Bill Nye's Cordwood by Bill Nye (top young adult novels .TXT) 📕

Asheville has splendid water works supplying first-class water to those who wish to use this popular fluid; electric lights all over the city, a street railway organized with its money put up to construct it next summer, first-class churches, schools and colleges, well supplied markets with moderate prices, and lots of genuine attractions beside the climate. Fuel and whiskey are about the same that they are in Chicago, so a man need not suffer here provided he has a moderate income.

The sportsman may sport here with impunity, and the angler may also triangular relaxation.

Moonshine whisky is also produced here in the mountains, though in a crude way, and very quietly. None of the moonshiners advertise much in the papers. They do not care for a big run of trade, but seem content to remain in obscurity. Sometimes, however, their work attracts the attention of prominent people who come out and call on them with shot-guns and regrets.

Then the moonshiner does his distillery up in a napkin and goes away into the primeval forest. Some years ago a party of revenue officers hunted out one of these amateur distillers and chased him up the side of the mountain, where they surrounded and captured him with his distillery on his back,[Pg 157] like a Babcock fire-extinguisher, and still warm.

The officer, in his report of the capture, referred to it as a still hunt, whereupon his commission was promptly revoked. The man who tries to have any fun with the present Administration must have his resignation where he can put his hand on it at a moment's warning.

BILL NYE POLITELY REFUSES THE JOB OF KING OF BULGARIA.

HE GIVES HIS REASONS FOR THE DECLINATION AND THROWS IN CHUNKS OF HEAVY-WEIGHT ADVICE—ADVISABILITY OF FORMING A ROYAL TRADES-UNION.

Bill Nye has furnished to the World the following copy of a cable dispatch just forwarded to the Allied Powers of Europe:

Slipperyelmhurst, Hudson, Wis.—To the Allied Powers, care of Lord Salisbury. Gentlemen: Your favor of recent date regarding my acceptance of the Bulgarian throne, which is now vacant and for rent, in which note you tender me the use of said throne for one year, with the privilege of three, is at hand. You also state that the Allied Powers are not favorable to Prince Nicholas and that you would prefer a dark horse. Looking over the entire[Pg 158] list of obscure men, it would seem you have been unable to fix upon a man who has made a better showing in this line than I have.

While I thank you for this kind offer of a throne that has, as you state, been newly refitted and refurnished throughout, I must decline it for reasons which I will try to give in my own rough, unpolished way.

In the first place I read in the dispatches to-day that Russia is mobilizing her troops, and I do not want anything to do with a country that will treat its soldiers in that way. Troops have certain rights as well as those who have sought the pleasanter walks of peace.

That is not all. I do not care to enter into a squabble in which I am not interested. Neither do I care to go to Bulgaria in the capacity of a carpet-bag monarch from the ten-cent counter, wearing a boiler-iron overcoat by day and a stab-proof corset at night. I have always been in favor of Bulgaria's selection of a monarch viva voce or vox populi, whichever you think would look the best in print.

I hate to see a monarch in hot water all the time and threatening to abdicate. Supposing he does abdicate, what good will that do, when he leaves a widow with nothing but a second-hand throne and a crown two sizes too small for his successor? I[Pg 159] have always said, and I still say, that nothing can be more pitiful than the sight of a lovely queen whose husband, in a wild frenzy of remorse, has abdicated himself.

Nothing, I repeat, can be sadder than this picture of a deserted queen, left high and dry, without means, forced at last to go to the pawnbrokers with a little plated, fluted crown with rabbit-skin ear-tabs on it!

We are prone to believe that a monarch has nothing to do but issue a ukase or a mandamus and that he will then have all the funds he wants; but such is not the case. Lots of our most successful monarchs are liable to be overtaken any year by a long, cold winter and found as late as Christmas reigning in their summer scepters.

I am inclined also to hesitate about accepting the Bulgarian throne for another reason—I do not care to be deposed when I want to do something else. I have had my deposition taken several times and it did not look like me either time.

I think that you monarchs ought to stand by each other more. If you would form a society of free and independent monarchs there in Europe, where you are so plenty, you could have a good time and every little while you could raise your salaries if you worked it right.

Now you pull and haul each other all the time[Pg 160] and keep yourselves in hot water day and night. That's no way for a dynasty any more than any one else. It impairs your usefulness and fills our telegraphic columns full of names that we can not pronounce. Every little while we have to pay the operator at this end of the cable ten dollars for writing in a rapid, flowing hand that "meanwhile Russia will continue to disregard the acts of the Sobranje."

Why should a great country like Russia go about trying to make trouble with a low-priced Sobranje! I think that a closer alliance of crowned heads, whose interests are identical, would certainly relieve the monotony of many a long, tedious reign. If I were to accept the throne of Bulgaria, which is not likely, so long as my good right arm can still jerk a fluent cross-cut saw in the English tongue, I would form a syndicate of monarchs with grips, pass-words, explanations and signals; every scepter would have a contralto whistle in the butt end which could be used as a sign of distress, while the other end could have a cork in it, and then steering a tottering dynasty down through the dim vista of crumbling centuries would not be so irksome as it now is.

As it is now, three or four allied powers ask a man to leave his business and squat on a cold, hard throne for a mere pittance, and then just as he[Pg 161] begins to let his whiskers grow and learns to dodge a big porcelain bomb those same allied powers jump on top of him all spraddled out and ask him for his deposition. That is no way to treat an amateur monarch who is trying to do right.

You can see that unless you stand by each other the thrones of Europe will soon be empty, and every two-dollar a day hotel in America will have an heir apparently to the throne for a head-waiter, with a coronet put on his clothes with a rubber stamp and a loaded scepter up his sleeve.

If you want to rear your children to love and respect the monarchy industry you must afford them better protection. I say this as a man who may not live to be over one hundred years of age, and with my feet thus settling into the boggy shores of time let me beg of you, monarchs and monarchesses, to make your calling an honorable one. Teach your children and their children to respect the business by which their parents earned their bread. Show them it is honorable to empire a country if they do it right. Teach them that to do right is better than to fraudulently turn a jack from the bottom of the pack. Teach them it is better to be a popular straight out-and-out artisan king who is sincere about it than to be a monarch who dares not leave his throne night or day for fear that somebody will put a number of bombs under it or criticise him in the papers.