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

"Do you think I would pay $1.50 for a machine to vicariously proclaim to the broad universe that I was at the bank, when I have no business with the bank?

"Do you suppose that I would advertise that I was at the post office when I was at the beer garden, or assert that I was at the court house, when, as a matter of fact, I was at that moment having a preparation of lemon-peel and other chemicals arranged for myself and another invalid in a cool retreat down town?

"No, sir! I spurn you and your cast-iron prevaricator, I promised my dying mother, who afterwards recovered, that I would never lie by machinery.

"If I cannot lie enough to keep up with the growing demand, I will resign like a man, and not call to my aid a cheap Jim Crow, hand-me-down-liar, costing $1.50 only.

"Always do right, and then you will never be put to shame.

"If you wish, you can leave the hall door ajar as you go out the main entrance."

Exeunt advance agent at upper left hand entrance, orchestra playing something soft and yielding.

SOME POSTOFFICE FIENDS

The official count shows that only two and one-half per cent, of those who go to the postoffice transact their business and then go away. The other ninety-seven and one-half per cent, do various things to cheer up the postmaster and make him earn his money and wish that he had died when he was teething. They also make it exceedingly interesting for the other two and one-half per cent. When I go to the postoffice there is always one man who meets me at the door and pours out a large rippling laugh into my face, flavored with old beer and the fragrances of a royal Havana cabbage-leaf cigar that he is sucking. If he cannot be present himself he is vicariously on deck.

He asks me if my circus was a financial success, and how my custard pie plants are doing, and then fills the sultry air with another gurgling laugh preserved in alcohol.

I like to smell a hearty laugh laden with second-hand whisky. It revives me and intoxicates me. Still I am trying not to become a helpless slave to the appetite for strong drink in this form. There are other forms of intemperance that are more seductive than this one.

There is also a boy who never had any mail, and whose relatives never had any mail, and they couldn't read it if they did, and if some one read it to them they couldn't answer it. He is always there, too.

When he sees me he hails me with a glad smile of recognition, and comes up to me and stands on my toes and is just as sociable and artless and trusting and alive with childish glee and incurable cussedness as he can be. He stirs me up with his elbows, and crawls through between my legs until the mail is open, and then he wedges himself in front of my box so that I can't get the key into it.

Some day when the janitor sweeps out the postoffice he will find a short suspender and a lock of brindle hair and a handful of large freckles, and he will wonder what it means.

It will be what I am going to leave of that boy for the coroner to operate on.

Then there are two boys who come to the box delivery to settle the difficulties that arise during the day. They fight long and hard, but a permanent peace is never declared. It is only temporary, and the next day the old feud is ripe again, and they fight it all over once more.

There is also an amusing party who cheerfully stands up against the boxes and reads his letters, and laughs when he finds something facetious, or swears when the letter don't suit him. He also announces to the bystanders who each letter is from, and seems to think the great throbbing world is standing with bated breath quivering with anxiety to know whether his sister in Arkansas has successfully acquired triplets this year or only twins.

This, however, is an error, for the great, throbbing world, with characteristic selfishness, don't care a brass-mounted continental one way or the other. One day this man got a letter with a mourning envelope, and I heaved a sigh of relief, for, thought I, he will now go away and be alone with his great grief. But he did not. He stood up manfully and controlled his emotions through it all; and when he got through he broke into the old silvery laugh.

It seems that his brother in Oregon had run out of yellow envelopes, and had filled the one with the black border unusually full of convulsive mirth.

What a world of bitter disappointment this is anyhow!

Then there is the woman who playfully stands at the general delivery window, and gleefully sticks her fangs out into the subsequent week, and skittishly chides the clerk because he doesn't get her a letter, and he good naturedly tells her as he has done daily for seven years, that he will write her one to-morrow.

Then she reluctantly goes home to get rested so that she can come again and stand there the next day.

Then comes the literary cuss, who takes a weekly paper from Vermont with a patent inside to it. He reads it with the purest unselfishness to me, and points out the fresh, new-laid jokes that one always finds in the enterprising paper with the patent digestion.

He also explains the jokes to me, so that I need not grope along through life in hopeless ignorance of what is going on all about me.

There is a woman, too, who comes to the window and lavishly buys a three-cent stamp, and runs out her tongue, and hangs it over the stamp clerk's shoulder, and lays the stamp back against the glottis and moistens it, and has to run her skinny finger down her turkey gobbler neck to rescue it, and then she pastes it on the upper left-hand corner of the envelope, and asks the clerk to be sure and see that it goes. She then thoughtfully tells him who it is to go to, and gives a short biography of the sendee.

There can be no doubt that some women are more capable of doing certain kinds of business than men are. All classes of business requiring careful and minute explanations and concise and exhaustive directions can be better attended to by this class of women.

They enter joyfully upon the task of shedding collateral information in a way that would appall a man, and when they confide in you, you know that they are not keeping anything back. You almost wish sometimes that they would keep back a little of it and not rob themselvss.

Still, perhaps it is better that this class of women is not trusted with any great amount of business, for life is so brief, so evanescent, and so transitory.

It is but a step from the cradle to the grave anyway, and if a man stands on one leg an hour, and then on the other an hour, listening to extensive information every time he sells a stamp, he will die with his ambitions unfruitioned.

AGRICULTURE AT AN ALTITUDE OF 7500 FEET

I herewith acknowledge the receipt of two bags of cane-seed from the Agricultural Department.

Mr. Le Duc is always thinking of me and evidently knew that I was yearning for some cane-seed. It will grow luxuriantly here on the spinal column of the American continent where winter lingers in the lap of spring till after the Fourth of July.

William says that this breed of sugar-cane "originated in Minnesota, and is claimed to have been the result of accidental hybridization."

I shall not allow anything of this kind myself if I can by the most tireless watchfulness avoid it. Accidental hybridization is what is demoralizing the sugar-cane of the whole country.

I shall plant this seed in drills two feet apart, mulching with rich top-dressing of retired gum boots and dead cats. I will then wait till the plant has germinated and appears above the surface, when I shall remove the boots and dead cats and rub the plants with a Turkish towel to promote a healthy circulation.

Then next fall while others who have sneered at me and called me a horny-handed buckwheater from the rural districts, are running up heavy bills for groceries, I will go out into my molasses orchard and pick a milk pan full of granulated sugar from my trees, or shell out enough maple sugar for breakfast at a slight cost and with the blessed consciousness that I did it all myself.

William is going to send me some more seeds that he thinks will do well in this tropical climate. If he could send me something that would be more hardy, like the early Swedish lemon-squeezer, or the mammoth custard-pie plant, or the Northern Spy cucumber tree, my reports to the department would be more cheerful than they are, but where plants have to wear their heavy California underclothes all through August they get discouraged and prefer to bloom in the sweet fields of Eden.

Last year I tried the hot-bed process, but it was not a signal success. This summer I shall use the hot-bed as an ice cream freezer. It wanted to act in that capacity last summer, but I had a freezer that did very well, so I foolishly used the hot-bed to assist the plants, although I know of several days in midsummer when my cabbage-plants had to get out of that hot-bed and run up and down the garden walk to keep their feet from freezing.

THE GENTLE YOUTH FROM LEADVILLE

In addition to the other attractions about the depot, the old museum of curiosities from the Rocky Mountains has been re-opened. I like to go down and listen to the remarks of the overland passenger relative to these articles. There are two stuffed coyotes chained to the door, one on each side, and it amuses me to see a solicitous parent nearly yank his little son to pieces for going so near these ferocious animals. The coyotes look very life-like, and show their teeth a good deal, but it breaks a man all up when he finds that their digestive apparatus has been replaced with sawdust and plaster of Paris.

After a coyote gets to padding himself out with baled hay and cotton so as to look plump, he loses his elasticity of spirits, and we cease to respect him. Sometimes a tourist asks if these coyotes are prairie dogs.

A few days ago a man from Michigan, who has been here two weeks and wears a large buckskin patch where it will do the most good, and who is very bitter in his remarks about "tenderfeet," was standing at the depot, when a young man, evidently from a theological seminary, came along from the train whistling, "What a friend we have in Jesus." He walked up to the Michigan man, who began to look fierce, and timidly asked if he would tell him all about the coyote.

The Michigan man, who never had seen a live coyote in his life, volunteered to tell him some of the finest decorated lies, with Venetian blinds and other trimmings to them, while the young man stood there in open-mouthed wonder, with daylight visible between his legs as high as the fifth rib. I never saw such a picture of rapt attention in my life. As he became more interested, the Michigan man warmed up to his work and lied to this guileless youth till the perspiration rolled down his face. As the train started out, the delegate to the Young Men's Christian Association asked the Michigan man for his address. "I want the address of some good earnest liar," he said, "one who can lie by the day, or by the job, and endure the strain. I want a man to enter the field for the championship of America. Any communication you may wish to make will reach me at Leadville, Colorado. I have been in the Rocky Mountains ever since I was three years old, and have lived for weeks with no other diet but coyote on toast and raw Michigan man." He waved his hand at the M. man, and said: "If I don't see you again, hello!" and he was gone.

How many such little episodes we experience on our journey to the tomb!

A SNIDE JOURNALIST

Recent occurrences here have seemed to absolutely demand that something be said relative to newspaper-men.

During my residence here I have been brought face to face with more fraud journalists than ever before, and I am forced to lift up my voice against it. I have met the ordinary-tramp who is pleased and happy if he be allowed to eat cold-grub and sleep beneath the twinkling stars, but the newspaper-tramp is meaner, more self assumed and has brighter prospects for perdition than all the rest. He stands out ahead of the rank and file of tramps as a kind of Major-General tramp, fearless and self reliant.

He feels the nobility of the profession of journalism, and indeed it is a calling of which its followers may well be proud, but the snide representative of the press is too proud. He puts on too many frills.

Perhaps I am too easily picked up in this manner, but I cannot help sympathizing with deserving newspaper men who lack many of the comforts of life. I have been there. I know what it is to battle with a cold world and wrestle with hunger. But now in the midst of prosperity, my heart goes out for these vagrants in such a way that just as I begin to get affluent, I find some subject for my charity, and I have to begin over again.

On Monday last a young man with a hopeful light in his eye, alighted from the eastern-bound train, and going into the Thornburg House, registered his name, at least we will play that it was his name, for no one else has since called in to claim it.