A Guest at the Ludlow, and Other Stories by Bill Nye (ereader ebook TXT) 📖

at it steadily for two minutes. She dressed simply, wearing the same clothes while tooling cross-country before breakfast[Pg 19] that she wore at the scalp dance the evening before. In summer time she shellacked herself and visited the poor. Taking a little box of water colors in a shawl strap, so that she could change her clothes whenever she felt like it, she would go away and be gone for a fortnight at a time, visiting the ultra fashionable people of her tribe.

Finally a white man penetrated this region. He did it by asking a brakeman on the West Shore road how to get here and then doing differently. In that way he had no trouble at all. He saw Utsa-yantha and loved her almost instantly. She was skinning a muskrat at the time, and he could not but admire her deftness and skill. From that moment he was not able to drive her image from his heart. He sought her again and again to tell her of his passion, but she would jump the fence and flee like a frightened fawn with a split stick on its tail, if such a comparison may be permitted. At last he won her, and married her quietly in his working clothes. The nearest justice of the peace was then in England, and so rather than wait he[Pg 20] was married informally to Utsa-yantha, and she went home very much impressed indeed. That fall a little russet baby came to bless their union. The blessing was all he had with him when he arrived.

Then the old chief Polka Dot arose in his wrath, to which he added a pair of moose hide moccasins, and he upbraided his daughter for her conduct. He upbraided her with a piazza pole from his wigwam. He was very much agitated. So was the pole.

Then he cursed her for being the mother of a 1/2 breed child, and stalking 1/4 he slew the white man by cutting open his trunk and disarranging his most valuable possessions. He then wiped the stab knife on his tossing mane, and grabbing his grandson by his swaddling clothes he hurled the surprised little stranger into Lake Utsa-yantha. By pouring another pailful of water into the lake the child was successfully drowned.

Then the widowed and childless Utsa-yantha came forth as night settled down upon the beautiful valley and the day died peacefully on the mountain tops. Her eyes were[Pg 21] red with weeping and her breath was punctuated with sobs. Putting on a pair of high rubber boots she waded out into the middle of the lake, where there is quite a deep place, and drowned herself.

When the old man found the body of his daughter he was considerably mortified. He took her to the top of the mountain and buried her there, and ever afterward, it is said, whenever any one spoke of the death of his daughter and her family, he would color up and change the subject.

This should teach us never to kill a son-in-law without getting his wife's consent.[Pg 22]

A GREAT CEREBRATOR III

Being at large in Virginia, along in the latter part of last season, I visited Monticello, the former home of Thomas Jefferson, also his grave. Monticello is about an hour's ride from Charlottesville, by diligence. One rides over a road constructed of rip-raps and broken stone. It is called a macadamized road, and twenty miles of it will make the pelvis of a long-waisted man chafe against his ears. I have decided that the site for my grave shall be at the end of a trunk line somewhere, and I will endow a droska to carry passengers to and from said grave.

Whatever my life may have been, and however short I may have fallen in my great struggle for a generous recognition by the American people, I propose to place my grave within reach of all.[Pg 23]

Monticello is reached by a circuitous route to the top of a beautiful hill, on the crest of which rests the brick house where Mr. Jefferson lived. You enter a lodge gate in charge of a venerable negro, to whom you pay two bits apiece for admission. This sum goes towards repairing the roads, according to the ticket which you get. It just goes toward it, however; it don't quite get there, I judge, for the roads are still appealing for aid. Perhaps the negro can tell how far it gets. Up through a neglected thicket of Virginia shrubs and ill-kempt trees you drive to the house. It is a house that would readily command $750, with queer porches to it, and large, airy windows. The top of the whole hill was graded level, or terraced, and an enormous quantity of work must have been required to do it, but Jefferson did not care. He did not care for fatigue. With two hundred slaves of his own, and a dowry of three hundred more which was poured into his coffers by his marriage, Jeff did not care how much toil it took to polish off the top of a bluff or how much the sweat stood out on the brow of a hill.[Pg 24]

Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. He sent it to one of the magazines, but it was returned as not available, so he used it in Congress and afterward got it printed in the Record.

I saw the chair he wrote it in. It is a plain, old-fashioned wooden chair, with a kind of bosom-board on the right arm, upon which Jefferson used to rest his Declaration of Independence whenever he wanted to write it.

There is also an old gig stored in the house. In this gig Jefferson used to ride from Monticello to Washington in a day. This is untrue, but it goes with the place. It takes from 8:30 A. M. until noon to ride this distance on a fast train, and in a much more direct line than the old wagon road ran.

Mr. Jefferson was the father of the University of Virginia, one of the most historic piles I have ever clapped eyes on. It is now under the management of a classical janitor, who has a tinge of negro blood in his veins, mixed with the rich Castilian blood of somebody else.[Pg 25]

He has been at the head of the University of Virginia for over forty years, bringing in the coals and exercising a general oversight over the curriculum and other furniture. He is a modest man, with a tendency toward the classical in his researches. He took us up on the roof, showed us the outlying country, and jarred our ear-drums with the big bell. Mr. Estes, who has general charge of Monticello—called Montechello—said that Mr. Jefferson used to sit on his front porch with a powerful glass, and watch the progress of the work on the University, and if the workmen undertook to smuggle in a soft brick, Mr. Jefferson, five or six miles away, detected it, and bounding lightly into his saddle, he rode down there to Charlottesville, and clubbed the bricklayers until they were glad to pull down the wall to that brick and take it out again.

This story is what made me speak of that section a few minutes ago as an outlying country.

The other day Charles L. Seigel told us the Confederate version of an attack on Fort Moultrie during the early days of the war,[Pg 26] which has never been printed. Mr. Seigel was a German Confederate, and early in the fight was quartered, in company with others, at the Moultrie House, a seaside hotel, the guests having deserted the building.

Although large soft beds with curled hair mattresses were in each room, the department issued ticks or sacks to be filled with straw for the use of the soldiers, so that they would not forget that war was a serious matter. Nobody used them, but they were there all the same.

Attached to the Moultrie House, and wandering about the back-yard, there was a small orphan jackass, a sorrowful little light blue mammal, with a tinge of bitter melancholy in his voice. He used to dwell on the past a good deal, and at night he would refer to it in tones that were choked with emotion.

The boys caught him one evening as the gloaming began to arrange itself, and threw him down on the green grass. They next pulled a straw bed over his head, and inserted him in it completely, cutting holes for[Pg 27] his legs. Then they tied a string of sleighbells to his tail, and hit him a smart, stinging blow with a black snake.