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

"His grave grows green to-day on the sunny hill-side 'neath the bending willow, and the soft, sweet breath that is sighing through the pines and stirring the delicate ferns beside the glassy depth of the mountain stream, is singing his requiem. [Perhaps, however, I am rushing the season for Leadville a little; if so the last refrain after the word 'presence,' may be wrapped up in warm flannels and stored away till July.]"

RHETORIC VS. WOODTICK

Camp on the New Jerusalem Mine, June 15

It is impossible at present to say anything about what the future of this district may bring forth. Every lead shows up beautifully, and so much so, in fact, that claim owners are working first one and then another in order to hold them under the new law, which requires an amount of work to be done on the lead within sixty days which is generally only required within one year. This new regulation, which is the act of the district of course, may not stand any very severe test, but at present the miners are respecting it.

It is severe on me, however, and virtually leaves me out. What I need is a law that will not ride over and overthrow and freeze out the poor man. This law is passed in the interest of capital and in direct violation of the rights and privileges of the great surging mass of horny-handed workingmen like Brick Pomeroy and myself.

I havn't the time to particularize or describe the different mines visited, and if I were to do so the chances are that I wouldn't cover myself or the district with glory.

It is true that I know a foot wall from a windlass, with one hand tied behind me, but if I were buying a mine I would be about as apt to purchase a deposit of sulphurets of expectations, showing traces of free milling telluride of disappointment, as anything else.

The camp has about 300 miners and prospectors now within the city limits. All up and down the picturesque valley of the swift-flowing river the low cabin and white tent dot the green sward, and far above the everlasting hills rear their heads on high, torn by the Titanic power of giant heat in the days of the long ago.

I said this to Professor Paige, the scientific correspondent of the Inter-Ocean, who accompanied me. I thought that perhaps it would tickle him to know that I could reel off a sentence like that, but it didn't affect him in that way. On the contrary, he seemed to think that the heat must have affected me in some way.

We climbed Jehu mountain on the evening that we arrived in camp. We thought it would be the proper thing to do, so we dug our toe-nails into the prehistoric granite and the micacious what's-his-name and climbed to the top.

For a few minutes we didn't mind it much and got along first-rate, trying to make each believe that climbing mountains was our regular business.

I began to tell the Professor a little harmless lie about how I had travelled among the Alps, but I didn't finish it. Somehow I felt like breathing in what atmosphere was not in actual use, but I didn't have any place to put it.

The air at Jehu Mountain is good enough what there is of it, but it is too rare. If a man could let out the back straps of his vest and breathe in the unoccupied atmosphere lying between the Laramie river and the Zodiac it would be all right, but he can't do it. His intentions are good, but his skin isn't elastic enough to hold the diluted fluid.

We climbed up to where we could see the silvery moon rising like a pale schoolma'am and looking sadly across the dark valley asleep in night's embrace. I thought it was time to say something.

"Professor," said I, as my brow lighted up like a torchlight procession, and my voice broke upon the hush and solitude of evening like the tremulous notes of the buzz saw, "do you not think that far away amid the unknown worlds which drift through space and along whose track the drifting systems of planets wheel and circle through countless ages, while man, clothed in a little brief authority, cuts such fantastic tricks Before high heaven as makes the angels weep, regarding himself as the center of the solar system, planning to frustrate the immutable laws of nature, violating the prime and co-ordinate common law of universes, going behind the returns, as it were, trying to peer behind the veil, as I might say, prognosticating the unprognosticatable, evading the axioms and by-laws which not only regulate worlds and their creation, but link the phantasmagoria of diagonal animalculæ and cast broadcast the oleaginous incongruity of prehistoric usufruct?"

The Professor didn't say anything. He didn't seem to have followed me. Somewhere the thread had been broken, and the glowing truths couched in such language as would light up the pages of history and astronomy, were lost upon the silent air.

The Professor seemed sad and anxious and preoccupied. There was a look of apprehension and doubt and distrust in his eye, and he moved about uneasily. I asked him if there were any last words that I could carry to his friends, and ii there were any little acts of humanity and friendship which I could perform to render his last moments more pleasant.

He said there were.

Then he told me that a wood-tick was slowly but surely boring a hole into his spinal column, near where the off scapula forms a junction with the nigh one, and asked me to help bring him to justice.

We should learn from this that heaven-born genius, with the music of poetic language and aflame with an inspiration almost miraculous, sometimes makes less impression upon the listener than a little insect no larger than a grain of mustard seed.

THE MODEL WIFE

Dr. Westwood lectured here on Wednesday evening on the Model Husband. He wanted me to sit upon the stage as the horrible example, but I declined. He was quite pointed in his remarks all the way through, and seemed to have me in his mind when he described the model husband, although of course he used a fictitious name. The lecture was a good one, and very well liked by the husbands who had to sit and take it for an hour and a half. Let the gentle male reader imagine himself sitting for that length of time with his own wife on one side of him and another man's wife on the other side of him, and when the speaker makes a point on the old man to get alternate jabs in the side from the delighted ladies.

I shall lecture here during the winter on the subject of the "Model Wife." I will then get even. I will tell how the young man with bright hopes, and thinking only of the great, consuming love he has for his new spouse, is torn away from the hallowed ties of home and the sunny influences of young companions, and buried in the poverty-stricken cottage of a woman who cannot begin to support him in the style in which he has been accustomed.

It is high time that this course of disgraceful misrepresentation on the part of young women should be exposed. I once knew a young man with the most gentle and trustful nature. He had never known care or sorrow. But an adventuress with winsome smile and loving voice crossed his path and allowed him to think that she could maintain a husband like other women, and in his blind adoration for her he bade good-bye to his home and its joys and madly walked out with her into the great, untried future. She told him that he should never know the cruel sting of poverty, and other romantic trash, and look at him to-day. He is a broken-hearted man. His wife does not take him into society; does not keep him clothed as other men are clothed, and grudgingly gives him the little pittance from week to week which she earns by washing.

Is it strange that his pillow is wet with tears, and in his agony he cries out upon the still air of night, "Oh, mother, why did I leave thy kindly protection and overshadowing love and marry a total stranger?"

Then the woman who has sworn to protect and love and cherish him kicks him in the pit of the stomach and harshly tells him to "dry up."

I sometimes think that if mothers knew to what sorrow and gross and shameless treatment their sons were to submit all through their lives, they would put them out of their misery with a base-ball club. Some mothers do try this but they postpone it too long and the sons get too large and more difficult to kill than when their skulls are young and tender.

I have alwavs maintained that a kind word and a caress will do more for the great yearning nature of the husband than harshness and severity. The tuue wife may reprove her husband when he spills coal all over the Brussels carpet and then steps on it and grinds it in, but how much better even that is than to kick him under the bed and then sit down on him and gouge out his eyes with a pinking iron.

I know that men are too often misunderstood. They may be rough on the exterior but they can love Oh, so earnestly, so warmly, so truly, so deeply, so intensely, so yearningly, so fondly and so universally!

Always kiss your husband good-bye when you go down town to your work. It may be the last time. I once knew a wife who went down town to price a new dolman, and because she was vexed about something she did not kiss her husband but slammed the door and left him. When she returned he was a corpse!

While peeling the potatoes for dinner with the carving knife, he had stepped on a clothes pin, which threw him forward over the baby carriage, the knife entering at the northeast corner of the gizzard and sticking out beneath the shoulder blade about two feet into space. What a scene for the now repentant wife. There, in the full vigor of his manhood, lay all that was mortal of her companion – dead as a mackerel!!!

Let us take this home to ourselves, and ask ourselves today if we are doing the square thing by the only husband we have. Are we loving him as we should, or are we turning this task over to the hired girl?

Intemperance, too, is a fruitful cause of connubial unhappiness. Young man, beware of a wife who loves the flowing bowl. I once knew a beautiful young lady, talented and with good business ability. The entire circle of her acquaintance admired and respected her, but alas! one evening at a banquet her companion, with a heavenly smile, asked her to drink wine. Gradually the taste grew upon her, and although she married, she could not support her husband, and he gradually pined away and died brokenhearted. He used to sit up nights for her to come home, and he caught the inflammatory rheumatism and swelled up and died. It was a terrible thing. I tell you we cannot be too careful. You take a handsome young man like the author of these lines and his power for good or evil is untold. I sometimes wish that I had not been constructed with so much dazzling beauty to the square inch, and I am almost tempted to go and disfigure myself some way. If I were to ask a fair gazelle on New Year's day to come and join me in a social glass and then throw one of those melting 2 by 8 glances of mine on her, I know for a moral certainty that before night she would be in the calaboose. But I shall guard against that. Nothing of that kind shall ever be laid at my door. I promised my aged parents when I left the old homestead that I would never set 'em up for anyone.

SOME OVERLAND TOURISTS

The varied classes of tourists passing over the Union Pacific Railroad, representing as they do all classes of humanity, seem to call for a brief notice from the nimble pen of a great man.

During my short but eventful life I have given a large portion of my time to studying human nature. Studying human nature and rustling for grub, as the Psalmist has it, have occupied my time ever since I arrived at man's estate.

There is one style of tourist which I am more particularly devoted to, perhaps, than any other. It is the young man who is in search of health for his invalid mustache. Only last week I saw one of these gentle youths who was going to try sea air and California fruit to see if he couldn't rescue his consumptive mustache from the jaws of death.

When he got off here and took the poor thing out to where it could look about and see the green plains and snow-capped mountains, I felt sorry for him. It is hard for one to be a successful tourist with a pale invalid along with him night and day, and I could imagine how that young man would have to get up nights when his mustache got restless and needed fresh air or wanted to take its tonic.

It was certainly the most gentle, retiring, modest mustache I ever saw. It didn't seem to care for anything only to be loved.

Every little while the youth would reach up to where it was and feel around nervously to see if it had climbed the golden stairs or was still on deck.

It was not a heavy mustache at all. It was about as voluptuous as a buffalo gnat's eye-brow.

I never saw a mustache before that brought the scalding tears to my eyes like that one. I thought how lonely the young man would be when it had glided up the flume and left him in this cold, uncharitable world with nothing to love and cling to but an earnest and unhappy boil on the back of his neck that wouldn't come to a focus.

Sometimes I go down to the train to see some fair young girl who is on the overland trip. But I am not always gratified.

A short time ago I went over, feeling as though I would like to see a fair young creature full of life and joy and with the light of a joyous future shining in her lustrous eyes.

It didn't seem to be her train. It was the day that a woman was on board with a Russia iron alapaca dress and white eyes. She was from Winnipewankiegingersuappetymagoggery, Maine.

She had a little sore-eyed boy with cream-colored hair and freckles on his face as large as a veal cutlet.

The boy would occasionally walk along the platform with his fore finger rammed into his mouth and hooked around his wisdom tooth. He would walk along looking up into the sky, and running into everybody and falling over the baggage truck till his mother got quite irritated, and I told the boy that the future looked dark for him unless he braced up and stopped pulverizing people's corns.

Bye and bye the boy ran into a blind man and knocked the wind out of him, so that all he could do for ten minutes was to stand there and gasp for breath as though he wanted to breathe in the vast realms of space.

Then his mother extended a long, bony hand with a large silver ferule on the biggest finger, and she laid hold of that lemon-colored kid of her's and gathered in as much of his ear as her hand would hold. She churned him up pretty good, and it didn't seem to be very much exertion for her either. Every little while he would make an aerial flight and back he would come, his boots banging against the car with a loud report. Finally the woman with the white eye, from Winnipewankiegingersuappetymagoggery, Me., consolidated her efforts for one grand flourish, but while in mid-air the boy's ear unscrewed and he lit out through the firmament, falling in a shapeless mass on the other side of the second-class car, where his gentle mother found him and gathered him up in her gingham apron.

There are lots of these little queer and amusing circumstances taking place here almost every day, and I have often thought that if some one with a taste for the ridiculous would turn his attention in that direction he would make an interesting sketch of them.