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

"His work in the line of temperance seems to have been mainly that of furnishing the horrible examples, so that young men might avoid the demon of rum.

"After the speaker got well under way and began to emphasize his language with some gestures that he has imported at great expense for his own use, the congregation seemed at a loss whether it would be best as a matter of safety to flee from intemperance or the death-dealing gestures of the speaker.

"Mr. Nye to-day gave bonds in the sum of $500 to keep the peace, shipped his gestures to Chicago, and will leave on the first south-bound train."

PERILS OF THE BUTTERNUT PICKER

Speaking of trains reminds me that I have been scooting around the country lately on mixed and accommodation trains.

They are a good style of conveyance in some respects. For instance, if a man has a car-load of wheat that he wants to run into St. Paul with and sell, he can have it attached to the mixed train, and then he can get into the coach and go along with it, and attend to it personally. But where a man's time is worth $9 a moment, as mine is, it is annoying.

At first I couldn't get accustomed to it. I couldn't overcome my inertia when the car started or stopped, and it kept me worn out all the time apologizing to a corpulent old lady in the third seat from me. Had I been given a little time to select a lady whose lap I would prefer to sit down in, there were a dozen perhaps in the car more desirable than this old lady, but in the hurry and agitation I always seemed to select her.

Finally the conductor said that kind of business had gone far enough, and he tied me into my seat with a shawl-strap.

The train was very long, and when it got under full head-, way it was almost impossible to stop it at the various stations. We either stopped out in the country prematurely or passed the station at the rate of nine miles a minute, and then repented and came back. I was struck with the similarity of the first five or six towns on the line and spoke of it to a friend who accompanied me.

It seemed to me that Clarksville, Mapleton, Eldorado Junction, Pine Grove and Brookville had been planned by the same architect, but my friend only laughed and showed me that we had been switched and side-tracked for two or three hours at the first-named place.

We stopped in the woods once and I went out after butternuts.

It was a lovely autumn day, and after the thick nutritious air of the car, it was paradise to get out into the forest, where the fresh, sweet odor of the falling leaves was everywhere, and the hush of nature's annual funeral checked the thoughtless word and noisy laughter of the invader.

I wandered on, thinking of the brevity and comparative unimportance of our human life. How short the race we run, and how unsatisfactory our achievements at last. How like the leaves of the forest we spring forth in the early summer of our existence, nod pleasantly to our fellows a few brief mornings, and then die.

Thoughtlessly and aimlessly I had wandered on until I came to a large butternut, which I climbed with the old and almost forgotten enthusiasm of boyhood. At the top I tried some of my old and difficult tricks, and just as the train moved silently away I was going through the difficult and dangerous act of hanging to the upper limb of a butternut tree by the seat of the pants, and waiting patiently for the bough or the cassimere to yield and let the artist down into the arena by force of gravitation.

Dear reader, did you ever go through this thrilling experience? Did you ever feel the utter insecurity and maddening uncertainty which it yields? If not, then these lines are not to you?

Gently the tree swayed to and fro with the motion of the autumn breeze. Sadly the pines were sighing like lost souls, and the dead leaves fell softly to the ground, like the footfalls of departed spirits. I began to wish that I could fall softly to the ground like the footfalls of departed spirits, too.

I began to get bored and unhappy after awhile. My feet and hands hung in a cluster, and the position seemed strained and unnatural. I began to yearn for society, and the comforts of a home. I mentally calculated the distance I would have to fall, and wondered which of my bones I would shatter the most, and what the doctor's bill would be.

All at once I heard what seemed like a sound of smothered laughter. It was no doubt nothing but a sound which my fevered imagination had conjured up, aided by the torrent of blood that rushed to my head and thumped so loudly in my ears, but it maddened me, and I summoned all my strength in the mighty struggle to free myself. Finally, there was a short, sharp crash, and I felt myself rapidly descending through space. I fancied that I was an acrobat, and had fallen from the center pole that holds up the sky. I thought I lay in the dust and sawdust of the ring in a shapeless mass; and over all, and above all, there was the maddening sensation that my wardrobe was not complete. In my tortured imagination I could hear demoniac laughter, and occasional words of derision. They became more pronounced and distinct at last, and I fancied I heard one of these grinning imps saying:

"How peaceful he looks, and how young and fair. See how carelessly he has inserted his nose in the moist earth. He must have suffered a good deal through life, and yet his face is calm and happy in its expression. His general appearance is that of perfect rest, and the glad fruition of every hope.

"Let us go up into the tree and get the rest of his remains, and send them all home together."

This last speaker reminded me of the conductor, and the similarity struck me even in my trance. Slowly I opened my eyes. It was he. I almost wished that the fall had killed me. I did not fall from the tree to be humorous, but if I had I should have considered it the crowning triumph of an eventful career.

Most everyone from the train was there, and several from the nearest towns along the line. I bowed my thanks in silence, and backed over to the car. I got aboard and sat down. I found that I attracted less attention when I was sitting down, and I never cared so little for public notice in my life as I did that day.

It seems that the train had gone away some distance, but when it got by itself it remembered that I was not on board, and the peanut boy remembered seeing me get off at this point. So, as the train was already two weeks and four days behind, the conductor decided to go back. He says now that he does not regret it. He says that the life of a conductor at the best has but few bright spots in it, and the oases along the desert which he treads are widely separated, but he told me with tears in his eyes that Providence had made me the humble instrument for great good, and he felt grateful to me.

When he breaks out into a glad ripple of childish laughter now without any apparent cause, he takes a piece of checked cassimere out of his pocket and explains how he got it, and tells the whole story to his friends, so there are a great many people along that line of travel who know me by reputation although they have never seen me.

A WORD OR TWO ABOUT THE SWALLOW

Lately I have made some valuable discoveries relative to ornithology, and I will give some of them to the public, for I love to shed information right and left, like a Normal school.

When the soft south wind began to kiss our cheeks, and the horse-radish and North Park prospector began to start, the swift-winged swallows drew near to my picturesque home on East Fifth street, and I hoped with a great, anxious, throbbing hope, that they would build beneath the Gothic eaves of my $200 ranche.

I would take my guitar at the sunset hour, and sit at my door in a camp-chair, with the fading glory of the dying day bathing me in a flood of golden light, and touching up my chubby form, and I would warble, "When Sparrows Build," an old solo in J, which seems to fit my voice, and the swallows would flit around me on tireless wing, and squeak, and sling mud over me till the cows came home.

This thing had gone on for several days, and the little mud houses under the eaves were pretty near ready, and in the meantime the spring bed bug had come with his fragrant breath, and turpentine, and quicksilver, and lime, and aquafortis, and giant-powder, and a feather, has made my home a howling wilderness, that smelled like a city drug store.

But it didn't kill the bugs. It pleased them. They called a meeting and tendered me a vote of thanks for the kind attentions with which they had been received. They ate all these diabolical drugs, not only on regular days, but right along through Lent.

I got mad and resolved to insure the house and burn it down. One evening I felt sad and worn, and was trying to solace myself by trilling a few snatches from Mendelssohn's "Wail," written in the key of G for a baritone voice. A neighbor came along and stopped to lean over the gate, and drink in the flood of melody which I was spilling out on the evening air. When I got through and stopped to tune my guitar anew, and scratch a warm place on my arm, he asked if I were not afraid that those swallows would bring bed bugs to the house.

I had heard that before, but I thought it was a campaign lie. I acted on the suggestion, however, and taking a long pole from behind the door, where I keep it for pictorial Bible men, I knocked down a 'dobe cottage, and proceeded to examine it.

It was level full of imported Merino and Cotswold and Southdown and Early Rose and Duchess of Oldenburg and twenty-ounce Pippins and Seek-no-further bed bugs. There were bed bugs in modest gray ulsters and bed bugs in dregs of wine and old gold, bed bugs in ashes of roses and beg bugs in elephants' breath, bed bugs with their night clothes on and in morning wrappers, bed bugs that were just going on the night shift, and bed bugs that had been at work all day and were just going to bed.

I killed all I could and then drove the rest into a pan of coal oil. When one undertook to get out of the pan I shot him. This conflict lasted several days. I neglected my other business and omitted morning prayers until there was a great calm and the swift-winged swallows homeward flew. When these feathered songsters come around my humble cot another spring they will meet with a cold, unwelcome reception. I shall not even ask them to take off their things.

I have formed the idea somehow from watching the eccentric nervous flight of the swallow, that when he makes one of those swift flank movements with the speed of chain lightning he must be acting from the impulse of a large, earnest, triangular bed bug of the boarding house variety. I may be wrong, but I have given this matter a good deal of attention, and whether this theory be correct or not I do not care. It is good enough for me.

LAUGHING SAM

During the past week I have experienced the pleasure of an acquaintance with Laughing Sam, a character well known throughout the West. Samuel Thompson was introduced to me on Tuesday last, and, although he has a look of subdued pain and half concealed anguish, I soon found that he was capable of exhibiting the most wild and ungovernable mirth.

Laughing Sam is employed by Surveyor Downey, and the latter has often told me how he wished that I could employ Sam by the month to laugh at what I might write, so that I could be encouraged.

After the formalities of an introduction were over, we began to tell anecdotes in order to get Sam into a cheerful frame of mind. When one would get tired and lay off for a rest, some other one would come forward to the bat and tell some more humorous tales. But Sam had evidently heard all these anecdotes, and looked disgusted and fatigued and bored.

Downey whispered to me that it wouldn't do; we must have something entirely different, and that I had better fix up one of those custom-made lies of mine, such as we used to tell at the boarding house in '75.

I did so with some hesitation, but Sam kindly gave me his attention and cheered me with an occasional pleased grunt. Then I threw my whole soul into it. I put in all the pathos of which I am capable at certain parts, and then where it was grand and terrific I got up and sawed the air, and where it was ludicrous I enlarged upon it till Sam's eye began to glisten.

By-and-by the fountains of the great deep opened, and Sam lay on the floor a quivering mass. Sometimes we thought he was dead, but then one leg would fly through the air and he would give a wild whoop of pain. Then, in a lucid moment, he would try to get up, but he would fall back again, and his lips would spasmodically relax and contract, and the air would be filled with a wild mixture of yells and whoops and gurgles and contortions.

It was not what was said that made him laugh, but it was because his time had come to indulge in a little mirth. I tried the same story afterward on an ordinary laughter, and when I got through he was bathed in tears. So it wasn't the story.

When Laughing Sam looks at his watch and sees that a large amount of mirthfulness is due he calmly puts away anything that may be near him of a fragile nature and proceeds to laugh in a way that shakes the stars loose in the firmament and disarranges the entire planetary world.

This fall he has an engagement to laugh for Eli Perkins during the lecture season. Eli is to give him half the proceeds of the lectures and Sam has got to laugh whether he feels like it or not.

THE CALAMITY JANE CONSOLIDATED

I have one claim – at least myself and two or three other capitalists have – which has shown itself to be very rich, but it is not for sale. We are sinking on it now. We set a force of men at work on it two weeks ago consisting of genial cuss from Bitter Creek. He dug a few hours in a vertical direction, when overworked nature yielded and he went to sleep.

I discharged the entire gang. Shortly after that at a great expense we secured a day shift by the name of O'Toole. He is Greek I think.

He is still at work, though he found it very difficult to use the long handle shovel at first. He insisted on pouring the dirt down the back of his neck and then climbing out of the shaft with it and undressing himself with a gentle repose of manner which indicated that he had perfect command of himself and knew that his time was going right on all the same.

Still there are drawbacks about this style of mining. The work does not progress as rapidly as the present rush and hurry and turmoil of the American people seem to demand.