Bill Nye's Chestnuts Old and New

Enjoy life while you live, for
You'll be along time dead.

While I do not fully indorse this sentiment, there is food in it for earnest thought.

THE ANTI-CLINKER BASE-BURNER BEE

I have noticed bees very closely indeed, during my life. In fact I have several times been thrown into immediate juxtaposition with them, and have had a great many opportunities to observe their ways, and I am free to say that I have not been so forcibly struck with the difference in their size as the noticeable difference in their temperature. I remember at one time sitting by a hive watching the habits of the bees, and thinking how industrious they were, and what a wide difference there is between the toilsome life of the little insect, and the enervating, aimless, idle and luxurious life of the newspaper man, when an impulsive little bee lit in my hair. He seemed to be feverish. Wherever he settled down he seemed to leave a hot place. I learned afterward that it was a new kind of bee called the anti-clinker base-burner bee.

CHESTNUT-BURR X – A FEW REMARKS ON OUR HOSTELRY SYSTEM AS IT NOW PREVAILS

America has made many gigantic strides, aside from those made at the battle of Bull Run, and her people spend much of their time pointing with pride to her remarkable progress; but we are prone to dwell too much upon our advantages as a summer resort, and our adroit methods of declining the Presidency before we are asked, while we forget some of our more important improvements, like the Elevated Railway and the American Hotel.

Let us, for a moment, look at the great changes that have been wrought in hotels during the past century. How marked has been the improvement and how wonderful the advancement. Everything has been changed. Even the towels have been changed.

Electric bells, consisting of a long and alert wire with an overcoat button at one end and a reticent boy at the other, have taken the place of the human voice and a low-browed red-elm club. Where once we were compelled to fall down a dark, narrow staircase, now we can go down the elevator or wander down the wrong stairway and ourselves in the laundry.

Where once we were mortified by being compelled to rise at table, reach nine feet and stab a porous pancake with our fork, meantime wiping the milk gravy out of a large yellow bowl with our coat-tails, now we can hire a tall, lithe gentleman in a full-dress suit to pass us the pancakes.

Even the bar-rooms of American hotels are changed. Once the bartender waited till his customer ran all his remarks into one long, hoarse word, with a hiccough on the end, and then he took him by the collar and threw him out into the cold and chaotic night. Now the bartender gradually rises on the price of drinks till his customer is frozen out, and while he is gone to the reading-room to borrow some more money the chemist moves the bar somewhere else, and when the guest returns he finds a barber-shop where he thought he left a bar-room.

One hundred years, on their swift pinions, have borne away the big and earnest dinner bell, and the sway-backed hair trunk that surprised a man so when he sat down upon it to consider what clothes he would put on first.

All these evidences of our crude, embryotic existence are gone, and in their places we have electric bells, and Saratoga trunks wherein we may conceal our hotel room and still have space left for our clothes.

It is very rare now that we see a United States senator snaking a two-year old Mambrino hair trunk up three flights of stairs to his room in order to secure the labor vote. Men, as well as hotels and hotel soap, have changed. Where once a cake of soap would only last a few weeks, science has come in and perfected a style of pink soap, flavored with vanilla, that will last for years, and a new slippery-elm towel that is absolutely impervious to moisture. Hand in hand, this soap and towel go gaily down the corridors of time, welcoming the coming and speeding the parting guest, jumping deftly out of the hands of the aristocracy into the hands of a receiver, but always calm, smooth and latherless.

Nature did not fit me to be the successful guest at a hotel. I can see why it is so. I do not know how to impress a hotel. I think all the way up from the depot, as I change hands with my hot-handled and heavy bag, how I will stride up to the counter and ask for the room that is generally given to Mr. Blaine; but when I get there I fall up against a cold wave, step back into a large india-rubber cuspidor, and my overtaxed valise bursts open. While the porter and I gather up my collars and gently press them in with our feet, the clerk decides that he hasn't got such a room as I would want.

I then go to another hotel and succeed in getting a room, which commands a view of a large red fire-escape, a long sweep of undulating eaves-trough and a lightning rod – usually No. 7 5/8s, near the laundry chimney and adjoining the baggage elevator.

After I have remained at the hotel several days and paid my bill whenever I have been asked to do so, and shown that I did not eat much and that I was willing to carry up my own coal, the proprietor relents and puts me in a room that is below timber line, and though it is a better room, I feel all the time as though I had driven out the night-watchman, for the bed is still warm, and knowing that he must be sleeping out in the cold hall all night as he patiently watches the hotel, I cannot sleep until three or four o'clock in the morning, and then I have to get up while the chambermaid makes my bed for the day.

I try hard when I enter a hotel to assume an air of arrogance and defiance, but I am all the time afraid that there is some one present who is acquainted with me.

Another thing that works against me is my apparel. In a strange hotel a man will do better, if he has fifty dollars only, and desires to remain two weeks, to go and buy a fifty-dollar suit of clothes with his money, taking his chances with the clerk, than to dress like a plain American citizen, and expect to be loved, on the grounds that he will pay his board.

But there is now a prospect for reform in this line, a scheme by which a man's name and record as a guest will be his credentials. When this plan becomes thoroughly understood and adopted, a modest man with money, who prefers to wear a soft hat, will not have to sleep in the Union depot, solely on the ground that the night clerk is opposed to a soft hat.

This scheme, to be brief, consists of a system of regular reports from tables and rooms, which reports are epitomized at the office and interchangeable with other hotels, on the principle of the R. G, Dun Commercial Agency. The guest is required to sign his order at the table or give the number of his room, whether the hotel is run on the European plan or not, and these orders in the aggregate, coming from head waiters, porters, chambermaids and bell-boys, make up a man's standing on a scale of from A to Z.

For instance, we will say a five-dollar-per-day house can afford to feed a man for a dollar a meal. The guest orders two dollars' worth, sticks his mustache into just enough of it to spoil it for stew or giblet purposes, and then goes to his room. Here he puts up the fire-escape rope for a clothes-line, does a week's washing, and hanging it out upon the improvised clothesline, he lights a strong pipe, puts his feet on the pillow-shams, and reads "As in a Looking Glass" while his wash is drying. When that man goes away he leaves a record at the hotel which confronts him at every hotel wherever he goes. As soon as he writes his name, the clerk, who has read it wrong side up just a little before he got it down, tells him that he is very sorry, but that the house is full, and people are sleeping on cots in the hall, and the proprietor himself has to sleep on the sideboard. The large white Suffolk hog, who has been in the habit of inaugurating a rain of terror and gravy in the dining-room and stealing the soap from the wash-room, just simply because he could out trump the clerk on diamonds, will thus have to go to the pound, where he belongs, and quiet, every day people, who rely on their integrity more than they do on their squeal, will get a chance.

A great many droll characters and bright, shrewd men are met with among hotel proprietors wherever you go. "The Fat Contributor" was lecturing once in the State of Kentucky, and had occasion to take dinner at a six-bit hotel. After the meal Mr. Griswold stepped up to the counter, took out a bale of bank notes, which he had received for his lecture the evening before, and asked what might be the damage.

"Three dollars," said the blue grass gentleman, who had buttoned his collar with a tenpenny nail, while he looked at "Gris" with a pained expression.

"Yes, but a man ought to be able to board here a week for three dollars. The whole house didn't cost more than forty or forty-five dollars. What's your idea in charging me three dollars for a wad of hominy and a piece of parched pork?"

"Well, sir," said the urbane landlord, as he put out the fire at a. distance of twenty feet by emptying his salivary surplus on it, "I need the money?"

The frankness and open, candid manner of the man won Mr. Griswold, and he asked him if he thought three dollars would be enough. The landlord said he could get along with that. Then Griswold opened his valise and took out a large brunette bottle of liniment marked "for external use." He passed it over to the landlord, and told him that he would find this stuff worked as well on the inside as it did on the outside. In a few moments the liniment of the "Fat Contributor" and the lineaments of the landlord had merged into each other, and a friendly feeling sprang up between the two men which time has never effaced. I have often thought of this, and wondered why it is that hotel men are not more open and cordial with their guests. Many a time I have paid a large bill grudgingly when I would have done it cheerfully if the landlord had told me he was in need.

I had intended to speak at some length on the new rope law, by which every man is made his own vigilance committee; but I feel that I am already encroaching on the advertising space, and so will have to omit it. In conclusion, I will say that the American hotels are far preferable to those we have in Paris in many ways, and not only outstrip those of England and the Continent, even as a corps de ballet outstrips a toboggan club, but they seem to excel and everlastingly knock the ancient hotels of Carthage, Rome and Tie Siding silly.

PITY FOR SAD-EYED HUSBANDS

If women would spend their evenings at home with their husbands, they would see a marked change in the brightness of their homes. Too many sad-eyed men are wearing away their lives at home alone. Would that I had a pen of fire to write in letters of living light the ignominy and contumely and – some more things like that, the names of which have escaped my memory – that are to-day being visited upon my sex.

MARRIAGE

Marriage is, to a man, at once the happiest and saddest event of his life. He quits all the companions and associations of his youth, and becomes the chief attraction of a new home. Every former tie is loosened, the spring of every hope and action is to be changed, and yet he flees with joy to the untrodden paths before him. Then woe to the woman who can blight such joyful anticipations, and wreck the bright hopes of the trusting, faithful, fragrant, masculine blossom, and bang his head against the sink, and throw him under the cooking range, and kick him into a three-cornered mass, and then sit down on him.

CHESTNUT-BURR XI – WILLIAM NYE VISITS ROYALTY FROM THE HOME OF THE HAM SANDWICH

The sun was just slipping out the back door of the West and hunting for the timber of New Jersey as Queen Kapiolani, at her rooms in the Victoria Hotel, received a plain, rectangular card, printed in two kinds of ink at the owner's steam job office, containing the following brief but logical statement:

Wilhelm Von Nyj,

Littérateur and Danseuse.

On the back of the card the Von Nyj arms had been emblazoned with a rubber stamp. Down-stairs, near the dais of the night clerk, stood a gayly caparisoned yet cultivated cuss, pouring over a late volume of the city directory. He was the author of these lines.

Scarcely an hour had elapsed when a tinted octavo page who waits on the Queen, slid down the stair-rail and told me that her royal Highness would receive me in state as soon as she could change her dress.

Later on I was ushered into the presence of Queen Kapiolani, who was at the time accompanied by her suite and another gentleman whose name I did not learn.

THAI X DID MOT DU'

She is a distinguished-looking woman of middle age, but in apparent good health, and with a constitution which I think would easily endure the fatigue of reigning over a much larger country than her own.

As I entered the room and made a low, groveling obeisance, an act that is wholly foreign to my nature, the Queen made a rapid movement towards the bell, but I held her back and assured her that I did not drink.

We then chatted gayly for some time in relation to the Sandwich business and court matters, including the Sharp trial.

For a long time the Queen seemed constrained, and evidently could not think of anything to say; but she soon saw that I was not haughty or reserved, and when at last she reluctantly showed me out and locked the door, I felt amply repaid for the annoyance that one naturally feels on visiting a perfect stranger.

From what she said regarding her dynasty I gather that it consists of a covey of half-grown islands in the Pacific, inhabited by people who were once benighted and carnivorous, but happy. Now they are well-informed and bilious, while they revel in suspenders and rum, with all the blessings of late hours, civilization and suicide.

The better classes of the Sandwich Islands have the same customs which prevail here, and the swallow-tail coat is quite prevalent there. The low-neck and short-sleeve costume is even carried to a greater excess, perhaps, and all opera tickets read:

Admit the Bearer and Barer.

In answer to a question of my own, the Queen said that crops in the Sandwich Islands were looking well, and that garden truck was far in advance of what she saw here.

She said that they had pie-plant in her garden big enough to eat before she came away, and new potatoes were as big as walnuts. Still, she is enjoying herself here first-rate, and says she sees many pleasing features about New York which will ever decorate the tablets of her memory.

I thanked her for this neat little compliment, and told her I should always regard her in the same manner.

I then wrote a little Impromptu stanza in her autograph album, wrung Her Majesty's hand, and retired with another suppliant and crouching bow, which indicated a contrite spirit, but was calculated to deceive.