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

The ride reminded me of a tour I took in July from Laramie over to Cheyenne, two years, ago. We had experienced the pleasure of riding over the mountain, on the Union Pacific train, and had held our breath while crossing Dale Creek bridge, and viewed with wonder the broken billows of granite, lying here and there at the tip-top of the mighty divide. But some one had said that it was nothing compared with the mirth-provoking trip by carriage across the mountains, over a fine wagon road to Cheyenne.

In the morning I nearly melted riding up the sandy canyon, and took off my coat and gliding pleasantly along-alternately sang one or two low throbs of melody, and alternately swore about the extreme heat.

When we got nearly to the top, I thought it didn't look well for a man to whom the American people look for so much in the future, to be riding along the public highway without his coat, so I put it on. At the top of the mountain I put on a linen duster and gloves. Shortly after that I put on my overshoes and a sealskin cap. Later, I put on my buffalo overcoat, and got out and ran behind the carriage to keep warm.

When I got to Cheyenne, the Doctor looked me over and said that he could save my feet because they had so much vitality, and were in such a good state of preservation; but my ears – my pride and glory – the ears that I had defended through the newspapers for years, and had stood up for when all about was dark – they had to go.

That is, part of them had to go, and there was enough left to hear with; but the ornamental scallops and box plaiting, and frills, the wainscoating, and royal Corinthian entablatures had to go.

EXAMINING THE BRAND ON A FROZEN STEER

A stock owner went out the other day over the divide to see how his cattle were standing the rigorous weather, and found a large, fine steer in his last long sleep. The stockman had to roll him over to see the brand, and he has regretted his curiosity ever since. He told me that the brand looked to him like a Roman candle making about 2,000 revolutions per moment, and with 187 more prismatic colors than he thought were in existence. Sometimes a steer is not dead but in a cold, sleepy stupor which precedes death, and when stirred up a little and irritated because he cannot die without turning over and showing his brand, he musters his remaining strength and kicks the inquisitive-stockman so high that he can see and recognize the features of departed friends. That was the way it happened on this occasion. The stockman fell in the branches of a pine tree on Jack Creek, not dead but very thoughtful. He said he was near enough to hear the rush of wings, and was just going to register and engage a room in the New Jerusalem when he returned to consciousness.

ONION PEELIN'S

The Chinese agriculturalist does his hair up in a French twist because he don't want to have his cue cumber the ground.

Almost every day there is a new liver pad or lung pad or kidney pad, but in its way nothing has succeeded in giving instant relief like the Leadville foot pad.

A man can scratch his back against a hat rack or a whatnot for a year or two, and attribute it to buckwheat cakes, but after he has gone on this way for about seven years, the public and his friends begin to lose faith in him.

A handsome competence is in store for the man who will invent a neat, durable and portable pie opener that will successfully reach the true inwardness of the average box-toed, Bessemer steel, gooseberry pie which the hired girl casts in her kitchen foundry.

Along the dreary pathway of this cloud-environed life of ours there is no joy so pure, no triumph so complete, no success so fraught with rapture, as that of the female artiste who hangs on the flying trapeze by her chilblain and kisses her hand to the perspiring throng.

It is not the disheartening sense of failure alone which makes a man swear in the stilly night, nor yet the fact that he has slapped his alabaster limb harder than he needed to, but it is the trifling and heartless way in which the mosquito kisses his hand to the audience, and soars away humming a Tyrolean lay.

Putting up stovepipe is easy enough, if you only go at it right. In the morning, breakfast on some light, nutritious diet, and drink too cups of hot coffee. After which put on a suit of old clothes – or new ones if you can get them on time – put on an old pair of buckskin gloves, and when every thing is ripe for the fatal blow, go and get a good hardware man who understands his business. If this rule be strictly adhered to, the gorgeous eighteen-karat-stem-winding profanity of the present day may be very largely diminished, and the world made better.

It is strange that the human heart is so easily influenced by the change of seasons, and although spring succeeds winter, and summer follows upon the heels of spring, just as it did centuries ago, yet the transition from one to the other is ever new and pleasing, and the bosom is gladdened with the cheering assurance of spring, or the promise of the coming summer time, with its wealth of golden days, its cucumbers and vinegar, its green corn, its string beans, its baseball, its mammoth circus, its fragrant flowers, and its soda water flavored with syrup from a long-necked, wicker-covered bottle, just as it was in the days of Pharoah, and Hannibal, and Andrew Jackson.