Bill Nye's Chestnuts Old and New
TextHOW TO DEAL WITH THE REVOLVER DIFFICULTY
If revolvers could not be sold for less than $500 a piece, with a guarantee on the part of the vendee, signed by good sureties, that he would support the widows and orphans, you would see more longevity lying around loose, and Western cemeteries would cease to roll up such mighty majorities.
THE FEMALE ARTISTE
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.
CHESTNUT-BURR XLV – FUN OF BEING A PUBLISHER
Publishing Is Not All Joy and Johnny jump-ups – A Singular Letter – Plot of a Novel – Algonquin and Sciatica.
Being a publisher is not all sunshine, joy and johnny-jump-ups, although the gentle and tractable reader may at times think so.
A letter was received two years ago by the publishers of this book, on the outside of which was the request to the "P. Master of Chicago to give to the most reliable man in Chicago and oblige."
The P. Master thereupon gave the letter to Messrs. Belford, Clarke & Co., who have sent it to me as a literary curiosity. I want it to go down to posterity, so I put it in this great work. I simply change the names, and where words are too obscure, doctor them up a little:
Butler, Bates county, Mo., Jan., 1886.
I have a novle fresh and pure from the pen, wich i would like to be examined by you. I wish to bring it before the public the ensuing summer. I have wrote a good deal for the press, and always with great success. I wrote once an article on the growth of pie plant wich was copied fur and wide. You may have heard of me through my poem on "The Cold, Damp Sea or the Murmuring Wave and its Sad Kerplunk."
I dashed it off one summer day for the Scabtown Herald.
In it, I enter the fair field of fancy and with exquisite word painting, I lead the reader on and on until he forgets that breakfast is ready, and follows the thrilling career of Algonquin and his own fair-haired Sciatica through page after page of delirious joy and poetic rithum.
In this novle I have wove a woof of possibilities criss-crossed with pictures of my own wild, unfettered fancy, which makes it a work at once truthful and yet sufficiently unnatural to make it egorly sot for by the great reading world.
The plot of the novle is this:
Algonquin is a poor artist, who paints lovely sunsets and things, nights, and cuts cordwood during the day, struggling to win a competence so that he can sue for the hand of Sciatica, the wealthy daughter of a plumber.
She does not love him much, and treats him coldly; but he perseveres till one of his exquisite pictures is egorly snapt up by a wealthy man at $2. The man afterwards turns out to be Sciatica's pa.
He says unkind things of Algonquin, and intimates that he is a better artist in four-foot wood than he is as a sunset man. He says that Algonquin is more of a Michael Angelo in basswood than anywhere else, and puts a wet blanket on Sciataca's love for Algonquin.
Then Sciataca grows colder than ever to Algonquin, and engages herself to a wealthy journalist.
Just as the wedding is about to take place, Algonquin finds that he is by birth an Ohio man. Sciataca repents and marries her first love. He secures the appointment of governor of Wyoming, and they remove to Cheyenne.
Then there are many little oursts of pictureskness and other things that I would like to see in print.
I send also a picture of myself which I would like to have in the book. Tell the artist to tone down the freckles so that the features may be seen by the observer and put on a diamond pin so that it will have an appearance of wealth, which the author of a book generally wears.
It is not wrote very good, but that won't make any difference when it is in print.
When the reading public begins to devour it, and the scads come rolling in, you can deduct enough for to pay your expenses of printing and pressing, and send me the balance by postoffice money order. Please get it on the market as soon as possible, as I need a Swiss muzzlin and some other togs suitable to my position in liturary circles. Yours truly,
Luella Blinker.
A LESSON FROM THE MULE
We may often learn a valuable lesson from the stubborn mule, and guard against the too protuberant use of our own ideas in opposition to other powers against which it is useless to contend. It may be wrong for giant powder to blow the top of a man's head off without cause, but repeated contests have proved that even when giant powder is in the wrong, it is eventually victorious.
CHESTNUT-BURR XLVI – PERFORMANCE OF THE PHOENIX
Mr. Blackburn, the Heavy Villian – Difficulties With the Scenery – The Play in New York – The Military Parade.
At the performance of "The Phoenix" here, the other night, there was a very affecting place where the play is transferred very quickly from a street scene to the elegant apartments of Mr. Blackburn, the heavy villain. The street scene had to be raised out of the way, and the effect of the transition was somewhat marred by the reluctance of the scenery in rolling up out of the way. It got about half way up, and stopped there in an undecided manner, which annoyed the heavy villain a good deal. He started to make some blood-curdling remarks about Mr. Bludsoe, and had got pretty well warmed up when the scenery came down with a bang on the stage.
The artist who pulls up the curtain and fills the hall lamps, then pulled the scene up so as to show the villain's feet for fifteen or twenty minutes, but he couldn't get it any farther. It seemed that the clothes line, by which the elaborate scenery is operated, got tangled up some way, and this caused the delay. After that another effort was made, and this time the street scene rolled up to about the third story of a brick hotel shown in the foreground, and stopped there, while the clarionet and first violin continued a kind of sad tremulo. Then a dark hand, with a wart on one finger and an oriental dollar store ring on another, came out from behind the wings and began to wind the clothes-line carefully around the pole at the foot of the scene. The villain then proceeded with his soliloquy, while the street scene hung by one corner in such a way as to make a large warehouse on the corner of the street stand at an angle of about forty-five degrees.
Laramie will never feel perfectly happy until these little hitches are dispensed with. Supposing that at some place in the play, where the heroine is speaking soft and low to her lover and the proper moment has arrived for her to pillow her sunny head upon his bosom, that street scene should fetch loose, and come down with such momentum as to knock the lovers over into the arms of the bass-viol player. Or suppose that in some death-bed act this same scene, loaded with a telegraph pole at the bottom, should settle down all at once in such a way as to leave the death-bed out on the corner of Monroe and Clark streets, in front of a candy store.
Modern stage mechanism has now reached such a degree of perfection that the stage carpenter does not go up on a step ladder, in the middle of a play, and nail the corner of a scene to a stick of 2x4 scantling, while a duel is going on near the step ladder. In all the larger theaters and opera houses, now, they are not doing that way.
Of course little incidents occur, however, even on the best stages, and where the whole thing works all right. For instance, the other day, a young actor, who was kneeling to a beautiful heiress down East, got a little too far front, and some scenery, which was to come together in the middle of the stage to pianissimo music, shut him outside and divided the tableau in two, leaving the young actor apparently kneeling at the foot of a street lamp, as though he might be hunting for a half a dollar that he had just dropped on the sidewalk.
There was a play in New York, not long ago, in which there was a kind of military parade introduced, and the leader of a file of soldiers had his instructions to march three times around the stage to martial music, and then file off at the left, the whole column, of course, following him. After marching once around, the stage manager was surprised to see the leader deliberately wheel, and walk off the stage, at the left, with the whole battalion following at his heels. The manager went to him and abused him shamefully for his haste, and told him he had a mind to discharge him; but the talented hack driver, who thus acted as the military leader, and who had over-played himself by marching off the stage ahead of time, said:
"Well, confound it, you can discharge me if you want to, but what was a man to do? Would you have me march around three times when my military pants were coming off, and I knew it? Military pride, pomp, parade and circumstance, are all right; but it can be overdone. A military squadron, detachment, or whatever it is, can make more of a parade, under certain circumstances, than is advertised. I didn't want to give people more show than they paid for, and I ask you to put yourself in my place. When a man is paid three dollars a week to play a Roman soldier, would you have him play the Greek slave? No, sir; I guess I know what I'm hired to play, and I'm going to play it. When you want me to play Adam in the Garden of Eden, just give me my fig leaf and salary enough to make it interesting, and I will try and properly interpret the character for you, or refund the money at the door."
FIRMNESS
Firmness is a good thing in its place, but we should early learn that to be firm, we need not stand up against a cyclone till our internal economy is blown into the tops of the neighboring trees. Moral courage is a good thing, but it is useless unless you have a liver to go along with it. Sometimes a man is required to lay down his life for his principles, but the cases where he is expected to lay down his digester on the altar of his belief, are comparatively seldom.
PUGILIST OR STATESMAN
Thousands of our own boys, who to-day are spearing frogs, or bathing in the rivers of their native land and parading on the shingly beach with no clothes on to speak of, are left to chose between such a career of usefulness and greatness of brow, and the humdrum life of a bilious student and pale, sad congressman. Will you rise to the proud pinnacle of fame as a pugilist, boys, or will you plug along as a sorrowing, overworked statesman? Now, in the spring-time of your lives, choose between the two, and abide the consequences.
CHESTNUT-BURR NYE AS A CRITIC AND NYE AS A POET.
POETIC CHESTNUTS
The Poet of the Greeley Eye – The Dying Cowboy and the Preacher – A Mournful Stanza – Poems by Nye – Apostrophe to an Orphan Mule – Ode to Spring – The Picnic Snoozeds Lament – Ode to the Cucumber – Apostrophe to Oscar Wilde – An Adjustable Campaign Song – The Beautiful Snow.
A new and dazzling literary star has risen above the horizon, and is just about to shoot athwart the starry vault of poesy. How wisely are all things ordered, and how promptly does the new star begin to beam, upon the decline of the old.
Hardly had the sweet singer of Michigan commenced to wane and to flicker, when, rising above the western hills, the glad light of the rising star is seen, and adown the canyons and gulches of the Rocky mountains comes the melodious cadences of the poet of the Greeley Eye.
Couched in the rough terms of the West, robed in the untutored language of the Michael Angelo slang of the miner and the cowboy, the poet at first twitters a little on a bough far up the canyon, gradually waking the echoes, until the song is taken up and handed back by every rock and crag along the rugged ramparts of the mighty mountain barrier.
Listen to the opening stanza of "The Dying Cowboy and the Preacher:"
So, old gospel shark, they tell me I must die;
That the wheels of life's wagon have rolled into their last rut,
Well, I will "pass in my checks" without a whimper or a cry,
And die as I have lived – "a hard nut."
This is no time-worn simile, no hackneyed illustration or bald-headed decrepit comparison, but a new, fresh illustration that appeals to the Western character, and lifts the very soul out of the kinks, as it were.
Wheels of life's wagon have rolled into their last rut.
Ah! how true to nature and yet how grand. How broad and sweeping. How melodious and yet how real. None but the true poet would have thought to compare the close of life to the sudden and unfortunate chuck of the off hind wheel of a lumber wagon into a rut.
In fancy we can see it all. We hear the low, sad kerplunk of the wheel, the loud burst of earnest, logical profanity, and then all is still.
Now and then the swish of a mule's tail through the air, or the sigh of the rawhide as it shimmers and hurtles through the silent air, and then a calm falls upon the scene. Anon, the driver bangs the mule that is ostensibly pulling his daylights out, but who is, in fact, humping up like an angle worm, without nulling a pound.
Then the poet comes to the close of the cowboy's career in this style:
"Do I repent?
"No – of nothing present or past;
"So skip, old preach, on gospel pap I won't be fed;
"My breath comes hard; I – am going – but – I – am game to the – last."
And reckless of the future, as the present, the cowboy was dead.
If we could write poetry like that, do you think we would plod along the dreary pathway of the journalist? Do you suppose that if we had the heaven-born gift of song to such a degree, that we could take hold of the hearts of millions and warble two or three little ditties like that, or write an elegy before breakfast, or construct an ionic, anapestic twitter like the foregoing, that we would carry in our own coal, and trim our own lamps, and wear a shirt two weeks at a time?
No, sir. We would hie us away to Europe or Salt Lake, and let our hair grow long, and we would write some obituary truck that would make people disgusted with life, and they would sigh for death that they might leave their insurance and their obituaries to their survivors.
POEMS BY BILL NYE
APOSTROPHE TO AN ORPHAN MULE.=
Oh! lonely, gentle, unobtrusive mule!
Thou standest idly 'gainst the azure sky,
And sweetly, sadly singeth like a hired man.
Who taught thee thus to warble
In the noontide heat and wrestle with
Thy deep, corroding grief and joyless woe?
Who taught thy simple heart
Its pent-up, wildly-warring waste
Of wanton woe to carol forth upon
The silent air?
I chide thee not, because thy
Song is fraught with grief-embittered
Monotony and joyless minor chords
Of wild, imported melody, for thou
Art restless, woe begirt and
Compassed round about with gloom,
Thou timid, trusting, orphan mule!
Few joys, indeed, are thine,
Thou thrice-bestricken, madly
Mournful, melancholy mule.
And he alone who strews
Thy pathway with his cold remains
Can give thee recompense
Of lemoncholy woe.
He who hath sought to steer
Thy limber, yielding tail
Fernist thy crupper-band
Hath given thee joy, and he alone.
'Tis true, he may have shot
Athwart the Zodiac, and, looking
O'er the outer walls upon
The New Jerusalem,
Have uttered vain regrets.
Thou reekest not. O orphan mule,
For it hath given thee joy, and
Bound about thy bursting heart,
And held thy tottering reason
To its throne.
Sing on, O mule, and warble
In the twilight gray,
Unchidden by th heartless throng.
Sing of thy parents on thy father's side.
Yearn for the days now past and gone;
For he who pens these halting,
Limping lines to thee
Doth bid thee yearn, and yearn, and yearn.
ODE TO SPRING.
FANTASIA FOR THE BASS DRUM; ADAPTED FROM THE GERMAN BY WILLIAM VON NYE.=
In the days of laughing spring time,
Comes the mild-eyed sorrel cow,
With bald-headed patches on her,
Poor and lousy, I allow;
And she waddles through your garden
O'er the radish-beds, I trow.
Then the red-nosed, wild-eyed orphan,
With his cyclopædiee,
Hies him to the rural districts
With more or less alacrity.
And he showeth up its merits
To the bright eternitee.
How the bumble-bee doth bumble
Bumbling in the fragrant air,
Bumbling with his little bumbler,
Till he climbs the golden stair.
Then the angels will provide him
With another bumbilaire.
THE PICNIC SNOOZER'S LAMENT
Gently lay aside the picnic,
For its usefulness is o'er,
And the winter style of misery
Stands and knocks upon your door.
Lariat the lonely oyster,
Drifting on some foreign shore;
Zion needs him in her business —
She can use him o'er and o'er.
Bring along the lonely oyster,
With the winter style of gloom,
And the supper for the pastor,
With its victims for the tomb.
Cast the pudding for the pastor,
With its double iron door;
It will gather in the pastor
For the bright and shining shore.
Put away the little picnic
Till the coming of the spring;
Useless now the swaying hammock
And the idle picnic swing.
Put away the pickled spider
And the cold pressed picnic fly,
And the decorated trousers
With their wealth of custard pie.
ODE TO THE CUCUMBER.=
O, a cucumber grew by the deep rolling sea,
And it tumbled about in reckless glee
Till the summer waned and the grass turned brown.
And the farmer plucked it and took it to town.
Wrinkled and warty and bilious and blue,
It lay in the market the autumn through;
Till a woman with freckles on her cheek
Led in her husband, so mild and meek.
He purchased the fruit, at her request,
And hid it forever under his vest,
For it doubled him up like a kangaroo,
And now he sleeps 'neath the violets blue.
APOSTROPHE ADDRESSED TO O. WILDE.=
Soft eyed seraphic kuss
With limber legs and lily on the side,
We greet you from the raw
And uncouth West.
The cowboy yearns to yank thee
To his brawny breast and squeeze
Thy palpitating gizzard
Through thy vest.
Come to the mountain fastness,
Oscar, with thy low neck shirt
And high neck pants;
Fly to the coyote's home,
Thou son of Albion,
James Crow bard and champion aesthete
From o'er the summer sea.
Sit on the fuzzy cactus, king of poesy,
And song,
Ride the fierce broncho o'er the dusty plain,
And le' the zephyr sigh among thy buttery locks.
Welcome thou genius of dyspeptic song,
Thou bilious lunatic from far-off lands.
Come to the home of genius,
By the snowy hills.
And wrestle with the alcoholic inspiration
Of our cordial home.
We yearn
To put the bloom upon thy alabaster nose,
And plant the jim-jams
In thy clustering hair.
Hail, mighty snoozer from across the main!
We greet thee
With our free, untutored ways and wild
Peculiar style of deadly beverage.
Come to the broad, free West and mingle
With our high-toned mob.
Come to the glorious Occident
And dally with the pack-mule's whisk-broom tail;
Study his odd yet soft demeanor,
And peculiar mien.
Tickle his gambrel with a sunflower bud
And scoot across the blue horizon
To the tooness of the sweet and succulent beyond.
We'll gladly
Gather up thy shattered remnants
With a broom and ship thee to thy beauteous home.
Forget us not,
Thou bilious pelican from o'er the sea.
Thou blue-nosed clam
With pimply, bulging brow, but
Come and we will welcome thee
With ancient omelet and fragrant sausage
Of forgotten years.
ADJUSTABLE CAMPAIGN SONG.=
(Air —Rally Round the Flag, Boys.)
Oh, we'll gather from the hillsides,
We'll gather from the glen,
Shouting the battle cry of…
And we'll round up our voters.
Our brave and trusty men,
Shouting the battle cry of…
Chorus
Oh, our candidate forever,
Te doodle daddy a,
Down with old…
Turn a foodie diddy a,
And we'll whoop de dooden do,
Fal de adden adden a,
And don't you never forget it.
Ob, we'll meet the craven foe
On the fall election day,
Shouting the battle cry of…
And we'll try to let him know
That we're going to have our way,
Shouting the battle cry of…
Chorus
Oh, our candidate forever, etc.
Oh, we're the people's friends,
As all can plainly see,
Shouting the battle cry of…
And we'll whoop de dooden doo,
With our big majority,
And don't you never forget it.
Chorus
Oh. our candidate forever, etc.
THE BEAUTIFUL SNOW.=
O drifted whiteness covering
The fair face of nature.
Pure as the sigh of a blessed spirit
On the eternal shores, you
Glitter in the summer sun
Considerable. My mortal
Ken seems weak and
Helpless in the midst of
Your dazzling splendor,
And I would hide my
Diminished head like
Serf unclothed in presence
Of his mighty King.
You lie engulphed
Within the cold embrace
Of rocky walls and giant
Cliffs. You spread out
Your white mantle and
Enwrap the whole broad
Universe, and a portion
Of York State.
You seem content
Resting in silent whiteness
On the frozen breast of
The cold, dead earth. You
Think apparently that
You are middling white;
But once I was in the
Same condition. I was
Pure as the beautiful snow,
But I fell. It was a
Right smart fall, too.
It churned me up a
Good deal and nearly
Knocked the supreme
Duplex from its intellectual
Throne. It occurred in
Washington, D. C.
But thou
Snow, lying so spotless
On the frozen earth, as
I remarked before, thou
Hast indeed a soft,
Soft thing. Thou comest
Down like the silent
Movements of a specter,
And thy fall upon the
Earth is like the tread
Of those who walk the
Shores of immortality.
You lie around all
Winter drawing your
Annuities till spring,
And then the soft
Breath from the south with
Touch seductive bids you
Go, and you light out
With more or less alacrity.