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

Some of the ladies brought home columbines that had been drowned; others brought home beautiful green mosses with red bugs in them; and others brought home lichens and ferns and neuralgia.

I didn't bring anything home. I was glad to get home myself, and know that I was all there.

I took the lunch basket and examined it. It looked sick and unhappy. At first I thought I would pick the red ants out of the lunch; then I thought it would save time to pick the lunch out of the red ants; but finally I thought I would compromise, by throwing the whole thing into the alley.

I am now preparing a work to be called the "Pick Nicker's Guide; or Starvation Made Easy and Even Desirable!" It will supply a want long felt, and will be within the reach of all.

THE VETERAN WHO DIED WHILE GETTING HIS PENSION

Many years ago, when business in my office was not very rushing, and time hung heavy on my hands, before I had attempted journalism, and no dream of my present dazzling literary success had entered my mind, I rashly offered to assist applicants for pensions in attracting the attention of the general government, at so much per head.

One hot day in July while I sat in my office killing flies with an elastic band and wondering if my mines would ever be quoted in the market, a middle-aged man came in and, spitting calmly into the porcelain cuspidore, began to tell me about his service as a soldier, and how he was wounded, and wished to secure a pension.

He said that several attorneys had already tried to procure one for him, but had failed to do so, giving up in despair. I examined the wound, which consisted of a large hole in the skull, caused by a gun-shot wound. He was almost entirely prevented by this wound from obtaining a livelihood, because he was liable at any moment to fall insensible to the ground, as the result of exercise or work. I told him that I would snatch a few moments from my arduous duties and proceed to do as he requested me.

Then I began a very brisk correspondence with the Interior Department. I would write to the Commissioner of Pensions in my vivacious but firm manner and he would send me back a humorous little circular showing me that I had been too hasty and premature. I never got mad or forgot myself but began a little farther back in the history of the world, and gradually led up to the war of the rebellion.

In reply the Commissioner would write back to me that my chronological table was at fault and I would cheerfully correct the error and proceed.

At this time, however, my client became a little despondent, several years having elapsed since we began our task. So to my other labors I had to add that of cheering up the applicant.

Time dragged its slow length along. Months succeeded months and the years sped on.

The Interior Department never forgot me. Every little while I would get a printed circular boiling over with mirth and filled with the most delightful conundrums relative to the late unpleasantness. These conundrums I would have my client answer and swear to every time, although I could see that he was failing mentally and physically. He would come into my office almost every day, and silently raise his right hand and with uncovered head stand there in a reverent attitude for me to swear him to something. Sometimes I had nothing for him to swear to, and then I would make him take the oath of allegiance and send him away. I wanted to keep him loyal if I could, whether he got his pension or not.

The last work had been nearly completed, and the claim had been turned over to the Surgeon-General's office, when the applicant yielded to the crumbling effect of relentless time, and took to his bed.

It was a sad moment for me. I could not keep back the silent tears when I saw the old man lying there so still and so helpless, and remembered how rosy, and strong, and happy he looked years and years ago, when he first asked me to apply for his pension.

I wrote the Department that if the claims could be passed upon soon, I would keep my client up on stimulants a short time, but that he was failing fast. Then I went to the bedside of the old man, and watched him tenderly.

When he saw me come into his room, although he could not talk any more, he would feebly raise his right hand, and I would swear him to support the Constitution of the United States, and then he would be easier. It seemed to me like a ghastly joke for the old man to swear he would support the Constitution of the United States, when he couldn't begin to support his own constitution; but I never mentioned it to him.

At last the blow fell. The Surgeon-General wrote me that owing to the lack of clerical aid in that office, and a failure of Congress to make any appropriation for that purpose, he was behind hand, and could not possibly reach the claim referred to before the close of the following year.

Then the old man passed into the great untried realm of the hereafter. But he was prepared.

With the aid of the government, I had given him an idea of Eternity and its vastness, which could not fail to be of priceless benefit to him.

After the government had used this pension money as long as it needed it, and was, so to speak, once more on its feet, the money was sent, and the old man's great-grand-children got it, and purchased a lawn-mower, a Mexican hairless dog, and some other necessaries of life with it.

I am now out of the pension business. It is a good thing, for I find that I am too impatient to attend to it. I am too anxious for tangible results in the near future. My desire to accomplish anything speedily is too violent and too previous.

GINGERBREAD POEMS AND COLD PICKLED FACTS

In an old number of Harper's Magazine, will be found a little poem upon the subject of Joseph, the chief of the Nez Perces. There is a kind of mellow and subdued heroic light cast over the final defeat of this great North American horse thief, which is in perfectly pleasing harniony with the New England idea of the noble unlettered relic of a defunct race. This soft-voiced poet, who probably knows about as much of the true occidental pig-stealer, as the latter does about the Electoral College, starts out this little brass-mounted epic in the following elegant style of prevarication:

From the northern desolation,
Comes the cry of exultation,
It has ended – he has yielded, and the stubborn fight won.
Let the nation in its glory,
Bow with shame before the story
Of the hero it has ruined, and the evil it has done.

It is too true that here in the wild West people haven't the advantages that are accorded to the East, and in our uncouth ignorance, and meager facilities for obtaining information, we are, no doubt, too prone to ascribe to the hostile inebriate of the plains a character which does not compare very favorably with the boss hero in the poem hereto attached, and marked "Exhibit A." But the people on the frontier should not set themselves up to judge what they know nothing of. Why should frontiersmen, without colleges, without observatories, without telescopes, or logarithms, or protoplasms, or spectroscopes, or heliotropes, how should they, I ask, who can lay no claim to anything but that they are poor, unsophisticated, grasshopper sufferers; with nothing to refer to but the naked facts – the ruins of their desolated homes, and the ghastly, mutilated corpses of their wives and children – try to compete with the venerable philosophers who live where the Patent Office reports are made, and within the shadow of the building in which the Illustrated Police Gazette and other such reliable authorities have their birth, and in which are illustrated with graphic skill, the Indian raids of the border, using the same old cut which is taken from the "Death of Captain Cook," to illustrate every Indian outbreak from Nebraska to Oregon.

Is it nothing forsooth for a nomadic race of buffalo slayers and maple sugar makers and cranberry pickers to rise from the dust and learn to love the wise institutions of a free government? To lay aside the old hickory bow of the original red man and take up the improved breech-loader? To take kindly to mixed drinks and Sabbath school picnics and temperance lectures and base-ball matches? To live contentedly about the agencies, playing poker for the whiskies during the cold and cruel winter? Then when the glad song of the robin awakes the echoes in spring, and the air is filled with a thousand nameless odors, among which may be detected the balmy breath of the government sock, to hie him away to the valleys with his fishing rod and flies (and other curious insects), or to spend the glorious days of midsummer at the camp-meeting or the horse-race? We can never know how his poor heart must burn to kick off his box-toed boots and throw aside his dress coat and suspenders, and gallop over the green hills and kick up his heels and whoop and yell, and tear out the tongues of a few white women and be sociable.

They are indeed the nation's wards, a little frisky and playful at times, to be sure, but we must overlook that. There can be no reason nor justice in forbidding these freeborn descendants of these mighty races the inalienable right to lock up their front doors at the agency and put the key in their pockets, and light out, if they wish to, across the country, spreading gory desolation along their trail, eating the farmers' hard earned store, pillaging his home, murdering his household, burning his crops, riding their war horses over his watermelon vines, eating his winter preserves, scalping the hired man and wearing away the farmer's red-flannel undershirt wrong side to, and wrong side up if they want to. And if any ignorant upstart of the frontier, who feels a little sore over the loss of his family, undertakes to defraud these wild, free sons of the forest of any or all of their rights, let the lop-eared, slab-sided, knock-kneed, crosseyed, spavined, lantern-jawed, sway-backed, mangy, flannelmouthed poet of the educated and refined East write poetry about him till he is glad to apologize.

ORIGIN OF BEAUTIFUL SNOW,

The following letter is from Captain Jack relative to the expedition under his charge, sent out for the purpose of bringing in the murdering group of Utes, against whom the government seems to maintain a feeling, it not of enmity, at least of coolness, and perhaps unfriendliness.

The Indian is not generally supposed to be a humorist, or inclined to be facetious; but the letter below would seem to indicate that there is, at the least, a kind of grim, rough, uncouth attempt on his part to make a paragrapher of himself.

I am not at liberty to give my reasons to the public for the publication of this letter; nor even the manner of securing it. Those to whom my word has been passed relative to a strict secrecy on my part in the above connection, shall not be betrayed. Friends who know me are aware that my word is as good as my bond, and even better than my promissory note.

On the Wing, February 1, 1880.

Dear Sir: – I have a little leisure in which to write of our journey, and will dictate this letter to an amanuensis. [Amanuensis is a Ute word; but you will understand it in this connection. It does not mean anything wrong.]

We find much snow through the mountains, which impedes our progress very materially. We crossed a canyon yesterday where there was a good deal. I should think there might be 1,500 feet in depth of it. It filled the canyon up full, and bulged up ten or fifteen feet above the sides. I composed a short poem about it. I knew that it was wrong to do so; but almost every one else has composed a poem on the beautiful snow, then why should I, although I have not taken out my naturalization papers, be denied the sweet solace of song? I said:

O drifted whiteness covering
The fair face of nature,
Pure as the sigh of a blessed spirit
On the eternal shores, you
Glitter in the summer sun
Considerable. My mortal
Ken seems weak and
Helpless in the midst of
Your dazzling splendor,
And I would hide my
Diminished head like
Serf unclothed in presence
Of his mighty King.

You lie engulphed
Within the cold embrace
Of rocky walls and giant
Cliffs. You spread out
Your white mantle and
Enwrap the whole broad
Universe, and a portion
Of York State.

You seem content,