toenail, stringhalt and mania. Copenhagen induces a melancholy, and the
game of bean bag is unduly exciting. Horse racing is too brief and
transitory as an outdoor game, requiring weeks and months for
preparation and lasting only long enough for a quick person to ejaculate
"Scat!" The pitcher's arm is a new disease, the outgrowth of base-ball;
the lawn-tennis elbow is another result of a popular open-air
amusement, and it begins to look as though the coming American would
hear with one overgrown telephonic ear, while the other will be
rudimentary only. He will have an abnormal base-ball arm with a
lawn-tennis elbow, a powerful foot-ball-kicking leg with the superior
toe driven back into the palm of his foot. He will have a highly trained
biceps muscle over his eye to retain his glass, and that eye will be
trained to shoot a curved glance over a high hat and witness anything on
the stage.
Other features grow abnormal, or shrink up from the lack of use, as a
result of our customs. For instance, the man whose business it is to get
along a crowded street with the utmost speed will have, finally, a hard,
sharp horn growing on each elbow, and a pair of spurs growing out of
each ankle. These will enable him to climb over a crowd and get there
early. Constant exposure to these weapons on the part of the pedestrian
will harden the walls of the thorax and abdomen until the coming man
will be an impervious man. The citizen who avails himself of all modern
methods of conveyance will ride from his door on the horse car to the
elevated station, where an elevator will elevate him to the train and a
revolving platform will swing him on board, or possibly the street car
will be lifted from the surface track to the elevated track, and the
passenger will retain his seat all the time. Then a man will simply hang
out a red card, like an express card, at his door, and a combination car
will call for him, take him to the nearest elevated station, elevate
him, car and all, to the track, take him where he wants to go, and call
for him at any hour of the night to bring him home. He will do his
exercising at home, chiefly taking artificial sea baths, jerking a
rowing machine or playing on a health lift till his eyes hang out on his
cheeks, and he need not do any walking whatever. In that way the coming
man will be over-developed above the legs, and his lower limbs will look
like the desolate stems of a frozen geranium. Eccentricities of limb
will be handed over like baldness from father to son among the dwellers
in the cities, where every advantage in the way of rapid transit is to
be had, until a metropolitan will be instantly picked out by his able
digestion and rudimentary legs, just as we now detect the gentleman from
the interior by his wild endeavors to overtake an elevated train.
In fact, Mr. Edison has now perfected, or announced that he is on the
road to the perfection of, a machine which I may be pardoned for calling
a storage think-tank. This will enable a brainy man to sit at home, and,
with an electric motor and a perfected phonograph, he can think into a
tin dipper or funnel, which will, by the aid of electricity and a new
style of foil, record and preserve his ideas on a sheet of soft metal,
so that when any one says to him, "A penny for your thoughts," he can go
to his valise and give him a piece of his mind. Thus the man who has
such wild and beautiful thoughts in the night and never can hold on to
them long enough to turn on the gas and get his writing materials, can
set this thing by the head of his bed, and, when the poetic thought
comes to him in the stilly night, he can think into a hopper, and the
genius of Franklin and Edison together will enable him to fire it back
at his friends in the morning while they eat their pancakes and glucose
syrup from Vermont, or he can mail the sheet of tinfoil to absent
friends, who may put it into their phonographs and utilize it. In this
way the world may harness the gray matter of its best men, and it will
be no uncommon thing to see a dozen brainy men tied up in a row in the
back office of an intellectual syndicate, dropping pregnant thoughts
into little electric coffee mills for a couple of hours a day, after
which they can put on their coats, draw their pay, and go home.
All this will reduce the quantity of exercise, both mental and physical.
Two men with good brains could do the thinking for 60,000,000 of people
and feel perfectly fresh and rested the next day. Take four men, we will
say, two to do the day thinking and two more to go on deck at night, and
see how much time the rest of the world would have to go fishing. See
how politics would become simplified. Conventions, primaries, bargains
and sales, campaign bitterness and vituperation--all might be wiped out.
A pair of political thinkers could furnish 100,000,000 of people with
logical conclusions enough to last them through the campaign and put an
unbiased opinion into a man's house each day for less than he now pays
for gas. Just before election you could go into your private office,
throw in a large dose of campaign whisky, light a campaign cigar, fasten
your buttonhole to the wall by an elastic band, so that there would be a
gentle pull on it, and turn the electricity on your mechanical thought
supply. It would save time and money, and the result would be the same
as it is now. This would only be the beginning, of course, and after a
while every qualified voter who did not feel like exerting himself so
much, need only give his name and proxy to the salaried thinker employed
by the National Think Retort and Supply Works. We talk a great deal
about the union of church and state, but that is not so dangerous, after
all, as the mixture of politics and independent thought. Will the coming
voter be an automatic, legless, hairless mollusk with an abnormal ear
constantly glued to the tube of a big tank full of symmetrical ideas
furnished by a national bureau of brains in the employ of the party in
power?
EARNING A REWARD
XVI
Those were troublous times indeed. All-wool justice in the courts was
impossible. The vigilance committee, or Salvation army, as it called
itself, didn't make much fuss about its work, but we all knew that the
best citizens belonged to it, and were in good standing.
It was in those days that young Stewart was short-handed for a
sheep-herder, and had to take up with a sullen, hairy vagrant called by
the other boys, "Esau." Esau hadn't been on the ranch a week before he
made trouble with the proprietor and got from Stewart the red-hot
blessing he deserved.
Then Esau got madder and skulked away down the valley among the little
sage brush hummocks and white alkali wasteland, to nurse his wrath.
When Stewart drove into the corral that night, Esau rose up from behind
an old sheep dip-tank, and without a word except what may have growled
around in his black heart, he leveled a Spencer rifle and shot his young
employer dead.
That was the tragedy of that week only. Others had occurred before and
others would probably occur again. Tragedy was getting too prevalent for
comfort. So as soon as a quick cayuse and a boy could get down into
town, the news spread and the authorities began in the routine manner to
set the old legal mill to running. Some one had to go down to "The
Tivoli" and find the prosecuting attorney, then a messenger had to go to
"The Alhambra" for the justice of the peace. The prosecuting attorney
was "full," and the judge had just drawn one card to complete a straight
flush, and had succeeded.
So it took time to get square-toed justice ready and arm the sheriff
with the proper documents.
In the meantime the Salvation army was fully half way to Clugston's
ranch. They had started out, as they said, "to see that Esau didn't get
away." They were also going to see that Esau was brought into town.
What happened after they got out there I only know from hearsay, for I
was not a member of the Salvation army at that time. But I learned from
one of those present, that they found Esau down in the sage brush on the
bottoms that lie between the abrupt corner of Sheep mountain and the
Little Laramie river. They captured him but he died soon after, as it
was told me, from the effects of opium taken with suicidal intent. I
remember seeing Esau the next morning, and I thought I noticed signs of
ropium, as there was a purple streak around the neck of the deceased,
together with other external phenomena not peculiar to opium.
But the grand difficulty with the Salvation army was that it didn't want
to bring Esau into town. A long, cold night ride with a person in Esau's
condition was disagreeable. Twenty miles of lonely road with a
deceased murderer in the bottom of the wagon is depressing. Those of
my readers who have tried it will agree with me that it is not
calculated to promote hilarity.
[Illustration: _Mr. Whatley hadn't gone more than half a mile when he
heard the wild and disappointed yells of the Salvation army_
(Page 159)]
So the Salvation army stopped at Whatley's ranch to get warm, hoping
that some one would steal the remains and elope with them. They stayed
some time and managed to "give away" the fact that there was a reward of
$5,000 out for Esau, dead or alive. The Salvation army even went so far
as to betray a good deal of hilarity over the easy way it had nailed the
reward or would as soon as said remains were delivered up and
identified.
Mr. Whatley thought that the Salvation army was having a kind of walk
away, so he slipped out at the back door of the ranch, put Esau into his
own wagon and drove off to town. Remember, this is the way it was told
to me.
Mr. Whatley hadn't gone more than half a mile when he heard the wild and
disappointed yells of the Salvation army. He put the buckskin on the
back of his horse without mercy, urged on by the enraged shouts and
yells of his infuriated pursuers. He reached town about midnight, and
his pursuers disappeared. But what was he to do with Esau?
He drove around all over town trying to find the official who signed for
the deceased. He went from house to house like a vegetable vender,
seeking sadly for the party who would give him a $5,000 check for Esau.
Nothing could be more depressing than to wake up one man after another
out of a sound sleep, and invite him to come out to the buggy and
identify the remains. One man went out and looked at him. He said he
didn't know how others felt about it, but he allowed that anybody who
would pay $5,000 for such a remains as Esau's could not have very good
taste.
Gradually it crept through Mr. Whatley's wool that the Salvation army
had been working him, so he left Esau at the engine house and went home.
On his ranch he nailed up a large board, on which had been painted in
antique characters, with a paddle and tar, the following:
[finger right] Vigilance Committees, Salvation Armies,
Morgues, or young physicians who may have deceased people on their
hands, are requested to refrain from conferring them on to the
undersigned.
[finger right] People who contemplate shuffling off their
own or other people's mortal coils will please not do so on these
grounds.
[finger right] The Salvation Army of the Rocky Mountains
is especially hereby warned to keep off the Grass! JAMES WHATLEY.
A PLEA FOR JUSTICE
XVII
_To the Honorable Mayor of New York:_
SIR--I suppose you are mayor of this whole town, and if so you are the
mayor of the hosspitals as well as of the municipality of New York. I am
a citizen of this place that has always been square towards every man
and paid my bills as they accrewed. I now ask you, in return for same,
to intervene and protect me in my rights. The millishy has never been
called out to suppress me. I have never been guilty of rebellyun or open
difyance off the law, and yet I am unable to get a square deal and I
write this brief note and enclose a two-cent stamp, to ascertain
whether, as mayor, you are for me or agin me.
[Illustration: ... _I was in a large, cool hosspital which smelt strong
of some forrin substans. The hed doctor had been breathing on me and so
I come too_ (Page 163)]
Three years ago I entered your town from a westerly direction. I done so
quietly and I presume that few will remember the sircumstans, yet such
was so. I had not been here two weeks when I was run into, knocked over
and tromped onto by the bay team of a purse-proud producer of beer. I
was dashed to earth and knocked galley west on Broadway st. looking
north by sed horses and I was wrecked while peasably on my way to my
place of business. When I come to myself I was in a large, cool
hosspital which smelt strong of some forrin substans. The hed doctor had
been breathing on me and so I come too. When I looked around me I
decided to murmur "Where am I at?" which I did.
I soon learned that I was in a hosspital, and that kind friends had
removed one of my legs. I will not take up your time, sir, by touching
on my sufferings. Suphice it to say that I went foarth at last a blasted
man, with a cork leg that don't look no more like my own once leg which
I was torn away from, in spite of the Old Harry. It is too late to
repine over a wooden leg, unless it is a pine leg, but I come to you,
sir, to interfear on behalf of another matter which I will now aprooch.
Sorrows at that time come on me thick and fast. During that fall I lost
my wife and two dogs by deth. This was the third wife I have been called
on to bury. It has been my blessed privilidge to mourn the loss of three
as good wives as I ever shook a stick at. I have got them all in one
cool, roomy toom, with a verse on the door of same and their address, so
that they will not delay the resurrection. Under the verse that was
engraved on the slab, some low cuss has wrote three verses of poetry
with a chorus to each verse which winds up with the words:
Tit, tat, toe, three in a row.
But all this is only introductory. Sir, it has long been my heart's
desire that all my beloved dead should repose together. I have a large
lot in the semmetery, and last week a movement was placed on foot to
inter my late leg by the sides of my deceased wives. I applied to the
hosspital for said leg, having got a permit to bury same. I was pleasant
and corechus to the authoritis there, saying that my name was Gray and I
was there to procure my leg, whereupon a young meddicle cuss said to
the head ampitater:
"Here's de man that wants to plant Gray's l-e-g in a churchyard."
He then laughed a hoarse laugh and went on preserving a polapus in a big
glass fruit can with alkohall in it. Wherever I went I met with a
general disposition to fool with a stricken and one-legged man. I went
from ward to ward, looking at suffering and smelling kloryform till I
was sick at heart. I was referred from Dan to Beersheby, from the
janiter up to the chief tongue inspector, and one place where I went
into they seemed to be picking bone splinters out from among a
gentleman's brains. I made bold to tell my business, but with small
hopes.
"This is the man I told you about, Doc," said a young man who was filing
and setting a small bone handsaw. "This is that matter of Gray, the man
who wants his leg."
"Damn your Gray matter," says this doctor, whereupon the rest bust into
ribald mirth.
I was insulted right and left for a whole forenoon, and came away
shocked and pained. Will you assist me? There is no reverence among
doctors any more and they have none of the finer feelings. Some asked me
if I had a check for my leg. Some said they thought it had escaped from
the hosspital and gone on the stage, and one feller said that this
hosspital would not be responsible for the legs of guests unless
deposited in the office safe. I like fun just as well as anybody, Mr.
Mayor, but I don't think any one should be youmerous over the cold dead
features of a leg from which I have been ruthlessly snatched.
I now beg, sir, to dror this hasty letter to an untimely end, hoping
that you will make it hot for this blooming hosspital and make them fork
over said leg. Yours, with kindest regards,
A. PITTSFIELD GRAY.
GRAINS OF TRUTH
XVIII
A young friend has written to me as follows: "Could you tell me
something of the location of the porcelain works in Sevres, France, and
what the process is of making those beautiful things which come from
there? How is the name of the town pronounced? Can you tell me anything
of the history of Mme. Pompadour? Who was the Dauphin? Did you learn
anything of Louis XV whilst in France? What are your literary habits?"
It is with a great, bounding joy that I impart the desired information.
Sevres is a small village just outside of St. Cloud (pronounced San
Cloo). It is given up to the manufacture of porcelain. You go to St.
Cloud by rail or river, and then drive over to Sevres by diligence or
voiture. Some go one way and some go the other. I rode up on the Seine,
aboard of a little, noiseless, low-pressure steamer about the size of a
sewing machine. It was called the Silvoo Play, I think.
The fare was thirty centimes--or, say, three cents. After paying my fare
and finding that I still had money left, I lunched at St. Cloud in the
open air at a trifling expense. I then took a bottle of milk from my
pocket and quenched my thirst. Traveling through France, one finds that
the water is especially bad, tasting of the Dauphin at times, and
dangerous in the extreme. I advise those, therefore, who wish to be well
whilst doing the Continent, to carry, especially in France, as I did, a
large, thick-set bottle of milk, or kumiss, with which to take the wire
edge off one's whistle whilst being yanked through the Louvre.
St. Cloud is seven miles west of the center of Paris and almost ten
miles by rail on the road to Versailles--pronounced Vairsi. St. Cloud
belongs to the Canton of Sevres and the arrondissement of Versailles. An
arrondissement is not anything reprehensible. It is all right. You,
yourself, could belong to an arrondissement if you lived in France.
St. Cloud is on the beautiful hill slope, looking down the valley of the
Seine, with Paris in the distance. It is peaceful and quiet and
beautiful. Everything is peaceful in Paris when there is no revolution
on the carpet. The steam cars run safely and do not make so much noise
as ours do. The steam whistle does not have such a hold on people as it
does here. The adjutant-general at the depot blows a little tin bugle,
the admiral of the train returns the salute, the adjutant-general says
"Allons!" and the train starts off like a somewhat leisurely young man
who is going to the depot to meet his wife's mother.
One does not realize what a Fourth of July racket we live in and employ
in our business till he has been the guest of a monarchy of Europe
between whose toes the timothy and clover have sprung up to a great
height. And yet it is a pleasing change, and I shall be glad when we as
a republic have passed the blow-hard period, laid aside the
ear-splitting steam whistle, settled down to good, permanent
institutions, and taken on the restful, sootheful, Boston air which
comes with time and the quiet self-congratulation that one is born in a
Bible land and with Gospel privileges, and where the right to worship in
a strictly high-church manner is open to all.
The Palace of St. Cloud was once the residence of Napoleon I in
summer-time. He used to go out there for the heated term, and folding
his arms across his stomach, have thought after thought regarding the
future of France. Yet he very likely never had an idea that some day it
would be a thrifty republic, engaged in growing green peas, or pulling a
soiled dove out of the Seine, now and then, to add to the attractions of
her justly celebrated morgue.
Louis XVIII also put up at the Palace in St. Cloud several summers. He
spelled it "palais," which shows that he had very poor early English
advantages, or that he was, as I have always suspected, a native of
Quebec. Charles X also changed the bedding somewhat, and moved in during
his reign. He also added a new iron sink and a place in the barn for
washing buggies. Louis Philippe spent his summers here for a number of
years, and wrote weekly letters to the Paris papers, signed "Uno," in
which he urged the taxpayers to show more veneration for their royal
nibs. Napoleon III occupied the palais in summer during his lifetime,
availing himself finally of the use of Mr. Bright's justly celebrated
disease and dying at the dawn of better institutions for beautiful but
unhappy France.
I visited the palais (pronounced pallay), which was burned by the
Prussians in 1870. The grounds occupy 960 acres, which I offered to buy
and fit up, but probably I did not deal with responsible parties. This
part of France reminds me very much of North Carolina. I mean, of
course, the natural features. Man has done more for France, it seems to
me, than for the Tar Heel State, and the cities of Asheville and Paris
are widely different. The police of Paris rarely get together in front
of the court-house to pitch horseshoes or dwell on the outlook for the
goober crop.
And yet the same blue, ozonic sky, if I may be allowed to coin a word,
the same soft, restful, dolce frumenti air of gentle, genial health, and
of cark destroying, magnetic balm to the congested soul, the inflamed
nerve and the festering brain, are present in Asheville that one finds
in the quiet drives of San Cloo with the successful squirt of the mighty
fountains of Vairsi and the dark and whispering forests of
Fon-taine-_bloo_.
The palais at San Cloo presents a rather dejected appearance since it
was burned, and the scorched walls are bare, save where here and there a
warped and wilted water pipe festoons the blackened and blistered wreck
of what was once so grand and so gay.
San Cloo has a normal school for the training of male teachers only. I
visited it, but for some cause I did not make a hit in my address to the
pupils until I began to speak in their own national tongue. Then the
closest attention was paid to what I said, and the keenest delight was
manifest on every radiant face. The president, who spoke some English,
shook hands with me as we parted, and I asked him how the students took
my remarks. He said: "They shall all the time keep the thinkness--what
you shall call the recollect--of monsieur's speech in preserves, so that
they shall forget it not continualle. We shall all the time say we have
not witness something like it since the time we come here, and have not
so much enjoy ourselves since the grand assassination by the guillotine.
Come next winter and be with us for one week. Some of us will remain in
the hall each time."
At San Cloo I hired of a quiet young fellow about thirty-five years of
age, who kept a very neat livery stable there, a sort of victoria and a
big Percheron horse, with fetlock whiskers that reminded me of the
Sutherland sisters. As I was in no hurry I sat on an iron settee in the
cool court of the livery stable, and with my arm resting on the shoulder
of the proprietor I spoke of the crops and asked if generally people
about there regarded the farmer movement as in any way threatening to
the other two great parties. He did not seem to know, and so I watched
the coachman who was to drive me, as he changed his clothes in order to
give me my money's worth in grandeur.
One thing I liked about France was that the people were willing, at a
slight advance on the regular price, to treat a very ordinary man with
unusual respect and esteem. This surprised and delighted me beyond
measure, and I often told people there that I did not begrudge the
additional expense. The coachman was also hostler, and when the carriage
was ready he altered his attire by removing a coarse, gray shirt or
tunic and putting on a long, olive green coachman's coat, with erect
linen collar and cuffs sewed into the collar and sleeves. He wore a high
hat that was much better than mine, as is frequently the case with
coachmen and their employers. My coachman now gives me his silk hat when
he gets through with it in the spring and fall, so I am better dressed
than I used to be.
But we were going to say a word regarding the porcelain works at
Sevres. It is a modern building and is under government control. The
museum is filled with the most beautiful china dishes and funny business
that one could well imagine. Besides, the pottery ever since its
construction has retained its models, and they, of course, are worthy of
a day's study. The "Sevres blue" is said to be a little bit bluer than
anything else in the known world except the man who starts a nonpareil
paper in a pica town.
I was careful not to break any of these vases and things, and thus
endeared myself to the foreman of the place. All employes are uniformed
and extremely deferential to recognized ability. Practically, for half a
day, I owned the place.
A cattle friend of mine who was looking for a dynasty whose tail he
could twist while in Europe, and who used often to say over our glass of
vin ordinaire (which I have since learned is not the best brand at all),
that nothing would tickle him more than "to have a little deal with a
crowned head and get him in the door," accidentally broke a blue crock
out there at Sevres which wouldn't hold over a gallon, and it took the
best part of a car load of cows to pay for it, he told me.