A Guest at the Ludlow, and Other Stories, Bill Nye [best mobile ebook reader .txt] 📗
- Author: Bill Nye
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These various birthplaces prove to us what style is best calculated for a presidential candidate. They demonstrate that poverty is no drawback, and that frequently it is a good stimulant for the right kind of a boy. I once knew a poor boy whose clothes did not fit him very well when he was little, and now that he is grown up it is the same way.
That poor boy was myself. But I can not close this research without saying that the boys alone can not claim the glory in America. The girls are entitled to recognition.
Permit me, therefore, to present the birthplace of Belva A. Lockwood. I do not speak of it because I desire to treat the matter lightly, but to call attention to little Belva's sagacity in selecting the same style of birthplace as that chosen by other presidential candidates. She very truly said in the course of a conversation with[Pg 217] the writer: "My theory as to the selection of a birthplace is, first be sure you are right and then go ahead."
We should learn from all the above that a humble origin does not prevent a successful career. Had Abraham Lincoln been wealthy, he would have been taught, perhaps, a style of elocution and gesture that would have taken first rate at a parlor entertainment, and yet he might never have made his Gettysburg speech. While he was president he never looked at his own hard hands and knotted knuckles that he was not reminded of his toiling neighbors, whose honest sweat and loyal blood had made this mighty republic a source of glory and not of shame forever.
So, in the future, whether it be a Grover, a Benjamin, or a Belva, may the President of the United States be ever ready to remove the cotton from his ears at the first cry of the oppressed and deserving poor.[Pg 218]
ON BROADWAY XXIIIOnce when in New York I observed a middle-aged man remove his coat at the corner of Fulton street and Broadway and wipe the shoulders thereof with a large red handkerchief of the Thurman brand. There was a dash of mud in his whiskers and a crick in his back. He had just sought to cross Broadway, and the disappointed ambulance had gone up street to answer another call. He was a plain man with a limited vocabulary, but he spoke feelingly. I asked him if I could be of any service to him, and he said No, not especially, unless I would be kind enough to go up under the back of his vest and see if I could find the end of his suspender. I did that and then held his coat for him while he got in it again. He after[Pg 219]ward walked down the east side of Broadway with me.
"That's twice I've tried to git acrost to take the Cortlandt street ferry boat sence one o'clock, and hed to give it up both times," he said, after he had secured his breath.
"So you don't live in town?"
"No, sir, I don't, and there won't be anybody else livin' in town, either, if they let them crazy teamsters run things. Look at my coat! I've wiped the noses of seventy-nine single horses and eleven double teams sence one o'clock, and my vitals is all a perfect jell. I bet if I was hauled up right now to be postmortumed the rear breadths of my liver would be a sight to behold."
"Why didn't you get a policeman to escort you across?"
"Why, condemb it, I did futher up the street, and when I left him the policeman reckoned his collar-bone was broke. It's a blamed outrage, I think. They say that a man that crosses Broadway for a year can be mayor of Boston, but my idee is that he's a[Pg 220] heap more likely to be mayor of the New Jerusalem."
A man that crosses Broadway for a year can be mayor of Boston, but my idee is that he's a heap more likely to be mayor of New Jerusalem (Page 220)
"Where do you live, anyway?"
"Well, I live near Pittsburg, P. A., where business is active enough to suit 'most anybody, 'specially when a man tries to blow out a natural-gast well, but we make our teamsters subservient to the Constitution of the United States. We don't allow this Juggernaut business the way you fellers do. There a man would drive clear round the block ruther than to kill a child, say nuthin of a grown person. Here the hubs and fellers of these big drays and trucks are mussed up all the time with the fragments of your best people. Look at me. What encouragement is there for a man to come here and trade? Folks that live here tell me that they do most of their business by telephone in the daytime, and then do their runnin' around at night, but I've got apast that. Time was when I could run around nights and then mow all day, but I can't do it now. People that leads a suddentary life, I s'pose, demands excitement, and at night they will have their fun; but take[Pg 221] a man like me—he wants to transact his business in the daytime by word o' mouth, and then go to bed. He don't want to go home at 3 o'clock with a plug hat full of digestive organs that he never can possibly put back just where they was before.
"No, I don't want to run down a big city like New York and nuther do I want to be run down myself. They tell me I can go up town on this side and take the boat so as to get to Jersey City that way, and I'm going to do it ruther than to go home with a neck yoke run through me. Folks say that Jurden is a hard road to travel, but I'm positive that a man would get jerked up and fined for driving as fast there as they do on Broadway; and then another thing, I s'pose there's a good deal less traffic over the road."
He then went down Wall street to the Hanover Square station and I saw him no more.[Pg 222]
MY TRIP TO DIXIE XXIVI once took quite a long railway trip into the South in search of my health. I called my physicians together, and they decided by a rising vote that I ought to go to a warmer clime, or I should enjoy very poor health all winter. So I decided to go in search of my health, if I died on the trail.
I bought tickets at Cincinnati of a pale, sallow liar, who is just beginning to work his way up to the forty-ninth degree in the Order of Ananias. He will surely be heard from again some day, as he has the elements that go to make up a successful prevaricator.
He said that I could go through from Cincinnati to Asheville, North Carolina, with only one easy change of cars, and in about twenty-three hours. It took me twice that time, and[Pg 223] I had to change cars three times in the dead of night.
The southern railroad is not in a flourishing condition. It ought to go somewhere for its health. Anyway, it ought to go somewhere, which at present it does not. According to the old Latin proverb, I presume we should say nothing but good of the dead, but I am here to say that the railroad that knocked my spine loose last week, and compelled me to carry lunch baskets and large Norman two-year-old gripsacks through the gloaming, till my arms hung down to the ground, does not deserve to be treated well, even after death.
I do not feel any antipathy toward the South, for I did not take any part in the war, remaining in Canada during the whole time, and so I can not now be accused of offensive partisanship. I have always avoided anything that would look like a settled conviction in any of these matters, retaining always a fair, unpartisan and neutral idiocy in relation to all national affairs, so that I might be[Pg 224] regarded as a good civil service reformer, and perhaps at some time hold an office.
To further illustrate how fair-minded I am in these matters, I may say I have patiently read all the war articles written by both sides, and I have not tried to dodge the foot-notes or the marginal references, or the war maps or the memoranda. I have read all these things until I can't tell who was victorious, and if that is not a fair and impartial way to look at the war, I don't know how to proceed in order to eradicate my prejudices.
But a railroad is not a political or sectional matter, and it ought not to be a local matter unless the train stays at one end of the line all the time. This road, however, is the one that discharged its engineer some years ago, and when he took his time-check he said he would now go to work for a sure-enough road with real iron rails to it, instead of two streaks of rust on a right of way.
All night long, except when we were changing cars, we rattled along over wobbling trestles and third mortgages. The cars[Pg 225] were graded from third-class down. The road itself was not graded at all.
They have the same old air in these coaches that they started out with. Different people, with various styles of breath, have used this air and then returned it. They are using the same air that they did before the war. It is not, strictly speaking, a national air. It is more of a languid air, with dark circles around its eyes.
At one place where I had an engagement to change cars, we had a wait of four hours, and I reclined on a hair-cloth lounge at the hotel, with the intention of sleeping a part of the time.
Dear, patient reader, did you every try to ride a refractory hair-cloth lounge all night, bare back? Did you ever get aboard a short, old-fashioned, black, hair-cloth lounge, with a disposition to buck?
I was told that this was a kind, family lounge that would not shy or make trouble anywhere, but I had only just closed my dark-red and mournful eyes in sleep when this lounge gently humped itself, and shed[Pg 226] me as it would its smooth, dark hair in the spring, tra la.
The floor caught me in its great strong arms and I vaulted back upon the polished bosom of the hair-cloth lounge. It was made for a man about fifty-three inches in length, and so I had to sleep with my feet in my pistol pockets and my nose in my bosom up to the second joint.
I got so that I could rise off the floor and climb on the lounge without waking up. It grew to be second nature to me. I did it just as a man who is hungry in his sleep bites off large fragments of the air and eats it involuntarily and smacks his lips and snorts. So I arose and deposited myself again and again on that old swayback but frolicsome wreck without waking. But I couldn't get aboard softly enough to avoid waking the lounge. It would yawn and rumble inside and rise and fall like the deep rolling sea, till at last I gave up trying to sleep on it any more, and curled up on the floor.
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