Bill Nye's Cordwood

Hornets lit all over me and walked around on my person. I did not dare to scrape them off, because they are so sensitive. You have to be very guarded in your conduct toward a hornet.

I remember once while I was watching the busy little hornet gathering honey and June bugs from the bosom of a rose, years ago. I stirred him up with a club, more as a practical joke than anything else, and he came and lit on my sunny hair – that was when I wore my own hair – and he walked around through my gleaming tresses quite awhile, making tracks as large as a watermelon all over my head. If he hadn't run out of tracks my head would have looked like a load of summer squashes. I remember I had to thump my head against the smoke house in order to smash him, and I had to comb him out with a fine comb and wear a waste paper basket two weeks for a hat.

Much has been said of the hornet, but he has an odd, quaint way after all, that is forever new.

A Tragedy

Out where the blue waves come and go,
Out where the zephyrs kiss the strand,
Down where the damp tides ebb and flow,
Where the ocean monkeys with the sand,
William, the hungry, rustles for his meal,
Slim William, the eldest, gathers the eel.

Up where the johnny jump-ups smile,
Up where the green hills meet the sky,
Where, out from her window for many a mile,
She watches the blue sea dimpling lie,
The wife of the eelist, with vizage grim,
Sits in the gloaming and watches for him.

Down in the moist and moaning sea,
Down where the day can never come,
With staring eyes that can never see
And lips that will ever continue dumb,
With eels in his breast, in a large wet wave,
William is filling a watery grave.

Up where the catnip is breathing hard,
Up where the tansy is flecked with dew,
Where the vesper soft as the onion peels
Wakens the echoes the twilight through,
The new-made widow still watches the shore
And sits there and waits, as I said before.

They come and tell her the pitiful tale,
With trembling voice and tear-dimmed eye,
They watch her cheek grow slightly pale,
Yet wonder at the calm reply:
"All our tears are but idle, gentlemen,
Go bring in the eels and set him again."

The Bronco Cow

BILL NYE UNDERTAKES TO MILK HER WHEN THE SIGN IS NOT RIGHT – DISASTROUS RESULTS

When I was young and used to roam around over the country, gathering water-melons in the dark of the moon, I used to think I could milk anybody's cow, but I do not think so now. I do not milk a cow now unless the sign is right, and it hasn't been right for a good many years.

The last cow I tried to milk was a common cow, born in obscurity; kind of a self-made cow. I remember her brow was low, but she wore her tail high and she was haughty, oh, so haughty.

I made a common-place remark to her, one that is used in the very best of society, one that need not have given offense anywhere. I said "so" – and she "soed". Then I told her to "histe" – and she histed. But I thought she overdid it. She put too much expression in it.

Just then I heard something crash through the window of the barn and fall with a dull, sickening thud on the outside.

The neighbors came to see what it was that caused the noise. They found that I had done it in getting through the window.

I asked the neighbors if the barn was still standing. They said it was. Then I asked if the cow was injured much. They said she seemed to be quite robust. Then I requested them to go in and calm the cow a little and see if they could get my plug hat off her horns.

I am buying all my milk now of a milk-man. I select a gentle milk-man who will not kick and I feel as though I could trust him. Then if he feels as though he could trust me, it is all right.

Autumn Thoughts

There can be nothing sadder than the solemn hush of nature that precedes the death of the year. The golden glory of autumn, with the billowy bronze and velvet azure of the skies above the royal robes of oak and maple, bespeak the closing hours of nature's teeming life and the silent farewell to humanity's gauze underwear.

Thus while nature dons her regal robe of scarlet and gold in honor of the farewell benefit to autumn, the sad-eyed poet hies away to a neighboring clothes line, and the hour of nature's grand blowout dons the flaming flannels of his friend out of respect for the hectic flush of the dying year.

Leaves have their time to fall, and so has the price of coal. And yet how sadly at variance with decaying nature is the robust coal market.

Another glorious summer with its wealth of pleasant memories is stored away among the archives of our history. Another gloomy winter is upon us. These wonderful colors that flame across the softened sky of Indian summer like the gory banner of royal conqueror, come but to warn us that in a few short weeks the water pipe will be bursted in the kitchen and the decorated washbowl be broken.

We flit through the dreamy hours of summer like swift-winged bumble bees amid the honeysuckle and pumpkin blossoms, storing away, perhaps, a little glucose honey and buckwheat pancakes for the future, but all at once, like a newspaper thief in the night, the king of frost and ripe mellow chilblains is upon us, and we crouch beneath the wintry blast and hump our spinal column up into the crisp air like a Texas steer that has thoughtlessly swallowed a raw cactus.

Life is one continued round of alternative joys and sorrows. To-day we are on the top wave of prosperity and warming ourselves in the glad sunlight of plenty, and to-morrow we are cast down and depressed financially, and have to stand off the washer-woman for our clean shirt or stay at home from the opera.

The November sky already frowns down upon us, and its frozen tears begin to fall. The little birds have hushed their little lay. So has the fatigued hen. Only a little while, and the yawning chasm in the cold, calm features of the Thanksgiving turkey will be filled with voluptuous stuffing and then sewed up. The florid features of the polygamous gobbler will be wrapped in sadness, and cranberry pie will be a burden, for the veal cutlet goeth to its long home, and the ice cream freezer is broken in the woodhouse.

Oh, time! thou baldheaded pelican with the venerable corncutter and the second hand hour-glass, thou playest strange pranks upon the children of men. No one would think, to look at thy bilious countenance and store teeth, that in thy bony bosom lurked such eccentric schemes.

The chubby boy, whose danger signal hangs sadly through the lattice-work of his pants, knows that Time, who waits for no man, will one day, if we struggle heroically on, give him knowledge and suspenders, and a solid girl, and experience and soft white mustache and eventually a low grave in the valley beneath the sighing elms and the weeping willow, where, in the misty twilight of the year, noiselessly upon his breast shall fall the deaf leaf, while the silent tear of the gray autumnal sky will come and sink into the yellow grass above his head.

    Bill Nye.

Bill Nye's Advice Bag

ANXIOUS QUESTIONS ANSWERED

PRESIDENT CLEVELAND'S CHILLING NEGLECT OF AN EDITOR DENOUNCED – THE WOMAN IN THE SLEEPING COACH – CALM REASONING DEALT OUT

ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS

"Ghoulish Glee," Bucyrus, O., writes: "For two years I have been sending a copy of my paper, the 'Palladium and Observer' to President Cleveland. Although I have criticised his administration editorially several times, I have done so with the best of motives and certainly for his good. If he was angry with me for this, he surely has never so expressed himself to me, but last August I sent him a bill for his paper covering two years and over, and he has not answered my letter up to this date. Will you answer this through the columns of the Daily News telling me what I had better do, and so that others who may be in the same fix can understand what your advice would be in such a case?"

Stop his paper. By all means deprive him of the paper. You should have done so before. Then you will feel perfectly free to criticise his administration to the bitter end.

Nothing startles a president any more than to shut off a paper that he has become attached to. Mr. Cleveland will go out and paw around in the wet grass in front of the white house, and finally he will go in, wondering what has become of the Palladium and Observer. In a week or two he will remit and tell you to continue sending the paper. Do not criticise his administration too severely till you see whether he is going to remit or not.

Early Rose, Mankato, Minn., writes: "Is it proper to mark passages in a book of poems loaned to one by a young man in whom one feels an interest, or should one be content with simply expressing one's admiration of certain passages in the book?"