SURPRISE EXPRESSED THAT THE PRESIDENT SHOULD TAKE A MOTHER-IN-LAW INTO
HIS CABINET AND ADD HOUSEKEEPING TO HIS OTHER AGONY.
HUDSON, WIS., June 3, 1886.
_The Hon. Grover Cleveland, Washington, D. C.:_
MY DEAR SIR: You have now assumed a new duty and taken upon yourself an
additional responsibility. Not content with the great weight of national
affairs, sufficient to crush any other pachyderm, you have cheerfully
and almost gleefully become a married man. While I cannot agree with you
politically, Grover, I am forced to admire your courage.
This morning a new life opens out to you--the life of a married man. It
is indeed a humiliating situation. To be a president of the United
States, the roustabout of a free people, is a trying situation; but to
be a newly married president, married in the full glare of official
life, with the eye of a divided constituency upon you, is to place
yourself where nerve is absolutely essential.
I, too, am married, but not under such trying circumstances. Others have
been married and still lived, but it has remained for you, Mr.
President, young as you are, to pose as a newly wedded president and to
take your new mother-in-law into the cabinet with you. For this reason,
I say freely that to walk a slack rope across the moist brow of Niagara
and carry a nervous man in a wheelbarrow sinks into a mere commonplace.
Daniel playing "tag" with a denful of half-starved lions becomes a
historic cipher, and the Hebrew children, sitting on a rosy bed of
red-hot clinkers in the fiery furnace, are almost forgotten.
With a large wad of civil service wedged in among your back teeth, a
larger fragment, perhaps, than you were prepared to masticate when you
bit it off; with an agonized southern democracy and a clamorous northern
constituency; with disappointment poorly concealed among your friends
and hilarity openly expressed by your enemies; with the snarl of the
vanquished Mr. Davis, who was at one time a sort of president himself,
as he rolls up future majorities for your foes; with a lot of
sharp-witted journalists walking all over you every twenty-four hours
and climbing up your stalwart frame with their telegraph repair boots
on, I am surprised, Grover, honestly, as between man and man, that you
should have tried to add housekeeping to all this other agony. Had you
been young and tender under the wings I might have understood it, but
you must admit, in the quiet and sanctity of your own home, Grover, that
you are no gosling. You have arrived at man's estate. You have climbed
the barbed-wire fence which separates the fluff and bloom and blossom
and bumble-bees of impetuous youth from the yellow fields and shadowy
orchards of middle life. You now stand in the full glare of life's
meridian. You are entering upon a new experience. Possibly you think
that because you are president the annoyances peculiar to the life of a
new, green groom will not reach you. Do not fool yourself in this
manner. Others have made the same mistake. Position, wealth and fame
cannot shut out the awkward and trying circumstances which attend the
married man even as the sparks are prone to fly upward.
It will seem odd to you at first, Mr. President, after the affairs of
the nation have been put aside for the day and the government fire proof
safe locked up for the night, to go up to your boudoir and converse with
a bride, with one corner of her mouth full of pins. A man may write a
pretty fair message to congress, one that will be accepted and printed
all over the country, and yet he may not be fitted to hold a
conversation with one corner of a woman's mouth while the other is
filled with pins. To some men it is given to be great as statesmen,
while to others it is given to be fluent conversationalists under these
circumstances.
Mr. President, I may be taking a great liberty in writing to you and
touching upon your private affairs, but I noticed that everybody else
was doing it and so I have nerved myself up to write you, having once
been a married man myself, though not, as I said, under the same
circumstances. When I was married I was only a plain justice of the
peace, plodding quietly along and striving to do my duty. You was then
sheriff of your county. Little did we think in those days that now you
would be a freshly married president and I the author of several pieces
which have been printed in the papers. Little did we think then, when I
was a justice of the peace in Wyoming and you a sheriff in New York,
that to-day your timothy lawn would be kicked all to pieces by your
admiring constituents, while I would be known and loved wherever the
English language is tampered with.
So we have risen together, you to a point from which you may be easily
observed and flayed alive by the newspapers, while I am the same
pleasant, unassuming, gentlemanly friend of the poor that I was when
only a justice of the peace and comparatively unknown.
I cannot close this letter without expressing a wish that your married
life may be a joyous one, as the paper at Laramie has said, "and that no
cloud may ever come to mar the horizon of your wedded bliss." (This
sentence is not my own. I copy it verbatim from a wedding notice of my
own written by a western journalist who is now at the Old Woman's Home.)
Mr. President, I hope you will not feel that I have been too forward in
writing to you personally over my own name. I mean to do what is best
for you. You can truly say that all I have ever done in this way has
been for your good. I speak in a plain way sometimes, but I don't beat
about the bush. I see that you do not want to have any engrossed bills
sent to you for a couple of weeks.
That's the way I was. I told all my creditors to withhold their
engrossed bills during my honeymoon, as I was otherwise engrossed.
This remark made me a great many friends and added to my large circle of
creditors. It was afterward printed in a foreign paper and explained in
a supplement of eight pages.
We are all pretty well here at home. I may go to Washington this fall if
I can sell a block of stock in the Pauper's Dream, a rich gold claim of
mine on Elk mountain. It is a very rich claim, but needs capital to
develop it. (This remark is not original with me. I quote from an
exchange.)
If I do come over to Washington do not let that make any difference in
your plans. If I thought your wife would send out to the neighbors and
borrow dishes and such things on my account I would not go a step.
Just stick your head out of the window and whistle as soon as the
cabinet is gone and I will come up there and spend the evening.
Remember that I have not grown cold toward you just because you have
married. You will find me the kind of a friend who will not desert you
just when you are in trouble. Yours, as heretofore,
_Bill Nye._
P. S.--I send you to-day a card-receiver. It looks like silver. Do not
let your wife bear on too hard when she polishes it. I was afraid you
might try to start into keeping house without a card-receiver, so I
bought this yesterday. When I got married I forgot to buy a
card-receiver, and I guess we would have frozen to death before we could
have purchased one, but friends were more thoughtful, and there were
nine of them among the gifts. If you decide that it would not be proper
for you to receive presents, you may return the card receiver to me, or
put it in the cellar-way till I come over there this fall.
_B. N._
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