Bill Nye

“ How it creeps into the home circle and snatches the wife in the full blush and bloom of womanhood, while the pale, sad-eyed husband sits at the sewing machine and barely makes enough to keep the little ones from want.
No one can fully realize, but he who has been there, so to speak, the terrible shock that Mr. Melville received on the first evening that his wife came staggering home. No one can tell how the pain froze his throbbing gizzard, or how he shuddered in the darkness, and filled the pillow-sham full of sobs when he first knew that she had got it up her nose. ”

“ Ah! how true to nature and yet how grand. How broad and sweeping. How melodious and yet how real. Hone but the true poet would have thought to compare the close of life to the sudden and unfortunate chuck of the off hind wheel of a lumber wagon into a rut.
In fancy we can see it all. We hear the low, sad kerplunk of the wheel, the loud burst of earnest, logical profanity, and then all is still.
How and then the swish of a mule's tail through the air, or the sigh of the rawhide as it shimmers and hurtles through the silent air, and then a calm falls upon the scene. ”

“ It is in our home life, however, that the codfish makes himself felt and remembered. When he enters our household, we feel his all pervading presence, like the perfume of wood violets, or the seductive odor of a dead mouse in the piano.
Friends may visit us and go away, to be forgotten with the advent of a new face; but the cold, calm, silent corpse of the codfish cannot be forgotten. Its chastened influence permeates the entire ranch. It steals into the parlor, like an unbidden guest, and flavors the costly curtains and the high-priced lambrequins. ”

“ The sigh of the approaching storm is heard at eventide, and the hostile Indian comes into the reservation to get some arnica for his chilblain, and to heal up the old feeling of intolerance on the part, of the pale face.
He leaves the glorious picture of mountain and glen; the wide sweep of magnificent nature, where a thousand gorgeous dyes are spread over the remains of the dead summer, and folding his tepee, he steals into the home of the white man that he may be once more at peace with the world. ”

“ While other young men put on their seal-brown overalls and wrench the laurel wreath and other vegetables from cruel fate, the youth who dangles near the old nest, and eats the hard-earned groceries of his father, shivers on the brink of life's great current and sheds the scalding tear.
He is the young-man-afraid-of-the-sawbuck, the human being with the unlaundried spinal column. The only vital question that may be said to agitate his pseudo brain is, whether he shall marry and bring his wife to the home nest, or marry and tear loose from his parents to live with his father-in-law. ”

“ No unkindness on the part of an eating-house ever provoked such a tornado of woe. We just weep when we see death and are brought in close contact with it. And we were not the only one that shed tears. Dickinson and Warren wept, strong men as they were. Even the butter wept. Strong as it was it could not control its emotions.
We don't very often answer a newspaper attack, but when we are accused of weeping till people have to take off their boots and wring out their socks, we want the public to know what it is for. ”

“ TWO STYLES. ONE of the peculiarities of correspondence is witnessed at this office every day, to which we desire to call the attention of our growing girls and boys, who ought to know that there is a long way and a short way of saying things on paper; a right way and a wrong way to express thoughts on a postal card, just as there is in conversation. We all admire the business man who is terse and to the point, and we dislike the man who hangs on to the door knob as though life was a never-ending summer dream, and refuses to say good-bye. It's so with correspondence. ”

“ It is only a hollow mockery, for the chamber-maid with the large slop-pail does not come at daylight to pound on your door, and try to get in and fix up your room, and wake you up, and frighten you to death with her shocking chaos of wart-environed and freckle-frescoed beauty.
There the new hotel will, no doubt, stand for ages, while a little way off, in his quiet grave, the proprietor, laid to rest in an old linen handkerchief, is sleeping away the years till he shall be awakened by the last grand reveille. There's no use talking, it's tough. ”

“ No man with the finer feelings of a gentleman will ever knock his new wife down in the church and tramp on her, until he knows to a reasonable degree of certainty that he is right. It may be annoying, of course, to the groom to stand and look out of the window for half an hour while the bride is allaying the hemorrhage of a pimple on her nose with a powder puff, but then, great hemlock! if a man can't endure that and smile, how will he behave when the clothesline falls down and the baby gets a kernel of corn up its nose? ”

“ It makes him as wild and skittish as it does an eighteen-year-old girl the first time she comes into town, and for the first time is met by the blare of trumpets, and the oriental wealth of the circus with its deformed camels and uniformed tramps driving its miles of cages with no animals in them. The great natural world and the giddy maelstrom of seething, perspiring humanity, peculiar to the city world, are two separate and distinct existences. ”

“ The nation to-day looks to her notaries public for her crowning glory and successful future. In their hands rest the might and the grandeur and the glory which, like a halo, in the years to come, will encircle the brow of Columbia. I feel the responsibility that rests upon me, and I tremble with the mighty weight of weal or woe for a great nation which hangs upon my every official act. ”

“ Some authors like to have a tall man, with a glazed grip-sack, and whose breath is stronger than his intellect, selling their works; but I do not prefer that way.
I like the candor and ingenuousness of the train-boy. He does not come to the front door while you are at prayers, and ring the bell till the hat-rack falls down, and then try to sell you a book containing 2,000 receipts for the blind staggers. He leans gently over you as you look out the car window, and he puts some pecan meats in your hand, and thus wins your trusting heart. Then he sells you a book, and takes an interest in you. ”

“ A youth who is so patient and so cheerful as you are—who would wait for a healthy man to die so that you could meander over his pulseless remnants, ought not to die a violent death. A soft-eyed seraph like you, who is no more conversant with the ways of this world than that, ought to be put in a glass vial of alcohol and preserved. I came up here to kill you and throw you into the rain-water barrel, but now that I know what a patient disposition you have, I shudder to think of the crime I was about to commit. ”

“ Still it may be that Whitelaw Reid is no happier with his high priced wife and his own record of crime, than we are in our simplicity here in the wild and rugged west, as we write little epics for our one-horse paper, and borrow tobacco of the foreman.
It is not all of life to live, nor all of death to die. We should live for a purpose, Mr. Reid, not aimlessly like a blind Indian, 200 miles from the reservation at Christmas-tide. ”

“ DIGNITY. COLONEL INGERSOLL said, at Omaha the other day, that he hated a dignified man and that he never knew one who had a particle of sense; that such men never learned, and were constantly forgetting something.
Josh Billings says that gravity is no more the sign of mental strength than a paper collar is the evidence of a shirt.
This leads us to say that the man who ranks as a dignified snoozer, and banks on winning wealth and a deathless name through this one source of strength, is in the most unenviable position of any one we know. Dignity does not draw. ”

“ We have been writing these things and obituaries alternately for several years, and yet there is no falling off in the mortality. For every man who is righteously slain, there are about a million law-abiding men, women and children murdered. Eternity's parquette is filled with people who got there by the self-cocking revolver route.
A man works twenty years to become known as a scholar, a newspaper man and a gentleman, while the illiterate murderer springs into immediate notoriety in a day, and the widow of his victim cannot even get her life insurance. ”

“ When we poured the glucose syrup on our pancakes, the stiff and cold remains of a large beetle and two cunning little twin cockroaches fell out into our plate, and lay there hushed in an eternal repose.
Death to us is all powerful. The King of Terrors is to us the mighty sovereign before whom we must all bow, from the mighty emperor down to the meanest slave, from the railroad superintendent, riding in his special car, down to the humblest humorist, all alike must some day curl up and die. ”

“ If we do not provide ourself with a few, it is our own fault. Man has spanned the ocean with an electric cable, and runs his street cars with another cable that puts people out of their misery as quick as a giant-powder caramel in a man's chest-protector, under certain circumstances. Science has done almost everything for us, except to pay our debts without leaning toward repudiation. We are making rapid strides in the line of progression. That is, the scientists are. Every little while you can hear a scientist burst a basting thread off his overalls, while making a stride. ”

“ Rise-up-William-Riley, for hope is dead in her breast, and the wigwam is desolate in the sage-brush.
Daughter of a great nation, we are not mad at you. You are not to be blamed because the republican party has busted your crust. We do not hate you because you eat your steak-rare and wear your own hair. It is your own right to do so if you wish. Brace up, therefore, and take a tumble, as it were, and try to be cheerful. We will not massacre you if you will not massacre us. All we want is peace, and you can wear what you like, only wear something, if you please, when you come into our society. ”

“ Ah, what a picture of woe we see before us. There in the solemn night, robed in? long, plainly constructed garment of pure white, buttoned at the throat in a negligent manner, stands Mr. Melville with his bare, tall brow glistening in the flickering rays of a kerosene lamp, which he holds in his hand, while on the front porch stands the wife who a few years ago promised to defend and protect him. She is a little unsteady on her feet, and her hat is out of plumb. She tries to be facetious, and asks him if that is where Mr. Melville lives. ”

“ The hotel was just completed, and the ladders, and the handsome lime barrels, and hods, and old nail kegs, and fragments of laths, and pieces of bricks, and scaffolds, and all those things that go to make life desirable, are still there adorning the hotel and the front yard; but there is no handsome man with a waxed mustache inside at the desk, shaking his head sadly when he is asked for a room, and looking at you with that high-born pity and contempt for your pleading, that the hotel clerk—heir apparent to the universe—always keeps for those who go to him with humility. ”

“ The codfish has a great wealth of glad, unfettered smile. When he laughs at anything, he has that same wide waste of mirth and back teeth that Mr. Talmage has. The Wyoming codfish is generally dead. Death, in most cases, is the result of exposure and loss of appetite. No one can look at the codfish of commerce, and not shed a tear. Far from home, with his system filled with salt, while his internal economy is gone, there is an air of sadness and homesickness and briny hopelessness about him that no one can see unmoved. ”

“ Royalty gets it in the nose every day or two, and yet after the family has hung onto the salary for several centuries it does not occur to the average king that he could strike a job as humorist on some London paper, at about the same salary and with none of the annoyances. The most of those people who have worn a great, heavy cast iron crown, with diamonds on it as big as a peanut, have become so attached to it that they can't swear off in a moment. ”

“ No matter how busy they may be, they will leave their own work and fly to your aid. With the light of sympathy in their eyes, they rush into the conversation, and, partaking of your own zeal, they take the words from your mouth, and cheerfully suck the juice out of your joke, handing back the rind and hoping for reward. That is where they get left, so far as I am concerned. I am almost always ready to repay rudeness with rudeness, and cold preserved gall with such acrid sarcasm as I may be able to secure at the moment. No one will ever know how I yearn for the blood of the interrupter. ”

“ Baldness is like fame, it cannot be purchased. It must be acquired. Some men may be born bald, some may acquire baldness, and others may have baldness thrust upon them, but they generally acquire it.
"The stage beard is also rather dizzy, as a rule. It looks as much like a beard that grew there, as a cow's tail would if tied to the bronze dog on the front porch. When you tie a heavy black beard on a young actor, whose whole soul would be churned up if he smoked a full-fledged cigar, he looks about as savage as a bowl of mush and milk struck with a club." ”

“ It brings within the reach of such men a business which, requiring no capital, still gives the actor much time to do as he chooses. Beauty often wins for itself a place in the great theatrical world, but it is rare that the tomato nose and the watery eye secure a salary for their proprietors. Business must be picking up when the wiggly legs and danger-signal nose will bring so much per week and railroad fare. Perhaps prohibition has got the "frightful example" business down to where it commands the notice of the world because of its seldom condition. ”

“ The blue-eyed moulder of public opinion, with one suspender hanging down at his side, and writing on a sheet of news-copy paper, has a more extensive costume, perhaps, than the old-time offender who bowed in the dust in the midst of the great populace, and with a halter under his ear admitted his offense, but he does not feel any more cheerful over it. ”