Remarks by Bill Nye (free ebook reader for pc TXT) 📖
- Author: Bill Nye
Book online «Remarks by Bill Nye (free ebook reader for pc TXT) 📖». Author Bill Nye
Well, we paid no attention whatever to the letter, but meantime he got into the mines, and the way he dead-headed feed and sour mash, on the strength of his relations with the press, made the older miners weep.
Buck Bramel got a little worried and wrote to me about it. He said that our soft-eyed mining savant was getting us a good many subscribers, and writing up every little gopher hole in North Park, and living on Cincinnati quail, as we miners call bacon; but he said that none of these fine, blooming letters, regarding the assays on “The Weasel Asleep,” “The Pauper's Dream,” “The Mary Ellen” and “The Over Draft,” ever seemed to crop out in the paper.
Why was it?
I wrote back that the white-eyed pelican from the buckwheat-enamelled plains of Arkansas had not remitted, was not employed by us, and that I would write and publish a little card of introduction for the bilious litterateur that would make people take in their domestic animals, and lock up their front fences and garden fountains.
In the meantime they sent him up the gulch to find some “float.” He had wandered away from camp thirty miles before he remembered that he didn't know what float looked like. Then he thought he would go back and inquire. He got lost while in a dark brown study and drifted into the bosom of the unknowable. He didn't miss the trail until a perpendicular wall of the Rocky Mountains, about 900 feet high, rose up and hit him athwart the nose.
{Illustration: COMMUNING WITH NATURE.}
He communed with nature and the coyotes one night and had a pretty tough time of it. He froze his nose partially off, and the coyotes came and gnawed his little dimpled toes. He passed a wretched night, and was greatly annoyed by the cold, which at that elevation sends the mercury toward zero all through the summer nights.
Of course he pulled the zodiac partially over him, and tried to button his alapaca duster a little closer, but his sleep was troubled by the sociability of the coyotes and the midnight twitter of the mountain lion. He ate moss agates rare and spruce gum for breakfast. When he got to the camp he looked like a forty-day starvationist hunting for a job.
They asked him if he found any float, and he said he didn't find a blamed drop of water, say nothing about float, and then they all laughed a merry laugh, and said that if he showed up at daylight the next morning within the limits of the park, the orders were to burn him at the stake.
The next morning neither he nor the best bay mule on the Troublesome was to be seen with naked eye. After that we heard of him in the San Juan country.
He had lacerated the finer feelings of the miners down there, and had violated the etiquette of San Juan, so they kicked a flour barrel out from under him one day when he was looking the other way, and being a poor tight-rope performer, he got tangled up with a piece of inch rope in such a way that he died of his injuries.
The Amateur Carpenter.
In my opinion every professional man should keep a chest of carpenters' tools in his barn or shop, and busy himself at odd hours with them in constructing the varied articles that are always needed about the house. There is a great deal of pleasure in feeling your own independence of other trades, and more especially of the carpenter. Every now and then your wife will want a bracket put up in some corner or other, and with your new, bright saw and glittering hammer you can put up one upon which she can hang a cast-iron horse-blanket lambrequin, with inflexible water lilies sewed in it.
A man will, if he tries, readily learn to do a great many such little things and his wife will brag on him to other ladies, and they will make invidious comparisons between their husbands who can't do anything of that kind whatever, and you who are “so handy.”
Firstly, you buy a set of amateur carpenter tools. You do not need to say that you are an amateur. The dealer will find that out when you ask him for an easy-running broad-ax or a green-gage plumb line. He will sell you a set of amateur's tools that will be made of old sheet-iron with basswood handles, and the saws will double up like a piece of stovepipe.
After you have nailed a board on the fence successfully, you will very naturally desire to do something much better, more difficult. You will probable try to erect a parlor table or rustic settee.
I made a very handsome bracket last week, and I was naturally proud of it. In fastening it together, if I hadn't inadvertently nailed it to the barn floor, I guess I could have used it very well, but in tearing it loose from the barn, so that the two could be used separately, I ruined a bracket that was intended to serve as the base, as it were, of a lambrequin which cost nine dollars, aside from the time expended on it.
During the month of March I built an ice-chest for this summer. It was not handsome, but it was roomy, and would be very nice for the season of 1886, I thought. It worked pretty well through March and April, but as the weather begins to warm up that ice-chest is about the warmest place around the house. There is actually a glow of heat around that ice-chest that I don't notice elsewhere. I've shown it to several personal friends. They seem to think it is not built tightly enough for an ice-chest. My brother looked at it yesterday, and said that his idea of an ice-chest was that it ought to be tight enough at least to hold the larger chunks of ice so that they would not escape through the pores of the ice-box. He says he never built one, but that it stood to reason that a refrigerator like that ought to be constructed so that it would keep the cows out of it. You don't want to have a refrigerator that the cattle can get through the cracks of and eat up your strawberries on ice, he says.
A neighbor of mine who once built a hen resort of laths, and now wears a thick thumb-nail that looks like a Brazil nut as a memento of that pullet corral, says my ice-chest is all right enough, only that it is not suited to this climate. He thinks that along Behring's Strait, during the holidays, my ice-chest would work like a charm. And even here, he thought, if I could keep the fever out of my chest there would be less pain.
I have made several other little articles of vertu this spring, to the construction of which I have contributed a good deal of time and two finger nails. I have also sawed into my leg two or three times. The leg, of course, will get well, but the pantaloons will not. Parties wishing to meet me in my studio during the
Comments (0)