How Bill Nye Failed to Make the Amende Honorable – A Pathetic Incident
It is rather interesting to watch the manner by which old customs have been slightly changed and handed down from age to age. Peculiarities of old traditions still linger among us, and are forked over to posterity like a wappy-jawed tea-pot or a long-time mortgage. No one can explain it, but the fact still remains patent that some of the oddities of our ancestors continue to appear from time to time clothed in the changing costumes of the prevailing fashions.
Along with these choice antiquities and carrying the nut-brown flavor of the dead and relentless original amende in which the offender appeared in public clothed only in a cotton flannel shirt and with a rope around his neck as an evidence of a former recantation down to this day when (sometimes) the pale editor in a stickfull of type admits that "his informant was in error," the amende honorable has marched along with the easy tread of time. The blue-eyed moulder of public opinion, with one suspender hanging down at his side and writing on a sheet of news-copy paper, has a more extensive costume perhaps than the old-time offender who bowed in the dust in the midst of the great populace and with a halter under his ear admitted his offense, but he does not feel any more cheerful over it.
I have been called upon several times to make the amende honorable, and I admit that it is not an occasion of much mirth and merriment. People who come into the editorial office to invest in a retraction are generally healthy, and have a stiff, reserved manner that no cheerfulness or hospitality can soften.
I remember an incident of this kind which occurred last summer in my office while I was writing something scathing. A large man with an air of profound perspiration about him and a plaid flannel shirt, stepped into the middle of the room and breathed in all the air that I was not using. He said he would give me four minutes in which to retract, and pulled out a watch by which to ascertain the exact time. I asked him if he would not allow me a moment or two to step over to a telegraph office to wire my parents of my awful death. He said I could walk out that door when I walked over his dead body. Then I waited a long time, till he told me my time was up, and asked me what I was waiting for. I told him I was waiting for him to die so that I could walk over his dead body. How could I walk over a corpse until life was extinct?
He stood and looked at me, at first in astonishment, afterward in pity. Finally tears welled up in his eyes and plowed their way down his broad and grimy face. Then he said I need not fear him.
"You are safe," said he. "A youth who is so patient and cheerful as you are, one who would wait for a healthy man to die so you could meander over his pulseless remnants, ought not to die a violent death. A soft-eyed seraph like you, who is no more conversant with the ways of the world than that, ought to be put in a glass vial of alcohol and preserved. I came up here to kill you and throw you into the rain-water barrel, but now that I know what a patient disposition you have, I shudder to think of the crime I was about to commit."
Seeing a Saw Mill
BILL NYE
I have just returned from a little trip up from the North Wisconsin Railway, where I went to catch a string of codfish and anything else that might be contagious.
Northern Wisconsin is the place where they yank a big wet log into a mill and turn it into cash as quick as a railroad man can draw his salary out of the pay-car. The log is held on a carriage by means of iron dogs while it is being worked into lumber. These iron dogs are not like those we see on the front steps of a brown stone front occasionally. They are another breed of dogs.
The managing editor of the mill lays out the log in his mind and works it into dimension stuff, shingles, bolts, slabs, edgings, two-by-fours, two-by-eights, two-by-sixes, etc., so as to use the goods to the best advantage, just as a woman takes a dress-pattern and cuts it so she won't have to piece the front breadths and will still have enough left to make a polonaise for last summer's gown.
I stood there for a long time watching the various saws and listening to the monstrous growl and wishing that I had been born a successful timber-thief instead of a poor boy without a rag to my back.
At one of these mills not long ago, a man backed up to get away from the carriage and thoughtlessly backed against a large saw that was revolving at the rate of about 200 times a minute. The saw took a large chew of tobacco from the plug he had in his pistol pocket and then began on him.
But there's no use going into the details. Such things are not cheerful. They gathered him up out of the saw-dust and put him in a nail keg and carried him away, but he did not speak again. Life was quite extinct. Whether it was the nervous shock that killed him, or the concussion of the cold saw against his liver that killed him no one ever knew.
The mill shut down a couple of hours so that the head sawyer could file his saw, and then work was resumed once more.
We should learn from this never to lean on the buzz-saw when it moveth itself aright.
How A Chinaman Rides the Untamed Broncho
BILL NYE
A Chinaman does not grab the bit of a broncho and yank it around till the noble beast can see thirteen new and peculiar kinds of fire-works, or kick him in the stomach, or knock his ribs loose, or swear at him until the firmament gets loose and begins to roll together like a scroll, but he gets on the wrong side and slides into the saddle and smiles and says something like what a guinea hen would say if she got excited and tried to repeat one of Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson's poems backward in his native tongue. At first the broncho seems temporarily rattled, but by-and-by he shoots athwart the sunny sky like a thing of life and comes down with his legs in a cluster like a bunch of asparagus.
This will throw a Chinaman's liver into the northwest corner of his throat, and his upper left hand duodessimo into the middle of next week, but he doesn't complain. He opens his mouth and breaths in all of the atmosphere the rest of the universe can spare, and tickles the broncho on the starboard quarter with his cork sole. The mirth-provoking movement throws the broncho into the wildest hysterics, and for some minutes the spectator doesn't see anything very distinctly. The autumnal twilight seems fraught with blonde broncho and pale-blue shirt tail and Chinaman moving in an irregular orbit, and occasionally throwing off meteoric articles of apparel and pre-historic chunks of ingenious profanity of the vintage of Confucius. When the sky clears up a little the Chinaman's hair is down and in wild profusion about his olive features. His shirt flap is very much frayed, like an American flag that has snapped in the breeze for thirteen weeks.
He finds also that he has telescoped his spinal column and jammed two ribs through the right superior duplex, has two or three vertebræ floating about through his system that he doesn't know what to do with. In fact, the Chinaman is a robust ruin, while the broncho is still in a good state of preservation. Now the broncho humps his back up into a circumambient atmosphere, and when he once bisects the earth's orbit and jabs his feet into the trembling earth a shapeless mass of brocaded silk and coarse black hair and taper nails and celestial shirt-tails and oolong profanity and disorganized Chinese remains comes down apparently from the New Jerusalem, and the coroner goes out on the street to get six good men and a chemist, and they analyze the collection. They report that the deceased had come to his death by reasons of concussion, induced by a ride from the outer battlements of the sweet by-and-by.
Bill Nye Wants to Know How to Preserve Game
Slipperyelmhurst, Hudson, Wis., Oct. 6. —To the Editor: Might I ask, through the column of your justly celebrated paper, if any one will give me the requisite information regarding the care of game during the winter?
My preserves are located on my estate here at Slipperyelmhurst, and while I am absent lecturing in the winter, in answer to the loud calls of the public, I am afraid that my game may not have the proper care, and that unscrupulous people may scalp my fox and poach the eggs of my pheasants.
Besides, I am rather ignorant of the care of game, and I would like to be able to instruct my game-keeper when I go away as to his duties.
The game-keeper at Slipperyelmhurst is what might be called a self-made game-keeper. He never had any instruction in his profession, aside from a slight amount of training in high-low-jack. Therefore he has won his way unassisted to the position he now occupies.
What I wish most of all is to understand the methods of preserving game during the winter so that when it is scarce in the spring I can take a can-opener and astonish people with my own preserves.
My fox succeeded in getting through the summer in fine form. I got him from Long Island where the sportsmen from New York had tried to hunt him for several seasons, but with indifferent success. He was not well broken in the first place, I presume, and the noise of the hounds and domesticated Englishmen in full cry no doubt frightened him. He is still timid and more or less afraid of the cars. He shies, too, when I lead him past an imitation Englishman. He is in good health, this fall, however, and as I got him at a low price I am greatly pleased. Very likely the reason he did not give good satisfaction in New York was that those who used him did not employ a good earth-stopper. Much depends on this man. Of what use is an active, robust and well-broken fox, well started, if he be permitted to get back into his hole? I have employed as an earth-stopper a gentleman who saws my wood during the winter and who assists us in fox-hunting in the hunting season.
Born in a quiet little rural village called Martelle, in Pierce county, Wisconsin, he early evinced a strong love for sport. Day after day he would abstain from going to school that he might go forth into the woods and study the habits of the chipmunk. For five years his health was impaired to such a degree that he was not well enough to safely attend school, but just barely robust enough to drag himself away to a distance of fourteen miles, where he could snare suckers and try to regain his health. To climb a lightning-rod and skin off the copper wire for snaring purposes with him was but the work of a moment. To go joyously afield day after day and drown out the gopher, while other boys were compelled to gopher an education, was his chief delight.
As a result of this course he is not a close student of books, but he can skin a squirrel without the slightest embarrassment, and you could wake him up suddenly out of a profound slumber and ascertain from him exactly what the best method is for draping a frog over a pickerel hook so as to produce the best and most pleasing effects. Such is the description of a man who, by his own unaided exertions, has risen to the proud position of earth-stopper on my estate.
He is ignorant of the care of wild game, however, and says he has never preserved any. We want to know whether it would be best to sprinkle our fox with camphor and put him down cellar or let him run in the henhouse during the winter.
Would your readers please say, also, if any of them have had any experience in fox-hunting, what is the best treatment for a horse which has injured himself on a barbed-wire fence while in rapid pursuit of the fox? I have a fine fox-hunter that I bought two years ago from a milk-man. This horse was quite high-spirited, and while the hounds were in full cry one day I had to take a barbed-wire fence with him. This horse, which I call Isosceles, because he is one kind of a triangle, went over the fence in such a manner as to catch the pit of his stomach on the barbed wire and expose his interior department and its methods to the casual spectator. We put back all the stomachs we thought he was entitled to, but he has not done well since that, and I have often thought that possibly we did not succeed in returning all his works. How many stomachs has the adult horse? I am utterly and sadly ignorant in these matters and I yearn for light.
I certainly favor a more thorough knowledge of animal anatomy on the part of our school-children.
Every child should know how many stomachs, bowels and gizzards there are in the fully equipped cow or horse. Nothing is more embarrassing to the true sportsman than to see his favorite horse ripped open by a barbed-wire fence while in full chase, and then not know which digestive organ should go back first, or when they have all been replaced.
So far as Isosceles is concerned, I remember thinking at the time that we must have put back inside of his system about twice as much digestive apparatus as he had before, as my earth-stopper said that we had given that horse enough for a four-horse team, and yet he is ill.
I would like to hear from any of the fox-hunters in Cook county who may have had a similar experience.
Bill Nye Attends Booth's "Hamlet."
Cleveland, O., Oct. 27, 1886.
Last evening I went to hear Mr. Edwin Booth in "Hamlet." I had read the play before, but it was better as he gave it, I think.
The play of "Hamlet" is not catchy, and there is a noticeable lack of local gags in it. A gentleman who stood up behind me and leaned against his breath all the evening said that he thought Ophelia's singing was too disconnected. He is a keen observer and has seen a great many plays. He went out frequently between the acts, and always came back in better spirits. He noticed that I wept a little in one or two places, and said that if I thought that was affecting I ought to see "Only a Farmer's Daughter." He drives a 'bus for the Hollenden Hotel here and has seen a great deal of life. Still, he talked freely with me through the evening, and told me what was coming next. He is a great admirer of the drama, and night after night he may be seen in the foyer, accompanied only by his breath.
There is considerable discussion among critics as to whether Hamlet was really insane or not, but I think that he assumed it in order to throw the prosecution off the track, for he was a very smart man, and when his uncle tried to work off some of his Danish prevarications on him I fully expected him to pull a card out of his pocket and present it to his royal tallness, on which might be seen the legend:
I AM SOMETHING OF A LIAR MYSELF!
But I am glad he did not, for it would have seemed out of character in a play like that.
Mr. Booth wore a dark, water-proof cloak all the evening and a sword with which he frequently killed people. He was dressed in black throughout, with hair of the same shade. He is using the same hair in "Hamlet" that he did twenty years ago, though he uses less of it. He wears black knickerbockers and long, black, crockless stockings.
Mr. Booth is doing well in the acting business, frequently getting as high as $2 apiece for tickets to his performances. He was encored by the audience several times last night, but refrained from repeating the play, fearing that it would make it late for those who had to go back to Belladonna, O., after the close of the entertainment.
Toward the end of the play a little rough on rats gets into the elderberry wine and the royal family drink it, after which there is considerable excitement, and a man with a good, reliable stomach-pump would have all he could do. Several of the royal family curl up and perish.
They do not die in the house.
During an interview between Hamlet and his mother an old gentleman who has the honor to be Ophelia's father hides behind a picket fence, so as to overhear the conversation. He gets excited and says something in a low, gutteral tone of voice, whereupon Hamlet runs his sword through the picket fence in such a way as to bore a large hole into the old man, who then dies.
I have heard a great many people speak the piece beginning —
To be or not to be,
but Mr. Booth does it better than any one I have ever heard. I once heard an elocutionist – kind of a smart Alickutionist as my friend The Hoosier Poet would say. This man recited "To be or not to be" in a manner which, he said, had frequently brought tears to eyes unused to weep. He recited it with his right hand socked into his bosom up to the elbow and his fair hair tossed about over his brow. His teeming brain, which claimed to be kind of a four-horse teaming brain, as it were, seemed to be on fire, and to all appearances he was indeed mad. So were the people who listened to him. He hissed it through his clinched teeth and snorted it through his ripe, red nose, wailed it up into the ceiling, and bleated it down the aisles, rolled it over and over against the rafters of his reverberating mouth, handed it out in big capsules, or hissed it through his puckered atomizer of a mouth, wailed and bellowed like a wild and maddened tailless steer in fly-time, darted across the stage like a headless hen, ripped the gentle atmosphere into shreds with his guinea-hen voluntary, bowed to us, and teetered off the stage.
Mr. Booth does not hoist his shoulders and settle back on his "pastern jints" like a man who is about to set a refractory brake on a coal car, neither does he immerse his right arm in his bosom up to the second joint. He seems to have the idea that Hamlet spoke these lines mostly because he felt like saying something instead of doing it to introduce a set of health-lift gestures and a hoarse, baritone snort.
A head of dank hair, a low, mellow, union-depot tone of voice, and a dark-blue, three sheet poster will not make a successful Hamlet, and blessed be the man who knows this without experimenting on the people till he has bunions on his immortal soul. I have sent a note to Mr. Booth this morning asking him to call at my room, No. 6-5/8, and saying that I would give him my idea about the drama from a purely unpartisan standpoint, but it is raining so fast now that I fear he will not be able to come.
Bill Nye's Advice
TO A YOUTH ABOUT DRUGS AND WRITING
Mr. Bill Nye, Hudson, Wis.– Dear Sir: I hope you will pardon me for addressing you on a matter of pure business, but I have heard that you are not averse to going out of your way to do a favor now and then to those who are sincere and appreciative.
I have learned from a friend that you have been around all over the west, and so I have taken the liberty of writing you to ask what you think would be the chances of success for a young man if he were to go to Kansas to enter the drug business.
I am a practical young druggist 23 years of age and have some money – a few hundred dollars – with which to go into business. Would you advise Kansas or Colorado as a good part of the west for that business?
I have also written some for the press, but with little success. I enclose you a few slips cut from the papers in which these articles originally appeared. I send stamp for reply and hope you will answer me, even though your time may be taken up pretty well by other matters.
Respectfully yours,Adolph Jaynes, Lock-Box 604.
Hudson, Wis., Oct. 1. —Mr. Adolph Jaynes, Lock-Box 604.– Dear Sir: Your favor of late date is at hand, and I take pleasure in writing this dictated letter to you, using the columns of the Chicago Daily News as a delicate way of reaching you. I will take the liberty of replying to your last question first, if you pardon me, and I say that you would do better, no doubt at once, in a financial way, to go on with your drug business than to monkey with literature.
In the first place, your style of composition is like the present style of dress among men. It is absolutely correct, and therefore it is absolutely like that of nine men out of every ten we meet. Your style of writing has a mustache on it, wears a three-button cutaway of some Scotch mixture, carries a cane, and wears a straight stand-up collar and scarf. It is so correct and so exactly in conformity with the prevailing style of composition, and your thoughts are expressed so thoroughly like other people's methods of dressing up their sentences and sand-papering the soul out of what they say, that I honestly think you would succeed better by trying to subsist upon the quick sales and small profits which the drug trade insures.
Now, let us consider the question of location:
Seriously, you ought to look over the ground yourself, but as you have asked me to give you my best judgment on the question of preference as between Kansas and Colorado, I will say without hesitation that, if you mean by the drug business the sale of sure-enough drugs, medicines, paints, oils, glass, putty, toilet articles, and prescriptions carefully compounded, I would not go to Kansas at this time.
If you would like to go to a flourishing country and put out a big basswood mortar in front of your shop in order to sell the tincture of damnation throughout bleeding Kansas, now is your golden opportunity. Now is the accepted time. If it is the great, big, burning desire of your heart to go into a town of 2,000 people and open the thirteenth drug store in order that you may stand behind a tall black walnut prescription case day in and day out, with a graduate in one hand and a Babcock fire-extinguisher in the other, filling orders for whiskey made of stump-water and the juice of future punishment, you will do well to go to Kansas. It is a temperance state and no saloons are allowed there. All is quiet and orderly, and the drug business is a great success.
You can run a dummy drug store there with two dozen dreary old glass bottles on the shelves, punctuated by the hand of time and the Kansas fly of the period, and with a prohibitory law at your back and a tall, red barrel in the back room filled with a mixture that will burn great holes into nature's heart and make the cemetery blossom as the rose, and in a few years you can sell enough of this justly celebrated preparation for household, scientific and experimental purposes only to fill your flabby pockets with wealth and paint the pure air of Kansas a bright and inflammatory red.
If you sincerely and earnestly yearn for a field where you may go forth and garner an honest harvest from the legitimate effort of an upright soda fountain and free and open sale of slippery elm in its unadulterated condition, I would go to some state where I would not have to enter into competition with a style of pharmacy that has the unholy instincts and ambitions of a blind pig, I would not go into the field where red-eyed ruin simply waited for a prescription blank, not necessarily for publication, but simply as a guaranty of good faith, in order that it may bound forth from behind the prescription case and populate the poor-houses and the paupers' nettle-grown addition to the silent city of the dead.
The great question of how best to down the demon rum is before the American people, and it will not be put aside until it is settled; but while this is being attended to, Mr. Jaynes, I would start a drug store farther away from the center of conflict and go on joyously, sacrificing expensive tinctures, compounds, and syrups at bed-rock prices.
Go on, Mr. Jaynes, dealing out to the yearning, panting public, drugs, paints, oils, glass, putty, varnish, patent medicines, and prescriptions carefully compounded, with none to molest or make afraid, but shun, oh shun the wild-eyed pharmacopeia that contains naught but the festering fluid so popular in Kansas, a compound that holds crime in solution and ruin in bulk, that shrivels up a man's gastric economy, and sears great ragged holes into his immortal soul. Take this advice home to your heart and you will ever command the hearty cooperation of "yours for health," as the late Lydia E. Pinkham so succinctly said.
Bill Nye.