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

"Do you think I would laugh at the bones of the Pilgrim Fathers, where are they? or burst into wild hilarity over the grave of Noah and his family?

"No, sir; their age and antiquity protect them. That is the way with your Phoenician joke.

"Another reason why I cannot laugh at it is this: I am not a very easy and extemporaneous laughter, anyway. I am generally shrouded in gloom, especially when I am in hot pursuit of a wild and skittish joke for my own use. It takes a good, fair, average joke that hasn't been used much to make me laugh easy, and besides, I have used up the fund of laugh that I had laid aside for that particular joke. It has, in fact, overdrawn some now, and is behind.

"I do not wish to intrench on the fund that I have concluded to offer as a purse for young jokes that have never made it in three minutes.

"I want to encourage green jokes, too, that have never trotted in harness before, and, besides, I must insist on using my scanty fund of laugh on jokes of the nineteenth century. I have got to draw the line somewhere.

"If I were making a collection of antique jokes of the vintage of 1400 years B. C., or arranging and classifying little bon-mots of the time of Cleopatra or King Solomon, I would give you a handsome sum for this one of yours, but I am just trying to worry along and pay expenses, and trying to be polite to every one I meet, and laughing at lots of things that I don't want to laugh at, and I am going to quit it.

"That is why I have met your little witticism with cold and heartless gravity."

A HAIRBREADTH ESCAPE

To-day I got shaved at a barber-shop, where I begged the operator to kill me and put me out of my misery.

I have been accustomed to gentle care and thoughtfulness at home, and my barber at Laramie handles me with the utmost tenderness. I was, therefore, poorly prepared to meet the man who this morning filled my soul with woe.

I know that I have not deserved this, for while others have berated the poor barber and swore about his bad breath and never-ending clatter and his general heartlessness, I have never said anything that was not filled with child-like trust and hearty good will toward him.

I have called the attention of the public to the fact that sometimes customers had bad breath and were restless and mean while being operated on, and then when they are all fixed up nicely, they put their hats on and light a cigar and hold up their finger to the weary barber and tell him that they will see him more subsequently.

Now, however, I feel differently.

This barber no doubt had never heard of me. He no doubt thought I was an ordinary plug who didn't know anything about luxury.

I shall mark a copy of this paper and send it to him.

Then while he is reading it I will steal up behind him with a pick handle and kill him. I want him to be reading this when I kill him, because it will assist the coroner in arriving at the immediate cause of his death.

The first whiff I took of this man's breath, I knew that he was rum's maniac.

He had the Jim James in an advanced stage. Now, I don't object to being shaved by a barber who is socially drunk, but when the mad glitter of the maniac is in his eye and I can see that he is debating the question of whether he will cut my head off and let it drop over the back of the chair or choke me to death with a lather brush, it makes me nervous and fidgetty.

This man made up his mind three times that he would kill me, and some one came in just in time to save me.

His chair was near a window, and there was a hole in the blind, so that when he was shaving the off side of my face he would turn my head over in such a position that I could look up into the middle of the sun. My attention had never before been called to the appearance of the sun as it looks to the naked eye, and I was a good deal surprised.

The more I looked into the very center of the great orb of day the more I was filled with wonder at the might and power that could create it. I began to pine for death immediately, so that I could be far away among the heavenly bodies, and in a land where no barber with the delirium triangles can ever enter.

This barber held my head down so that the sun could shine into my darkened understanding, until I felt that my brain had melted and was floating around and swashing about in my skull like warm butter.

His hand was very unsteady, too. I lost faith in him on the start when he cut off a mole under my chin and threw it into the spittoon. I did not care very particularly for the mole, and did not need it particularly, but at the same time I had not decided to take it off at that time. In fact I had worn it so long that I had become attached to it. It had also become attached to me.

That is why I could not restrain my tears when the barber cut it off and then stepped back to the other end of the room to see how I looked without it.

MYSELF, DR. TALMAGE, AND OTHER DIVINES

September 5, 1880

I am beginning to-day to keep a diary. It is not an agreeable task, but I feel that the wild, glad bursts of unfettered thought which surge through my ponderous mind ought to be embalmed in eligible characters, and passed down to posterity.

The thought may arise in the mind of the reader that this is taking a low and contemptible advantage of a posterity that never in word or deed ever harmed me; but I care not. Other able men have perpetrated their diaries upon me when I was not in a condition to help myself, and now that I can hand down and transmit to nations yet unborn, the same great heritage unimpaired, there is a sweet consciousness of a revenge that has been fully glutted.

To day I have been to church. I do not speak of it as remarkable at all, for wherever I am, whether at home or abroad, my first thought is, where will I find a sanctuary?

The minister was quite classical and he pumped the congregation so full of heathen mythology that he came very near forgetting that he had a word to say on behalf of Christianity as the advance agent of Zion.

I do not wish to say one word that would sound like irreverence toward the cause which this man undertook to represent; but I want to jot down a little thought or two relative to this exponent, so that I may be placed squarely upon the record.

I have often thought when I have watched this class of ministers, with one hand resting in a graceful and negligent posture on the altar rail, while the self-conscious Demosthenes reeled off a 4th of July prayer to the miserable, wretched and undone sinners before him, how God has said that He is a jealous God; and I have wondered if these prayers, arranged with great care to meet the criticism of the worshippers, and with an off-hand disregard to the feelings of the Almighty that is very cool and very refreshing indeed, whether they ever lay hold of the throne of grace or not, and whether they ever lift up mankind or make the world better.

Speaking of divines, reminds me of the very pleasant trip I had over the Union Pacific on my way east with Brother Talmage. I call him Brother Tannage because he called me brother occasionally. He no doubt thought that in different walks of life, perhaps, but working in the same direction, we were both laboring to make the world better.

Brother Talmage, General Crook, myself and two or three other eminent men together occupied the sleeper Boise City. Brother Talmage and I one day were seized with the same irresistable desire, at the same moment, to change our shirts. He was a little nearer the wash-room than I was, so he got there first, and we stood up together smiling at each other sweetly, with a clean shirt in our hands, and didn't know exactly how to express ourselves.

I was the first to speak. I told the Doctor that it was of no consequence particularly, and I would wait. He said no, I must not wait for him, and insisted so cordially on my coming in there that we went in together and tackled the mysteries of our toilet at the same time.

It was pretty tough on me, for I had been accustomed while peeling off a damp shirt to go through a few little vocal exercises and dance around on one leg and howl.

Going from the mountains of Wyoming down into the tropical heat of Nebraska made me perspire a good deal, and nothing but the firm and irresistible restraint thrown about me by an eminent divine kept me from swearing.

But the Doctor did not get mad. When he shoved his bald head into his shirt a large smile was on his face, and when it emerged at the top and he waved his arms above his head and struggled to climb up into the shirt, so that he could look out over the battlements, he was still smiling. He was not only smiling, but he was smiling a good deal. Those who have seen Dr. Talmage smile know now he throws his whole soul into it.

If I could jam my head up through a wilderness of shirt and starch and saw off my windpipe as I looked out over the billowy, buttonless mass, and still smile, as Dr. Talmage does, I would give all my broad possessions in a moment.

This offer will hold good up to the 15th.

We got quite sociable and cordial toward the close, and I got the Doctor to reach up as far as he could on my spinal column and bring down the refractory end of a suspender, then I retaliated by going down into his true inwardness after a collar button that had dropped into oblivion.

While he was smiling with that glad, free smile of his, which he takes along with him instead of baggage, he told me a pretty good thing on the editor of the Herald of Salt Lake. He told it to me in confidence, he said, because he knew he could rely on a newspaper man. Then he laughed and seemed to think it was a good joke.

It seems that when Dr. Talmage was in Salt Lake, the Tribune published what purported to be an interview between a reporter of that paper and the Brooklyn divine.

Shortly afterward, and while Dr. T. was in San Francisco, he received a letter from the editor of the Herald and a marked copy of the paper, giving the Doctor a very flattering notice. In his letter the editor said: "I enclose a clipping from the Tribune purporting to be an interview between yourself and a reporter of that paper; will you be kind enough to write me whether it is or is not genuine?"

The Doctor looked the clipping carefully over, and as it was nothing but a blood-curdling account of the merits of Day's Kidney pad, he had no hesitancy in pronouncing the alleged interview a fraud. Still he never wrote the editor of the Herald, and he no doubt still wonders why it is that Dr. Talmage don't come forward and state the facts, so that the Gentile Tribune may be shown up.

The Doctor says that too much care cannot be used by the editor who wields the shears not to get his editorials mixed up with patent medicine advertisements.

FINE-CUT AS A MEANS OF GRACE

The amateur tobacco chewer many times through lack of consideration allows himself to be forced into very awkward and unpleasant positions. As a fair sample of the perils to which the young and inexperienced masticator of the weed is subjected, the following may be given:

A few Sabbaths ago a young man who was attending divine worship up on Piety Avenue, concluded, as the sermon was about one-half done and didn't seem to get very exciting, that he would take a chew of tobacco. He wasn't a handsome chewer, and while he was sliding the weed out of his pocket and getting it behind his handkerchief and working it into his mouth, he looked as though he might be robbing a blind woman of her last copper. Then when he got it into his mouth and tried to look pious and anxious about the welfare of his never dying soul, the chew in his mouth felt as big as a Magnolia ham. Being new in the business, the salivary glands were so surprised that they began to secrete at a remarkable rate. The young man got alarmed. He wanted to spit. His eyes began to hang out on his cheek, and still the salivary glands continued to give down. He thought about spitting in his handkerchief or his hat, but neither seemed to answer the purpose. He was getting wild. He thought of swallowing it, but he knew that his stomach wasn't large enough.

In his madness he resolved that he would let drive down the aisle when the pastor looked the other way. He waited till the divine threw his eyes toward heaven and then he shut his eyes and turned loose. An old gentleman about three pews down the aisle yawned at that moment and threw his open hand out into the aisle in such a manner as to catch the contribution without any loss to speak of. He did not put his hand out for that purpose and did not seem to want it, but he got it all right.