Kitabı oku: «Bill Nye and Boomerang. Or, The Tale of a Meek-Eyed Mule, and Some Other Literary Gems», sayfa 19
THE RELENTLESS GARDEN HOSE
It is now the proper time for the cross-eyed woman to fool with the garden hose. I have faced death in almost every form and I do not know what fear is, but when a woman with one eye gazing into the zodiac and the other peering into the middle of next week and wearing one of those large floppy sun bonnets, picks up the nozzle of the garden hose and turns on the full force of the institution, I fly wildly to the Mountains of Hepsidam.
Water won't hurt anyone of course if care is used not to forget and drink any of it, but it is this horrible suspense and uncertainty about facing the nozzle of a garden hose in the hands of a cross eyed woman that unnerves me and paralyzes me.
Instantaneous death is nothing to me. I am as cool and collected where leaden rain and iron hail are thickest, as I would be in my own office writing the obituary of the man who steals my jokes. But I hate to be drowned slowly in my good clothes and on dry land and have my dying gaze rest on a woman whose ravishing beauty would drive a narrow-gauge mule into convulsions and make him hate himself to death.
A WAIL
To the Editor of the Bass Drum:
I appeal to the charity of more favored sisters of the east, who live in an atmosphere of music to throw a crumb of comfort to one who lives in the wilderness and has, in the past ten years, heard positively no music.
I want a list of contralto songs for the voice, compass two octaves G, in bass clef to G, above the line, treble. I should also like a list of piano solos, third or fourth grade, the Trauemerei order of music preferred. I will make any compensation desired, and forever bless my friends in need. No Name.
It is pretty sad to suffer along for ten years and not hear any music. It must seem dull and quiet, especially to one who has lived in an atmosphere of music. Ten years with no one at hand to churn up the atmosphere occasionally with something extending "from G in bass clef to G above the line treble" is a long while. But here in the "wilderness" we have to squeeze along the best way we can. We can't go and hear Ole Bull every two weeks here. Sitting Bull is about as near as we can approximate to the Bull family. It is pretty tough, and there is no denying it.
Speaking about crumbs of comfort, however, if "No Name" will drop around to the Bass Drum office, say about 12:30 to-morrow, we will attend to the crumb business. We do not, as a general rule, warble much, but if she will come around at that hour we will trill two or three little olios for "one who lives in the wilderness, and has in the past ten years heard positively no music." If we had known that she was starving along that way without five cents' worth of music to lay her jaw to, we would have hunted her up and given her a blast or two. There's nothing mean about us. We may be rough and perhaps impulsive at times, but we will never hush our merry lay so long as anybody is suffering. Always come right to us when hungry for music.
THE GREAT, HORRID MAN RECEIVETH NEW YEAR CALLS
In my Boudoir, Dec. 20, 1879.
New Year's Day will be Leap Year, and the ladies want to make calls.
The masculine man will, therefore, have to receive. Some of us will club together at private houses and receive, while others will "hire a hall" and sling a great deal of agony, no doubt. I shall be at home to some extent. I shall wear my organdy, looped up with demi-overskirt of the same, and three-ply lambrequins of Swiss, with corded edges and button-holes of elephant's breath cut plain. My panier is down at the machine shop now and will be done in a few days. I shall be assisted by Superintendent Dickinson and First Assistant Postmaster General Spalding of the Laramie post-office department, and the grand difficulty will no doubt occur at the residence of the latter.
Mr. Dickinson will wear a lavender moire antique with all wool underclothes. The costume will be draped on the side with bevel pinions, and looped back with English button-holes, and cut low in the neck.
Mr. Spalding will wear a cream-colored walking suit with train No. 4. He will also wear buttons with buttonholes to match. Sleeves cut Princesse, with polished elbows of same. Boots plain with cranberry sauce. Brocaded silk overskirt, with lemon sauce. Fifty-three button kids, fastening to the suspenders, open back, with Italian dressing.
I give these notes to the reporter in advance, because women are so apt to get these things all mixed up. After we have spent so much time constructing an elaborate wardrobe, we do not wish the journals of the Territory to come out the next day, and make each one of us appear like "a perfect dud." Our table will also look the nicest of any in town. We have designed it ourselves. We have arranged the hose so that we can play it on the dishes after we have used them, and save splashing around in hot water between meals. We intend to feed the first three or four delegations without doing any work on the dishes. After that we will of course have to turn on the hose. Visitors will be made to feel perfectly at home. Callers will be required not to spit on the floor. Parties making calls will not be allowed to throw peanut shells in the card-receiver, or leave their muddy articles on the piano. Callers will please remain seated while the frigid sustenance is circulated. No standing callers allowed. Standing collars are going out of style anyhow.
JUST THE THING
Office of The Twilight Bumble Bee.
We have just received a copy of the Nebraska Staats Zeitung-Tribune a nice little eight page German paper, published at Grand Island, Nebraska. We have not read it all through yet, but it is a mighty good paper. We do not understand much German. We are a little rusty. "Zwei glass lager" is about all the German we know, and that isn't very pure.
But this paper we like. There is a tone about it that seems to indicate a lofty conception of true journalism. A noble ambition to cope with vice and the prevailing errors of the day, and to conquer ignorance and wrong. As we said before, there are a great many things in the paper which we fail to quite "catch on" to, owing to our ignorance of the German language, but there is a picture of a cook stove on the eighth page that is first-rate. It is in the English language. There is also a picture of a wind mill, in fractured English, on the same page. It is very correct in its sentiment, and we endorse it.
In conclusion we will say that from what we have seen of this paper, we are prepared to say that it meets a want long felt. It is pure in tone, noble in politics, fearless in its attack upon the popular shortcomings of the day, and well deserving of the hearty approval of the public.
THANKS
M. E. Post, M. C., of Cheyenne, will please accept our thanks for an indestructible pumpkin pie, presented on the 9th inst. It is the most durable pie that we ever wrestled with. Probably it was not picked early enough and got too ripe. It is the first genuine cane-bottomed pie, with patent dust damper and nickle-plated movement that we have tasted since we came west. He says it was raised on the Laramie plains. If this be true, we have opened up before us another resource of which we may be justly proud. We have valuable marble quarries, but marble may be cracked and broken. We also have mountains of iron and leads of valuable quartz, but all these must yield to the superior strength of man. This style of pie, however, will defy the power of mortal ingenuity, and withstand the effacing finger of time. Men may come and men may go but this pie will last forever. We make bold to say that when Gabriel sounds the proclamation that time is no more, this blasted pie will stand up without a blush and say: "Here, Gabriel, is where you get your nice, fresh pie, and don't you forget it, either."
AN ANTI-MORMON TOWN
A Mormon missionary turned himself loose in Rawlins the other night and attempted to proselyte the good people into getting another invoice of wives to assist in taking off the chill of the approaching winter; but there was a feeling in the audience that the man who represented the church of the Latter Day Saints was a little off in addressing them, so they went to a dealer in old and rare antiquities and purchased some eggs that had a smell which is peculiar to eggs that have yielded to the infirmities of age.
The Rawlins people raised the windows on the sides of the building and broke eleven and one-half dozen out of a possible twelve dozen of these eggs, which had been coined in the year of the great crash. It was the year when so many hens were not feeling well; they broke them against the brass collar button of the orator, and they ran down in graceful little brooklets and rivulets and squiblets and driblets overleven and one-half dozen out of a possible twelve dozen of these eggs, which had been coined in the year of the great crash. It was the year when so many hens were not feeling well; they broke them against the brass collar button of the orator, and they ran down in graceful little brooklets and rivulets and squiblets and driblets over his white lawn tie and boiled shirt.
Rawlins is not strictly a Mormon town, and the lecturer who took some clothes through in a valise the other day bound for Evanston, where he could get them washed, was arrested by a New York detective who was sure he had at last caught the man who had Stewart's body.
A CHRISTMAS RIDE IN JULY
I've just returned from a long ride to the Soda Lakes.
The ride reminded me of a tour I took in July from Laramie over to Cheyenne, two years, ago. We had experienced the pleasure of riding over the mountain, on the Union Pacific train, and had held our breath while crossing Dale Creek bridge, and viewed with wonder the broken billows of granite, lying here and there at the tip-top of the mighty divide. But some one had said that it was nothing compared with the mirth-provoking trip by carriage across the mountains, over a fine wagon road to Cheyenne.
In the morning I nearly melted riding up the sandy canyon, and took off my coat and gliding pleasantly along-alternately sang one or two low throbs of melody, and alternately swore about the extreme heat.
When we got nearly to the top, I thought it didn't look well for a man to whom the American people look for so much in the future, to be riding along the public highway without his coat, so I put it on. At the top of the mountain I put on a linen duster and gloves. Shortly after that I put on my overshoes and a sealskin cap. Later, I put on my buffalo overcoat, and got out and ran behind the carriage to keep warm.
When I got to Cheyenne, the Doctor looked me over and said that he could save my feet because they had so much vitality, and were in such a good state of preservation; but my ears – my pride and glory – the ears that I had defended through the newspapers for years, and had stood up for when all about was dark – they had to go.
That is, part of them had to go, and there was enough left to hear with; but the ornamental scallops and box plaiting, and frills, the wainscoating, and royal Corinthian entablatures had to go.
EXAMINING THE BRAND ON A FROZEN STEER
A stock owner went out the other day over the divide to see how his cattle were standing the rigorous weather, and found a large, fine steer in his last long sleep. The stockman had to roll him over to see the brand, and he has regretted his curiosity ever since. He told me that the brand looked to him like a Roman candle making about 2,000 revolutions per moment, and with 187 more prismatic colors than he thought were in existence. Sometimes a steer is not dead but in a cold, sleepy stupor which precedes death, and when stirred up a little and irritated because he cannot die without turning over and showing his brand, he musters his remaining strength and kicks the inquisitive-stockman so high that he can see and recognize the features of departed friends. That was the way it happened on this occasion. The stockman fell in the branches of a pine tree on Jack Creek, not dead but very thoughtful. He said he was near enough to hear the rush of wings, and was just going to register and engage a room in the New Jerusalem when he returned to consciousness.
ONION PEELIN'S
The Chinese agriculturalist does his hair up in a French twist because he don't want to have his cue cumber the ground.
Almost every day there is a new liver pad or lung pad or kidney pad, but in its way nothing has succeeded in giving instant relief like the Leadville foot pad.
A man can scratch his back against a hat rack or a whatnot for a year or two, and attribute it to buckwheat cakes, but after he has gone on this way for about seven years, the public and his friends begin to lose faith in him.
A handsome competence is in store for the man who will invent a neat, durable and portable pie opener that will successfully reach the true inwardness of the average box-toed, Bessemer steel, gooseberry pie which the hired girl casts in her kitchen foundry.
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.
It is not the disheartening sense of failure alone which makes a man swear in the stilly night, nor yet the fact that he has slapped his alabaster limb harder than he needed to, but it is the trifling and heartless way in which the mosquito kisses his hand to the audience, and soars away humming a Tyrolean lay.
Putting up stovepipe is easy enough, if you only go at it right. In the morning, breakfast on some light, nutritious diet, and drink too cups of hot coffee. After which put on a suit of old clothes – or new ones if you can get them on time – put on an old pair of buckskin gloves, and when every thing is ripe for the fatal blow, go and get a good hardware man who understands his business. If this rule be strictly adhered to, the gorgeous eighteen-karat-stem-winding profanity of the present day may be very largely diminished, and the world made better.
It is strange that the human heart is so easily influenced by the change of seasons, and although spring succeeds winter, and summer follows upon the heels of spring, just as it did centuries ago, yet the transition from one to the other is ever new and pleasing, and the bosom is gladdened with the cheering assurance of spring, or the promise of the coming summer time, with its wealth of golden days, its cucumbers and vinegar, its green corn, its string beans, its baseball, its mammoth circus, its fragrant flowers, and its soda water flavored with syrup from a long-necked, wicker-covered bottle, just as it was in the days of Pharoah, and Hannibal, and Andrew Jackson.
