Bill Nye's Cordwood by Bill Nye (top young adult novels .TXT) π
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- Author: Bill Nye
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"You are indeed a brave lad," exclaimed the stranger, as he repressed a smile. "And do you not at times become very weary and wish for other ways of passing your time?"
"Indeed I do, sir," said the lad. "I would fain run and romp and be gay like other boys, but I must engage in constant manual exercise, or we will have no bread to eat and I have not seen a pie since papa perished in the moist and moaning sea."
SAVED FROM A HURRIED GRAVE.
"And what if I were to tell you that your papa did not perish at sea, but was saved from a hurried grave?" asked the stranger in pleasing tones.
"Ah, sir," exclaimed George, in a genteel manner, again doffing his cap. "I'm too polite to tell you what I would say, and beside, sir, you are much larger than I am."
"But, my brave lad," said the man in low musi[Pg 45]cal tones, "do you not know me, Georgie. Oh, George!"
"I must say," replied George, "that you have the advantage of me. Whilst I may have met you before, I can not at this moment place you, sir."
"My son! oh, my son!" murmured the man, at the same time taking a large strawberry mark out of the valise and showing it to the lad. "Do you not recognize your parent on your father's side? When our good ship went to the bottom, all perished save me. I swam several miles through the billows, and at last, utterly exhausted, gave up all hope of life. Suddenly a bright idea came to me and I walked out of the sea and rested myself.
"And now, my brave boy," exclaimed the man with great glee, "see what I have brought for you." It was but the work of a moment to unclasp from a shawl strap, which he held in his hand, and present to George's astonished gaze, a large 40 cent watermelon, which he had brought with him from the Orient.
"Ah," said George, "this is indeed a glad surprise. Albeit, how can I ever repay you?"βBill Nye in Boston Globe.[Pg 46]
SURPRISE EXPRESSED THAT THE PRESIDENT SHOULD TAKE A MOTHER-IN-LAW INTO HIS CABINET AND ADD HOUSEKEEPING TO HIS OTHER AGONY.
Hudson, Wis., June 3, 1886.
The Hon. Grover Cleveland, Washington, D. C.:
My Dear Sir: You have now assumed a new duty and taken upon yourself an additional responsibility. Not content with the great weight of national affairs, sufficient to crush any other pachyderm, you have cheerfully and almost gleefully become a married man. While I cannot agree with you politically, Grover, I am forced to admire your courage.
This morning a new life opens out to youβthe life of a married man. It is indeed a humiliating situation. To be a president of the United States, the roustabout of a free people, is a trying situa[Pg 47]tion; but to be a newly married president, married in the full glare of official life, with the eye of a divided constituency upon you, is to place yourself where nerve is absolutely essential.
I, too, am married, but not under such trying circumstances. Others have been married and still lived, but it has remained for you, Mr. President, young as you are, to pose as a newly wedded president and to take your new mother-in-law into the cabinet with you. For this reason, I say freely that to walk a slack rope across the moist brow of Niagara and carry a nervous man in a wheelbarrow sinks into a mere commonplace. Daniel playing "tag" with a denful of half-starved lions becomes a historic cipher, and the Hebrew children, sitting on a rosy bed of red-hot clinkers in the fiery furnace, are almost forgotten.
With a large wad of civil service wedged in among your back teeth, a larger fragment, perhaps, than you were prepared to masticate when you bit it off; with an agonized southern democracy and a clamorous northern constituency; with disappointment poorly concealed among your friends and hilarity openly expressed by your enemies; with the snarl of the vanquished Mr. Davis, who was at one time a sort of president himself, as he rolls up future majorities for your foes; with a lot of sharp-witted journalists walking all over you every twen[Pg 48]ty-four hours and climbing up your stalwart frame with their telegraph repair boots on, I am surprised, Grover, honestly, as between man and man, that you should have tried to add housekeeping to all this other agony. Had you been young and tender under the wings I might have understood it, but you must admit, in the quiet and sanctity of your own home, Grover, that you are no gosling. You have arrived at man's estate. You have climbed the barbed-wire fence which separates the fluff and bloom and blossom and bumble-bees of impetuous youth from the yellow fields and shadowy orchards of middle life. You now stand in the full glare of life's meridian. You are entering upon a new experience. Possibly you think that because you are president the annoyances peculiar to the life of a new, green groom will not reach you. Do not fool yourself in this manner. Others have made the same mistake. Position, wealth and fame cannot shut out the awkward and trying circumstances which attend the married man even as the sparks are prone to fly upward.
It will seem odd to you at first, Mr. President, after the affairs of the nation have been put aside for the day and the government fire proof safe locked up for the night, to go up to your boudoir and converse with a bride, with one corner of her mouth full of pins. A man may write a pretty fair mes[Pg 49]sage to congress, one that will be accepted and printed all over the country, and yet he may not be fitted to hold a conversation with one corner of a woman's mouth while the other is filled with pins. To some men it is given to be great as statesmen, while to others it is given to be fluent conversationalists under these circumstances.
Mr. President, I may be taking a great liberty in writing to you and touching upon your private affairs, but I noticed that everybody else was doing it and so I have nerved myself up to write you, having once been a married man myself, though not, as I said, under the same circumstances. When I was married I was only a plain justice of the peace, plodding quietly along and striving to do my duty. You was then sheriff of your county. Little did we think in those days that now you would be a freshly married president and I the author of several pieces which have been printed in the papers. Little did we think then, when I was a justice of the peace in Wyoming and you a sheriff in New York, that to-day your timothy lawn would be kicked all to pieces by your admiring constituents, while I would be known and loved wherever the English language is tampered with.
So we have risen together, you to a point from which you may be easily observed and flayed alive by the newspapers, while I am the same pleasant,[Pg 50] unassuming, gentlemanly friend of the poor that I was when only a justice of the peace and comparatively unknown.
I cannot close this letter without expressing a wish that your married life may be a joyous one, as the paper at Laramie has said, "and that no cloud may ever come to mar the horizon of your wedded bliss." (This sentence is not my own. I copy it verbatim from a wedding notice of my own written by a western journalist who is now at the Old Woman's Home.)
Mr. President, I hope you will not feel that I have been too forward in writing to you personally over my own name. I mean to do what is best for you. You can truly say that all I have ever done in this way has been for your good. I speak in a plain way sometimes, but I don't beat about the bush. I see that you do not want to have any engrossed bills sent to you for a couple of weeks.
That's the way I was. I told all my creditors to withhold their engrossed bills during my honeymoon, as I was otherwise engrossed. This remark made me a great many friends and added to my large circle of creditors. It was afterward printed in a foreign paper and explained in a supplement of eight pages.
We are all pretty well here at home. I may go to Washington this fall if I can sell a block of stock[Pg 51] in the Pauper's Dream, a rich gold claim of mine on Elk mountain. It is a very rich claim, but needs capital to develop it. (This remark is not original with me. I quote from an exchange.)
If I do come over to Washington do not let that make any difference in your plans. If I thought your wife would send out to the neighbors and borrow dishes and such things on my account I would not go a step.
Just stick your head out of the window and whistle as soon as the cabinet is gone and I will come up there and spend the evening.
Remember that I have not grown cold toward you just because you have married. You will find me the kind of a friend who will not desert you just when you are in trouble. Yours, as heretofore,
Bill Nye.
P. S.βI send you to-day a card-receiver. It looks like silver. Do not let your wife bear on too hard when she polishes it. I was afraid you might try to start into keeping house without a card-receiver, so I bought this yesterday. When I got married I forgot to buy a card-receiver, and I guess we would have frozen to death before we could have purchased one, but friends were more thoughtful, and there were nine of them among the gifts. If you decide that it would not be proper for you to receive presents, you may return the card re[Pg 52]ceiver to me, or put it in the cellar-way till I come over there this fall.
B. N.
[Pg 53]
No Doubt as to His Condition.HarryβI hear that you have lost your father. Allow me to express my sympathy.
Jack (with a sigh)βThank you. Yes, he has gone; but the event was expected for a long time, and the blow was consequently less severe than if it had not been looked for.
H.βHis property was large?
J.βYes; something like a quarter of a million.
H.βI heard that his intellect, owing to his illness, was somewhat feeble during his latter years. Is there any probability of the will being contested?
J.βNo; father was quite sane when he made his will. He left everything to me.
Cyclones.We were riding along on the bounding train yesterday, and some one spoke of the free and democratic way that people in this country got acquainted with each other while traveling. Then we got to talking about railway sociability and railway etiquette, when a young man from East[Pg 54] Jasper, who had wildly jumped and grabbed his valise every time the train hesitated, said that it was queer what railway travel would do in the way of throwing people together. He said that in Nebraska once he and a large, corpulent gentleman, both total strangers, were thrown together while trying to jump a washout, and an intimacy sprang up between them that had ripened into open hostility.
From that we got to talking about natural phenomena and storms. I spoke of the cyclone with some feeling and a little bitterness, perhaps, briefly telling my own experience, and making the storm as loud and wet and violent as possible.
Then a gentleman from Kansas, named George L. Murdock, an old cattleman, was telling of a cyclone that came across his range two years ago last September. The sky was clear to begin with, and then all at once, as Mr. Murdock states, a little cloud no larger than a man's hand might have been seen. It moved toward the southwest gently, with its hands in its pockets for a few moments, and then Mr. Murdock discovered that it was of
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