Remarks, Bill Nye [android pdf ebook reader txt] 📗
- Author: Bill Nye
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Throughout a long and disastrous war, sometimes referred to as a fratricidal war, during which this fair land was drenched in blood, and also during which aforesaid war numerous frightful blunders were made which are fast coming to the surface—through the courtesy of participants in said war who have patiently waited for those who blundered to die off, and now admit that said participants who are dead did blunder exceedingly throughout all this long and deadly struggle for the supremacy of liberty and right—as I was about to say when my mind began to wobble, the American pie has shown forth resplendent in the full glare of a noonday sun or beneath the pale-green of the electric light, and she stands forth proudly to-day with her undying loyalty to dyspepsia untrammeled and her deep and deadly gastric antipathy still fiercely burning in her breast.
That is the proud history of American pie. Powers, principalities, kingdoms and hand-made dynasties may crumble, but the republican form of pie does not crumble. Tyranny may totter on its throne, but the American pie does not totter. Not a tot. No foreign threat has ever been able to make our common chicken pie quail. I do not say this because it is smart; I simply say it to fill up.
But would it not do Columbus good to come among us to-day and look over our free institutions? Would it not please him to ride over this continent which has been rescued by his presence of mind from the thraldom of barbarism and forked over to the genial and refining influences of prohibition and pie?
America fills no mean niche in the great history of nations, and if you listen carefully for a few moments you will hear some American, with his mouth full of pie, make that remark. The American is always frank and perfectly free to state that no other country can approach this one. We allow no little two-for-a-quarter monarchy to excel us in the size of our failures or in the calm and self-poised deliberation with which we erect a monument to the glory of a worthy citizen who is dead, and therefore politically useless.
The careless student of the career of Columbus will find much in these lines that he has not yet seen. He will realize when he comes to read this little sketch the pains and the trouble and the research necessary before such an article on the life and work of Columbus could be written, and he will thank me for it; but it is not for that that I have done it. It is a pleasure for me to hunt up and arrange historical and biographical data in a pleasing form for the student and savant. I am only too glad to please and gratify the student and the savant. I was that way myself once and I know how to sympathize with them,
P.S.—I neglected to state that Columbus was a married man. Still, he did not murmur or repine.
Accepting the Laramie Postoffice.
Office of Daily Boomerang, Laramie City, Wy., Aug. 9, 1882.
My Dear General.—I have received by telegraph the news of my nomination by the President and my confirmation by the Senate, as postmaster at Laramie, and wish, to extend my thanks for the same.
I have ordered an entirely new set of boxes and postoffice outfit, including new corrugated cuspidors for the lady clerks.
I look upon the appointment, myself, as a great triumph of eternal truth over error and wrong. It is one of the epochs, I may say, in the Nation's onward march toward political purity and perfection. I do not know when I have noticed any stride in the affairs of state, which so thoroughly impressed me with its wisdom.
Now that we are co-workers in the same department, I trust that you will not feel shy or backward in consulting me at any time relative to matters concerning postoffice affairs. Be perfectly frank with me, and feel perfectly free to just bring anything of that kind right to me. Do not feel reluctant because I may at times appear haughty and indifferent, cold or reserved. Perhaps you do not think I know the difference between a general delivery window and a three-m quad, but that is a mistake.
{Illustration: A NEW OFFICE OUTFIT.}
My general information is far beyond my years.
With profoundest regard, and a hearty endorsement of the policy of the President and the Senate, whatever it may be,
I remain, sincerely yours,
Bill Nye, P.M.
Gen. Frank Hatton, Washington, D.C.
A Journalistic Tenderfoot.
Most everyone who has tried the publication of a newspaper will call to mind as he reads this item, a similar experience, though, perhaps, not so pronounced and protuberant.
Early one summer morning a gawky young tenderfoot, both as to the West and the details of journalism, came into the office and asked me for a job as correspondent to write up the mines in North Park. He wore his hair longish and tried to make it curl. The result was a greasy coat collar and the general tout ensemble of the genus “smart Aleck.” He had also clothed himself in the extravagant clothes of the dime novel scout and beautiful girl-rescuer of the Indian country. He had been driven west by a wild desire to hunt the flagrant Sioux warrior, and do a general Wild Bill business; hoping, no doubt, before the season closed, to rescue enough beautiful captive maidens to get up a young Vassar College in Wyoming or Montana.
I told him that we did not care for a mining correspondent who did not know a piece of blossom rock from a geranium. I knew it took a man a good many years to gain knowledge enough to know where to sink a prospect shaft even, and as to passing opinions on a vein, it would seem almost wicked and sacriligious to send a man out there among those old grizzly miners who had spent their lives in bitter experience, unless the young man could readily distinguish the points of difference between a chunk of free milling quartz and a fragment of bologna sausage.
He still thought he could write us letters that would do the paper some eternal good, and though I told him, as he wrung my hand and left, to refrain from writing or doing any work for us, he wrote a letter before he had reached the home station on the stage road, or at least sent us a long letter from there. It might have been written before he started, however.
The letter was of the “we-have-went” and “I-have-never-saw”
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