Chapter 7

It was this young man from Ohio, named Williams, that you hazed last year, or at least that's what I gether from a letter sent me by your warden. He maintains that you started in to mix Mr. Williams up with the campus in some way, and that in some way Mr. Williams resented it and got his fangs tangled up in the bridge of your nose.

You never wrote this to me or to your mother, but I know how busy you are with your studies, and I hope you won't ever neglect your books just to write to us.

Your warden, or whoever he is, said that Mr. Williams also hung a hand-painted marine view over your eye and put an extra eyelid on one of your ears.

I wish that, if you get time, you would write us about it, because, if there's anything I can do for you in the arnica line, I would be pleased to do so.

The president also says that in the scuffle you and Mr. Williams swapped belts as follows, to-wit: That Williams snatched off the belt of your little Norfolk jacket, and then gave you one in the eye.

From this I gether that the old prez, as you faseshusly call him, is an youmorist. He is not a very good penman, however; though, so far, his words have all been spelled correct.

I would hate to see you permanently injured, Henry, but I hope that when you try to tramp on the toes of a good boy simply because you are a seanyour and he is a fresh, as you frequently state, that he will arise and rip your little pleated jacket up the back and make your spinal colyum look like a corderoy bridge in the spring tra la. (This is from a Japan show I was to last week.)

Why should a seanyour in a colledge tromp onto the young chaps that come in there to learn? Have you forgot how I fatted up the old cow and beefed her so that you could go and monkey with youclid and algebray? Have you forgot how the other boys pulled you through a mill pond and made you tobogin down hill in a salt barrel with brads in it? Do you remember how your mother went down there to nuss you for two weeks and I stayed to home, and done my own work and the housework too and cooked my own vittles for the whole two weeks?

And now, Henry, you call yourself a seanyour, and therefore, because you are simply older in crime, you want to muss up Mr. Williams's features so that his mother will have to come over and nuss him. I am glad that your little pleated coat is ripped up the back, Henry, under the circumstances, and I am also glad that you are wearing the belt--over your off eye. If there's anything I can do to add to the hilarity of the occasion, please let me know and I will tend to it.

The lop-horned heifer is a parent once more, and I am trying in my poor, weak way to learn her wayward offspring how to drink out of a patent pail without pushing your old father over into the hay-mow. He is a cute little quadruped, with a wild desire to have fun at my expense. He loves to swaller a part of my coat-tail Sunday morning, when I am dressed up, and then return it to me in a moist condition. He seems to know that when I address the sabbath school the children will see the joke and enjoy it.

Your mother is about the same, trying in her meek way to adjust herself to a new set of teeth that are a size too large for her. She has one large bunion in the roof of her mouth already, but is still resolved to hold out faithful, and hopes these few lines will find you enjoying the same great blessing.

You will find inclosed a dark-blue money-order for four eighty-five. It is money that I had set aside to pay my taxes, but there is no novelty about paying taxes. I've done that before, so it don't thrill me as it used to.

Give my congratulations to Mr. Williams. He has got the elements of greatness to a wonderful degree. If I happened to be participating in that colledge of yours, I would gently but firmly decline to be tromped onto.

So good-bye for this time.

Your Father.

Eccentricity in Lunch.

Over at Kasota Junction, the other day, I found a living curiosity. He was a man of about medium height, perhaps 45 years of age, of a quiet disposition, and not noticeable or peculiar in his general manner. He runs the railroad eating-house at that point, and the one odd characteristic which he has, makes him well known all through three or four States. I could not illustrate his eccentricity any better than by relating a circumstance that occurred to me at the Junction last week. I had just eaten breakfast there and paid for it. I stepped up to the cigar case and asked this man if he had “a rattling good cigar.”

Without knowing it I had struck the very point upon which this man seems to be a crank, if you will allow me that expression, though it doesn't fit very well in this place. He looked at me in a sad and subdued manner and said, “No, sir; I haven't a rattling good cigar in the house. I have some cigars there that I bought for Havana fillers, but they are mostly filled with pieces of Colorado Maduro overalls. There's a box over yonder that I bought for good, straight ten cent cigars, but they are only a chaos of hay and Flora, Fino and Damfino, all socked into a Wisconsin wrapper. Over in the other end of the case is a brand of cigars that were to knock the tar out of all other kinds of weeds, according to the urbane rustler who sold them to me, and then drew on me before I could light one of them. Well, instead of being a fine Colorado Claro with a high-priced wrapper, they are common Mexicano stinkaros in a Mother Hubbard wrapper. The commercial tourist who sold me those cigars and then drew on me at sight was a good deal better on the draw than his cigars are. If you will notice, you will see that each cigar has a spinal column to it, and this outer debris is wrapped around it. One man bought a cigar out of that box last week. I told him, though, just as I am telling you, that they were no good, and if he bought one he would regret it. But he took one and went out on the veranda to smoke it. Then he stepped on a melon rind and fell with great force on his side. When we picked him up he gasped once or twice and expired. We opened his vest hurriedly and found that, in falling, this bouquet de Gluefactoro cigar, with the spinal column, had been driven through his breast bone and had penetrated his heart. The wrapper of the cigar never so much as cracked.”

“But doesn't it impair your trade to run on in this wild, reckless way about your cigars?”

“It may at first, but not after awhile. I always tell people what my cigars are made of, and then they can't blame me; so, after awhile they get to believe what I say about them. I often wonder that no cigar man ever tried this way before. I do just the same way about my lunch counter. If a man steps up and wants a fresh ham sandwich I give it to him if I've got it, and if I haven't it I tell him so. If you turn my sandwiches over, you will find the date of its publication on every one. If they are not fresh, and I have no fresh ones, I tell the customer that they are not so blamed fresh as the young man with the gauze moustache, but that I can remember very well when they were fresh, and if his artificial teeth fit him pretty well he can try one.

“It's just the same with boiled eggs. I have a rubber dating stamp, and as soon as the eggs are turned over to me by the hen for inspection, I date them. Then they are boiled and another date in red is stamped on them. If one of my clerks should date an egg ahead, I would fire him too quick.

“On this account, people who know me will skip a meal at Missouri Junction, in order to come here and eat things that are not clouded with mystery. I do not keep any poor stuff when I can help it, but if I do, I don't conceal the horrible fact.

“Of course a new cook will sometimes smuggle a late date onto a mediaeval egg and sell it, but he has to change his name and flee.

“I suppose that if every eating-house should date everything, and be square with the public, it would be an old story and wouldn't pay; but as it is, no one trying to compete with me, I do well out of it, and people come here out of curiosity a good deal.

“The reason I try to do right and win the public esteem is that the general public never did me any harm and the majority of people who travel are a kind that I may meet in a future state. I should hate to have a thousand traveling men holding nuggets of rancid ham sandwiches under my nose through all eternity, and know that I had lied about it. It's an honest fact, if I knew I'd got to stand up and apologize for my hand-made, all-around, seamless pies, and quarantine cigars, Heaven would be no object.”

Insomnia in Domestic Animals.

If there be one thing above another that I revel in, it is science. I have devoted much of my life to scientific research, and though it hasn't made much stir in the scientific world so far, I am positive that when I am gone the scientists of our day will miss me, and the red-nosed theorist will come and shed the scalding tear over my humble tomb.

My attention was first attracted to insomnia as the foe of the domestic animal, by the strange appearance of a favorite dog named Lucretia Borgia. I did not name this animal Lucretia Borgia. He was named when I purchased him. In his eccentric and abnormal thirst for blood he favored Lucretia, but in sex he did not. I got him partly because he loved children. The owner said Lucretia Borgia was an ardent lover of children, and I found that he was. He seemed to love them best in the spring of the year, when they were tender. He would have eaten up a favorite child of mine, if the youngster hadn't left a rubber ball in his pocket which clogged the glottis of Lucretia till I could get there and disengage what was left of the child.

Lucretia soon after this began to be restless. He would come to my casement and lift up his voice, and howl into the bosom of the silent night. At first I thought that he had found some one in distress, or wanted to get me out of doors and save my life. I went out several nights in a weird costume that I had made up of garments belonging to different members of my family. I dressed carefully in the dark and stole out to kill the assassin referred to by Lucretia, but he was not there. Then the faithful animal would run up to me and with almost human, pleading eyes, bark and run away toward a distant alley. I immediately decided that some one was suffering there. I had read in books about dogs that led their masters away to the suffering and saved people's lives; so, when Lucretia came to me with his great, honest eyes and took little mementoes out of the calf of my leg, and then galloped off seven or eight blocks, I followed him in the chill air of night and my Mosaic clothes. I wandered away to where the dog stopped behind a livery stable, and there, lying in a shuddering heap on the frosty ground, lay the still, white features of a soup bone that had outlived its usefulness.

On the way back, I met a physician who had been up town to swear in an American citizen who would vote twenty-one years later, if he lived. The physician stopped me and was going to take me to the home of the friendless, when he discovered who I was.

You wrap a tall man, with a William H. Seward nose, in a flannel robe, cut plain, and then put a plug hat and a sealskin sacque and Arctic overshoes on him, and put him out in the street, under the gaslight, with his trim, purple ankles just revealing themselves as he madly gallops after a hydrophobia infested dog, and it is not, after all, surprising that people's curiosity should be a little bit excited.

After I had introduced myself to the physician and asked him for a cigar, explaining that I could not find any in the clothes I had on, I asked him about Lucretia Borgia. I told the doctor how Lucretia seemed restless nights and nervous and irritable days, and how he seemed to be almost a mental wreck, and asked him what the trouble was.

He said it was undoubtedly “insomnia.” He said that it was a bad case of it, too. I told him I thought so myself. I said I didn't mind the insomnia that Lucretia had so much as I did my own. I was getting more insomnia on my hands than I could use.

He gave me something to administer to Lucretia. He said I must put it in a link of sausage and leave the sausage where it would appear that I didn't want the dog to get it, and then Lucretia would eat it greedily.

I did so. It worked well so far as the administration of the remedy was concerned, but it was fatal to my little, high strung, yearnful dog. It must have contained something of a deleterious character, for the next morning a coarse man took Lucretia Borgia by the tail and laid him where the violets blow. Malignant insomnia is fast becoming the great foe to the modern American dog.

Along Lake Superior.

I have just returned from a brief visit to Duluth. After strolling along the Bay of Naples and watching old Vesuvius vomit red-hot mud, vapor and other campaign documents, Duluth is quite a change. The ice in the bay at Duluth was thirty-eight inches in depth when I left there the last week in March, and we rode across it with the utmost impunity. By the time these lines fall beneath the eye of the genial, courteous and urbane reader, the new railroad bridge across the bay, over a mile and a half long, will have been completed, so that you may ride from Chicago to Duluth over the Northwestern and Omaha railroads with great comfort. I would be glad to digress here and tell about the beauty of the summer scenery along the Omaha road, and the shy and beautiful troutlet, and the dark and silent Chippewa squawlet and her little bleached out pappooselet, were it not for the unkind and cruel thrusts that I would invoke from the scenery cynic who believes that a newspaper man's opinions may be largely warped with a pass.

Duluth has been joked a good deal, but she stands it first-rate and takes it good naturedly. She claims 16,000 people, some of whom I met at the opera house there. If the rest of the 16,000 are as pleasant as those I conversed with that evening, Duluth must be a pleasant place to live in. Duluth has a very pleasant and beautiful opera house that seats 1,000 people. A few more could have elbowed their way into the opera house the evening that I spoke there, but they preferred to suffer on at home.

Lake Superior is one of the largest aggregations of fresh wetness in the world, if not the largest. When I stop to think that some day all this cold, cold water will have to be absorbed by mankind, it gives me a cramp in the geographical center.

Around the west end of Lake Superior there is a string of towns which stretches along the shore for miles under one name or another, all waiting for the boom to strike and make the northern Chicago. You cannot visit Duluth or Superior without feeling that at any moment the tide of trade will rise and designate the point where the future metropolis of the northern lakes is to be. I firmly believe that this summer will decide it, and my guess is that what is now known as West Superior is to get the benefit. For many years destiny has been hovering over the west end of this mighty lake, and now the favored point is going to be designated. Duluth has past prosperity and expensive improvements in her favor, and in fact the whole locality is going to be benefited, but if I had a block in West Superior with a roller rink on it, I would wear my best clothes every day and claim to be a millionaire in disguise. Ex-President R. B. Hayes has a large brick block in Duluth, but he does not occupy it. Those who go to Duluth hoping to meet Mr. Hayes will be bitterly disappointed.

The streams that run into Lake Superior are alive with trout, and next summer I propose to go up there and roast until I have so thoroughly saturated my system with trout that the trout bones will stick out through my clothes in every direction and people will regard me as a beautiful toothpick holder.

Still there will be a few left for those who think of going up there. All I will need will be barely enough to feed Albert Victor and myself from day to day. People who have never seen a crowned head with a peeled nose on it are cordially invited to come over and see us during office hours. Albert is not at all haughty, and I intend to throw aside my usual reserve this summer also--for the time. P. Wales' son and I will be far from the cares that crowd so thick and fast on greatness. People who come to our cedar bark wigwam to show us their mosquito bites, will be received as cordially as though no great social chasm yawned between us.

Many will meet us in the depths of the forest and go away thinking that we are just common plugs of whom the world wots not; but there is where they will fool themselves.

Then, when the season is over, we will come back into the great maelstrom of life, he to wait for his grandmother's overshoes and I to thrill waiting millions from the rostrum with my “Tale of the Broncho Cow.” And so it goes with us all. Adown life's rugged pathway some must toil on from daylight to dark to earn their meagre pittance as kings, while others are born to wear a swallow-tail coat every evening and wring tears of genuine anguish from their audiences.

They tell some rather wide stories about people who have gone up there total physical wrecks and returned strong and well. One man said that he knew a young college student, who was all run down and weak, go up there on the Brule and eat trout and fight mosquitoes a few months, and when he returned to his Boston home he was so stout and well and tanned up that his parents did not know him. There was a man in our car who weighed 300 pounds. He seemed to be boiling out through his clothes everywhere. He was the happiest looking man I ever saw. All he seemed to do in this life was to sit all day and whistle and laugh and trot his stomach, first on one knee and then on the other.

He said that he went up into the pine forests of the Great Lake region a broken-down hypochondriac and confirmed consumptive. He had been measured for a funeral sermon three times, he said, and had never used either of them. He knew a clergyman named Brayley who went up into that region with Bright's justly celebrated disease. He was so emaciated that he couldn't carry a watch. The ticking of the watch rattled his bones so that it made him nervous, and at night they had to pack him in cotton so that he wouldn't break a leg when he turned over. He got to sleeping out nights on a bed of balsam and spruce boughs and eating venison and trout.

When he came down in the spring, he passed through a car of lumbermen and one of them put a warm, wet quid of tobacco in his plug hat for a joke. There were a hundred of these lumbermen when the preacher began, and when the train got into Eau Claire there were only three of them well enough to go around to the office and draw their pay.

This is just as the story was given to me and I repeat it to show how bracing the climate near Superior is. Remember, if you please, that I do not want the story to be repeated as coming from me, for I have nothing left now but my reputation for veracity, and that has had a very hard winter of it.

I Tried Milling.

I think I was about 18 years of age when I decided that I would be a miller, with flour on my clothes and a salary of $200 per month. This was not the first thing I had decided to be, and afterward changed my mind about.

I engaged to learn my profession of a man called Sam Newton, I believe; at least I will call him that for the sake of argument. My business was to weigh wheat, deduct as much as possible on account of cockle, pigeon grass and wild buckwheat, and to chisel the honest farmer out of all he would stand. This was the programme with Mr. Newton; but I am happy to say that it met with its reward, and the sheriff afterward operated the mill.

On stormy days I did the book-keeping, with a scoop shovel behind my ear, in a pile of middlings on the fifth floor. Gradually I drifted into doing a good deal of this kind of brain work. I would chop the ice out of the turbine wheel at 5 o'clock A.M., and then frolic up six flights of stairs and shovel shorts till 9 o'clock P.M.

By shoveling bran and other vegetables 16 hours a day, a general knowledge of the milling business may be readily obtained. I used to scoop middlings till I could see stars, and then I would look out at the landscape and ponder.

I got so that I piled up more ponder, after a while, than I did middlings.

One day the proprietor came up stairs and discovered me in a brown study, whereupon he cursed me in a subdued Presbyterian way, abbreviated my salary from $26 per month to $18 and reduced me to the ranks.

Afterward I got together enough desultory information so that I could superintend the feed stone. The feed stone is used to grind hen feed and other luxuries. One day I noticed an odor that reminded me of a hot overshoe trying to smother a glue factory at the close of a tropical day. I spoke to the chief floor walker of the mill about it, and he said “dod gammit” or something that sounded like that, in a course and brutal manner. He then kicked my person in a rude and hurried tone of voice, and told me that the feed stone was burning up.

He was a very fierce man, with a violent and ungovernable temper, and, finding that I was only increasing his brutal fury, I afterward resigned my position. I talked it over with the proprietor, and both agreed that it would be best. He agreed to it before I did, and rather hurried up my determination to go.

I rather hated to go so soon, but he made it an object for me to go, and I went. I started in with the idea that I would begin at the bottom of the ladder, as it were, and gradually climb to the bran bin by my own exertions, hoping by honesty, industry, and carrying two bushels of wheat up nine flights of stairs, to become a wealthy man, with corn meal in my hair and cracked wheat in my coat pocket, but I did not seem to accomplish it.

Instead of having ink on my fingers and a chastened look of woe on my clear-cut Grecian features, I might have poured No. 1 hard wheat and buckwheat flour out of my long taper ears every night, if I had stuck to the profession. Still, as I say, it was for another man's best good that I resigned. The head miller had no control over himself and the proprietor had rather set his heart on my resignation, so it was better that way.

Still I like to roll around in the bran pile, and monkey in the cracked wheat. I love also to go out in the kitchen and put corn meal down the back of the cook's neck while my wife is working a purple silk Kensington dog, with navy blue mane and tail, on a gothic lambrequin.

I can never cease to hanker for the rumble and grumble of the busy mill, and the solemn murmur of the millstones and the machinery are music to me. More so than the solemn murmur of the proprietor used to be when he came in at an inopportune moment, and in that impromptu and extemporaneous manner of his, and found me admiring the wild and beautiful scenery. He may have been a good miller, but he had no love for the beautiful. Perhaps that is why he was always so cold and cruel toward me. My slender, willowy grace and mellow, bird-like voice never seemed to melt his stony heart.

Our Forefathers.

Seattle, W.T., December 12.--I am up here on the Sound in two senses. I rode down to-day from Tacoma on the Sound, and to-night I shall lecture at Frye's Opera House.