A Guest at the Ludlow, and Other Stories, Bill Nye [best mobile ebook reader .txt] 📗
- Author: Bill Nye
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Bread is served to the Freshmen and Juniors in rectangular wads. It is such bread as convicts' tears have moistened many thousand years. In that way it gets quite moist.
The most painful feature about life in Ludlow Street Jail is the confinement. One can not avoid a feeling of being constantly hampered and hemmed in.
One more disagreeable thing is the great social distinction here. The poor man who sleeps in a stone niche near the roof, and who is constantly elbowed and hustled out of his bed by earnest and restless vermin with a tendency toward insomnia, is harassed by meeting in the court-yard and corridors the paying boarders who wear good clothes, live well, have their cigars, brandy and Kentucky Sec all the time.
The McAllister crowd here is just as exclusive as it is on the outside.[Pg 8]
But, great Scott! what a comfort it is to a man like me, who has been nearly killed by a cyclone, to feel the firm, secure walls and solid time lock when he goes to bed at night! Even if I can not belong to the 400, I am almost happy.
We retire at 7:30 o'clock at night and arise at 6:30 in the morning, so as to get an early start. A man who has five or ten years to stay in a place like this naturally likes to get at it as soon as possible each day, and so he gets up at 6:30.
We dress by the gaudy light of the candle, and while we do so, we remember far away at home our wife and the little boy asleep in her arms. They do not get up at 6:30. It is at this hour we remember the fragrant drawer in the dresser at home where our clean shirts, and collars and cuffs, and socks and handkerchiefs, are put every week by our wife. We also recall as we go about our stone den, with its odor of former corned beef, and the ghost of some bloody-handed predecessor's snore still moaning in the walls,[Pg 9] the picture of green grass by our own doorway, and the apples that were just ripening, when the bench warrant came.
The time from 6:30 to breakfast is occupied by the average, or non-paying inmate, in doing the chamberwork and tidying up his state-room. I do not know how others feel about it, but I dislike chamberwork most heartily, especially when I am in jail. Nothing has done more to keep me out of jail, I guess, than the fact that while there I have to make up my bed and dust the piano.
Breakfast is generally table d'h�te and consists of bread. A tin-cup of coffee takes the taste of the bread out of your mouth, and then if you have some Limburger cheese in your pocket you can with that remove the taste of the coffee.
Dinner is served at 12 o'clock, and consists of more bread with soup. This soup has everything in it except nourishment. The bead on this soup is noticeable for quite a distance. It is disagreeable. Several days ago I heard that the Mayor was in the soup,[Pg 10] but I didn't realize it before. I thought it was a newspaper yarn. There is everything in this soup, from shop-worn rice up to neat's-foot oil. Once I thought I detected cuisine in it.
The dinner menu is changed on Fridays, Sundays and Thursdays, on which days you get the soup first and the bread afterwards. In this way the bread is saved.
Three days in a week each man gets at dinner a potato containing a thousand-legged worm. At 6 o'clock comes supper with toast and responses. Bread is served at supper time, together with a cup of tea. To those who dislike bread and never eat soup, or do not drink tea or coffee, life at Ludlow Street Jail is indeed irksome.
I asked for kumiss and a pony of Benedictine, as my stone boudoir made me feel rocky, but it has not yet been sent up.
Somehow, while here, I can not forget poor old man Dorrit, the Master of the Marshalsea, and how the Debtors' Prison preyed upon his mind till he didn't enjoy anything except to[Pg 11] stand off and admire himself. Ludlow Street Jail is a good deal like it in many ways, and I can see how in time the canker of unrest and the bitter memories of those who did us wrong but who are basking in the bright and bracing air, while we, to meet their obligations, sacrifice our money, our health and at last our minds, would kill hope and ambition.
In a few weeks I believe I should also get a preying on my mind. That is about the last thing I would think of preying on, but a man must eat something.
Before closing this brief and incomplete account as a guest at Ludlow Street Jail I ought, in justice to my family, to say, perhaps, that I came down this morning to see a friend of mine who is here because he refuses to pay alimony to his recreant and morbidly sociable wife. He says he is quite content to stay here, so long as his wife is on the outside. He is writing a small ready-reference book on his side of the great problem, "Is Marriage a Failure?"
With this I shake him by the hand and in[Pg 12] a moment the big iron storm-door clangs behind me, the big lock clicks in its hoarse, black throat and I welcome even the air of Ludlow street so long as the blue sky is above it.[Pg 13]
OLD POLKA DOT'S DAUGHTER III once decided to visit an acquaintance who had named his country place "The Elms." I went partly to punish him because his invitation was so evidently hollow and insincere.
He had "The Elms" worked on his clothes, and embossed on his stationery and blown in his glass, and it pained him to eat his food from table linen that didn't have "The Elms" emblazoned on it. He told me to come and surprise him any time, and shoot in his preserves, and stay until business compelled me to return to town again. He had no doubt heard that I never surprise any one, and never go away from home very much, and so thought it would be safe. Therefore I went. I went just to teach him a valuable lesson. When I go to visit a man for a week, he is[Pg 14] certainly thenceforth going to be a better man, or else punishment is of no avail and the chastening rod entirely useless in his case.
"The Elms" was a misnomer. It should have been called "The Shagbark" or "The Doodle Bug's Lair." It was supposed to mean a wide sweep of meadow, a vine covered lodge, a broad velvet lawn, and a carriage way, where the drowsy locust, in the sensuous shadow of magnanimous elms, gnawed a file at intervals through the day, while back of all this the mossy and gray-whiskered front and corrugated brow of the venerable architectural pile stood off and admired itself in the deep and glassy pool at its base.
In the first place none of the yeomanry for eight miles around knew that he called his old malarial tank "The Elms," so it was hard to find. But when I described the looks of the lord of The Elms they wink at each other and wagged their heads and said, "Oh, yes, we know him," also interjecting well known one syllable words that are not euphonious enough to print.
... "His old look of apprehensive cordiality did not leave him until he had seen me climb on a load of hay with my trunk and start for home" (Page 15)
When I got there he was down cellar sprout[Pg 15]ing potatoes, and his wife was hanging out upon the clothes line a pair of gathered summer trousers that evidently were made for a man who had been badly mangled in a saw-mill.
The Elms was not even picturesque, and the preserves were out of order. I was received with the same cordiality which you detect on the face of any other kind of detected liar. He wanted to be regarded as a remarkable host and landed proprietor, without being really hospitable. I remained there at The Elms a few days, rubbing rock salt and Cayenne pepper into the wounds of my host, and suggesting different names for his home, such as "The Tom Tit's Eyrie," "The Weeping Willow," "The Crook Neck Squash" and "The Muskrat's Retreat." Then I came away. His old look of apprehensive cordiality did not leave him until he had seen me climb on a load of hay with my trunk and start for home.
During my brief sojourn I noticed that the surrounding country was full of people, and I presume there was a larger population of "boarders," as we were called indiscrimi[Pg 16]nately, than ever before. The number of available points to which the victims of humidity and poor plumbing may retreat in summer time is constantly on the increase, while, so far as I know, all the private and public boarding places are filled to their utmost capacity. Everywhere, the gaudy boarder in flannels and ecru shoes looms upon the green lawn or the brown dirt road, or scales the mountain one day and stays in bed the following week, rubbing James B. Pond's Extract on his swollen joints.
I scaled Mount Utsa-yantha in company with others. We picked out a nice hot day, and, selecting the most erect wall of the mountain, facing west, we scaled it in such a way that it will not have to be done again till new scales grow on it.
Mount Utsa-yantha is 3,365 feet above sea level, and has a brow which reminds me of mine. It is broad, massive and bleak. The foot of the mountain is more massive, however. From the top of the mountain one gets, with a good glass, a view of six or seven states, I was told. Possibly there were that[Pg 17] many in sight, though at that season of the year states look so much alike that it takes an expert to pick them out readily. When states are moulting, it is all I can do to tell Vermont from Massachusetts. On this mountain one gets a nice view and highly exhilarating birch beer.
Albany can be distinctly seen with a glass—a field glass, I mean, not a glass of birch beer. Some claim that the nub of a political boom may be seen protruding from the Capitol with the nude vision. Others say they can see the Green mountains, and as far south as the eye can reach. We took two hours and a half for the ascent of the mountain, and came down in about twenty minutes. We descended ungracefully—the way the Irishman claimed that the toad walked, viz.: "git up and sit down."
Mount Utsa-yantha—I use the accepted orthography as found in the Blackhawk dictionary—has a legend also. Many centuries ago this beautiful valley was infested by the red brother and his bronze progeny. Where now the red and blue blazer goes shimmering[Pg 18] through the swaying maples, and the girl with her other dress on and her straw colored canvas cinch knocketh the croquet ball galley west, once there dwelt an old chief whom we will call Polka Dot, the pride of his people. He looked somewhat like William Maxwell Evarts, but was a heavier set man. Places where old Polka Dot sat down and accumulated rest for himself are still shown to city people whose faith was not overworked while young.
Old Polka Dot was a firm man, with double teeth all around, and his prowess got into the personal columns of the papers every little while. He had a daughter named Utsa-yantha, which means "a messenger sent hastily for treasure," so I am told, or possibly old Polka Dot meant to imply "one sent off for cash."
Anyhow Utsa-yantha grew to be quite comely, as Indian women go. I never yet saw one that couldn't stop an ordinary planet by looking
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