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

After speaking tearfully of her life as a child, she says:

My childhood days have passed and gone,
And it fills my heart with pain,
To think that youth will never more
Return to me again.
And now, kind friends, what I have wrote
I hope you will pass o'er,
And not criticize, as some have done,
Hitherto herebefore.

I know that it ill becomes me to assume the prerogative of criticizing a poet's style or even to suggest any improvements, but sometimes an outsider may be able to stand off as it were and see little defects in a masterpiece which the author can not see.

My idea would be to take these poems and remove the crown sheet, then put in new running gear, upset and bush the pitman, kalsomine the boiler plate, drill new holes in the eccentric, rim out the gas pipe, raise the posterior eccentric to a level with the gang plank, slide the ash pan forward of the monkey wrench, securing it by draw bars to the topgallant mizzen. Then, throwing open the condenser and allowing the cerebellum to rest firmly against the vicarious whippety-whop, fair time may be made on a gentle grade.

If I were to suggest anything further it would be that Julia have entire change of air and surroundings. Michigan is too healthy for an ambitious obituary poet. She naturally has too much time on her hands. Let her go into the yellow fever districts next summer, where she can work in two or three of her cheerful little funeral odes every morning before breakfast. That's the place for her. It may kill her, but if it should we will trust in Providence to raise up some inspired idiot to take her place. We will struggle along anyway with George Francis Train and Denis Kearney and Dr. Mary Walker, even if Julia joins the glad throng of poets who let their hair grow long and kick up their heels in the green fields of Eden.

One more suggestion which will, I know, be accepted as coming from one who never says anything but in the kindest spirit. I think that Julia takes advantage of her poetic license. A poetic license, as I understand it, simply allows the poet to jump the 15 over the 14 in order to bring in the proper rhyme, but it does not allow the writer to usurp the management of the entire system of worlds, and introduce dog-days and ice-cream between Christmas and New Year. It does not in any way allow the contractor of prize funeral puffs to sandwich a tropical evening with the scent of orange blossom and mignonette, in between two December days in Michigan, that would freeze the lightning rods off the houses, and when the owners of cast iron dogs have to bring them in, and stand them behind the parlor stove.

Julia can't fool me much on a Michigan winter. When the seductive breath from the north comes soughing across Lake Superior, redolent with the blossom rock of the copper mines, and dead cranberry vines, and slippery elm bark, the poet or poetess who could maliciously crawl into a buffalo overcoat, and write a dirge that worked in "sighing soft winds," just for the benefit of one whose spirit is in a land where house plants never freeze, should have no poetic license. I would be in favor of having such license revoked, or raising the price so high that none but good, reliable, square toed poets could practice. I would suggest $500 per year for poets driving one horse, and dealing in native poems on death, spring, beautiful snow, etc., etc.; $1,000 per year for two horse, platform spring poets, retailers of imported poems; and $1,500 per year for poets who do a general business in manufactured Havana poems, or native wrappers with Havana fillers.

We have too many poets in our glorious republic who ought to be peeling the epidermis off a bull train; and too many poetesses who would succeed better boiling soap-grease, or spiking a 6 x 8 patch on the quarter-deck of a faithful husband's overalls.

I do not refer entirely to Julia in the last few lines, for Julia is not deserving of such criticism. She was never intended to do the drudgery of housework. She is too frail. She couldn't cook, because her cake would be sad, and her soft, wavy hair, like the mane of a Cayuse plug, would get in the cod-fish balls, and cling to the butter.

No, Julia, you don't look like a woman whose career as a housewife would be a success. From the mournful look in your limpid eye, I would say that your lignum-vitæ bread, and celluloid custard pie, and indestructible waffles, and fireproof pancakes, and burglar-proof chicken pie, would give you away. Your mind would be far away in the poet's realm, and you would put shoe blacking in the blanc mange, and silver gloss starch in the tea, and cod liver oil in the sponge cake. So, Julia, you may continue right along as you are doing. It don't do much harm, and no doubt it does you a heap of good.

SHOEING A BRONCO

Recently I have taken a little recreation when I felt despondent, by witnessing the difficult and dangerous feat of shoeing a bronco.

Whenever I get low spirited and feel that a critical public don't appreciate my wonderful genius as a spring poet, I go around to Brown & Poole's blacksmith shop on A street, and watch them shoe a vicious bronco. I always go back to the office cheered and soothed, and better prepared to fight the battle of life.

They have a new rig now for this purpose. It consists of two broad sinches, which together cover the thorax and abdomen of the bronco, to the ends of which – the sinches, I mean – are attached ropes, four in number, which each pass over a pulley above the animal, and then are wrapped about a windlass. The bronco is led to the proper position, like a young man who is going to have a photograph taken, the sinches slipped under his body and attached to the ropes.

Then the man at the wheel makes two or three turns in rapid succession.

The bronco is seen to hump himself, like the boss camel of the grand aggregation of living wonders. He grunts a good deal and switches his tail, while the ropes continue to work in the pulleys and the man at the capstan spits on his hands and rolls up on the wheel.

After a while the bronco hangs from the ceiling like a discouraged dish rag, and after trying for two or three hundred times unsuccessfully to kick a hole in the starry firmament, he yields and hangs at half mast while the blacksmith shoes him.

Yesterday I felt as though I must see something cheerful, and so I went over to watch a bronco getting his shoes on for the round-up. I was fortunate. They led up a quiet, gentlemanly appearing plug with all the weary, despondent air of a disappointed bronco who has had aspirations for being a circus horse, and has "got left." When they put the sinches around him he sighed as though his heart would break, and his great, soulful eyes were wet with tears. One man said it was a shame to put a gentle pony into a sling like that in order to shoe him, and the general feeling seemed to be that a great wrong was being perpetrated.

Gradually the ropes tightened on him and his abdomen began to disappear. He rose till he looked like a dead dog that had been fished out of the river with a grappling iron. Then he gave a grunt that shook the walls of the firmament, and he reached out about five yards till his hind feet felt of a Greaser's eye, and with an athletic movement he jumped through the sling and lit on the blacksmith's forge with his head about three feet up the chimney. He proceeded then to do some extra ground and lofty tumbling and kicking. A large anvil was held up for him to kick till he tired himself out, and then the blacksmith put a fire and burglar proof safe over his head and shod him.

The bronco is full of spirit, and, although docile under ordinary circumstances, he will at times get enthusiastic and do things which he afterwards, in his sober moments, bitterly regrets.

Some broncos have formed the habit of bucking. They do not all buck. Only those that are alive do so. When they are dead they are more subdued and gentle.

A bronco often becomes so attached to his master that he will lay down his life if necessary. His master's life, I mean.

When a bronco comes up to me and lays his head over my shoulder, and asks me to scratch his chilblain for him, I always excuse myself on the ground that I have a family dependent on me, and furthermore, that I am a United States Commissioner, and to a certain extent the government hinges on me.

Think what a ghastly hole there would be in the official staff of the republic if I were launched into eternity now, when good men are so scarce.

Some days I worry a good deal over this question. Suppose that some unprincipled political enemy who wanted to be United States Commissioner or Notary Public in my place should assassinate me!!!

Lots of people never see this. They sec how smoothly the machinery of government moves along, and they do not dream of possible harm. They do not know how quick she might slip a cog, or the eccentric get jammed through the indicator, if, some evening when I am at the opera house, or the minstrel show, the assassin should steal up on me, and shoot a large, irregular aperture into my cerebellum.

This may not happen, of course; but I suggest it, so that the public will, as it were, throw its protecting arms about me, and not neglect me while I am alive.

PUMPKIN JIM; OR THE TALE OF A BUSTED JACKASS RABBIT

CHAPTER I. – PUMPKIN JIM

It was evening in the mountains. The golden god of day was gliding slowly adown the crimson west. Here and there the cerulean dome was flecked with snowy clouds.

The flecks were visible to the naked eye.

Meanwhile the golden god of day, hereinbefore referred to, continued to glide adown the crimson west, with about the same symmetrical glide. It had done so on several occasions previous to the opening of this story.

The katydid was singing sleepily in the long grass, and the grizzly bear was trilling between eleven trills on the still air.

It was a spot where the foot of man had never trod, and the undisturbed temple of nature with its hallowed hush and never ending repose. The lofty pines were swaying softly to and fro in the gentle breeze of evening, and the babbling brook went babbling along down its rocky bed in the bottom of the canon, with a merry bab.

All at once, like a flash of dazzling light, a noble youth came slowly down the mountain side, riding an ambling palfrey of the narrow-guage variety, with a paint-brush tail on him – (that is the palfrey, of course.) The palfrey was a delicate buckskin color, with high, intellectual ears and Roman nose.

In crossing the stream the palfrey stubbed his toe, and fell on his noble rider, breaking the man's leg in three places, and jamming one of his ribs through the liver and into the ground, thus pinning him to the earth, and preventing him from rising.

The buckskin palfrey, with almost human foresight, and wonderful intelligence, found a soft place in the grassy bottom, and lay down.

There, in the slanting rays of the declining sun, and stretched out upon the sedgy brink of the clear mountain stream, far from the reach of man and miles beyond the outer line of civilization, lay Pumpkin Jim, the Yipping, Yelling Yahoo of Dirty Woman's Ranch.

He lav there partially submerged in the stream and partially in the clear, bracing atmosphere. Wild-eyed and beautiful he lay there, looking up into the glad realms of space, with that murderous glitter in his eye that wins a woman's love, and the sympathy of kind hearted philanthropists.

Occasionally he would raise his broken limb and try to use it, but it generally wilted and drooped like the leg of a rag doll.

Then he would struggle to raise himself up and drag his body out upon the bank, but the broken rib would tear out large chunks of his liver, and make him feel wretched and unhappy.

"Curses upon thee, thou base and treacherous mule!" he murmured, brokenly. "By my beard, thou hast poorly repaid me for my unremitting kindness to thee. Ah, alack, alack, alack – "

He was just about to alack some more, when a mellow, girlish voice came floating down the gulch and fell in large fragments near where he lay.

He gathered up some of the chunks of melody to see what the song might be. It was that wonderful masterpiece of Mozart's, "When Johnny Comes Marching Home."

Then he swooned.

The gurgling brook still continued to gurg. We will let it gurg.