Bill Nye and Boomerang. Or, The Tale of a Meek-Eyed Mule, and Some Other Literary Gems

He seemed to feel hurt about something. He looked like a man who has suddenly lost faith in humanity and become soured, as it were. Some who sat near him said he swore. Anyway, he lost the thread of the discourse. That part of the sermon he now says is a blank to him. It is several blanks. He called upon blank to everlastingly blank such a blankety blank blank, idiotic blank fool as the young man was.

Meantime the young man has quit the use of tobacco. He did not know at first whether to swear off or kill himself. The other day he said: "Only two weeks ago I stood up and said proudly I amateur. To-day, praise be to redeeming grace, I am not a chewer." (This joke for the first few days will have to be watered very carefully and wrapped in a California blanket, for it is not strong at all. However, if it can be worked through the cold weather it is no slouch of a joke.)

THE WEATHER AND SOME OTHER THINGS

Sometimes I wish that Wyoming had more vegetation and less catarrh, more bloom and summer and fragrance and less Christmas and New Year's through the summer.

I like the clear, bracing air of 7,500 feet above the civilized world, but I get weary of putting on and taking off my buffalo overcoat for meals all through dog days. I yearn for a land where a man can take off his ulster and overshoes while he delivers a Fourth of July oration, without flying into the face of Providence and dying of pneumonia.

Perhaps I am unreasonable, but I can't help it. I have my own peculiar notions, and I am not to blame for them.

As I write these lines I look out across the wide sweep of brownish gray plains dotted here and there with ranches and defunct buffalo craniums, and I see shutting down over the sides of the abrupt mountains, and meeting the foothills, a white mist which melts into the gray sky. It is a snow storm in the mountains.

I saw this with wonder and admiration for the first two or three million times. When it became a matter of daily occurrence as a wonder or curiosity, it was below mediocrity. Last July a snow storm gathered one afternoon and fell among the foothills and whitened the whole line to within four or five miles of town, and it certainly was a peculiar freak of nature, but it convinced me that whatever enterprises I might launch into here I would not try to raise oranges and figs until the isothermal line should meet with a change of heart.

I have just been reading Colonel Downey's poem. It is very good what there is of it, but somehow we lay aside the Congressional Record wishing that there had been more of it.

Just as we get interested and carried away with it, having read the first five or six thousand words, it comes to an abrupt termination.

I have often wished that I could write poetry. It would do me a heap of good. I would like to write a little book of poems with a blue cover and beveled edges and an index to it. It would tickle me pretty near to death.

But I can't seem to do it. When I write a poem and devote a good deal of study and thought to it, and get it to suit me, the great seething mass of humanity, regardless of my feelings, get down on the grass and yell and hoot and kick up the green sward, and whoop at the idea of calling that poetry. It hurts me and grieves me, and has a tendency to sour my disposition, so that when a really deserving poet comes to the front I haven't the good nature and sweetness of disposition to enter dispassionately upon the subject and say a kind word where I ought to, but I will say of Colonel Downey's poem that it certainly has great depth and width and length, and as you go on, it seems to broaden out and extend farther on and cover more ground and take in more territory and branch out and widen and lay hold of great tracts of thought and open up new fields and fresh pastures and make homestead claims and enter large desert land tracts and prove up under the timber culture act and the bounty land act and throw open the Indian reservation to settlement.

The matter of decorating the Capitol with sacred subjects is one which would receive the hearty approval of all the people of the country, and I often wish that the Colonel had alluded to it in his poem.

I have some curiosity to know what his ideas are on that point.

I, for one, would be glad to see appropriate paintings of scriptural subjects decorating the walls of our national capitol, and have often been on the verge of offering to do it at my own expense.

A cheerful painting to adorn the walls back of the Speaker's desk, would be a study by some great artist, representing Sampson mashing the Philistines with the jawbone of an ass.

It would be historical and also symbolical; but principally symbolical.

Then another painting might be executed representing Balaam's ass delivering a speech on the Indian question. It would take first rate, and when visitors from abroad made a flying trip to Washington during the summer, and missed seeing Wade Hampton, and felt disappointed, they could go and see Balaam's ass, and go home with their curiosity gratified.

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, dedicated to Ben Hill and some other Congressional soiled doves.

Then there are some simpler subjects which might be worked up and hung in the Congressional nursery to please the children till the session closed for the day, and their miscellaneous dads came to carry them home.

I could think of lots of nice subjects for a painter to paint, or a sculptor to sculp, if I were to give my attention to it# But I haven't the time.

THE PARABLE OF THE UNJUST STEWARD

Now there was a certain rich man in those days, who kept a large inn on the American plan.

And the hegira from other lands over against Kabzul and Eder, and Breckinridge and Kinah, and Georgetown and Dimmonah, and Kedesh and Roaring Forks, and Hador and Ithnan, and the Gunnison country and Ziph, and Telem and Silver Cliff, Beoloth and Hadattah, and even beyond Hazar – Gadah and Buena Vista, was exceedingly simultaneous.

And throughout the country roundabout was there never before an hegira that seemed to hegira with the same hegira with which this hegira did hegira.

And behold the inn was overrun day by day with pilgrims who journeyed thither with shekels and scrip and pieces of silver.

And the inn-keeper said unto himself, "Go to;" and he was very wroth, insomuch that he tore his beard and swore a large, dark-blue oath about the size of a man's hand.

For behold the inn-keeper gat not the shekels, and he wist not why it was.

Now, it was so that in the inn was one Keno-El-Pharo, the steward, and he stood behind the tablets wherein the pilgrims did write the names of themselves and their wives and their sons and their daughters.

And Keno-El-Pharo wore purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day, and he drank the wines of one Mumm, and they were extra dry, and so even was Keno-El-Pharo from the rising of the sun until the going down thereof.

And behold one day the inn-keeper took a large tumble even unto himself, and also unto the racket of Keno-El-Pharo the son of Ahaz Ben Bunko.

And he said unto Keno, "Give an account of thy stewardship that thou mayest be no longer steward."

And Keno-El-Pharo cried with a loud voice and wept and fell down and rose up and went unto his place.

And he looked into the mirror, and patted the soap lock on his brow and he saw that he was fair to look: upon.

But he was exceedingly sorrowful and he said, What shall I do? for my lord taketh away the stewardship, and verily it was a good thing to have.

Alas! I know not what to do. I cannot get a position as mining expert, and to beg I am ashamed. I am resolved what I will do. And he smiled unto himself, and the breadth of the smile was even six cubits from one end thereof even unto the other.

So he called unto himself one of his lord's debtors, and he said, How much owest thou my lord?

And he said, Even for seven days food and lodging at $3.50 per day, together with my reckoning at the bar, amounting to thirty pieces of silver of the denomination known as the dollar even of our dads.

And the steward said unto him, Take thy bill quickly and write fifteen.

And it was so. And he said unto another, How much owest thou my lord?

And he answered him and said, fifty pieces of silver.

And the steward said unto him, take thy bill and write twenty-five.

And it was so.

And behold these two guests of the inn were solid with Keno El-Pharo from that hour.

And when Keno-El-Pharo received the Oriental grand bounce from the inn-keeper, the guests of the inn, to whom Keno had shown mercy, procured him a pass over the road, and they whiled away the hours with Keno-El-Pharo, and he did teach them some pleasant games; and when the even was come he went his way unto Kansas City, and they with whom he had abode wot not how it was, for they were penniless.

And Keno-El-Pharo abode long in the land over against St. Louis, and he was steward in one of the great inns for many years, and he wore good clothes day by day and waxed fat, and he rested his stomach on the counter, and he said to himself, ha! ha!

ODE TO SPRING

Fantasia for the Bass Drum; Adapted from the German by William Von Nye.

In the days of laughing spring time,
Comes the mild-eyed sorrel cow,
With bald-headed patches on her,