Bill Nye

“ A large codfish, with a broad and sunny smile, and his bosom full of rock salt, is tied in the creek to freshen and fit himself for the responsible position of floor manager of the codfish ball.
A pale chambermaid, wearing a black jersey with large pores in it, through which she is gently percolating, now goes joyously up the stairs to make the little post-office lock-box rooms look ten times worse than they ever did before. She warbles a low refrain as she nimbly knocks loose the venerable dust of centuries, and sets it afloat throughout the rooms. All is bustle about the house. ”

“ We flit through the dreamy hours of summer like swift-winged bumble bees amid the honeysuckle and pumpkin blossoms, storing away, perhaps, a little glucose honey and buckwheat pancakes for the future, but all at once, like a newspaper thief in the night, the king of frost and ripe mellow chilblains is upon us, and we crouch beneath the wintry blast and hump our spinal column up into the crisp air like a Texas steer that has thoughtlessly swallowed a raw cactus.
Life is one continued round of alternative joys and sorrows. ”

“ The long and thankless job of measuring the diameter of the earth, no matter what the weather might be, away from home and friends, footsore and weary, still plodding on, fatigued but determined to know the mean diameter of the earth, even if it took a leg, measuring on for thousands of weary miles, and getting farther and farther away from home, and then forgetting, perhaps, how many thousand miles they had gone, and being compelled to go back and measure it over again while their noses got red and their fingers were benumbed. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Very likely you are a seaside resortist and do not care for pants, but I simply say to you that if you are a worthy young man weary with life's great battles—beaten back, perhaps, and wounded—with your neck knocked crooked like a tom-tit that has run against a telegraph wire in the night, come up here into northern Wisconsin, where the butternut gleams in the autumn sunshine and the ax-helve has her home. ”

“ He opens his mouth and breaths in all of the atmosphere the rest of the universe can spare, and tickles the broncho on the starboard quarter with his cork sole. The mirth-provoking movement throws the broncho into the wildest hysterics, and for some minutes the spectator doesn't see anything very distinctly. The autumnal twilight seems fraught with blonde broncho and pale-blue shirt tail and Chinaman moving in an irregular orbit, and occasionally throwing off meteoric articles of apparel and pre-historic chunks of ingenious profanity of the vintage of Confucius. ”

“ Thus while nature dons her regal robe of scarlet and gold in honor of the farewell benefit to autumn, the sad-eyed poet hies away to a neighboring clothes line, and the hour of nature's grand blowout dons the flaming flannels of his friend out of respect for the hectic flush of the dying year.
Leaves have their time to fall, and so has the price of coal. And yet how sadly at variance with decaying nature is the robust coal market. ”

“ You can run a dummy drug store there with two dozen dreary old glass bottles on the shelves, punctuated by the hand of time and the Kansas fly of the period, and with a prohibitory law at your back and a tall, red barrel in the back room filled [Pg 131] with a mixture that will burn great holes into nature's heart and make the cemetery blossom as the rose, and in a few years you can sell enough of this justly celebrated preparation for household, scientific and experimental purposes only to fill your flabby pockets with wealth and paint the pure air of Kansas a bright and inflammatory red. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And yet we say to our missionaries: "No man can be a Christian and use tobacco."
I say, and I say it, too, with all that depth of feeling which has always characterized my earnest nature, that in this we are committing a great error.
What have the cannibals ever done for us as a people that we should avoid the use of tobacco in order to fit our flesh for their tables. In what way have they sought to ameliorate our condition in life that we should strive in death to tickle their palates.
Look at the history of the cannibal for past ages. ”

“ But astronomy is a very enervating branch of science. Galileo frequently came down to breakfast with red, heavy eyes; eyes that were swollen full of unshed tears. Still he persevered. Day after day he worked and toiled. Year after year he went on with his task till he had worked out in his own mind the satellites of Jupiter and placed a small tin tag on each one, so that he would know it readily when he saw it again. Then he began to look up Saturn's rings and investigate the freckles on the sun. ”

“ If it is the great, big, burning desire of your heart to go into a town of 2,000 people and open the thirteenth drug store in order that you may stand behind a tall black walnut prescription case day in and day out, with a graduate in one hand and a Babcock fire-extinguisher in the other, filling orders for whiskey made of stump-water and the juice of future punishment, you will do well to go to Kansas. It is a temperance state and no saloons are allowed there. All is quiet and orderly, and the drug business is a great success. ”

“ A youth who is so patient and cheerful as you are, one who would wait for a healthy man to die so 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 the 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. ”

“ Do I ask the cannibal to break off the pernicious use of tobacco because I dislike the flavor of it in his brisket? I will defy any respectable resident of the cannibal islands to-day to place his finger on a solitary instance where I have ever, by word or deed, intimated that he should make the slightest change in his habits on my account, unless it be that I may have suggested that a diet consisting of more anarchists and less human beings would be more productive of general and lasting good. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Just as the fond parent of a white-eyed, two-legged freak of nature loves to name his mentally-diluted son Napoleon, and for the same reason that a prominent horse owner in Illinois last year socked my name on a tall, buckskin-colored colt that did not resemble me, intellectually or physically, a colt that did not know enough to go around a barbed-wire fence, but sought to sift himself through it into an untimely grave, so this man has named his sway-backed wigwam the Fifth Avenue Hotel. ”

“ There can be nothing sadder than the solemn hush of nature that precedes the death of the year. The golden glory of autumn, with the billowy bronze and velvet azure of the skies above the royal robes of oak and maple, bespeak the closing hours of nature's teeming life and the silent farewell to humanity's gauze underwear. ”

“ I never saw such a haughty rooster in my life. Actually, when I got out to feed him in the morning he would give me a cold, arrogant look that hurt my feelings. I know I'm not what you would call an educated man nor a polished man, though I claim to have a son that is both of said things, but I hate to have a rooster crow over me because he has had better advantages and better breeding than I have. So there was no love lost between us, as you can see.
Directly I noticed that the hen began to have spells of vertigo. ”

“ Other scientists who have sat up nights to monkey with the solar system, and thereby shattered their nervous systems, claim that the earth is getting top-heavy at the north pole, and that one of these days while we are thinking of something else, the great weight of accummulated ice, snow, and the vast accummulation of second-hand arctic relief expeditions, will jerk the earth out of its present position with so much spontaneity, and in such an extremely forthwith manner, that many people will be permanently strabismused and much bric-a-brac will be for sale at a great sacrifice. ”

“ If you would like to go to a flourishing country and put out a big basswood mortar in front of your shop in order to sell the tincture of damnation throughout bleeding Kansas, now is your golden opportunity. ”

“ What America wants to-day is not so much a larger number of high-browed men who will get up on their hind feet and call on heaven to paralyze their right arms before they will do a wrong act, or ask to have their tongues nailed to the ridge-pole of their mouths rather than utter a false or dangerous doctrine. ”

“ We live in an age of rapid advancement in all branches of learning, and people who do not rise early in the morning will not retain their position in the procession. I look forward with confidence to the day when no cowboy will undertake to ride the range without a diploma. Educated labor is what we need. Cowboys who can tell you in scientific terms why it is always the biggest steer that eats "pigeon weed" in the spring and why he should swell up and bust on a rising Chicago market. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I cannot endure the society of a low-bred hen, and a refined hen seems to look down on me, and so I thought if I could get one of those ottymatic inkybaters I could have the whole process under my own control, and if the blooded hens wanted to go to the sanitarium and sit around there with their hands in their pockets while the great hungry world of traffic clamored for more spring chickens fried in butter they might do so and be doggoned. ”

“ If you do not like the climate you can keep yourself to the smoking tobacco.
Here you will find old Mr. Ozone with his coat off and a feather duster in his hand, prepared to dust the cobwebs from the catacombs of the asthmatic or the consumptive. There is enough climate wasted here every year to supply a city the size of Chicago. Moreover, there is now a handsome hotel here called the Battery Park—that has been full ever since it was built and you can get good saddle horses, carriages or donkeys at reasonable rates in town. ”

“ The average Englishman will most always think of something that nobody else would naturally think of. Now, our cattleman would have gone on for years with his great steer emporium without thinking of establishing an institution where a poor boy might go and learn to rope a 4-year-old in such a way as to throw him on his stomach with a sickening thud.
The young Maverick savant could take a kindergarten course in the study of cow brands. Here a wide field opens up to the scholar. ”

“ To me the statement that tobacco-tainted human flesh is offensive to the cannibal does not come home with crushing power.
Perhaps I do not love my fellow-man so well as the cannibal does. I know that I am selfish in this way, and if my cannibal brother desires to polish my wishbone he must take me as he finds me. I cannot abstain wholly from the use of tobacco in order to gratify the pampered tastes of one who has never gone out of his way to do me a favor. ”

“ Every child should know how many stomachs, bowels and gizzards there are in the fully equipped cow or horse. Nothing is more embarrassing to the true sportsman than to see his favorite horse ripped open by a barbed-wire fence while in full chase, and then not know which digestive organ should go back first, or when they have all been replaced. ”

“ So many millionaires have been made with "free grass" and the early-rising, automatic branding iron that every man in the United States who has a cow that can stand the journey seems to be about to take her west and embark in business as a cattle king.
But let me warn the amateur cow man that in the great grazing regions it takes a good many acres of thin grass to maintain the adult steer in affluence for twelve months, and the great pastures at the base of the mountains are being pretty well tested. ”

“ But now that the idea has been turned loose, I shall look forward to the time when wealthy men who have been in the habit of dying and leaving their money to other institutions, will meet with a change of heart, and begin to endow the cowboys' college, and the Maverick hotbed of broncho sciences. ”

“ To Peter Cooper is largely due the boom given to railway business, he having constructed the first locomotive ever made in this country, and put it on the Baltimore & Ohio railroad.
The first train ever operated must have been a grand sight. First came the locomotive, a large Babcock fire-extinguisher on trucks, with a smoke-stack like a full-blown speaking-tube with a frill around the top; the engineer at his post in a plug hat, with an umbrella over his head and his hand on the throttle, borrowing a chew of tobacco now and then of the farmers who passed him on their way to town. ”

“ I have heard it intimated by people who seemed to know what they were talking about that truth is mighty and will prevail, but I do not see much show for her till the cyclone season is over.
The Earth.
The earth is that body in the solar system which most of my readers now reside upon, and which some of them, I regret to say, modestly desire to own and control, forgetting that the earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof. Some men do not care who owns the earth so long as they get the fullness. ”