Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) by Nye and Riley (read book .TXT) đź“•
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- Author: Nye and Riley
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[Pg 16]
[Pg 17]
Last week I visited my birthplace in the State of Maine. I waited thirty years for the public to visit it, and as there didn't seem to be much of a rush this spring, I thought I would go and visit it myself. I was telling a friend the other day that the public did not seem to manifest the interest in my birthplace that I thought it ought to, and he said I ought not to mind that. "Just wait," said he, "till the people of the United States have an opportunity to visit your tomb, and you will be surprised to see how they will run excursion trains up there to Moosehead lake, or wherever you plant yourself. It will be a perfect picnic. Your hold on the American people, William, is wonderful, but your death would seem to assure it, and kind of crystallize the affection now existing, but still in a nebulous and gummy state."[Pg 18]
A man ought not to criticise his birthplace, I presume, and yet, if I were to do it all over again, I do not know whether I would select that particular spot or not. Sometimes I think I would not. And yet, what memories cluster about that old house! There was the place where I first met my parents. It was at that time that an acquaintance sprang up which has ripened in later years into mutual respect and esteem. It was there that what might be termed a casual meeting took place, that has, under the alchemy of resist-less years, turned to golden links, forming a pleasant but powerful bond of union between my parents and myself. For that reason, I hope that I may be spared to my parents for many years to come.
Many memories now cluster about that old home, as I have said. There is, also, other bric-a-brac which has accumulated since I was born there. I took a small stone from the front yard as a kind of memento of the occasion and the place. I do not think it has been detected yet. There was another stone in the yard, so it may be weeks before any one finds out that I took one of them.
How humble the home, and yet what a lesson it should teach the boys of America! Here, amid the barren and inhospitable waste of rocks and cold, the last place in the world that a great man would naturally select to be born in, began the life of one who, by his own unaided effort, in after years rose to the proud height of postmaster at Laramie City, Wy. T., and with an estimate of the future that seemed almost prophetic, resigned before he could be characterized as an offensive partisan.
Here on the banks of the raging Piscataquis, where[Pg 19] winter lingers in the lap of spring till it occasions a good deal of talk, there began a career which has been the wonder and admiration of every vigilance committee west of the turbulent Missouri.
There on that spot, with no inheritance but a predisposition to baldness and a bitter hatred of rum; with no personal property but a misfit suspender and a stone-bruise, began a life history which has never ceased to be a warning to people who have sold goods on credit.
It should teach the youth of our great broad land what glorious possibilities may lie concealed in the rough and tough bosom of the reluctant present. It shows how steady perseverance and a good appetite will always win in the end. It teaches us that wealth is not indispensable, and that if we live as we should, draw out of politics at the proper time, and die a few days before the public absolutely demand it, the matter of our birthplace will not be considered.
Still, my birthplace is all right as a birthplace. It was a good, quiet place in which to be born. All the old neighbors said that Shirley was a very quiet place up to the time I was born there, and when I took my parents by the hand and gently led them away in the spring of '53, saying, "Parents, this is no place for us," it again became quiet.
It is the only birthplace I have, however, and I hope that all the readers of this sketch will feel perfectly free to go there any time and visit it and carry their dinner as I did. Extravagant cordiality and overflowing hospitality have always kept my birthplace back.[Pg 20]
Never talk back! sich things is ripperhensible;
feller only "corks" hisse'f that jaws a man that's hot;
In a quarrel, of you'll only keep your mouth shet and act sensible,
The man that does the talkin'll git worsted every shot!
Never talk back to a feller that's abusin' you—
Jest let him carry on, and rip, and cuss and swear;
And when he finds his lyin' and his dammin's jest amusin' you,
You've gut him clean kaflummixed, and you want to hold him there!
Never talk back, and wake up the whole community,
And call a man a liar, over law, or Politics,—
You can lift and land him furder and with gracefuller impunity
With one good jolt of silence than a half a dozen kicks!
[Pg 21]
"Ki-yi!" said Mr. Squincher,
As in contemplative pose,
He stood before the looking-glass
And burnished up his nose,
And brushed the dandruff from a span-
Spick-splinter suit of clothes,—
"Why, bless you, Mr. Squincher,
You're as handsome as a rose!"
"There are some," continued Squincher,
As he raised upon his toes
To catch his full reflection,
And the fascinating bows
That graced his legs,—"I reckon
There are some folks never knows
How beautiful is human legs
[Pg 22]In pantaloons like those!"
"But ah!" sighed Mr. Squincher,
As a ghastly phantom 'rose
And leered above his shoulder
Like the deadliest of foes,—
With fleshless arms and fingers,
And a skull, with glistening rows
Of teeth that crunched and gritted,—
"It's my tailor, I suppose!"
They found him in the morning—
So the mystic legend goes—
With the placid face still smiling
In its statuesque repose;—
With a lily in his left hand,
And in his right a rose,
With their fragrance curling upward
Through a nimbus 'round his nose.
[Pg 23]
Facial Neuralgia is what is keeping Jay Gould back this summer and preventing him from making as much money as he would otherwise. With good health and his present methods of doing business Mr. Gould could in a few years be beyond the reach of want, but he is up so much nights with his face that he has to keep one gas-jet burning all the time. Besides he has cabled once to Dr. Brown-Sequard for a neuralgia pill that he thought would relieve the intense pain, and found after he had paid for the cablegram that every druggist in New York kept the Brown-Sequard pill in stock. But when a man is ill he does not care for expense, especially when he controls an Atlantic cable or two.
This neuralgia pill is about the size of a two-year-old colt and pure white. I have been compelled to take several of them myself while suffering from facial neuralgia; for neuralgia does not spare the good, the[Pg 24] true or the beautiful. She comes along and nips the poor yeoman as well as the millionaire who sits in the lap of luxury. Millionaires who flatter themselves that they can evade neuralgia by going and sitting in the lap of luxury make a great mistake.
"And do you find that this large porcelain pill relieves you at all, Mr. Gould?" I asked him during one of these attacks, as he sat in his studio with his face tied up in hot bran.
"No, it does me no good whatever," said the man who likes to take a lame railroad and put it on its feet by issuing more bonds. "It contains a little morphine, which dulls the pain but there's nothing in the pill to cure the cause. My neuralgia comes from indigestion. My appetite is four sizes too large for a man of my height, and every little while I overeat. I then get dangerously ill and stocks become greatly depressed in consequence. I am now in a position where, if I had a constitution that would stand the strain, I could get well off in a few years, but I am not strong enough. Every little change in the weather affects me. I see a red-headed girl on the street and immediately afterwards I see one of these big white pills."
"Are you sure, Mr. Gould," I asked him with some solicitude, as I bent forward and inhaled the rich fragrance of the carnation in his button-hole, "that you have not taken cold in some way?"
"Possibly I have," he said, as he shrank back in a petulant way, I thought. "Last week I got my feet a little damp while playing the hose on some of my stocks, but I hardly think that was what caused the trouble. I am apt to overeat, as I said. I am especially fond of fruit, too. When I was a boy I had no[Pg 25] trouble, because I always divided my fruit with another boy, of whom I was very fond. I would always divide my fruit in two equal parts, keeping one of these and eating the other myself. Many and many a time when this boy and I went out together and only had one wormy apple between us, I have divided it and given him the worm.
"As a boy, I was taught to believe that half is always better than the hole."
"And are you not afraid that this neuralgia after it has picnicked around among your features may fly to your vitals?"
"Possibly so," said Mr. Gould, snapping the hunting[Pg 26] case of his massive silver watch with a loud report, "but I am guarding against this by keeping my pocketbook wrapped up all the time in an old red flannel shirt."
Here Mr. Gould arose and went out of the room for a long time, and I could hear him pacing up and down outside, stopping now and then to peer through the keyhole to see if I had gone away.
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