Bill Nye's Chestnuts Old and New

THE TRUE TALE OF WILLIAM TELL

William Tell ran a hay ranche near Bergelen, about 580 years ago. Tell had lived in the mountains all his life, and shot chamois and chipmunks with a cross-gun, till he was a bad man to stir up.

At that time Switzerland was run principally by a lot of carpet-baggers from Austria, and Tell got down on them about the year 1307. It seems that Tell wanted the government contract to furnish hay, at $45 a ton, for the Year 1306, and Gessler, who was controlling the patronage of Switzerland, let the contract to an Austrian who had a big lot of condemned hay, farther up the gulch.

One day Gessler put his plug hat up on a telegraph pole, and issued order 236, regular series, to the effect that every snoozer who passed down the toll road should bow to it.

Gessler happened to be in behind the brush when Tell Went by, and he noticed that Bill said "Shoot the hat," and didn't salute it; so he told his men to gather Mr. Tell in, and put him in the refrigerator.

Gessler told him that if he Would shoot a crab-apple from the head of his only son at 200 yards, with a cross-gun, he would give him his liberty.

Tell consented, and knocked the apple higher than Gilroy's kite. Old Gessler, however, noticed another arrow sticking in William's girdle, and he asked what kind of a flowery break that was.

Tell told him that if he had killed the kid instead of busting the apple, he intended to drill a hole through the stomach of Mr. Gessler. This made Gessler mad again, and he took Tell on a picnic up the river, in irons.

Tell jumped off when he got a good chance, and cut across a bend in the river, and when the picnic party came down, he shot Gessler deader than a mackeral.

This opened the ball for freedom, and weakened the Austrian government so much that in the following November they elected Tell to fill the long term, and a half-breed for the short term.

After that, Tell was recognized by the ruling power, and he could get most any contract that he wanted to. He got the service on the stage line up into the Alps increased to a daily, and had the contracts in the name of his son Albert.

The appropriation was increased $150,000 per year, and he had a good thing.

Tell lived many years after this, and was loved by the Swiss people because he had freed their land.

Whenever he felt lonesome, he would take his crossgun and go out and kill a tyrant. He had tyrant on toast most every day till Switzerland was free, and the peasants blessed him as their deliverer.

When Tell got to be an old man he would go out into the mountains and apostrophize them in these memorable words:

"Ye crags and peaks, I'm with you once again. I hold to you the hands I held to you on previous occasions, to show you they are free. The tyrant's crust is busted, so to speak. His race is run, and he himself hath scooted up the flume. Sic semper McGinnis, terra Anna, nux vomica, Schweitzer lease, Timbuctoo, erysipelas, e pluribus unum, sciataca, multum in parvo, vox populi, vox snockomonthegob."

WHY WE WEEP

In justice to ourself we desire to state that the Cheyenne Sun has villified us and placed us in a false position before the public. It has stated that while at Rock Creek station, in the early part of the week, we were taken for a peanutter, and otherwise ill-treated at the railroad eating corral and omelette emporium, and that in consequence of such treatment we shed great, scalding tears as large as watermelons. This is not true. We did shed the tears as above set forth, but not because of ill-treatment on the part of the eating-house proprietor.

It was the presence of death that broke our heart and opened the fountains of our great deep, so to speak, when we poured the glucose syrup on our pancakes, the stiff and cold remains of a large beetle and two cunning little twin cockroaches fell out into our plate, and lay there hushed in an eternal repose.

Death to us is all powerful. The King of Terrors is to us the mighty sovereign before whom we must all bow, from the mighty emperor down to the meanest slave, from the railroad superintendent, riding in his special car, down to the humblest humorist, all alike must some day curl up and die. This saddens us at all times, but more peculiarly so when Death, with his relentless lawn-mower, has gathered in the young anu innocent. This was the case where two little twin cockroaches, whose lives had been unspotted, and whose years had been unclouded by wrong and selfishness were called upon to meet death together. In the stillness of the night, when others slept, these affectionate little twins crept into the glucose syrup and died.

We hope no one will misrepresent this matter. We did weep, and we are not ashamed to own it. We sat there and sobbed until the tablecloth was wet for four feet, and the venerable ham was floating around in tears. It was not for ourself, however, that we wept. No unkindness on the part of an eating house ever provoked such a tornado of woe. We just weep when we see death and are brought in close contact with it. And we were not the only one that shed tears. Dickinson and Warren wept, strong men as they were. Even the butter wept. Strong as it was it could not control its emotions.

We don't very often answer a newspaper attack, but when we are accused of weeping till people have to take off their boots and wring out their socks, we want the public to know what it is for.

ETIQUETTE FOR THE YOUNG

Young children who have to wait till older people have eaten all there is in the house, should not open the dining-room door during the meal and ask the host if he is going to eat all day. It makes the company feel ill at ease, and lays up wrath in the parents' heart.

Children should not appear displeased with the regular courses at dinner, and then fill up on pie. Eat the less expensive food first, and then organize a picnic in the preserves afterward.

Do not close out the last of your soup by taking the plate in your mouth and pouring the liquid down your childish neck. You might spill it on your bosom, and it enlarges and distorts the mouth unnecessarily.

When asked what part of the fowl you prefer, do not say you will take the part that goes over the fence last. This remark is very humorous, but the rising generation ought to originate some new table jokes that will be worthy of the age in which we live.

Children should early learn the use of the fork, and how to handle it. This knowledge can be acquired by allowing them to pry up the carpet tacks with this instrument, and other little exercises, such as the parent mind may suggest.

The child should be taught at once not to wave his bread around over the table, while in conversation, or to fill his mouth full of potatoes, and then converse in a rich tone of voice with someone out in the yard. He might get his dinner down his trochea and cause his parents great anxiety.

In picking up a plate or saucer filled with soup or with moist food, the child should be taught not to parboil his thumb in the contents of the dish, and to avoid swallowing soup bones or other indigestible debris.

Toothpicks are generally the last course, and children should not be permitted to pick their teeth and kick the table through the other exercises. While grace is being said at table, children should know that it is a breach of good breeding to smouge fruit cake, just because their parents' heads are bowed down, and their attention for the moment turned in another direction. Children ought not to be permitted to find fault with the dinner, or fool with the cat while they are eating. Boys should, before going to the table, empty all the frogs and grasshoppers out of their pockets, or those insects might crawl out during the festivities, and jump into the gravy.

If a fly wades into your jelly up to his gambrels, do not mash him with your spoon before all the guests, as death is at all times depressing to those who are at dinner, and retards digestion. Take the fly out carefully, with what naturally adheres to his person, and wipe him on the table cloth. It will demonstrate your perfect command of yourself, and afford much amusement for the company. Do not stand up in your chair and try to spear a roll with your fork. It is not good manners to do so, and you might slip and bust your crust, by so doing. Say "thank you," and "much obliged," and "beg pardon," wherever you can work in these remarks, as it throws people off their guard, and gives you an opportunity to get in your work on the pastry and other bric-a-brac near you at the time.

SWEET SAINT VALENTINE

It is the evening of St. Valentine's Day, and I am thinking of the long ago. St. Valentine's Day is nothing now but a blessed memory. Another landmark has been left behind in our onward march toward the great hereafter. We come upon the earth, battle a little while with its joys and its griefs, and then we pass away to give place to other actors on the mighty stage.

Only a few short years ago what an era St. Valentine's Day was to me. How I still get valentines, but they are different and they effect me differently. They are not of so high an order of merit artistically, and the poetry is more impudent and less on the turtle-dove order.

Some may be neglected on St. Valentine's Day, but I am not. I never go away by myself and get mad because I have been overlooked. I generally get valentines enough to paper a large hall. I file them away carefully and sell them back to the dealer for next year. Then the following St. Valentine's Day I love to look at the familiar features of those I have received in the years agone.

One of these blessed valentines I have learned to love as I do my life. I received it first in 1870. It represents a newspaper reporter with a nose on him like the woman's suffrage movement. It is a large, enthusiastic nose of a bright bay color with bias folds of the same, shirred with dregs of wine. How well I know that nose. The reporter is represented in tight green pants and orange coat. The vest is scarlet and the necktie is maroon, shot with old gold.

The picture represents the young journalist as a little bit disposed to be brainy. The intellect is large and abnormally prominent. It hangs out over the deep-set eyes like the minority juror on the average panel.

I cannot help contrasting this dazzling five-cent valentine with the delicate little poem in pale blue and Torchon lace which I received in the days of yore from the red-headed girl with the wart on her thumb. Ah! how little of genuine pleasure have fame and fortune to offer us compared with that of sitting behind the same school desk with the Bismarck blonde of the school and with her alternately masticating the same hunk of spruce gum.

I sometimes chew gum nowadays to see if it will bring back the old pleasant sensations, but it don't. The teacher is not watching me now. There is too little restraint, and the companion, too, who then assisted in operating the gum business, and used to spit on her slate with such elegance and abandon, and wipe it thoughtfully off with her apron, she too is gone. One summer day when the little birds were pouring forth their lay, and the little lambs were frisking on the green sward, and yanking their tails athwart the ambient air, she lit out for the great untried West with a grasshopper sufferer. The fluff and bloom of existence for her too is gone. She bangs eternal punishment out of thirteen consecutive children near Ogallalla, Neb., and wears out her sweet girlish nature working up her husband's underclothes into a rag carpet. It seems tough, but such is life.

CARRYING REVOLVERS

The righteous war against the carrying of pistols is still going bravely on all over the country, and the mayors of the larger cities are making it red hot for every one who violates the law.

This is right. No man ever carried one that he did not intend to kill some one with it. If he does not intend to kill some one, why does he carry a deadly weapon? The result is that very often a man who, if he had gone unarmed as he ought to, would have been a respected citizen, becomes a caged murderer with a weeping, widowed wife and worse than orphaned children at home.

We used to feel at times as though here in this western country we were having a pretty lonesome time of it, never having killed anybody, and we began to think that in order to command respect we would have to start a private cemetery, so one time when we had a good opportunity we drew our pop on a man and shot at him.

He often writes to us now and tells us how healthy he is. Before we shot at him he used to have trouble with his digestion, and every spring he was so bilious that he didn't care whether he lived or not. How he weighs 200 and looks forward to a long and useful life.

Still the revolver is not always a health promoter. It is more deadly as a general rule for the owner than any one else. Half at least of the distressing accidents that occur as a result of carrying a pistol, are distressing mainly to the man who carries the weapon.

We sometimes think that if editors would set the example, and instead of going around armed to the teeth, would rely on the strength of their noble manhood and a white oak club, others would follow and discard the pistol. For a year we have been using a club, with the best results, and although the exercise has been pretty severe at times, the death rate has been considerably reduced, and many of our citizens have been spared to bless the community with their presence.

Let the press of the country take hold of this thing, and the day will come when a man may enter the editorial office as fearlessly as now he goes into the postoffice.

Nothing unnerves a man like going into a sanctum and finding fragments of an old acquaintance scattered over the velvet carpet, or ruthlessly jammed into a porcelain cuspidore.

THE AGITATED HEN

Dear reader, did you ever wrestle with a hen that had a wild, uncontrollable desire to incubate? Did you ever struggle on, day after day, trying to convince her that her mission was to furnish eggs for your table instead of hovering all day on a door knob, trying to hatch out a litter of front doors?

William II. Root, of this place, who has made the hen a study, both in her home life and while lying in the embrace of death, has struck upon an argument which the average hen will pay more attention to than any other he has discovered in his researches.

He says the modern hen ignores almost everything when she once gets the notion that she has received a call to incubate. You can deluge her with the garden hose, or throw old umbrellas at her, or change her nest, but that don't count with the firm and stubborn hen. You can take the eggs out of the nest and put a blooded bull-dog or a nest of new-laid bumblebees in place of them, and she will hover over them as assiduously as she did before.

William H. Root's hen had shown some signs of this mania, so he took out the eggs and let her try her incubate on a horse rake awhile, just so she could kind of taper off gradual and not have her mind shattered. Then he tried her at hatching out four-tined forks, and at last her taste got so vitiated that she took the contract to furnish the country with bustles by hatching out an old hoop skirt that had gone to seed.

Mr. Boot then made an experiment. We were one of a board of scientists who assisted in the consultation. The owner of the hen got a strip of red flannel and tied it around her tail.

The hen seemed annoyed as soon as she discovered it, No hen cares to have a sash hung on her system that doesn't match her complexion. A seal-brown hen with a red flannel polonaise don't seem to harmonize, and she is aware of it just as much as anybody is.

That hen seemed to have thought of something all at once that had escaped her mind before, and so she went away.

She stepped about nine feet at a lick on the start and gained time as she proceeded. When she bumped her nose against the corner of the stable she changed her mind about her direction. She altered her course a little, but continued her rapid style of movement.

Her eyes began to look wild. She seemed to be losing her reason. She got so pretty soon that she did'nt recognize the faces of her friends. She passed Mr. Root without being able to distinguish him from a total stranger.

These peculiar movements were kept up during the entire afternoon, till the hen got so fatigued that she crawled into a length of old stovepipe, and the committee retired to prepare a report.

It is the opinion of the press that this is a triumph of genius in hen culture. It is not severe, though linn, in its treatment and while it of course annoys and unmans the hen temporarily, it is salutary in its results, and at the same time it furnishes a pleasant little matinee for the spectators. We say to those upon whose hands time hangs heavily these long-days, that there is nothing that soothes the ruffled mind and fills the soul with a glad thrill of pleasure like the erratic movements of a decorated hen. It may not be a high order of enjoyment, but it affords a great deal of laugh to the superficial foot to those who are not very accomplished, and who laugh at things and then consider its propriety afterward.

A FRONTIER INCIDENT

Calamity is the name of a man who lives in the gold camp of Cummins City. He has another name, but nobody seems to know what it is. It has been torn off the wrapper some way, and so the boys call him Calamity.

He is a man of singular mind and construction. The most noticeable feature about Calamity is his superstitious dread of muscular activity. Some people will not tackle any kind of business enterprise on Friday. Calamity is even more the victim of this vague superstition, and has a dread of beginning work on any day of the week, for fear that some disaster may befall him.

Last spring he had a little domestic trouble, and his wife made complaints that Calamity had worn out an old long-handled shovel on her, trying to convince her about some abstruse theory of his.

The testimony seemed rather against Calamity, and the miners told him that as soon as they got over the rush a little and had the leisure they would have to hang him.

They hoped he would take advantage of the hurry of business and go away, because they didn't want to hang him so early in the season. But Calamity didn't go away. He stayed because it was easier to stay than it was to go. He did not, of course, pine for the notoriety of being the first man hung in the young camp, but rather than pull up stakes and move away from a place where there were so many pleasant associations, he concluded to stay and meet death calmly in whatever form he might come.

One evening, after the work of the day was done and the boys had eaten their suppers, one of them suggested that it would be a good time to hang Calamity. So they got things in shape and went down to the Big Laramie bridge.

Calamity was with them. They got things ready for the exercise to begin, and then asked the victim if he had anything to say. He loosened the rope around his neck a little with one hand, so that he could speak with more freedom, and holding his pantaloons on with the other, said:

"Gentlemen of the convention, I call you to witness that this public demonstration toward me is entirely unsought on my part. I have never courted notoriety.

"Plugging along in comparative obscurity is good enough for me. This is the first time I have ever addressed an audience. That is why I am embarrassed and ill at ease.

"You have brought me here to hang me because I seem harsh and severe with my wife. You have entered the hallowed presence of my home life and assumed the prerogative of subverting my household discipline.

"It is well. I do not care to live, so long as my authority is questioned. You have already changed my submissive wife to an arrogant and self-reliant woman.

"Yesterday I told her to go out and grease the wagon, and she straightened up to her full height and told me to grease it myself.

"I have always been kind and thoughtful to her. When she had to go up in the gulch in the winter after firewood, my coat shielded her from the storm while I sat in the cabin through the long hours. I could name other instances of unselfishness on my part, but I will not take up your time.

"She uses my smoking tobacco, and kicks my vertebræ into my hat on the most unlooked-for occasions. She does not love me any more, and life to me is only a hollow mockery.

"Death, with its wide waste of eternal calm, and its shoreless sea of rest, is a glad relief to me. I go, but I leave in your midst a skittish and able-bodied widow who will make Rome howl. I bequeath her to this camp. She is yours, gentlemen. She is all I have to give, but in giving her to you, I feel that my untimely death will always be looked upon in this gulch as a dire calamity.

"The day will come when you will look back upon this awful night and wish that I was alive again; but it will be too late. I will be far away. My soul will be in the land where domestic infelicity and cold feet can never enter.

"Bury me at the foot of Vinegar Hill, where the sage hen and the fuzzy bumblebee may gambol o'er my lowly grave."

When Calamity had finished, an impromptu caucus was called, and when it was adjourned, Calamity went home to his cabin to surprise his wife. She hasn't fully recovered from the surprise as we go to press.