Kitabı oku: «Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns)», sayfa 6

"Curly Locks!"

 
"Curly Locks! Curly Locks! wilt thou be mine?
Thou shalt not wash the dishes, nor yet feed the swine —
But sit on a cushion and sew a fine seam,
And feast upon strawberries, sugar and cream."
 
 
Curly Locks! Curly Locks! wilt thou be mine?
The throb of my heart is in every line,
And the pulse of a passion, as airy and glad
In its musical beat as the little Prince had!
 
 
Thou shalt not wash the dishes, nor yet feed the swine! —
O, I'll dapple thy hands with these kisses of mine
Till the pink of the nail of each finger shall be
As a little pet blush in full blossom for me.
 
 
But sit on a cushion and sew a fine seam,
And thou shalt have fabric as fair as a dream, —
The red of my veins, and the white of my love,
And the gold of my joy for the braiding thereof.
 
 
And feast upon strawberries, sugar and cream
From a service of silver, with jewels agleam, —
At thy feet will I bide, at thy beck will I rise,
And twinkle my soul in the night of thine eyes!
 
 
"Curly Locks! Curly Locks! wilt thou be mine?
Thou shalt not wash the dishes, nor yet feed the swine;
But sit on a cushion and sew a fine seam,
And feast upon strawberries, sugar and cream."
 

Lines on Turning Over a Pass

Some newspaper men claim that they feel a great deal freer if they pay their fare.

That is true, no doubt; but too much freedom does not agree with me. It makes me lawless. I sometimes think that a little wholesome restriction is the best thing in the world for me. That is the reason I never murmur at the conditions on the back of an annual pass. Of course they restrict me from bringing suit against the road in case of death, but I don't mind that. In case of my death it is my intention to lay aside the cares and details of business and try to secure a change of scene and complete rest. People who think that after my demise I shall have nothing better to do than hang around the musty, tobacco-spattered corridors of a court-room and wait for a verdict of damages against a courteous railroad company do not thoroughly understand my true nature.

But the interstate-commerce bill does not shut out the employe! Acting upon this slight suggestion of hope, I wrote, a short time ago, to Mr. St. John, the genial and whole-souled general passenger agent of the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad, as follows:

Asheville, N. C., Feb. 10, 1887.

E. St. John, G. P. A., C., R. I. & P. R'y, Chicago.

Dear Sir: – Do you not desire an employe on your charming road? I do not know what it is to be an employe, for I was never in that condition, but I pant to be one now.

Of course I am ignorant of the duties of an employe, but I have always been a warm friend of your road and rejoiced in its success. How are your folks?

Yours truly,

Col. Bill Nye.

Day before yesterday I received the following note from General St. John, printed on a purple typewriter:

Chicago, Feb. 13, 1887.

Col. Bill Nye, Asheville, N. C.

Sir: – My folks are quite well.

Yours truly,

E. St. John.

I also wrote to Gen. A. V. H. Carpenter, of the Milwaukee road, at the same time, for we had corresponded some back and forth in the happy past. I wrote in about the following terms:

Asheville, N. C., Feb. 10, 1887.

A. V. H. Carpenter, G. P. A. C., M. & St. P. R'y, Milwaukee, Wis.

Dear Sir: – How are you fixed for employes this spring?

I feel like doing something of that kind and could give you some good endorsements from prominent people both at home and abroad.

What does an employe have to do?

If I can help your justly celebrated road any here in the South do not hesitate about mentioning it.

I am still quite lame in my left leg, which was broken in the cyclone, and cannot walk without great pain.

Yours with kindest regards,

Bill Nye.

I have just received the following reply from Mr. Carpenter:

Milwaukee, Wis., Feb. 14, 1887.

Bill Nye, Esq., Asheville, N. C.

Dear Sir: – You are too late. As I write this letter, there is a string of men extending from my office door clear down to the Soldiers' Home. All of them want to be employes. This crowd embraces the Senate and House of Representatives of the Wisconsin Legislature, State officials, judges, journalists, jurors, justices of the peace, orphans, overseers of highways, fish commissioners, pugilists, widows of pugilists, unidentified orphans of pugilists, etc., etc., and they are all just about as well qualified to be employes as you are.

I suppose you would poultice a hot box with pounded ice, and so would they.

I am sorry to hear about your lame leg. The surgeon of our road says perhaps you do not use it enough.

Yours for the thorough enforcement of law,

A. V. H. Carpenter. Per G.

Not having written to Mr. Hughitt of the Northwestern road for a long time, and fearing that he might think I had grown cold toward him, I wrote the following note on the 9th:

Asheville, N. C., Feb. 9, 1887.

Marvin Hughitt, Second Vice-President and General

Manager Chicago & Northwestern Railway,

Chicago, Ill.

Dear Sir: —

Excuse me for not writing before. I did not wish to write you until I could do so in a bright and cheery manner, and for some weeks I have been the hot-bed of twenty-one Early Rose boils. It was extremely humorous without being funny. My enemies gloated over me in ghoulish glee.

I see by a recent statement in the press that your road has greatly increased in business. Do you feel the need of an employe? Any light employment that will be honorable without involving too much perspiration would be acceptable.

I am traveling about a good deal these days, and if I can do you any good as an agent or in referring to your smooth road-bed and the magnificent scenery along your line, I would be glad to regard that in the light of employment. Everywhere I go I hear your road very highly spoken of.

Yours truly,

Bill Nye.

I shall write to some more roads in a few weeks. It seems to me there ought to be work for a man who is able and willing to be an employe.

That Night

 
You and I, and that night,
with its perfume and glory! —
The scent of the locusts —
the light of the moon;
And the violin weaving the
waltzers a story,
Enmeshing their feet in the
weft of the tune,
Till their shadows uncertain,
Reeled round on the curtain,
While under the trellis we drank in the June.
 
 
Soaked through with the midnight, the cedars were sleeping.
Their shadowy tresses outlined in the bright
Crystal, moon-smitten mists, where the fountain's heart leaping
Forever, forever burst, full with delight;
And its lisp on my spirit
Fell faint as that near it
Whose love like a lily bloomed out in the night.
 
 
O your glove was an odorous sachet of blisses!
The breath of your fan was a breeze from Cathay!
And the rose at your throat was a nest of spi'led kisses! —
And the music! – in fancy I hear it to-day,
As I sit here, confessing
Our secret, and blessing
My rival who found us, and waltzed you away.
 

The Truth about Methuselah

We first met Methuselah in the capacity of a son. At the age of sixty-five Enoch arose one night and telephoned his family physician to come over and assist him in meeting Methuselah.

Day at last dawned on Enoch's happy home, and its first red rays lit up the still redder surface of the little stranger. For three hundred years Enoch and Methuselah jogged along together in the capacity of father and son. Then Enoch was suddenly cut down. It was at this time that little Methuselah first realized what it was to be an orphan. He could not at first realize that his father was dead. He could not understand why Enoch, with no inherited disease, should be shuffled off at the age of three hundred and sixty-five years. But the doctor said to Methuselah: "My son, you are indeed fatherless. I have done all I could, but it is useless. I have told Enoch many a time that if he went in swimming before the ice went out of the creek it would finally down him, but he thought he knew better than I did. He was a headstrong man, Enoch was. He sneered at me and alluded to me as a fresh young gosling, because he was three hundred years older than I was. He has received the reward of the willful, and verily the doom of the smart Aleck is his."

Methuselah now cast about him for some occupation which would take up his attention and assuage his wild, passionate grief over the loss of his father. He entered into the walks of men and learned their ways. It was at this time that he learned the pernicious habit of using tobacco. We cannot wonder at it when we remember that he was now fatherless. He was at the mercy of the coarse, rough world. Possibly he learned the use of tobacco when he went away to attend business college after the death of his father. Be that as it may, the noxious weed certainly hastened his death, for six hundred years after this we find him a corpse!

Death is ever a surprise, even at the end of a long illness and after a ripe old age. To those who are near it seems abrupt; so to his grandchildren, some of whom survived him, his children having died of old age, the death of Methuselah came like a thunderbolt from a clear sky.

Methuselah succeeded in cording up more of a record, such as it was, than any other man of whom history informs us. Time, the tomb-builder and amateur mower, came and leaned over the front yard and looked at Methuselah, and ran his thumb over the jagged edge of his scythe, and went away whistling a low refrain. He kept up this refrain business for nearly ten centuries, while Methuselah continued to stand out amid the general wreck of men and nations.

Even as the young, strong mower going forth with his mower for to mow spareth the tall and drab hornet's nest and passeth by on the other side, so Time, with his Waterbury hour-glass and his overworked hay-knife over his shoulder, and his long Mormon whiskers, and his high sleek dome of thought with its gray lambrequin of hair around the base of it, mowed all around Methuselah and then passed on.

Methuselah decorated the graves of those who perished in a dozen different wars. He did not enlist himself, for over nine hundred years of his life he was exempt. He would go to the enlisting places and offer his services, and the officer would tell him to go home and encourage his grandchildren to go. Then Methuselah would sit around Noah's front steps, and smoke and criticise the conduct of the war, also the conduct of the enemy.

It is said of Methuselah that he never was the same man after his son Lamech died. He was greatly attached to Lamech, and, when he woke up one night to find his son purple in the face with membraneous croup, he could hardly realize that he might lose him. The idea of losing a boy who had just rounded the glorious morn of his 777th year had never occurred to him. But death loves a shining mark, and he garnered little Lammie and left Methuselah to mourn for a couple of centuries.

Methuselah finally got so that he couldn't sleep any later than 4 o'clock in the morning, and he didn't see how any one else could. The older he got, and the less valuable his time became, the earlier he would rise, so that he could get an early start. As the centuries filed slowly by, and Methuselah got to where all he had to do was to shuffle into his loose-fitting clothes and rest his gums on the top of a large slick-headed cane and mutter up the chimney, and then groan and extricate himself from his clothes again and retire, he rose earlier and earlier in the morning, and muttered more and more about the young folks sleeping away the best of the day, and he said he had no doubt that sleeping and snoring till breakfast time helped to carry off Lam. But one day old Father Time came along with a new scythe, and he drew the whetstone across it a few times, and rolled the sleeves of his red-flannel undergarment up over his warty elbows, and Mr. Methuselah passed on to that undiscovered country, with a ripe experience and a long clean record.

We can almost fancy how the physicians, who had disagreed about his case all the way through, came and insisted on a post-mortem examination to prove which was right and what was really the matter with him. We can imagine how people went by shaking their heads and regretting that Methuselah should have tampered with tobacco when he knew that it affected his heart.

But he is gone. He lived to see his own promissory notes rise, flourish, acquire interest, pine away at last and finally outlaw. He acquired a large farm in the very heart of the county-seat, and refused to move or to plot, and called it Methuselah's addition. He came out in spring regularly for nine hundred years after he got too old to work out his poll-tax on the road, and put in his time telling the rising generation how to make a good road. Meantime other old people, who were almost one hundred years of age, moved away and went West where they would attract attention and command respect. There was actually no pleasure in getting old around where Methuselah was, and being ordered about and scolded and kept in the background by him.

So when at last he died, people sighed and said: "Well, it was better for him to die before he got childish. It was best that he should die at a time when he knew it all. We can't help thinking what an acquisition Methuselah will be on the evergreen shore when he gets there, with all his ripe experience and his habits of early rising."

And the next morning after the funeral Methuselah's family did not get out of bed till nearly 9 o'clock.

A Black Hills Episode

 
A little, warty, dried-up sort
O' lookin' chap 'at hadn't ort
A ben a-usin' round no bar,
With gents like us a-drinkin' thar!
 
 
And that idee occurred to me
The livin' minit 'at I see
The little cuss elbowin' in
To humor his besettin' sin.
 
 
There 're nothin' small in me at all,
But when I heer the rooster call
For shugar and a spoon, I says:
"Jest got in from the States, I guess."
 
 
He never 'peared as if he heerd,
But stood thar, wipin' uv his beard,
And smilin' to hisself as if
I'd been a-givin' him a stiff.
 
 
And I-says-I, a edgin' by
The bantam, and a-gazin' high
Above his plug – says I: "I knowed
A little feller onc't 'at blowed
Around like you, and tuck his drinks
With shugar in – and his folks thinks
He's dead now – 'cause we boxed and sent
The scraps back to the Settlement!"
 
 
The boys tells me, 'at got to see
His modus operandum, he
Jest 'peared to come onjointed-like
Afore he ever struck a strike!
 
 
And I'll admit, the way he fit
Wuz dazzlin' – what I see uv hit;
And squarin' things up fair and fine,
Says I: "A little 'shug' in mine!"
 

The Rossville Lecture Course

Rossville, Mich., March, '87

 
Folks up here at Rossville got up a lectur'-course;
All the leadin' citizens they wus out in force;
Met and talked at Williamses, and 'greed to meet agin,
And helt another corkus when the next reports wuz in;
Met agin at Samuelses; and met agin at Moore's,
And Johnts he put the shutters up and jest barred the doors! —
And yit, I'll jest be dagg-don'd! ef didn't take a week
'Fore we'd settled where to write to git a man to speak!
 
 
Found out where the Bureau wus, and then and there agreed
To strike while the iron's hot, and foller up the lead.
Simp was secatary; so he tuck his pen in hand,
And ast what they'd tax us for the one on "Holy Land" —
"One of Colonel J. De-Koombs Abelust and Best
Lecturs," the circ'lar stated, "Give East er West!"
Wanted fifty dollars, and his kyar-fare to and from,
And Simp was hence instructed fer to write him not to come.
Then we talked and jawed around another week er so,
And writ the Bureau 'bout the town a-bein' sort o' slow
And fogey-like, and pore as dirt, and lackin' enterprise,
And ignornter'n any other 'cordin' to its size:
Till finally the Bureau said they'd send a cheaper man
Fer forty dollars, who would give "A Talk about Japan" —
"A regular Japanee hiss'f," the pamphlet claimed; and so,
Nobody knowed his languige, and of course we let him go!
 
 
Kindo' then let up a spell – but rallied onc't ag'in,
And writ to price a feller on what's called the "violin" —
A Swede, er Pole, er somepin – but no matter what he wus,
Doc Sifers said he'd heerd him, and he wusn't wuth a kuss!
And then we ast fer Swingses terms; and Cook, and Ingersoll —
And blame! ef forty dollars looked like anything at all!
And then Burdette, we tried fer him; and Bob he writ to say
He wus busy writin' ortographts, and couldn't git away.
 
 
At last – along in Aprile – we signed to take this-here
Bill Nye of Californy, 'at was posted to appear
"The Humorestest Funny Man 'at Ever Jammed a Hall!"
So we made big preparations, and swep' out the church and all!
And night he wus to lectur', and the neighbors all was there,
And strangers packed along the aisles 'at come from ever'where,
Committee got a telegrapht the preacher read, 'at run —
"Got off at Rossville, Indiany, stead of Michigun."
 

The Tar-heel Cow

Asheville, N. C., December 9. – There is no place in the United States, so far as I know, where the cow is more versatile or ambidextrous, if I may be allowed the use of a term that is far above my station in life, than here in the mountains of North Carolina, where the obese 'possum and the anonymous distiller have their homes.

Not only is the Tar-heel cow the author of a pale but athletic style of butter, but in her leisure hours she aids in tilling the perpendicular farm on the hillside, or draws the products to market. In this way she contrives to put in her time to the best advantage, and when she dies, it casts a gloom over the community in which she has resided.

The life of a North Carolina cow is indeed fraught with various changes and saturated with a zeal which is praiseworthy in the extreme. From the sunny days when she gambols through the beautiful valleys, inserting her black retrousse and perspiration-dotted nose into the blue grass from ear to ear, until at life's close, when every part and portion of her overworked system is turned into food, raiment or overcoat buttons, the life of a Tar-heel cow is one of intense activity.

Her girlhood is short, and almost before we have deemed her emancipated from calfhood herself we find her in the capacity of a mother. With the cares of maternity other demands are quickly made upon her. She is obliged to ostracize herself from society, and enter into the prosaic details of producing small, pallid globules of butter, the very pallor of which so thoroughly belies its lusty strength.

The butter she turns out rapidly until it begins to be worth something, when she suddenly suspends publication and begins to haul wood to market. In this great work she is assisted by the pearl-gray or ecru colored jackass of the tepid South. This animal has been referred to in the newspapers throughout the country, and yet he never ceases to be an object of the greatest interest.

Jackasses in the South are of two kinds, viz., male and female. Much as has been said of the jackass pro and con, I do not remember ever to have seen the above statement in print before, and yet it is as trite as it is incontrovertible. In the Rocky mountains we call this animal the burro. There he packs bacon, flour and salt to the miners. The miners eat the bacon and flour, and with the salt they are enabled successfully to salt the mines.

The burro has a low, contralto voice which ought to have some machine oil on it. The voice of this animal is not unpleasant if he would pull some of the pathos out of it and make it more joyous.

Here the jackass at times becomes a co-worker with the cow in hauling tobacco and other necessaries of life into town, but he goes no further in the matter of assistance. He compels her to tread the cheese press alone and contributes nothing whatever in the way of assistance for the butter industry.

The North Carolina cow is frequently seen here driven double or single by means of a small rope line attached to a tall, emaciated gentleman, who is generally clothed with the divine right of suffrage, to which he adds a small pair of ear-bobbs during the holidays.

The cow is attached to each shaft and a small single-tree, or swingletree, by means of a broad strap harness. She also wears a breeching, in which respect she frequently has the advantage of her escort.

I think I have never witnessed a sadder sight than that of a new milch cow, torn away from home and friends and kindred dear, descending a steep, mountain road at a rapid rate and striving in her poor, weak manner to keep out of the way of a small Jackson Democratic wagon loaded with a big hogshead full of tobacco. It seems to me so totally foreign to the nature of the cow to enter into the tobacco traffic, a line of business for which she can have no sympathy and in which she certainly can feel very little interest.

Tobacco of the very finest kind is produced here, and is used mainly for smoking purposes. It is the highest-price tobacco produced in this country. A tobacco broker here yesterday showed me a large quantity of what he called export tobacco. It looks very much like other tobacco while growing.

He says that foreigners use a great deal of this kind. I am learning all about the tobacco industry while here, and as fast as I get hold of any new facts I will communicate them to the press. The newspapers of this country have done much for me, not only by publishing many pleasant things about me, but by refraining from publishing other things about me, and so I am glad to be able, now and then, to repay this kindness by furnishing information and facts for which I have no use myself, but which may be of incalculable value to the press.

As I write these lines I am informed that the snow is twenty-six inches deep here and four feet deep at High Point in this State. People who did not bring in their pomegranates last evening are bitterly bewailing their thoughtlessness to-day.

A great many people come here from various parts of the world, for the climate. When they have remained here for one winter, however, they decide to leave it where it is.

It is said that the climate here is very much like that of Turin. But I did not intend to go to Turin even before I heard about that.

Please send my paper to the same address, and if some one who knows a good remedy for chilblains will contribute it to these columns, I shall watch for it with great interest.

Yours as here 2 4,

Bill Nye.

P. S. – I should have said, relative to the cow of this State, that if the owners would work their butter more and their cows less they would confer a great boon on the consumer of both.

B. N.