deteriorating?_

|Ring the bell and the door will open," is the remark made by a small

label over a bell handle in Third avenue, near Eighteenth street, where

Mme. La Foy reads the past, present and future at so much per read.

Love, marriage, divorce, business, speculation and sickness are there

handled with the utmost impunity by "Mme. La Foy, the famous scientific

astrologist," who has monkeyed with the planets for twenty years, and if

she wanted any information has "read it in the stars." I rang the

bell the other day to see if the door would open. It did so after

considerable delay, and a pimply boy in knee pants showed me upstairs

into the waiting room. After a while I was removed to the consultation

room, where Mme. La Foy, seated behind a small oilcloth-covered table,

rakes up old personalities and pries into the future at cut rates.

Skirmishing about among the planets for twenty years involves a great

deal of fatigue and exposure, to say nothing of the night work, and so

Mme. La Foy has the air of one who has put in a very busy life. She

is as familiar with planets, though, as you or I might be with our own

family, and calls them by their first names. She would know Jupiter,

Venus, Saturn, Adonis or any of the other fixed stars the darkest night

that ever blew.

"Mme. La Foy De Graw," said I, bowing with the easy grace of a gentleman

of the old school, "would you mind peering into the future for me about

a half dollar's worth, not necessarily for publication, et cetera."

"Certainly not. What would you like to know?"

"Why, I want to know all I can for the money,"

I said, in a bantering tone. "Of course I do not wish to know what I

already know. It is what I do not know now that I desire to know. Tell

me what I do not know, Madam. I will detain you but a moment."

She gave me back my large, round half dollar and told me that she was

already weary. She asked me to excuse her. She was willing to unveil the

future to me in her poor, weak way, but she could not guarantee to let a

large flood of light into the darkened basement of a benighted mind for

half a dollar.

"You can tell me what year and on what day of what month you were born,"

said Mme. La Foy, "and I will outline your life to you. I generally

require a lock of the hair, but in your case we will dispense with it."

I told her when I was born and the circumstances, as well as I could

recall them.

"This brings you under Venus, Mercury and Mars. These three planets were

in conjunction at the time of your birth. You were born when the sign

was wrong, and you have had more or less trouble ever since.

Had you been born when the sign was in the head or the heart, instead of

the feet, you would not have spread out over the ground so much.

"Your health is very good, as is the health of those generally who are

born under the same auspices that you were. People who are born under

the reign of the crab are apt to be cancerous. You, however, have great

lung power and wonderful gastric possibilities. Yet, at times, you would

be very easily upset. A strong cyclone that would unroof a courthouse

or tip over a through train would also upset you, in spite of your broad

firm feet, if the wind got behind one of your ears.

"You will be married early and you will be very happy, though your wife

will not enjoy herself very much. Your wife will be much happier during

her second marriage.

[Illustration: 0047]

"You will prosper better in business matters without forming any

partnerships. Do not go into partnership with a small, dark man, who

has neuralgia and a fine yacht. He has abundant means, but he will go

through you like an electric shock.

"Tuesdays and Saturdays will be your most fortunate days on which to

borrow money of men with light hair. Mondays and Thursdays will be your

best days for approaching dark men.

"Look out for a low-sot man accompanied by an office cat, both of whom

are engaged in the newspaper business. He is crafty and bald-headed on

his father's side. He prints the only paper that contains the full text

of his speeches at testimonials and dinners given to other people. Do

not loan him money on any account.

"You would succeed well as a musician or an inventor, but you would not

do well as a poet. You have all the keen sensibility and strong passion

of a poet, but you haven't the hair. Do not try poesy.

"In the future I see you very prosperous You are on the lecture

platform speaking. Large crowds of people are jostling each other at the

box-office and trying to get their money back.

"Then I see you riding behind a flexible horse that must have cost a

large sum of money. You are smoking a cigar that has never been in use

before. Then Venus bisects the orbit of Mars, and I see you going home

with your head tied up in the lap-robe, you and your spirited horse in

the same ambulance."

"But do you see anything for me in the future, Mme. La Foy?" I asked,

taking my feet off the table, the better to watch her features;

"anything that would seem to indicate political preferment, a reward for

past services to my country, as it were?"

"No, not clearly. But wait a moment. Your horoscope begins to get a

little more intelligent. I see you at the door of the Senate Chamber.

You are counting over your money and looking sadly at a schedule of

prices. Then you turn sorrowfully away, and decide to buy a seat in the

House instead. Many years after I see you in the Senate. You are there

day after day attending to your duties. You are there early, before any

one else, and I see you pacing back and forth, up and down the

aisles, sweeping out the Senate Chamber and dusting off the seats and

rejuvenating the cuspidors."

"Does this horoscope which you are using this season give you any

idea as to whether money matters will be scarce with me next week or

otherwise, and if so, what I had better do about it?"

"Towards the last of the week you will experience considerable monetary

prostration; but just as you have become despondent, at the very tail

end of the week, the horizon will clear up and a slight, dark gentleman,

with wide trousers, who is a total stranger to you, will loan you

quite a sum of money, with the understanding that it is to be repaid on

Monday."

"Then you would not advise me to go to Coney Island until the week after

next?"

"Certainly not."

"Would it be etiquette in dancing a quadrille to swing a young person of

the opposite sex twice round at a select party when you are but slightly

acquainted, but feel quite confident that her partner is unarmed?"

"Yes."

"Does your horoscope tell a person what to do with raspberry jelly that

will not jell?"

"No, not at the present prices."

"So you predict an early marriage, with threatening weather and strong

prevailing easterly winds along the Gulf States?"

"Yes, sir."

"And is there no way that this early marriage may be evaded?"

"No, not unless you put it off till later in life."

"Thank you," I said, rising and looking out the window over a broad

sweep of undulating alley and wind-swept roofing; "and now, how much are

you out on this?"

"Sir!"

"What's the damage?"

"Oh, one dollar."

"But don't you advertise to read the past, present and future for fifty

cents?"

"Well, that is where a person has had other information before in his

life and has some knowledge to begin with; but where I fill up a vacant

mind entirely, and store it with facts of all kinds, and stock it up

so that it can do business for itself, I charge a dollar. I cannot

thoroughly relit and refurnish a mental tenement from the ground up for

fifty cents."

I do not think we have as good "Astrologists" now as we used to have.

Astrologists cannot crawl under the tent and pry into the future as they

could three or four thousand years ago.

INGRATITUDE OF THE HUMAN HEART.

|When I was a child I was different from other boys in many respects. I

was always looking about to see what good I could do. I am that way yet.

If my little brother wanted to go in swimming contrary to orders, I was

not strong enough to prevent him, but I would go in with him and save

him from a watery grave. I went in the water thousands of times that

way, and as a result he is alive to-day. But he is ungrateful. He hardly

ever mentions it now, but he remembers the Gordian knots that I tied in

his shirts. He speaks of them frequently.

<b>CHESTNUT-BURR</b> V--CONCERNING THE FRENCH MASTERPIECES AT THE ACADEMY OF

DESIGN.

_A Connoisseur with Original Ideas Who Grasps at Once the Spirit of the

Canvas and discovers Various Latent Beauties Unknown Even to the Artist

Himself--Diana Surprised, and Attired in an Atmosphere that Defies

Fashion's Edict._

|Taking _The World_ artist with me in order to know fully what I was

talking about, I visited the Academy of Design a day or two ago for the

purpose of witnessing some of the pictures from Paris which are now on

exhibition there. Many of these pictures are large and beautiful, while

others are small and ornery. At the head of the stairs is a smallish

picture, with a good, heavy frame and greenish foreground. It is not

on the catalogue, so I will try to describe it briefly. About half way

between the foreground and middle distance there is a cream-colored

perspective, while above this there is a rag-carpet sky, with lumps on

it.

"And is there no way of removing these large lumps of paint, so as to

give the picture an even appearance?" I asked Mr. McDougall.

"Oh, no; they don't want to do that," he said; "that is the _impasto_

method of putting on the colors, which brings out the salient features

of the painting."

So this imposture method, it seems, is really gaining ground, and this

picture, with the soldier-overcoat sky and green chenille grass and

gargetty distance, would no doubt be worth in Paris thirteen or fourteen

dollars.

No. 84 is a picture by Charles Durand, entitled "A Country Woman in

Champagne." I was bitterly disappointed in this picture, for though

the woman seems to be in good spirits the artist has utterly failed to

grapple fully with his subject, and without the catalogue in his hand I

would defy the most brilliant connoisseur to say definitely whether or

not she is under the influence of liquor.

We next walk around to No. 168, a picture by Camille Pissaro.

M. Pissaro has ten pictures in the Academy, but this one is the best.

It is made by the squirt system of painting, graining and kalsomining,

which is now becoming so _a la mode_ and _rouge et noir_. The artist

tells me that the colors are carefully arranged in a tin pail and

applied to the canvas by means of a squirt gun or Rembrandt stomach

pump. This gives the painting a beautiful yet dappled appearance, which

could not be obtained with a brush.

This picture is worth three dollars of any man's money for the frame is

worth two dollars, and there is at least a dollar's worth of paint on

the picture that is just as good as ever. The artist has handled the

feet in a masterly manner, bringing them out so that they hang over the

frame like a thing of life. If I could paint feet as M. Pissaro does I

would not spend my life striping buggies in a close room among coarse

men with putty on their pantaloons, but I would burst forth from my

humble surroundings, and I would attract the attention of the whole

great world of art with my massive and heroic feet. Then from this I

would gradually get so that I could make pictures that would resemble

people. There is no reason why M. Pissaro should not do well in that

way, for he has painted No. 171, "A woman at a Well," in which the most

unkempt and uncultivated peasant can at once distinguish which is the

woman and which is the well. He is also the author of "Spring," a squirt

study with a blue rash, which has broken out where the sky ought to be.

No. 136 is the "Execution of Maximilian," by Edouard Manet, a foreign

artist. The scene is laid at the base of an old Mexican slaughter-house.

In the foreground may be seen the rear of the Mexican army with its

wealth of _tournure_ and cute little gored panties. All Mexican troops

have their trousers gored at the hips. Sometimes they also have them

gored at the bull-fights which take place there. In the contiguous

distance Maximilian maybe seen, wearing the hat which has evidently

infuriated the Mexican populace. The artist says that Maximilian objects

to being shot, but I pretend not to hear him, and he repeats the remark,

so I have to say "Very good, very good," and then we pass on to No. 60,

which is entitled "Dreams," by Prévis de Chavannes.

In this picture a weary man, who has worn himself out sleeping in

haystacks and trying to solve the labor problem, so that the great curse

of industry may be wiped out and the wealthy man made to pay the taxes

while the poor man assists in sharing the burden of dividends, is lying

on the ground with a pleasant smile on his face. He is asleep, with his

mouth slightly ajar, showing how his teeth are fastened in their places.

He is smiling in his slumber, and there is hay in his whiskers. Three

decalcomanie angels are seen fastened to the sky in the form of a

tableau. One is scattering cookies in his pathway, while the second has

a laurel wreath which is offered at a great reduction, as the owner

is about to leave the city for the summer. These are the new style

of wingless angels recently introduced into art and now becoming very

popular.

M. Chavannes is also the mechanic who constructed a picture numbered 61

and called the "Poor Fisherman." The history of this little picture is

full of pathos. The scene is laid in Newark Bay, N. J. A poor fisherman

and his children go out to spend the day, taking their lunch with them.

"O papa, let us take two or three cucumbers with our lunch," says one of

the children, in glee.

"Very well, my child," exclaims the father, with ill-concealed delight,

"Go down to the market and get one for each of us."

The artist has chosen to make his study of the fisherman a short time

after lunch. The father is engaged in regretting something which it is

now too late to recall. Cholera infantum has overtaken the younger

child and the other is gathering lobelia for her father. The picture is

wonderful in its conception ana execution. One can see that he is a poor

fisherman, for he has not caught any fish, and the great agony he feels

is depicted in his face and the altitude of his hair. The picture

might have been called a battle piece or a French interior, with equal

propriety.

Manet has several bright and cheery bits of color, among them No. 147,

"Spring at Giverny," which might be called Fourth of July in a Roman

candle factory without misleading the thoughtful art-student.

No. 150, "Meadows at Giverny," by the same man, is a study in connecting

the foreground and background of an oil painting by means of purple hay

and dark-blue bunches of boneset in such a way as to deceive the eye.

I have always bitterly regretted that while I was abroad I did not go to

Giverny and see the purple hay and navy-blue tansy and water cress which

grow there in such great abundance. How often we go hurrying through

a country, seeing the old and well-worn features shown us by the

professional guides and tourists, forgetting or overlooking more

important matters, like a scene in France, No. 142, entitled "Women

Bathing." I presume I was within three-quarters of a mile of this view

and yet came home without knowing anything about it.

No. 123, "Diana Surprised," is no doubt the best picture in the whole

collection. The tall and beautiful figure of Diana in the middle

distance in the act of being surprised, is well calculated to appeal to

any one with a tender heart or a few extra clothes. Diana has just been

in swimming with her entire _corps de ballet_, and on coming out of the

water is surprised to find that someone has stolen her clothes. The

artist has very happily caught the attitude and expression at the moment

when she is about to offer a reward for them. The picture is so true to

life that I instinctively stammered "Excuse me," and got behind the

artist who was with me. The figures are life size and the attitudes are

easy and graceful in the extreme. One very beautiful young woman in the

middle foreground, about seven and one-half inches north of the frame of

the picture, with her back to the spectator, crouches at Diana's feet.

She has done her beautiful and abundant hair up in a graceful coil at

the back of her head, but has gone no further with her toilet when the

surprise takes place. The idea is lofty and the treatment beneficial. I

do not know that I am using these terms as I should, but I am doing the

best I can.

We often hear our friends regret that their portraits, dressed in

clothing that has long since become obsolete, are still in existence,

and though the features are correctly reproduced, the costume is now

so ridiculous as to impair the _de trop_ of the picture and mar its

_aplomb_.

Jules Lefebvre has overcome this great obstacle in a marvelous manner,

and gives us Diana and her entire staff surrounded by an atmosphere

that time cannot cloud with contumely or obscure with ridicule. Had the

artist seen fit to paint Diana wearing a Garibaldi waist and very full

skirt with large hoops, and her hair wrapped around two or three large

"rats," he might have been true to the customs and costumes of a certain

period in the history of art, but it would not have stood the test of

time. As it is he has wisely chosen to throw about her a certain air

of _hauteur_ which will look just as well in a hundred years as it does

now.

The picture has a massive frame and would brighten up one end of a

dining-room very much. I was deeply mortified and disappointed to learn

that it was not for sale. Actéon is the party who surprised Diana.

[Illustration: 0057]

<b>CHESTNUT-BURR</b> VI--BILL NYE DIAGNOSTICATES THE PLAINT OF A COUNTRY

COUSIN.

_Nice Points of Seasonable Etiquette---City Relatives Whose Friendship

Grows Warm with the Summer, but Who Regard a Chalk Meerschaum Pipe at

Christmas as an Offset for a Season's Board._

|I hold that I violate no particular amount of confidence when I lay the

following private letter before the heated public:

Shirley-on-the-Piscataquis River,

State of Maine, June 20, 1887.

_Mr. William Nye, World Office, New York._

Sir: I have been a reader of _The World_ for some time and have

frequently noticed the alacrity with which you have come forward and

explained things through its columns. You must be indeed a kind-hearted

man, or you would not try to throw light on things just to oblige other

people, when you do not, as a matter of fact, know what you are talking

about. Few men would so far forget their own comfort as to do this in

order to please others. Most men are selfish and hang back when asked a

difficult question, preferring to wait till they know how to answer it;

but you, sir, you seem to be so free always to come forward and explain

things, and yet are so buoyant and hopeful that you will escape the

authorities, that I have ventured to write you in regard to a matter

that I feel somewhat of an interest in. It is now getting along into

the shank of the summer and people from the great cities of our land are

beginning to care less and less for the allurements of sewer gas, and to

sigh for a home in the country and to hanker for the "spare room" in a

quiet neighborhood at $2 a week with board.

I have seen a great many rules of etiquette for the guidance of country

people who go to the city, but I have never run up against a large,

blue-book telling city people how to conduct themselves as to avoid

adverse criticism while in the country. Every little while some person

writes a piece regarding the queer pranks of a countryman in town and

acts it out on the stage and makes a whole pile of money on it, but we

do not seem to get the other side of this matter at all. What I desire

is that you will give us a few hints in regard to the conduct of city

people who visit in the rural districts during the heated term. I am not

a professional summer-resort tender or anything of that kind, but I am a

plain man, that works and slaves in the lumber woods all winter and then

blows it in, if you will allow the term, on some New York friends of my

wife's who come down, as they state, for the purpose of relaxation, but

really to spread themselves out over our new white coverlids with their

clothes on, and murmur in a dreamy voice: "Oh, how restful!"

They also kick because we have no elevated trains that will take them

down to the depot, whereas I am not able and cannot get enough ahead or

forehanded sufficiently to do so, as heaven is my judge.

[Illustration: 0063]

They bring with them a small son, who is a pale, emaciated little cuss,

with a quiet way of catching my three-year-old heifer by the tail and

scaring the life out of her that is far beyond his years. His mother

thinks he will not live, mayhap, to grow up, and I hope she may not be

disappointed. Still he has a good appetite, and one day last summer,

besides his meals, he ate:=

```One pocketful green apples (pippins),

```One pocketful green apples (Ben Davis),

```Three large steins rhubarb,

```One hatful green gooseberries,

```Two ginger cookies, without holes,

```Three ginger cookies, with holes,

```One adult cucumber, with salt on same,

```One glass new milk,

```Two uncooked hen eggs, on half-shell.=

I laid off all that day from haying in order to follow the little rascal

around with a lead pencil and a piece of paper and see how much he would

eat. That evening I thought what a beautiful night he had selected

for his death. The moon was slipping in and out through the frothy,

fleece-lined clouds, and I could imagine the angels just behind the

battlements putting the celestial bric-a-brac high enough up so that

Henry couldn't get hold of it when he came. I had a slow horse concealed

behind the barn, with which I intended going for the doctor. It was a

horse with which I had failed to get the doctor in time on a similar

occasion, and I felt that he could be relied on now.

Night settled down on the riproaring Piscataquis and deepened the

shadows at the base of Russell Mountain. The spruce gum tree of the

Moosehead Lake region laid aside its work for the day and the common

warty toad of the Pine Tree State began to overestimate himself and

inflate his person with the bugs of the evening, now and then lighting

up his interior with a lightning bug. It was a glorious evening that

little Henry had selected and set aside for his death. But he was really

the only one in our house who slept well that night, and seemed to wake

up thoroughly refreshed. He is still alive as I write and is coming down

here in July emptier than ever.

Oh, sir, can you help me? Will you print this poor petition of mine,

with the tear-stains on it, and your reply to it in _The World_ and

send me a copy of the paper that I can show to Henry's father, who is a

cousin of my wife's but otherwise has nothing to which he can point with

pride? Yours sincerely,

Eben L. Tewey.

P. S.--I have presumed some on your good nature, because I have been

told that you was born here. I am sorry to say that Shirley has never

overcome this entirely. It has hurt her with other towns in the State,

but you can see yourself that there was no way we could provide against

it. My wife sends love, and hopes you will print this letter without

giving my name, or if so, with a fictitious name, as they call it, and

perhaps it will fall into the hands of those people who come down here

every summer with nothing in them but sincere friendship and go home

full of victuals. I wish you would put into it some way a piece that

says I do not regard a Christmas present of a chalk meershum pipe, with

a red celluloid stem, as an offset against a summer's board of a family

that has more malaria than good manners. Slap that in, in your genial

way, so as not to give offense, and whenever you visit your old

birthplace, and want to just let go all holts and have a good time, come

right to our house. I have lathed and plastered the cook-room and fitted

it up as a kind of Inebriates' Home, and I would feel tickled to death

to have you come and see what you think of it.

E. L. T.

P. S. Again. If you print this letter, Slocum would be a good fictitious

name to sign to it, and I would want an extra copy of the paper also.

T.

_Reply_.

Sir: Will you allow me to say that I think it is such letters as the

above that create ill-feeling between the people of the country and the

people of the city, and cause the relations to be strained, especially

those relations that live in the country. Although you are not

altogether in the wrong, Eben, and although country people, who live

near to nature's heart, have certain inalienable rights which should be

respected, yet there is no work on etiquette which covers the case you

allude to.

It would be very difficult for me to write out a code of ethics for

the government of your relative while in the country, and from the

description you give of him I judge that we could not enforce it anyway

without calling out the State troops.

I take him to belong to that class of New York business men who are so

active doing nothing every day, that in order to impress people with

their importance, they are in the habit of pushing a woman or two off

the Brooklyn bridge in their wild struggle to get over into the City

Hall park and sit down. I presume that he is that kind of a man here,

and so we think you ought to get along with him through July and August

if we take him for the rest of the year.

He is the kind that would knock down an old woman in the morning, in his

efforts to get the first possible elevated train, and then do nothing

else all day but try to recover from the shock. I wouldn't be surprised

if he ultimately wrote a book on etiquette, which will inform a

countryman how to conduct himself while he is in town. Maybe he is

writing it now.

I can imagine, Eben, what sad havoc the son of such a man would create

in your quiet Piscataquis home. In my mind's eye I can see him trying to

carry out his father's lofty notions of refinement and courtesy. I

can see his bright smile as he lands at your door and begins to insert

himself into your home life, to breathe resinous air of the piney

woods, and to pour kerosene into the sugar bowl, to chase the gaudy

decalcomanie butterfly, and put angle worms in the churn.

In this man's book on etiquette he will, doubtless, say that should

you have occasion while at table to use a toothpick, you should hold

a napkin before your mouth while doing so, in order to avoid giving

offense to those who are at table. It is not necessary for you to crawl

under the table to pick your teeth, or to go out behind the barn, for

by throwing a large napkin over your head you can pick your teeth with

impunity though you should not use a fork, as it does not look well and

it might put out your eye.

Nothing is more disgusting to a refined mind than to see a man at table

holding one of his eyes on a fork and scrutinizing it with the other.

In calling on a lady who is away from home leave your card. If the visit

is intended for two or three ladies at the house, leave two or three

cards, but do not turn down the corner of the card as that custom is now

exploded except in three card monte circles and even then it is regarded

with suspicion.

All these things, however, are for the guidance of people who come to

town, and those who go into the country are left practically without any

suitable book to guide them.

I do not know of any better way for you to do, Eben, than to write a

polite note to your relatives asking them if they contemplate paying you

a visit this summer, and if so at what time, and whether they will bring

Henry or not. Use plain white unruled note paper and write only on one

side, unless you are a Mugwump in which case you might write on both

sides.

Then if they write that they do so contemplate paying you a visit

without paying anything else, I do not know of anything for you to

do but to go away somewhere for the summer, leaving your house fully

insured and in the hands of a reliable incendiary.

Write again, Eben, and feel perfectly free to come and lean on me in

all matters of etiquette. Do not come to town without hunting me up. You

will find me at the Post-Office forenoons and in the pest-house during

the afternoon. Yours, with kind regards.

MEN ARE OFTEN MISUNDERSTOOD.

|They may be rough on the exterior but they can love Oh, so earnestly,

so warmly, so truly, so deeply, so intensely, so yearningly, so fondly,

and so universally!

<b>CHESTNUT-BURR</b> VII--BILL NYE IN THE ROLE OF AN UTE INDIAN JENKINS.

_Personal Gossip Designed to Interest the Indian Society

People--Remarkable Toilets Seen on the Reservation--A Novel Aboriginal

Dinner Menu--Points for Society Reporters--Eager to Make Their Mark._

|The following Ute society gossip is full of interest to those who have

personal acquaintances and friends, among that set. I have only just

received them, and hasten to give them as early as possible, knowing

that the readers of _The World_ will all feel an interest in what is

going on in and about the reservation:

The season at White River will be unusually gay this winter, and soon

there will be one continuous round of hilarity, indigestion, mirth,

colic and social hatred, Red Horse, the smoke-tanned horse-fiddle

_maestro_, will play and call off again this winter for germans, grub

dances and jack-rabbit gorges as usual.

The Ouray War Club will give a series of hops in November under its own

auspices, and in December it will hold two Germans. In going through

these Germans no favors will be shown by the club.

Mr. and Mrs. Mexican-Hairless-Dog-upon-whom-there-are-no-Flies have been

spending the summer at their delightful hostile home near White River.

They have just returned for the winter, beautifully bronzed by the

elements, and report one of the most exhilarating outbreaks they ever

were to.

Lop-Ear-Son-of-the-Cyclone received a cablegram last week, on his return

from the war-path, offering him a princely salary to come to London, and

assist in robbing the Deadwood coach. He says the legitimate drama is

certainly making wonderful strides. He has heard the American Opera

Company in "Hero," and says that no one who has lived on the reservation

all his life can have any idea of the strides that are being made on the

stage. He has not decided whether to accept the offer or not, but says

that if the stage they are going to rob is the operatic stage he will

not assist at any price. He says he knows what it is to suffer for

clothes himself.

The members of the Chipeta Canoeing Club have just returned from a

summer jaunt, and are in good spirits. They report that a good time

was had and health greatly improved. The club will give a sociable and

gastric recital at its grounds next week. The proceeds will go toward

beautifying the grounds of the club and promoting a general good

feeling. Each member is permitted to bring one cash friend.

Tail-Man-Who-Toys with-the-Thunderbolts will start to-morrow for the

home of the Great White Father, at Washington. He goes to make a treaty

or two and be awed by the surplus in the treasury. He will make as many

treaties as possible, after which he will invite the Great White Father

to visit our young and growing reservation, enjoy our crude hospitality

and cultivate the Ute vote.

A select scalp-dance and rum sociable will take place at the foot of the

gulch, at the middle of the present moon, after which there will be a

presentation speech and resolutions of respect tendered to the Board of

Outbreaks and the Sub-Committee on Hostility.

The following will be the _menu_:

Reservation soup, strengthened with rain-water; condemned sardines,

codfish balls, fish plates, railroad frogs' legs, sage hen à la Colorow,

jerked jack-rabbits, roasting ears à la massacre, hot-house clams,

rattlesnakes' tongues à la fire-water, prickly pears, fruit of the loom,

dried apples and whisky. Dancing will be kept up till a late hour.

The approaching nuptials of Fly-by-Night, a partial widower of Snippeta,

daughter of Wipe-Up-the-Ground-with-His-Enemies, will be the occasion

of quite a _tout ensemble_ and blow-out. He will marry the surviving

members of the family of Warnpo-the-Wailer-that-Wakes-Up-in-the-Night.

He will on this occasion lead to the altar Mrs. Wampo-the-Wailer, etc.,

her two daughters and the hired girl. The wedding will take place at the

residence of the bride. Invitations are already out and parties who have

not yet received any, but who would like to be present and swap a tin

napkin ring for a square meal, will be invited if they will leave their

address with the groom.

Crash-of-the-Tempest, a prominent man of the tribe, laid a large tumor

on our table last week, weighing four pounds, from which he was removed

on Wednesday. So far, this is the largest tumor that has been brought in

this summer to apply on subscription. Call again, Crash.

Soiled Charley and Peek-a-Boo, delegates of the Ute notion sent to the

Great White Father at Washington, returned yesterday from Red Top, the

great tepee of the Pale Chief. They made a great many treaties and

both are utterly exhausted. Peek-a-Boo is confined to his wigwam by the

hallucination that the air is full of bright red bumble bees with blue

tails. He says that he does not mind the hostility of the white man,

but it is his hospitality that makes him tired.

[Illustration: 0071]

A full-dress reception and _consommé_ was tendered to the friends of

labor at the home of Past Worthy Chief Fly-up-the-Creek, of White

River, by his own neighbors and Uncompaghre admirers on Tuesday evening.

At an early hour guests began to arrive and crawl under the tent into

the reception-room.

A fine band, consisting of a man who had deserted from the regular

military band, played Boulanger's March on the bass drum with deep

feeling.

The widow of Wampo-the-Wailer and affianced of old Fly-by-Night, wore a

dark coiffure, held in place by the wish-bone of a sage hen, and looked

first rate.

Miss Wampo, the elder, wore a _négligé_ costume, consisting of a red

California blanket, caught back with real burdock burrs and held in

place by means of a hame strap.

The younger Miss Wampo wore a Smyrna rug, with bunch grass at the

throat.

Mrs. D. W. Peek-a-Boo wore a cavalry saddle blanket, with Turkish

overalls and bone ornaments.

Miss Peek-a-Boo wore a straw-colored _jardiniere_, cut V-shape, looped

back with a russet shawl strap and trimmed with rick-rack around the

arm-holes. Her eyes danced with merriment, and she danced with most

anybody in the wigwam.

Little Casino, the daughter of Fly-Up-the-Creek, of the Uncompaghres,

wore the gable end of an "A" tent, trimmed with red flannel rosettes. It

had veneered panels, and the new and extremely swell sleeves, blown up

above the elbow and tight the rest of the way, in which, as she said in

her naive way, they resembled her father, who was tight half of the time

and blown up the rest of the time. Little Casino was the life of the

party, and it would be hard to opine of anything more charming than

her bright and cheery way of telling a funny story, which convulsed her

audience, while she quietly completed a fractional flush and took home

the long-delayed jack pot to her needy father. She is an intellectual

exotic of which the Uncompaghres may well be proud, and is also one of

those rare productions of nature never at a loss for something to write

in an autograph album. In the album of a young warrior of the Third Ute

Infantry she has written: "In friendship's great fruitage, please regard

me as your huckleberry, Little Casino."

Our genial townsman, William H. Colorow, is home again after a prolonged

hunting and camping trip, during which he was attacked and cordially

shot at by a group of gentlemen who came to serve a writ of replevin

on him. Col. Colorow does not know exactly what the writ of replevin

is for, unless it be for the purpose of accumulating mileage for the

sheriff. Few were killed during the engagement, except a small pappoose

belonging to Mr. and Mrs. Roll-on-Silver-Moon, who returned last evening

with the remains of their child. A late copy of a New York paper alludes

to this as "a furious engagement, after which the Indians carried off

their dead according to their custom." Mr. and Mrs. Roll-on-Silver-Moon

were warned against taking the baby with them on an extended camping

trip, but they seemed to think that it would be perfectly safe, as

the child was only seven weeks old, and could not have incurred the

hostility of the War Department. This was not improbable at all,

for, according to the records, it takes from nine to eleven weeks to

officially irritate the War Department. The little one now lies at the

wigwam of its afflicted parents, on Cavyo street, and certainly does not

look as though it could have stood out so long against the sheriff and

his posse.

Mrs. Roll-on-Silver-Moon has a painful bullet wound in the shoulder, but

feels so grieved about the loss of little Cholera Infantum that she does

not make much fuss over her injury. The funeral of the little one will

take place this evening, from its late residence, and friends of the

parents are cordially invited to come and participate. Wailing will

begin promptly at sundown.

Mr. and Mrs. P. P. C. Shinny-on-Your-Own-Ground are just back from a

summer jaunt in the Little Big Horn Mountains, whither they went in

search of health. They returned laden with golden rod and a large catch

of landlocked grasshoppers. As soon as they get thoroughly rested they

will announce a select locust, grasshopper and cricket feed at their

home, during which a celebrated band from the Staten Island ferry will

oblige with a new selection, known as "The Cricket on the Hearth."

Major Santee, who is now at home repairing the roof of his gothic tepee,

which was so damaged by the recent storms that it allowed hail, rain

and horned cattle to penetrate his apartments at all times of the day

or night, says that in the late great Ute war everybody wanted to fight

except the Indians and the War Department. He believes that no Indian

outbreak can be regarded as a success without the hearty co-operation

and godspeed of the government, and a quorum of Indians who are willing

to break out into open hostility. Major Santee lost a niece during the

recent encounter. She was not hostile to any one, but was respected

by all, and will now cast a gloom. She had no hard feelings toward the

sheriff or any one of his posse, and had never met them before. She was

very plain in appearance, and this was her first engagement. The sheriff

now claims that he thought she was reaching for her gun, whereas it

appears that she was making a wild grab for her Indian trail.

Major Santee says that he hopes it will be many a long day before the

sheriff organizes another Ute outbreak and compels the Utes to come

and bring their families. He lays that human life here is now so cheap?

especially the red style of human life, that sometimes he is almost

tempted to steal two hundred thousand dollars and go to New York, where

he will be safe.

SURE CURE FOR BILIOUSNESS.

|Whenever I get bilious and need exercise, I go over to the south end of

town and vicariously hoe radishes for an hour or two till the pores

are open, and I feel that delightful languor and the chastened sense of

hunger and honesty which comes to the man who is not afraid to toil.

<b>CHESTNUT-BURR</b> VIII--IN AN UNGUARDED MOMENT BILL NYE IS CAPTURED BY A

POLITICAL SIREN.

_Decoyed by Honeyed Words He Essays to Purify Politics--The Inevitable

Delegation from Irving Hall--An Unreserved Statement of Campaign

Expenses--Some Items of a Momentous Canvass Disclosed._

|I have only just returned from the new-made grave of a little boomlet

of my own. Yesterday I dug a little hole in the back yard and buried

in it my little boom, where the pie-plant will cast its cooling shadows

over it and the pinch-bug can come and carol above it at eventide.

A few weeks ago a plain man came to me and asked me my name. Refreshing

my memory by looking at the mark on my linen, I told him promptly who

I was. He said he had resided in New York for a long time and felt the

hour had now arrived for politics in this city to be purified. Would I

assist him in this great work? If so, would I appoint a trysting place

where we could meet and tryst? I suggested the holy hush and quiet

of lower Broadway or the New York end of the East River bridge at 6

o'clock; but he said no, we might be discovered. So we agreed to meet

at my house. There he told me that his idea was to run me for the State

Senate this fall, not because he had any political axe to grind, but

because he wanted to see old methods wiped out and the will of the

people find true and unfettered expression.

"And, sir," I asked, "what party do you represent?"

"I represent those who wish for purity, those who sigh for the results

of unbought suffrages, these who despise old methods and yearn to hear

the unsmothered voice of the people."

"Then you are Mr. Vox Populi himself, perhaps?"

"No, my name is Kargill, and I am in dead earnest. I represent the party

of purity in New York."

"And why did you not bring the party with you? Then you and I and

my wife and this party you speak of could have had a game of whist

together," said I with an air of inimitable drollery.

But he seemed to be shocked by my trifling manner, and again asked me to

be his standard-bearer. Finally I said reluctantly that I would do so,

for I have always said that I would never shrink from my duty in case I

should become the victim of political preferment.

In Wyoming I had several times accepted the portfolio of justice of

the peace, and so I knew what it was to be called forth by the wild

and clamorous appeals of my constituents and asked to stand up for

principle, to buckle on the armor of true patriotism and with drawn

sword and overdrawn salary to battle for the right.

In running for office in Wyoming our greatest expense and annoyance

arose from the immense distances we had to travel in order to go over

one county. Many a day I have traveled during an exciting canvass from

daylight till dark without meeting a voter. But here was a Senatorial

district not larger than a joint school district, and I thought that the

expense of making a canvass would be comparatively small.

That was where I made a mistake. On the day after Mr. Lucifer Kargill

had entered my home and with honeyed words made me believe that New York

had been, figuratively speaking, sitting back on her haunches for fifty

years waiting for me to come along and be a standard-bearer, a man came

to my house who said he had heard that I was looking toward the Senate,

and that he had come to see me as the representative of Irving Hall. I

said that I did not care a continental for Irving Hall, so far as my

own campaign was concerned, as I intended to do all my speaking in the

school-houses.

He said that I did not understand him. What he wanted to know was, what

percentage of my gross earnings at Albany would go into the Irving Hall

sinking fund, provided that organization indorsed me? I said that I was

going into this campaign to purify politics, and that I would do what

was right toward Irving Hall, in order to be placed in a position where

I could get in my work as a purifier.

We then had a long talk upon what he called the needs of the hour. He

said that I would make a good candidate, as I had no past. I was unknown

and safe. Besides, he could see that I had the elements of success,

for I had never expressed any opinion about anything, and had never

antagonized any of the different wings of the party by saying anything

that people had paid any attention to. He said also that he learned I

had belonged to all the different parties, and so would be familiar with

the methods of each. He then asked me to sign a pledge and after I had

done so he shook hands with me and went away.

The next day I was waited upon by the treasurers of eleven chowder

clubs, the financial secretary of the Shanty Sharpshooters and Goat Hill

Volunteers. A man also came to obtain means for burying a dead friend.

I afterward saw him doing so to some extent. He was burying his friend

beneath the solemn shadow of a heavy mahogany-colored mustache, of which

he was the sole proprieter.

I was waited upon by delegations from Tammany, the County Democracy and

the Jeffersonian Simplicity Chub. Everybody seemed to have dropped his

own business in order to wait upon me, I became pledged to every one on

condition that I should be elected. It makes me shudder now to think

what I may have signed. I paid forty odd dollars for the privilege of

voting for a beautiful child, and thus lost all influence with every

other parent in the contest. I voted for the most popular young lady and

heard afterward that she regarded me only as a friend. I had a

biography and portrait of myself printed in an obscure paper that

claimed a large circulation, and the first time the forms went into the

press a loose screw fell out on the machinery, caught in the forehead of

my portrait and peeled back the scalp so that it dropped over the eye

like a prayer rag hanging out of the window.

I had paid a boy three dollars to scatter these papers among the

neighbors, but I met him as he came out of the office and made it five

dollars if he would put them in the bosom of the moaning tide.

I give below a rough draft of expenses, not including; some of the items

referred to above:

[Illustration: 0081]

[Illustration: 0082]

Yesterday I tried to find the red-nosed man who first asked me to go

into the standard-bearer business, in order to withdraw my name, but

I could not find him in the directory. I therefore take this means of

saying, as I said to my assignee last evening, that if a public office

be a public bust, I might just as well bust now and have it over.

To-morrow I will sell out my residence, a cane voted to me as the most

popular man in the State; also an assortment of political pulls, a

little loose in the handles, but otherwise all right. I will close out

at the same time five hundred torches, three hundred tin helmets, nine

transparencies and one double-leaded editorial, entitled "Dinna Ye Hear

the Slogan?"

VIRTUE ITS OWN REWARD.

|A noble, generous-hearted man in Cheyenne lost $250, and an honest

chambermaid found it in his room. The warm heart of the man swelled with

gratitude, and seemed to reach out after all mankind, that he might in

some way assist them with the $250 which was lost, and was found again.

So he fell on the neck of the chambermaid, and while his tears took the

starch out of her linen collar, he put his hand in his pocket and found

her a counterfeit twenty-five cent scrip. "Take this," he said, between

his sobs, "Virtue is its own reward. Do not use it unwisely, put it

into Laramie County bonds, where thieves cannot corrupt, nor moths break

through and gnaw the corners off."

A GOOD PAINTING FOR THE CAPITOL.

|I have seen a very spirited painting somewhere; I think it was at the

Louvre, or the Vatican, or Fort Collins, by either Michael Angelo, or

Raphael, or Eli Perkins, which represented Joseph presenting a portion

of his ulster overcoat to Potiphar's wife, and lighting out for the

Cairo and Palestine 11 o'clock train, with a great deal of earnestness.

This would be a good painting to hang on the walls of the Capitol.

<b>CHESTNUT-BURR</b> IX--BILL NYE DESCANTS UPON YOUNG IVES'S IDEAS IN FINANCE.

_Mr. Ives's Earnest Desire Not to Tell a Lie or Anything Else--Blighted

Powers of Recalling the Past Put Him Alongside the Gentle Gould

Himself--Touching Letter Received from a Patron of His Road._

|The present age may be regarded as the age of investigation. This

morbid curiosity on the part of the American people to know how large

fortunes are acquired is a healthy sign, and the desire of the press, as

well as the people, to investigate the parlor magic and funny business

by which a man can buy two millions of dollars' worth of stock in the

Aurora Borealis without paying for it, stick a quill in it and inflate

the stock to twenty millions, then borrow thirty-five millions on

the new stock by booming it, make an assignment, bust and slide a

fifty-pound ledger up his sleeve, is most gratifying.

For the benefit and entertainment of those who still believe that the

Sunday paper is not an engine of destruction, and for the consideration

of those who may have been kept away from church on this summer Sabbath

morning by sickness or insomnia, let us turn for a moment to the

thoughtful scrutiny of Mr. Henry S. Ives, the young Napoleon of Wall

street.

In the first place, Mr. Ives has done nothing new. Starting out, no

doubt, with Mr. Gould as his model, he has kept up the imitation even to

the loss of memory and blighted powers of recalling the past during an

investigation. (I use Mr. Gould's name simply as an illustration--for I

have no special antipathy toward Mr. Gould.) Personally we are friendly.

He made his money by means of his comatose memory and flabby integrity,

while I made mine by means of earnest, honest toil, and a lurid

imagination.

But in the case of Mr. Ives, the gentle, polite failure to remember,

the earnest desire not to tell a lie or anything else, the courteous and

unobtrusive effort to avoid being too positive about anything that

would assist anybody in ascertaining anything--all, all remind the close

student of Mr. Jay Gould. The conversation during the investigation for

one day ran something like this:

"Mr. Ives, did you in making your assignment turn over all the books

connected with your business?"

"Do you mean my library?"

"No; the books of account, the daybook, cash book, ledger, etc., etc."

"Oh!"

"I ask if you turned over all such books on the date of your

assignment?"

"I could hardly tell that. At least, I would only swear on information

and belief."

"Well, to the best of your knowledge and belief, did you turn over those

books at that time?"

"I think I did, but I am not positive as to the date?"

"What makes you think you did?"

"Because I did frequently turn the books over, in order to see how they

looked on the other side."

* * * * *

"Mr. Ives, we find that several of the more important books connected

with your office and the firm of Henry S. Ives & Co. are missing. Do you

know where they are?"

"No, I do not,"

"Were they in your office prior to your assignment?"

"Yes, they were there, according to the best of my knowledge and belief,

up to the time that they were not there."

"Have you any idea, Mr. Ives, where those books are now?"

"No sir; only in a general way?"

"How do you mean in a general way?"

"Well, I mean that I know only in what might be called a general way."

"Well, Mr. Ives, will you state then, in a general way, where those

books are now?"

"Yes, sir; they are elsewhere."

"What makes you say they are elsewhere, Mr. Ives?"

"Because they are not there."

*****

"Well, now, will you tell us whether you removed those books from the

office of IH. S. Ives & Co. or not?"

"Do you ask me to answer that question personally?"

"Yes."

"Do you wish a verbal answer or would you rather have it in writing?"

"Answer orally."

"Well, then, I did not, to my knowledge."

"Would you have been apt to know of it if you had taken them away

yourself?"

"Well, only in a general way."

"Would you have known about it if any one else had taken them away?"

"I think I would but I might not. There was a great deal of passing

along our street, and they may have been taken while I was looking out

of the window, waiting till the crowds rolled by."

And so Mr. Ives continued to shed information upon the inquiring mind in

a courteous and opaque manner that must have endeared him to all.

Mr. Ives has in no transaction shown himself so thoroughly shrewd as he

did when he swapped a doubtful reputation for a large sum of money. The

only wonder is that there were so many men who wanted to invest in that

kind of goods. He did a shrewd thing, but he will not be able to profit

by it.

Success, however, should only be measured by the content it brings with

it. While Henry S. Ives was lighting his mighty financial battles and

winning for himself the title of the Young Napoleon of Wall street,

dwelling in a little palace lined with ivory and gold, but cursed by the

consuming desire to be rich, and forgetful, like Mr. Gould, how full of

calm and soothing content is the following simple letter, written by

a man who undertook last year to inaugurate a Shakesperian revival in

southern Ohio:

Cincinnati, O., Aug. 3, 1886.

_Mr. Henry S. Ives, New York, N. Y._

_Dear Sir_: I have just arrived in this city after a long and

debilitating but rather enjoyable trip over your line, and I now take

pen in hand to thank you for the use of your roadbed from Indianapolis

to this place. It is a good road, and I was surprised to find it well

ballasted and furnished with cool retreats and shady culverts every few

miles wherein a man could rest.

It is a good route for the poor but pampered tragedian to take, and

water-melons grow close to the fence. I have traveled over many other

roads since the new and pernicious law, but nowhere have I found

watermelons more succulent or less coy and secretive than on your justly

celebrated line. I also notice with pleasure that green corn is still

susceptible, and wild paw paws are growing in the summer sun.

I thought I saw you go by in your special car just north of the first

trestle outside of town, but you went by so fast that I could not tell

definitely till too late. Please excuse me for not speaking to you

as you passed by. Success on the stage has not taught me to forget or

ignore my friends whenever I am thrown in contact with them.

People write me that New York State is rapidly settling up, and that

property is advancing rapidly in every direction. Is this so? Advancing

rapidly in every direction is, I suppose, one of the most difficult

feats known to calisthenics. I have tried it myself, years ago, but now

I do not practice it, having quit drinking altogether.

I hope you will let me know any time that I can be of use to you, either

in mowing weeds or gathering nuts that have ripened and fallen off your

track. I enjoy, especially in the autumn when the hectic of the dying

year has flooded the forests with its multiplied glories, and the

cricket sings his sleepy song to the tired heart, and the locust lifts

its lawn-mower voice in the boughs of the poplar, to go nutting along a

prolific railroad track.

I would be glad, also, if you have not secured anyone else, to assist

you in herding your stock on Wall street. Railroad stock frequently runs

down and gets the hollow horn for lack of care during the winter months.

Always feel free to call on me at any time that I can be of service to

you.

Yours truly,

A-----B------.

The moral to be drawn from the career of Napoleon Bonaparte Ives is that

they who make haste to be rich may not be innocent. As Gen. McClellan

once said, there can be no better incentive to integrity than the

generous approval accorded to honesty by those who are honest. All other

kinds of approval are not worth struggling for. Money will buy a certain

kind of applause, but it is the kind that turns to scorn when justice

begins to get in her fine work.

And life itself is brief. Storied urn and animated bust may succeed well

in society, but they cannot soothe the dull cold ear of death. Freckled

granite and prevaricating marble may perpetuate the fraud of a lifetime,

but they do not always indicate success.

For myself I would rather have more sincere and honest friends through

life, and afterwards content myself with a plainer tomb.

Not many miles from the costly mausoleum of a great millionaire a

sign-board by the roadside reads:=

````This way to Foley's Grove!

````Enjoy life while you live, for

````You'll be along time dead.=

While I do not fully indorse this sentiment, there is food in it for

earnest thought.

THE ANTI-CLINKER BASE-BURNER BEE.

|I have noticed bees very closely indeed, during my life. In fact I have

several times been thrown into immediate juxtaposition with them, and

have had a great many opportunities to observe their ways, and I am free

to say that I have not been so forcibly struck with the difference in

their size as the noticeable difference in their temperature. I remember

at one time sitting by a hive watching the habits of the bees, and

thinking how industrious they were, and what a wide difference there

is between the toilsome life of the little insect, and the enervating,

aimless, idle and luxurious life of the newspaper man, when an impulsive

little bee lit in my hair. He seemed to be feverish. Wherever he settled

down he seemed to leave a hot place. I learned afterward that it was a

new kind of bee called the anti-clinker base-burner bee.

<b>CHESTNUT-BURR</b> X--A FEW REMARKS ON OUR HOSTELRY SYSTEM AS IT NOW

PREVAILS.

_Why a man in a Soft Hat is not always Welcome--The Hotel Clerk and his

Frigidity Apparatus--The Hotel Hog and his Habits--how he may be Headed

Off--Drolleries of Shrewd Bonifaces._

|America has made many gigantic strides, aside from those made at the

battle of Bull Run, and her people spend much of their time pointing

with pride to her remarkable progress; but we are prone to dwell too

much upon our advantages as a summer resort, and our adroit methods of

declining the Presidency before we are asked, while we forget some

of our more important improvements, like the Elevated Railway and the

American Hotel.

Let us, for a moment, look at the great changes that have been wrought

in hotels during the past century. How marked has been the improvement

and how wonderful the advancement. Everything has been changed. Even the

towels have been changed.

Electric bells, consisting of a long and alert wire with an overcoat

button at one end and a reticent boy at the other, have taken the place

of the human voice and a low-browed red-elm club. Where once we were

compelled to fall down a dark, narrow staircase, now we can go down the

elevator or wander down the wrong stairway and ourselves in the laundry.

Where once we were mortified by being compelled to rise at table, reach

nine feet and stab a porous pancake with our fork, meantime wiping the

milk gravy out of a large yellow bowl with our coat-tails, now we

can hire a tall, lithe gentleman in a full-dress suit to pass us the

pancakes.

Even the bar-rooms of American hotels are changed. Once the bartender

waited till his customer ran all his remarks into one long, hoarse word,

with a hiccough on the end, and then he took him by the collar and threw

him out into the cold and chaotic night. Now the bartender gradually

rises on the price of drinks till his customer is frozen out, and while

he is gone to the reading-room to borrow some more money the chemist

moves the bar somewhere else, and when the guest returns he finds a

barber-shop where he thought he left a bar-room.

One hundred years, on their swift pinions, have borne away the big and

earnest dinner bell, and the sway-backed hair trunk that surprised a

man so when he sat down upon it to consider what clothes he would put on

first.

All these evidences of our crude, embryotic existence are gone, and in

their places we have electric bells, and Saratoga trunks wherein we may

conceal our hotel room and still have space left for our clothes.

It is very rare now that we see a United States senator snaking a

two-year old Mambrino hair trunk up three flights of stairs to his room

in order to secure the labor vote. Men, as well as hotels and hotel

soap, have changed. Where once a cake of soap would only last a few

weeks, science has come in and perfected a style of pink soap, flavored

with vanilla, that will last for years, and a new slippery-elm towel

that is absolutely impervious to moisture. Hand in hand, this soap and

towel go gaily down the corridors of time, welcoming the coming and

speeding the parting guest, jumping deftly out of the hands of the

aristocracy into the hands of a receiver, but always calm, smooth and

latherless.

Nature did not fit me to be the successful guest at a hotel. I can see

why it is so. I do not know how to impress a hotel. I think all the way

up from the depot, as I change hands with my hot-handled and heavy

bag, how I will stride up to the counter and ask for the room that is

generally given to Mr. Blaine; but when I get there I fall up against

a cold wave, step back into a large india-rubber cuspidor, and my

overtaxed valise bursts open. While the porter and I gather up my

collars and gently press them in with our feet, the clerk decides that

he hasn't got such a room as I would want.

I then go to another hotel and succeed in getting a room, which

commands a view of a large red fire-escape, a long sweep of undulating

eaves-trough and a lightning rod--usually No. 7 5/8s, near the laundry

chimney and adjoining the baggage elevator.

After I have remained at the hotel several days and paid my bill

whenever I have been asked to do so, and shown that I did not eat much

and that I was willing to carry up my own coal, the proprietor relents

and puts me in a room that is below timber line, and though it is

a better room, I feel all the time as though I had driven out the

night-watchman, for the bed is still warm, and knowing that he must

be sleeping out in the cold hall all night as he patiently watches the

hotel, I cannot sleep until three or four o'clock in the morning, and

then I have to get up while the chambermaid makes my bed for the day.

I try hard when I enter a hotel to assume an air of arrogance and

defiance, but I am all the time afraid that there is some one present

who is acquainted with me.

Another thing that works against me is my apparel. In a strange hotel a

man will do better, if he has fifty dollars only, and desires to remain

two weeks, to go and buy a fifty-dollar suit of clothes with his money,

taking his chances with the clerk, than to dress like a plain American

citizen, and expect to be loved, on the grounds that he will pay his

board.

But there is now a prospect for reform in this line, a scheme by which a

man's name and record as a guest will be his credentials. When this plan

becomes thoroughly understood and adopted, a modest man with money, who

prefers to wear a soft hat, will not have to sleep in the Union depot,

solely on the ground that the night clerk is opposed to a soft hat.

[Illustration: 0097]

This scheme, to be brief, consists of a system of regular reports

from tables and rooms, which reports are epitomized at the office and

interchangeable with other hotels, on the principle of the R. G, Dun

Commercial Agency. The guest is required to sign his order at the table

or give the number of his room, whether the hotel is run on the European

plan or not, and these orders in the aggregate, coming from head

waiters, porters, chambermaids and bell-boys, make up a man's standing

on a scale of from A to Z.

For instance, we will say a five-dollar-per-day house can afford to feed

a man for a dollar a meal. The guest orders two dollars' worth, sticks

his mustache into just enough of it to spoil it for stew or giblet

purposes, and then goes to his room. Here he puts up the fire-escape

rope for a clothes-line, does a week's washing, and hanging it out upon

the improvised clothesline, he lights a strong pipe, puts his feet on

the pillow-shams, and reads "As in a Looking Glass" while his wash is

drying. When that man goes away he leaves a record at the hotel which

confronts him at every hotel wherever he goes. As soon as he writes his

name, the clerk, who has read it wrong side up just a little before he

got it down, tells him that he is very sorry, but that the house is

full, and people are sleeping on cots in the hall, and the proprietor

himself has to sleep on the sideboard. The large white Suffolk hog, who

has been in the habit of inaugurating a rain of terror and gravy in

the dining-room and stealing the soap from the wash-room, just simply

because he could out trump the clerk on diamonds, will thus have to go

to the pound, where he belongs, and quiet, every day people, who rely on

their integrity more than they do on their squeal, will get a chance.

A great many droll characters and bright, shrewd men are met with among

hotel proprietors wherever you go. "The Fat Contributor" was lecturing

once in the State of Kentucky, and had occasion to take dinner at a

six-bit hotel. After the meal Mr. Griswold stepped up to the counter,

took out a bale of bank notes, which he had received for his lecture the

evening before, and asked what might be the damage.

"Three dollars," said the blue grass gentleman, who had buttoned his

collar with a tenpenny nail, while he looked at "Gris" with a pained

expression.

"Yes, but a man ought to be able to board here a week for three dollars.

The whole house didn't cost more than forty or forty-five dollars.

What's your idea in charging me three dollars for a wad of hominy and a

piece of parched pork?"

"Well, sir," said the urbane landlord, as he put out the fire at a.

distance of twenty feet by emptying his salivary surplus on it, "I need

the money?"

The frankness and open, candid manner of the man won Mr. Griswold, and

he asked him if he thought three dollars would be enough. The landlord

said he could get along with that. Then Griswold opened his valise and

took out a large brunette bottle of liniment marked "for external use."

He passed it over to the landlord, and told him that he would find this

stuff worked as well on the inside as it did on the outside. In a few

moments the liniment of the "Fat Contributor" and the lineaments of the

landlord had merged into each other, and a friendly feeling sprang up

between the two men which time has never effaced. I have often thought

of this, and wondered why it is that hotel men are not more open

and cordial with their guests. Many a time I have paid a large bill

grudgingly when I would have done it cheerfully if the landlord had told

me he was in need.

I had intended to speak at some length on the new rope law, by which

every man is made his own vigilance committee; but I feel that I am

already encroaching on the advertising space, and so will have to

omit it. In conclusion, I will say that the American hotels are far

preferable to those we have in Paris in many ways, and not only

outstrip those of England and the Continent, even as a _corps de ballet_

outstrips a toboggan club, but they seem to excel and everlastingly

knock the ancient hotels of Carthage, Rome and Tie Siding silly.

PITY FOR SAD-EYED HUSBANDS.

|If women would spend their evenings at home with their husbands, they

would see a marked change in the brightness of their homes. Too many

sad-eyed men are wearing away their lives at home alone. Would that I

had a pen of fire to write in letters of living light the ignominy

and contumely and--some more things like that, the names of which have

escaped my memory--that are to-day being visited upon my sex.

MARRIAGE.

|Marriage is, to a man, at once the happiest and saddest event of his

life. He quits all the companions and associations of his youth,

and becomes the chief attraction of a new home. Every former tie is

loosened, the spring of every hope and action is to be changed, and yet

he flees with joy to the untrodden paths before him. Then woe to the

woman who can blight such joyful anticipations, and wreck the bright

hopes of the trusting, faithful, fragrant, masculine blossom, and bang

his head against the sink, and throw him under the cooking range, and

kick him into a three-cornered mass, and then sit down on him.

<b>CHESTNUT-BURR</b> XI--WILLIAM NYE VISITS ROYALTY FROM THE HOME OF THE HAM

SANDWICH.

_Queen Kapiolani Receives the Distinguished Littérateur in State--A

Robust, Healthful Queen--Sandwich Business and Court Matters--The

Swallow-tail Coat in the Sandwich Islands._

|The sun was just slipping out the back door of the West and hunting

for the timber of New Jersey as Queen Kapiolani, at her rooms in the

Victoria Hotel, received a plain, rectangular card, printed in two kinds

of ink at the owner's steam job office, containing the following brief

but logical statement:

Wilhelm Von Nyj,

Littérateur and Danseuse.

On the back of the card the Von Nyj arms had been emblazoned with a

rubber stamp. Down-stairs, near the dais of the night clerk, stood a

gayly caparisoned yet cultivated cuss, pouring over a late volume of the

city directory. He was the author of these lines.

Scarcely an hour had elapsed when a tinted octavo page who waits on

the Queen, slid down the stair-rail and told me that her royal Highness

would receive me in state as soon as she could change her dress.

Later on I was ushered into the presence of Queen Kapiolani, who was at

the time accompanied by her suite and another gentleman whose name I did

not learn.

THAI X DID MOT DU'

She is a distinguished-looking woman of middle age, but in apparent good

health, and with a constitution which I think would easily endure the

fatigue of reigning over a much larger country than her own.

As I entered the room and made a low, groveling obeisance, an act that

is wholly foreign to my nature, the Queen made a rapid movement towards

the bell, but I held her back and assured her that I did not drink.

[Illustration: 0101]

We then chatted gayly for some time in relation to the Sandwich business

and court matters, including the Sharp trial.

For a long time the Queen seemed constrained, and evidently could not

think of anything to say; but she soon saw that I was not haughty or

reserved, and when at last she reluctantly showed me out and locked the

door, I felt amply repaid for the annoyance that one naturally feels on

visiting a perfect stranger.

From what she said regarding her dynasty I gather that it consists of a

covey of half-grown islands in the Pacific, inhabited by people who were

once benighted and carnivorous, but happy. Now they are well-informed

and bilious, while they revel in suspenders and rum, with all the

blessings of late hours, civilization and suicide.

The better classes of the Sandwich Islands have the same customs which

prevail here, and the swallow-tail coat is quite prevalent there. The

low-neck and short-sleeve costume is even carried to a greater excess,

perhaps, and all opera tickets read:

Admit the Bearer and Barer.

In answer to a question of my own, the Queen said that crops in the

Sandwich Islands were looking well, and that garden truck was far in

advance of what she saw here.

She said that they had pie-plant in her garden big enough to eat before

she came away, and new potatoes were as big as walnuts. Still, she

is enjoying herself here first-rate, and says she sees many pleasing

features about New York which will ever decorate the tablets of her

memory.

I thanked her for this neat little compliment, and told her I should

always regard her in the same manner.

I then wrote a little Impromptu stanza in her autograph album, wrung Her

Majesty's hand, and retired with another suppliant and crouching bow,

which indicated a contrite spirit, but was calculated to deceive.

I took the liberty of extending to Her Majesty the freedom of the city,

and asked her to visit our pressrooms and see us squat our burning

thoughts into a quarter of a million copies of the paper, and all for

two cents.

I also asked her to come up any time and read our Hawaii exchanges, for

I know how lonely anybody can be in a great city sometimes, and how one

yearns for a glimpse of his country paper.

The Queen is well paid while she reigns; and even while away as she is

now, with her scepter standing idly in the umbrella rack at home, and a

large pink mosquito net thrown over the throne, her pay is still going

on night and dav.

The above is substantially all that I said during the interview, though

the Queen said something as I came out of the room, escorted by the

janitor, which I did not quite catch.

I did say, however, just before leaving the room, that I regretted

sincerely the unfortunate time of the year at which Her Majesty had

decided to visit us, it being rather between hay and grass, as it

were, for as there was no r in the month it was a little too late for

missionaries and a little too early for watermelons.

It was-only an instant later that I joined the janitor at the foot of

the stairs.

This evening the Queen will visit the Casino and see Mr. Wilson try for

the three hundred and eighty-second time to restrain the flowing leg of

his green plush pantaloons.

A WORD OF EXPLANATION.

|For the benefit of my readers, many of whom are not what might be

called practical newspaper men and women, I will say that if your

time is very precious, and life is too short for you to fool away your

evenings reading local advertisements, and you are at times in grave

doubt as to what is advertisement and what is news, just cast your eye

to the bottom of the article, and if there is a foot-note which lays

"tylfritu3dp" or something of that stripe, you may safely say that

no matter how much confidence you may have had in the editor up to that

date, the article with a foot-note of that kind is published from a

purely mercenary motive, and the editor may or may not indorse the

sentiments therein enunciated.

<b>CHESTNUT-BURR</b>--THE HUMORIST INTERVIEWS HIS GRACE THE DUKE IN THE

IMPROVED STYLE.

_Marlborough's Seeming Lack of Appreciation of a Joke--Likewise his

Lack of Loquacity--A Cordial Invitation to the Duke to Visit the

Metropolis--Nye's Naive and Graceful Conservation on Society Gossip._

Newport, Sept. 8.

|I have just terminated a pleasant call upon the Duke of Marbro at his

lodgings. I write his name Marbro because that is the way we pronounce

it here at Newport. In the language of my ostensibly colored friend, Mr.

Rankin, the amateur pronouncer would call it Marl-bor-ough, with three

grunts, while in fact Marbro, the correct pronunciation of the name, is

executed with but one grunt.

I found the Duke seated on a low ottoman, clad in a loosely fitting

costume of pajamas. It was so loose and negligé that it was on the

tip of my tongue to ask him if his mother made it for him out of his

father's old pajamas; but I suddenly remembered that I was in Newport,

and not in Tombstone, Arizona, and I restrained myself.

The Duke is suffering from a slight cold, which he contracted for

during the early part of the week. It resulted from his ignorance of our

changeable and freckle-minded climate. On Tuesday he took a long stroll,

and while several miles from his lodgings and wearing his light summer

cane, he was overtaken by a severe and sudden change in the temperature.

The Marbros are not a strong race, and I am told that one of the Duke's

second cousins died of pneumonia from exposing himself to the severity

of a Christmas-day frolic clad in an autumn cane.

The Duke rose languidly as I entered, and, taking a reef in his pajamas

clothes, looked at me in an inquiring way which betokened that, though

of lineage high, he was not entirely at his ease in my presence.

"Duke," said I, standing my umbrella up in the corner to show my

childlike confidence in him, "how's your conduct?"

In five minutes afterwards I would have given worlds if I could have

recalled my rash words. I did not mean anything more than to utter a

piece of pleasantry, for I am passionately fond of pleasantry even in

society; but Marbro seemed to take it to heart and to feel distressed.

He made a low, guttural sound, but his reply seemed to die away in the

mansard roof of his mouth. He stammered out something which sounded

like the wail of a damned soul. At least it struck me to be like that,

although my lot has not been cast among that class of souls since I got

out of politics, and I may have forgotten their style of wail.

To hide his embarrassment, Marbro "rosined" his eye and put a large

glass paper weight in it. He then regarded me with some amazement

through this piece of brick-a-brac, while I poured out a grown person's

dose of Rectified Ruin which stood on the escritoire and drank it with a

keen relish, which showed that I trusted him implicitly. Everything I

did was done to make Marbro forget himself and feel at his ease.

I told him I had known the Marbros in Maine ever since I was a boy; that

we didn't feel above them then, and it would be a poor time to begin

now at my time of life to look down on people just because I now wrote

pieces for the paper, many of which were afterwards printed. We always

thought that the Marbros, or Marlboroughs, of Maine, got their name

from burrowing in the marl along the Piscataquis, I said.

Thus I chatted on with him for an hour or two without seeming to chirk

him up at all. "Duke," said I at last, "I know what the matter must be

with you--you are socially ostracized. I knew it as soon as I came into

the room. You cannot disguise it from me. You are suffering from social

ostracism, and it is breaking you down. The social demands made by

America upon an imported social wreck do not give said wreck time to eat

his meals and obtain a necessary amount of rest. I suppose there is

nowhere in the world a climate that is so trying on a person suffering

from social ostracism as that of my native land. In other climes they

give a social outcast rest, but here he gets absolutely no rest

whatever."

[Illustration: 0109]

I then drifted into society chat in a graceful and naïve way which,

with others, has never failed to melt the stoniest heart. I told him

that I had understood, since I came to Newport, that the demands

of society here were so unrelenting that they had kept Mr. and Mrs.

Mayonnaise dressing all the time.

A long pause ensued here, during which I could hear Marbro's reason

tottering on its throne. After waiting three-quarters of an hour, by

my watch, and failing to see that my remark had shed even a ray of

sunshine, where erstwhile all was gloom and chaos, I gave him my address

and told him that if, in the future, he ever derived any beneficial

effects from the above joke, I would be glad to have him communicate

with me. And even if I were to die before he could truly say that he had

been benefited by this joke and grapple with its keen, incisive nub, my

grandchildren would be tickled almost to death to know that he had taken

it to pieces and put it together again and found out how it was built

and laugh at its ingenious mechanism.

I conversed with the Duke some time about the way his visit to Newport

had depressed the price of real estate, and offered him the freedom of

New York, hoping that he could depress the price of real estate there so

that I could buy some.

"But," said I, assuming an air of perfect repose, as I flung myself on

a low couch in such a way as to give a faint view of my new red socks,

"you will find it different in New York. Social ostracism there will not

materially affect the price of real estate in the neighborhood of the

postoffice. In fact, Marbro," said I, regarding him earnestly for a

moment through the bottom of a cut-glass tumbler, "there is not enough

English social ostracism in New York to supply the demand. Come to

our young and thriving town, a town that is rich in resources and

liabilities; a town that threatens to rival Omaha as a railroad center;

a town where a B. and O. deal has been a common occurrence every day for

over a year; a town where you can ride on the elevated trains and get

yourself pinched in the iron gate by the guard or go down to Wall street

and get pinched by the directors; a town where a man like Henry S. Ives

can buy about seven million dollars' worth of stuff that he can't pay

for, while a poor man who goes into a general store to buy a pair of

ear muffs is followed up by a private detective for fear he may run his

finger into the molasses barrel and then lick it syruptitiously. Come

on, Duke," said I, growing more talkative as the fumes of his fifty-two

dollar liquor rose to my surprised and delighted brains; "come on to New

York and mix up with us, and get on to our ways."

"See Fulton market by midnight, bite off a piece of atmosphere from

Castle Garden, and come with me to see Guiteau's head in the museum.

Guiteau was the last of a long line of assassins. He prophesied that

everyone connected with his trial would come to a bad end. Quite a

number of those connected with this celebrated trial are already dead,

and more especially Mr. Guiteau himself, whose skeleton is in the

Smithsonian Institution, his viscera in the Potomac, and his head in a

jar of alcohol. If you will come to New York, Marbro, you will have

a good time, and the rose geraniums will come back to your pallid and

durable cheek.

"If you will give us a whirl, Duke," said I, selecting an umbrella from

the decorated crock in the hall and coming back to where he still sat,

"you will be pleased and gratified with us; and if you can spare time to

come over and see me personally I would try to be as cordial and chatty

as you have been with me. No man ever entertained me as you have, or sat

and examined me through the bottom of an old microscope for two hours,

to be forgotten again by me. Marbro, if you will come to New York, we

will go and visit anybody's tomb that you may designate."

I then let myself out of the house with an adjustable pass-key and

hastened away. Shortly after I got back to my own lodgings, sometimes

called a room, a lackey from the Duke, wearing a livery-colored lively,

handed me a note from Marbro, in which he said he hoped that in case I

used this interview for publication I would be careful to give his exact

language.

In my poor, weak way, I think I have done so.

THE CHINESE COMPOSITOR.

|The Chinese compositor cannot sit at his case as our printers do, but

must walk from one case to another constantly, as the characters needed

cover such a large number, that they cannot be put into anything

like the space used in the English newspaper office. In setting up an

ordinary piece of manuscript, the Chinese printer will waltz up and down

the room for a few moments, and then go down stairs for a line of lower

case. Then he takes the elevator and goes up into the third story

after some caps, and then goes out into the woodshed for a handful of

astonishers. The successful Chinese compositor doesn't need to be so

very intelligent, but he must be a good pedestrian.

THE TRUE AMERICAN.

|The true American would rather work himself into luxury or the lunatic

asylum than to hang like a great wart upon the face of nature.

<b>CHESTNUT-BURR</b>--XII "THE OLD MAN ELOQUENT."

_Sitting Bull before the Council of the Sioux Nation--An Impressive

Speech--Civilization and the Paleface Doing their Deadly Work--The

Moccasins of a Mighty Nation._

|The following speech of Sitting Bull has been specially translated and

reported by our Indian editor, who is also wholesale and retail dealer

in deceased languages, and general agent for home-made Sioux rhetoric

and smoke-tanned Indian eloquence. New laid Indian laments with bead

trimmings. Compiler of novel and desirable styles of war dances. Indian

eloquence furnished to debating clubs and publishers of school readers:

"Warriors and war-scarred veterans of the frontier; Once more the

warpath is overgrown with bunch grass, and the tomahawk slumbers in the

wigwam of the red man. Grim-visaged war has given place to the piping

times of peace. The cold and cruel winter is upon lus. It has been upon

us for some time.

"The wail of departed spirits is on the night wind, and the wail of the

man with the chilblain answers back from the warrior's wigwam.

"Children of the forest, we are few. Where once the shrill war-whoop of

the chieftain collected our tribe like the leaves of the forest, I might

now yell till the cows come home without bringing out a quorum.

"We are fading away before the march of the paleface, and sinking into

oblivion like the snowflake on the bosom of the Stinking Water.

"Warriors, I am the last of a mighty race. We were a race of chieftains.

Alas! we will soon begone. The Bull family will soon pass from the face

of the earth. Ole is gone, and John is failing, and I don't feel very

well myself. We are the victims of the paleface, and our lands are taken

away.

"A few more suns, and the civilization, and valley tan, and hand made

sour mash, and horse liniment of the paleface will have done their

deadly work.

"Our squaws and pappooses are scattered to the four winds of heaven; and

we are left desolate.

"Where is The-Daughter-of-the-Tempest? Where is

The-Wall-Eyed-Maiden-With-the-Peeled-Nose?

"Where is Victoria Regina Dei Gracia Sitting Bull? Where is Knock-Kneed

Chemiloon? Where are Sway-Back Sue and Meek-Eyed Government Socks?

"They have sunk beneath the fire-waters of the goggle-eyed Caucasian.

They have succumbed to the delirum triangles, and when I call them they

come not. They do not hear my voice. Their moans are heard upon the

still night air, and they cry for revenge. Look at the sad remnant of

the family of Sitting Bull, your chief. One sore-eyed squaw is left

alone. Her face is furrowed o'er with the famine of many winters, and

her nose is only the ruin of its former greatness. Her moccasins are

worn out, and the soldier pants she wears are too long for her. She is

drunk also. She is not as drunk as she can get, but she is hopeful and

persevering. She has also learned to lie like the white man. She is now

an easy, extemporaneous liar. When we gather around the campfire and

enact our untutored lies in the gloaming, Lucretia Borgia Skowhegan

Sitting Bull, with the inspiration of six fingers of agency coffin

varnish, proceeds to tell the prize prevarication, and then the house

adjourns, and nothing can be heard but the muffled tread of the agency

corn beef, going out to get some fresh air. Lucretia Borgia is also

becoming slovenly. It is evening, and yet she has not donned her evening

dress. Her back hair is unkempt, and her front hair is unbung. Pretty

soon I will take a tomahawk and bang it for her. She seems despondent

and hopeless. As she leans against the trunk of a mighty oak and

scratches her back, you can see that her thoughts are far away. Her

other suspender is gone, but she don't care a cold, smooth clam. She is

thinking of her childhood days by the banks of Minnehaha.

"Warriors, we stand in the moccasins of a mighty nation. We represent

the starving remnant of the once powerful Sioux. Our pirogue stands idly

on the shore. I don't know what a pirogue is, but it stands idly on the

shore.

"When the spring flowers bloom again, and the grass is green upon the

plains, we will once more go upon the warpath. We will avenge the wrongs

of our nation. I have not fully glutted my vengeance. I have seven or

eight more gluts on hand, and we will shout our war-cry once more, and

mutilate some more Anglo-Saxons. We will silence the avenging cries of

our people. We will spatter the green grass and gray greasewood with the

gore of the paleface, and feed the white-livered emigrant to the coyote.

We will spread death and desolation everywhere, and fill the air with

gum overshoes and remains. Let us yield up our lives clearly while we

mash the paleface beyond recognition, and shoot his hired man so full of

holes that he will look like a suspension bridge.

"Warriors, there is our hunting ground. The buffalo, the antelope,

the sage hen and the jackass rabbit are ours. Ours to enjoy, ours to

perpetuate, ours to transmit. The Great Spirit created these animals for

the red man, and not for the bilious tourists, between whose legs the

chestnut sunlight penetrates clear up to his collar bone."

*****

"Then we will ride down on the regular army, when he is thinking of

something else, and we will scare him into convulsions, and our medicine

men will attend to the convulsions while we sample the supplies.

"Then we will take some cold sliced Indian agent and some bay rum, and

go on a picnic.

"Warriors, farewell. Be virtuous and you will be happy; but you will be

lonesome, sometimes. Think of what I have said to you about the council

fire, and govern yourselves accordingly, We will not murmur at the

celluloid cracker and cast iron codfish ball, but in the spring we will

have veal cutlets for breakfast, and peace commissioner on toast for

dinner. The squaw of Sitting Bull shall have a new plug hat, and if the

weather is severe, she shall have two of them.

"Warriors, farewell. I am done. I have spoken. I have nothing more to

say. Sic semper domino. Plumbago erysipelas, in hock eureka, sciataca,

usufruct, lim-burger, gobraugh."

<b>CHESTNUT-BURR</b> XIV--THE AMENDE HONORABLE.

_Lingering Traditions--The Molder of Public Opinion--No Mirth in making

the Amende Honorable--Four Minutes to Decide._

|It is rather interesting to watch the manner which old customs have

been slightly changed and handed down from age to age. Peculiarities of

old traditions still linger among us, and are forked over to posterity

like a wappy-jawed teapot or a long-time mortgage. No one can explain

it, but the fact still remains patent that some of the oddities of our

ancestors continue to appear, from time to time, clothed in the changing

costumes of the prevailing fashion.

Along with these choice antiquities, and carrying the nut-brown flavor

of the dead and relentless years, comes the amende honorable. From the

original amende in which the offender appeared in public clothed only in

a cotton-flannel shirt, and with a rope about his neck as an evidence of

a formal recantation, down to this day when (sometimes) the pale editor,

in a stickful of type, admits that "his informant was in error," the

amende honorable has marched along with the easy tread of time. The

blue-eyed molder of public opinion, with one suspender hanging down

at his side, and writing on a sheet of news-copy paper, has a more

extensive costume, perhaps, than the old-time offender who bowed in the

dust in the midst of the great populace, and with a halter under his ear

admitted his offense, but he does not feel any more cheerful over it.

I have been called upon several times to make the amende honorable, and

I admit that it is not an occasion of mirth and merriment. People who

come into the editorial office to invest in a retraction are generally

very healthy, and have a stiff, reserved manner that no cheerfulness of

hospitality can soften.

I remember of an accident of this kind which occurred last summer in my

office, while I was writing something scathing. A large man with an air

of profound perspiration about him, and plaid flannel shirt, stepped

into the middle of the room, and breathed in the air that I was not

using. He said he would give me four minutes in which to retract, and

pulled out a watch by which to ascertain the exact time. I asked him if

he would not allow me a moment or two to go over to the telegraph office

and to wire my parents of my awful death. He said I could walk out of

that door when I walked over his dead body. Then I waited a long time,

until he told me my time was up, and asked what I was waiting for. I

told him I was waiting for him to die, so that I could walk over his

dead body. How could I walk over a corpse until life was extinct?

He stood and looked at me first in astonishment, afterward in pity.

Finally tears welled up in his eyes, and plowed their way down his brown

and grimy face. Then he said that I need not fear him. "You are safe,"

said he. "A youth who is so patient and so cheerful as you are--who

would wait for a healthy man to die so that you could meander over his

pulseless remnants, ought not to die a violent death. A soft-eyed seraph

like you, who is no more conversant with the ways of this world than

that, ought to be put in a glass vial of alcohol and preserved. I came

up here to kill you and throw you in the rainwater barrel, but now that

I know what a patient disposition you have, I shudder to think of the

crime I was about to commit."

SWEET INFLUENCES OF CHANGING SEASONS.

|It is strange that the human heart is so easily influenced by the

change of seasons; and although spring succeeds winter, and summer

follows upon the heels of spring, just as it did centuries ago, yet the

transition from one to the other is ever new and pleasing, and the bosom

is gladdened with the cheering assurance of spring, or the promise of

the coming summer time, with its wealth of golden days, its cucumbers

and vinegar, its green corn, its string beans, its base-ball, its

mammoth circus, its fragrant flowers, and its soda water flavored with

syrup from a long-necked, wicker-covered bottle, just as it was in the

days of Pharoah, and Hannibal, and Andrew Jackson.

THE MARCH OF CIVILIZATION.

|Spokane Ike," the Indian who killed a doctor last summer for failing

to cure his child, has been hanged. This shows the onward march of

civilization, and vouchsafes to us the time when a doctor's life will be

in less danger than that of his patient.

<b>CHESTNUT-BURR</b>. XV--A BIG CORNER ON PORK.

_Independent Order of Forty Liars--Brother Jedediah Holcomb--The

Muffled Tread of Many Feet--Leader of the Trusty Phalanx--The most noble

Prevaricator._

|At a regular round-up of the Rocky Mountain division of the Independent

Order of Forty Liars, on Saturday evening, the most noble prevaricator

having directed the breath-tester to examine all present to see that

they were in possession of the annual password, explanations and

signals, and to report to the most noble promoter of twenty-seven karat

falsehoods whether all were so qualified to remain, and the report

having been satisfactory, the most noble prevaricator announced that

after the report of the custodian of campaign lies for the past year

and the annual statements of the division bartender and most noble

beer-yanker had been handed in and passed upon, the next business to

come before the division would be the nominations and the election of

most noble prevaricator to serve during the year 1887.

"Under the rules of our order," said the M. P., "ten minutes will

be given each aspirant for the office named in which to address the

meeting. It is understood that the time shall be devoted to short

anecdotes, personal reminiscences, etc., and the brethren will be given

ample scope to enlarge upon any details which the subject may suggest.

Our usual custom is to devote at least one hour to this highly

entertaining exercise, and I call to mind now some of the most enjoyable

moments of my life spent in listening to others or in constructing for

the amusement of others a few of the most entertaining and instructive

falsehoods that the history of our most noble order has known.

"We have several prominent visiting members here from other parts of the

country, among whom I am gratified to name Brother Eli Perkins, Brother

O'Keefe, of Pike's Peak, and Brothers Morey and Barnum, from the East,

who will address the meeting, perhaps, for a few moments after other

business has been disposed of."

After singing the opening ode, accompanied by the lyre, the usual order

of business having been attended to, the addresses of aspirants for the

office of M. N. P. of the Rocky Mountain division were called for.

The last speaker was Brother Jedediah Holcomb, who thus addressed the

assemblage:

"Most noble prevaricator of the Rocky Mountain division of Forty Liars,

and brethren of the order: Many years ago, when I was a mere stripling,

as it were, and just upon the verge of manhood, so to speak, I was

sitting on the green grass south of Chicago, near where Drexel boulevard

comes into South Park, thinking of my hard luck and wishing that my

future might be more prosperous than my past.

"That locality was then a howling wilderness compared with what it is

now, and where to-day the beautiful drives and walks are so inviting

there was nothing then but prairie and swamp, with here and there a

scrub oak tree.

"Chicago was a stirring western city then, but she was young and small.

She had not then accumulated the fabulous wealth of new and peculiar

metropolitan odors which she now enjoys, and in place of the rich,

fructifying fragrance of the stock yards, there was nothing but the wild

honeysuckle and the dead horse.

"Out where some of the most beautiful residences now stand there was

nothing then but the dank thistle nodding in the wind, or the timid

picnic bumble bee, hanging on the autumn bough and yearning to be

gathered in by the small boy.

"As I sat there long ago, ana, shrouded in the September haze, was

dreaming of a fortunate future for myself, I heard the muilled tread

of innumerable feet drawing nearer and nearer. The sound was like the

footfall of a regiment of infantry approaching, and I arose to see what

it was.

"I had not long to wait, for soon there hove in sight a very singular

spectacle. First came a large Illinois hog at the head of a long column

of Illinois hogs, all marching in Indian fashion, and grunting with

that placid, gentle grunt which the hog carries with him. On closer

examination into this singular phenomenon, I saw that all the hogs,

except the leader, were blind, each animal having his predecessor's tail

in his mouth throughout the long line, consisting of 13,521 unfortunate,

sightless hogs, cheerfully following their leader toward water.

"I was never so struck with the wonderful instinct of the brute creation

in my life, and my eyes filled with tears when I saw the child-like

faith and confidence of each blind animal following with implicit trust

the more fortunate guide.

"Soon, however, a great dazzling three-cornered idea worked its way into

my intellect. Dashing away my idle tears, I drew my revolver and shot

off the leader's tail, leaving the long line of disconcerted and

aimless hogs in the middle of a broad prairie, with no guide but the

dephlogisticated tail of a hog who was then three-quarters of a mile

away.

"Then I stole up, and taking the gory tail in my hand, I led the

trusting phalanx down to the stock yards and sold the outfit at eight

cents, live weight.

[Illustration: 0123]

"This was the start of my dazzling career as a capitalist, a career to

which I now point with pride. Thus from a poor boy with one suspender

and a sore toe, I have risen to be one of our loading business men,

known and respected by all, and by industry and economy, and borrowing

my chewing tobacco, I have come to be one of our solid men."

When Brother Holcomb ceased to speak, there was a painful silence of

perhaps five moments, and then Brother Woodtick Williams moved that the

rules be suspended, and Brother Holcomb declared the unanimous choice of

the order for the most noble prevaricator, to serve _sine die_.

Passed.

Then the quartette sang the closing ode, and each member, after hanging

up his regalia in the ante room, walked thoughtfully home in the crisp

winter starlight.

<b>CHESTNUT-BURR</b> XVI-PATRICK OLESON.

_The Banks of the Pulgarlic River--Patrick Fireman on 259--The Goal Was

Reached--The Story only Partially True._

|Many years ago, on the banks of the Pulgarlic river, lived a poor boy

named Patrick Oleson. When Patrick was only a year old, his father and

mother got into a little difficulty, in which the mother was killed. The

father, as soon as he regained his composure, saw that he had gone too

far, and when the sheriff came and marched him off to jail, he frankly

confessed that he had been perhaps too hasty.

Still, public opinion seemed turned against him; and in the following

spring Patrick's father was unanimously chosen by a convention of six

property-holders of the county to jump from a new pine platform into the

sweet subsequently.

The affair was a success, and Patrick was left an orphan at the tender

age of one and one-half years to wrestle for himself. His first impulse

was to write humorous letters to the press, and thus become affluent;

but the papers that were solvent returned his letters, and the papers

that accepted them busted the subsequent autumn. So Patrick decided that

as soon as he could complete a college course that would fit him for the

position, he would either enter the ministry or become a railroad man.

While at college he read the story of an engineer who had saved the life

of a little child by grabbing it from the cow-catcher while the train

was going at lightning speed, and, as a result, was promoted to general

passenger agent of the road.

So Patrick decided to be a railroad man and save some children from

being squashed by the train, so that he could be promoted and get a big

salary. He therefore studied to fit himself for the position to which he

aspired, and after five years' hard study he graduated with high honors

and a torpid liver.

He then sought out a good paying road that he thought he would

eventually like to be president of, and applied for a position on it.

By waiting till the following spring he got a job braking extra,

averaging $13 per month, till one day he screwed up a brake too tight

and wore out a wheel on the caboose. After that he was called into

the office of the superintendent, as Patrick supposed, to take the

superintendent's place, perhaps; but the superintendent swore at him,

and called him Flatwheel Oleson, and told him he had better hoe corn and

smash potato-bugs for a livelihood.

Patrick felt hurt and grieved, and, more in sorrow than in anger, he got

the oriental grand bounce, and had to rustle for another job. This time

he tried to secure the position of master mechanic; but when the road

to which he applied found out that he didn't know the difference between

the cow-catcher and the automatic air brake, Patrick was appointed as

assistant polisher and wiper extraordinary at the roundhouse.

All this time he never drank a drop or uttered a profane word. No matter

how much he was imposed upon, he never got mad or quarreled with

the other men. He sometimes felt sorely tried, but he saw that other

railroad men did not swear, so he did not.

After nine years of mental strain in the round-house, he was put on the

road as a fireman on 259; he was now, after sixteen years' hard study

and perseverance, on the road to promotion.

Just as soon as he could find a child on the track, some day, and snatch

the innocent little thing from the jaws of death, he felt that he would

be solid. Sometimes he would allow his mind to dwell on this subject so

long that his fire would go out and the engineer would report him, and

the old man would lay him off to give him a chance to think it over.

Three years Patrick fired on 259, and there wasn't a child that got

within 1,300 feet of the track when his engine came by. They seemed to

know that Patrick was perishing to save a child from being flattened out

by the train.

He began to get discouraged. He said he would try it another year, and

if he failed he would have to give up railroading and go to Congress.

One day he had just fired up the 259 in good shape and looked out of the

window ahead, when he saw a little child toddling along toward them and

only a few yards away, while the engine shrieked like a demon, and the

little chubby baby came on toward the rushing monster, whose hot breath,

with short, sharp hisses, rushed through the June morning.

Patrick felt that the joy or sorrow of a whole lifetime was in store for

him. It was not only life or death to the joyous parents, but it was

the culmination of the hopes and fears, the agony, the self-denial and

disappointments of his whole life, and the opening up of a new future to

him, or it was another lost opportunity and the continuation of along,

dreary, uneventful journey to the grave.

He was out on the pilot in an instant. He did not breathe. The rushing

engine trembled beneath him, and like a flash the still laughing child

was in his strong-arms.

He had triumphed. The goal was reached. The great struggle was over, and

in a few days he would be president of the road. He got home, and a man

came toward him with a document of some kind. His breath came short and

hard. It was probably his credentials as president of the road. He took

it and read it over in a sort of dream. It was only a notice that his

board bill had been garnisheed, and the superintendent told him that

he must pay it or the company would have to squeeze along without his

services.

In the morning the papers had a short account of Patrick's bravery, but

it was spoken of simply as "an almost fatal accident," and Patrick's

name appeared as Ole Fitzpatrick. He began to feel that he wasn't

getting a fair shake. His promotion to the presidency of the road seemed

to lag. There was a hitch in the senate probably about his confirmation

or something of that kind. The acting president of the corporation

selfishly retained his position, and looked so healthy, and seemed so

pleased with himself that Patrick lost all patience.

One day a man with a wart on his nose met Patrick on the street and

asked him if he was the gallant fireman of 259 who saved a little child

a week or two ago.

Patrick said he was.

The man grasped his hand and said:

"That was my child. It was almost the only child I had. I only had nine

others, and would have been almost childless if little James Abraham

Garfield had been busted. You have done a brave, noble act, and the

Lord will reward you. I am a poor man, as you would readily guess by

my clothing and the fact that we have ten children. I cannot reward you

with wealth or position, but I don't want to seem ungrateful or close

or contiguous. Come with me my benefactor, and I will shake you for the

drinks."

Then Patrick Oleson went away where he could be alone with his surging

thoughts. He is now running a hurdy-gurdy in the San Juan country.

This story is only partially true. The main fact, however, viz.; that

a child wasn't run over by a train, is true. It is different from most

stories about saving children; but the spring style of story is a little

different from that of former seasons, anyway.

In the spring style of prevarication, the engineer will either fail to

grab the child in time and there will be nothing left on the track but a

gingham apron and a grease spot, or, if he succeeds in saving the child,

he will not get the position of sergeant-at-arms and a gold-headed cane,

as was formerly the style.

PLEASURES OF SPRING.

|Spring is the most joyful season of the year. The little brooklets

are released from their icy fetters, and go laughing and rippling along

their winding way. The birds begin to sing in the budding branches, and

the soft south wind calls forth the green grass. The husbandman then

goes forth to dig the horseradish for his frugal meal. He also jabs his

finger into the rosebud mouth of the wild-eyed calf, and proceeds to

wean him from the gentle cow. The cow-boy goes forth humming a jocund

lay. So does the hen. Boys should not go near the hen while she is

occupied with her tuneful lay. She might seize them by the off ear, and

bear them away to her den, and feed them to her young. The hen rises

early in the morning so as to catch the swift-footed angleworm as he

flits from flower to flower. The angleworm cannot bite.

AN UNCLOUDED WELCOME.

|H. P. Willis once said: "The sweetest thing in life is the unclouded

welcome of a wife." This is true, indeed, but when her welcome is

clouded with an atmosphere of angry words and coal scuttles, there is

something about it that makes a man want to go out in the woodshed and

sleep on the ice-chest.

TOO MUCH GOD AND NO FLOUR.

|Old Chief Pocotello, now at the Fort Hall agency, in answer to an

inquiry relative to the true Christian character of a former Indian

agent at that place, gave in very terse language the most accurate

description of a hypocrite that was ever given to the public. "Ugh! Too

much God and no flour."

<b>CHESTNUT-BURR</b>. XVII--LONGING FOR HOME.

_Tom Fagan's Wild Horse--His Peculiar Taste in Lunches--Not an Arabian

Steed, but of Wyoming Descent--He Yearns for his old Home._

|Tom Fagan, of this city, has a wild horse that don't seem to take

to the rush and hurry and turmoil of a metropolis. He has been so

accustomed to the glad, free air of the plains and mountains that the

hampered and false life of a throbbing city, with its myriad industries,

makes him nervous and unhappy. He sighs for the boundless prairie and

the pure breath of the lifegiving mountain atmosphere. So taciturn is

he in fact, and so cursed by homesickness and weariness of an artificial

and unnatural horse society here in Laramie, that he refuses to eat

anything and is gradually pining away. Sometimes he takes a light lunch

out of Mr. Fagan's arm, but for days and days he utterly loathes food.

He also loathes those who try to go into the stable and fondle him.

He isn't apparently very much on the fondle. He don't yearn for human

society, but seems to want to be by himself and think it over.

The wild horse in stories soon learns to love his master and stay by him

and carry him through flood or fire, and generally knows more than the

_Cyclopedia Brittanica_; but this horse is not the historical horse that

they put into wild Arabian falsehoods. He is just a plain, unassuming

wild horse of Wyoming descent, whose pedigree is slightly clouded, and

who is sensitive on the question of his ancestry. All he wants is just

to be let alone, and most everybody has decided that he is right. They

came to that conclusion after they had soaked their persons in arnica

and glued themselves together with poultices.

Perhaps, after a while, he will conclude to eat hay and grow up with

the country, but now he sighs for his native bunch-grass and the buffalo

wallow wherein he has heretofore made his lair. We don't wonder much,

though, that a horse who has lived in the country should be a little

rattled here when he finds the electric light, and bicycles, and lawn

mowers, and Uncle Tom's Cabin troupes, and baled hay at $20 per ton. It

makes him as wild and skittish as it does an eighteen-year-old girl the

first time she comes into town, and for the first time is met by the

blare of trumpets, and the oriental wealth of the circus with its

deformed camels and uniformed tramps driving its miles of cages with

no animals in them. The great natural world and the giddy maelstrom

of seething, perspiring humanity, peculiar to the city world, are two

separate and distinct existences.

DIGNITY.

|Dignity does not draw. It answers in place of intellectual tone for

twenty minutes, but after awhile it fails to get there. Dignity works

all right in a wooden Indian or a drum major, but the man who desires to

draw a salary through life and to be sure of a visible means of support,

will do well to make some other provision than a haughty look and the

air of patronage.

<b>CHESTNUT-BURR</b> XVIII--THE TRUE HISTORY OF DAMON AND PYTHIAS.

_Dionysius the Elder--Paris Green in the Pie--Damon and Pythias--Pythias

about to Be Sacrificed--The Solitary Horseman Puts in an Appearance._

CHAPTER I.

|The romantic story of Damon and Pythias, which has been celebrated

in verse and song for over two thousand years, is supposed to have

originated during the reign of Dionysius I, or Dionysius the Elder as

he was also called, who resigned about 350 years b. c. He must have been

called "The Elder," more for a joke than anything else, as he was by

inclination a Unitarian, although he was never a member of any church

whatever, and was, in fact, the wickedest man in all Syracuse.

Dionysius arose to the throne from the ranks, and used to call himself

a self made man. He was tyrannical, severe and selfish, as all self-made

men are. Selfmade men are very prone to usurp the prerogative of the

Almighty and overwork themselves. They are not satisfied with the

position of division superintendent of creation, but they want to be

most worthy high grand muck-a-muck of the entire ranch, or their lives

are gloomy fizzles.

Dionysius was indeed so odious and so overbearing toward his subjects

that he lived in constant fear of assassination at their hands. This

fear robbed him of his rest and rendered life a dreary waste to the

tyrannical king. He lived in constant dread that each previous moment

would be followed by the succeeding one. He would eat a hearty supper

and retire to rest, but the night would be cursed with horrid dreams

of the Scythians and White River Utes peeling off his epidermis

and throwing him into a boiling cauldron with red pepper and other

counter-irritants, while they danced the Highland fling around this

royal barbecue.

Even his own wife and children were forbidden to enter his presence for

fear that they would put "barn arsenic" in the blanc-mange or "Cosgrove

arsenic" in the pancakes, or Paris green in the pie.

During his reign he had constructed an immense subterranean cavernous

arrangement, called the Ear of Dionysius, because it resembled in shape

and general telephonic power, the human ear. It was the largest ear on

record. One day a workman expressed the desire to erect a similar ear of

tin or galvanized iron on old Di. himself. Some one "blowed on him," and

the next morning his head was thumping about in the waste paper basket

at the General Office. When one of the king's subjects, who thought he

was solid with the administration, would say: "Beyond the possibility

of a doubt, your Most Serene Highness is the kind and loving guardian of

his people, and the idol of his subjects," His Royal Tallness would say,

"What ye givin' us Do you wish to play the Most Sublime Overseer of the

Universe and General Ticket Agent Plenipotentiary for a Chinaman? Ha!!!

You cannot fill up the King of Syracuse with taffy." Then he would order

the chief executioner to run the man through the royal sausage grinder,

ana throw him into the Mediterranean. In this way the sausage-grinder

was kept running night and day, and the chief engineer who ran the

machine made double time every month.