Bill Nye's Cordwood by Bill Nye (free ebook reader for ipad txt) 📗

with their great object and the oil of tobacco that the great Caucasian chowder of those regions would be followed by such weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth and such remorse and repentance and gastric upheavals that it would be as unsafe to eat a mission[Pg 83]ary in the cannibal islands as it is to eat ice-cream in the United States to-day. Bill Nye's Arctic-le.

The excitement consequent upon the anticipated departure of Mr. Gilder for the north pole has recently awakened in the bosom of the American people a new interest in what I may term that great terra incognita, if I may be pardoned for using a phrase from my own mother tongue.

Let us for a moment look back across the bleak waste of years and see what wonderful progress has been made in the discovery of the pole. We may then ask ourselves, who will be first to tack his location notice on the gnawed and season-cracked surface of the pole itself, and what will he do with it after he has so filed upon it?

Iceland, I presume, was discovered about 860 A. D., or 1,026 years ago, but the stampede to Iceland has always been under control, and you can get corner lots in the most desirable cities of Iceland, and wear a long rickety name with links in it like a rosewood sausage, to-day at a low price. Naddodr, a Norwegian viking, discovered Iceland A. D. 860, but he did not live to meet Lieutenant Greely or any of our most celebrated northern tourists. Why Naddodr yearned to go north and[Pg 84] discover a colder country than his own, why he should seek to wet his feet and get icicles down his back in order to bring to light more snow-banks and chilblains, I cannot at this time understand. Why should a robust and prosperous viking roam around in the cold trying to nose out more frost-bitten Esquimaux, when he could remain at home and vike?

But I leave this to the thinking mind. Let the thinking mind grapple with it. It has no charms for me. Moreover, I haven't that kind of a mind.

Octher, another Norwegian gentleman, sailed around North cape and crossed the arctic circle in 890 A. D., but he crossed it in the night, and didn't notice it at the time.

Two or three years later, Erik the Red took a large snow-shovel and discovered the east coast of Greenland. Erik the Red was a Northman, and he flourished about the ninth century, and before the war. He sailed around in that country for several years, drinking bay rum and bear's oil and having a good time. He wore fur underclothes all the time, winter and summer, and evaded the poll-tax for a long time. Erik also established a settlement on the south-east coast of Greenland in about latitude 60 degrees north. These people remained here for some time, subsisting on shrimp salad, sea-moss farina, and neat's-foot oil. But finally they became so bored with the quiet country life and the[Pg 85] backward springs that they removed from there to a land that is fairer than day, to use the words of another. They removed during the holidays, leaving their axle grease and all they held dear, including their remains.

From that on down to 1380 we hear or read varying and disconnected accounts of people who have been up that way, acquired a large red chilblain, made an observation, and died. Representatives from almost every quarter of the globe have been to the far north, eaten their little hunch of jerked polar-bear, and then the polar-bear has eaten his little hunch of jerked explorer, and so the good work went on.

The polar bear, with his wonderful retentive faculties, has succeeded in retaining his great secret regarding the pole, together with the man who came out there to find out about it. So up to 1380 a large number of nameless explorers went to this celebrated watering-place, shot a few pemmican, ate a jerked whale, shuddered a couple of times, and died. It has been the history of arctic exploration from the earliest ages. Men have taken their lives and a few doughnuts in their hands, wandered away into the uncertain light of the frozen north, made a few observations—to each other regarding the backward spring—and then cached their skeletons forever.[Pg 86]

In 1380 two Italians named Lem took a load of sun-kissed bananas and made a voyage to the extreme north, but the historian says that the accounts are so conflicting, and as the stories told by the two brothers did not agree and neither ever told it the same on two separate occasions, the history of their voyage is not used very much.

Years rolled on, boys continued to go to school and see in their geographies enticing pictures of men in expensive fur clothing running sharp iron spears and long dangerous stab knives into ferocious white bears and snorting around on large cakes of cold ice and having a good time. These inspired the growing youth to rise up and do likewise. So every nation 'neath the sun has contributed its assortments of choice, white skeletons and second hand clothes to the remorseless maw of the hungry and ravenous north.

And still the great pole continued to squeak on through days that were six months long and nights that made breakfast seem almost useless.

In 1477 Columbus went up that way, but did not succeed in starving to death. He got a bird's-eye view of a large deposit of dark-blue ice, got hungry and came home.

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the northern nations of Europe, and especially the Dutch, kept the discovery business red-hot, but[Pg 87] they did not get any fragments of the true pole. The maritime nations of Europe, together with other foreign powers, dynasties, and human beings, for some time had spells of visiting the polar seas and neglecting to come back. It was the custom then as it is now, to go twenty rods farther than any other man had ever been, eat a deviled bootleg, curl up, and perish. Thousands of the best and brightest minds of all ages have yielded to this wild desire to live on sperm oil, pain-killer and jerked walrus, keep a little blue diary for thirteen weeks, and then feed it to a tall white bear with red gums.

That is not all. Millions of gallons of whiskey are sent to these frozen countries and used by the explorer in treating the untutored Esquimaux, who are not, and never will be, voters. It seems to me utterly ill-advised and shamefully idiotic.

Bill Nye's Answers to Correspondents.

Capitalist—Will you kindly furnish your address once more? You must either stop moving about so or leave some one at home to represent you. Nothing is more humiliating to a literary man of keen sensibilities than to draw at sight and have the draft returned with the memorandum on the back in pencil "Gone to the White mountains," or "Gone to Lake Elmo on another bridal tour," or[Pg 88] "Gone to Bayfield to be absent several years," or "Gone to Minnetonka to wait till the clouds roll by."

"Searcher," Peru, Ill.—Cum grano salis was the motto of the ancients, and was written in blue letters at the base of the shield on a field emerald, supported by a cucumber recumbent. The author is unknown.

"S. Q. G.," McGree's Prairie, Iowa, asks: "Do you know of any place where a young man can get a good living?"

That depends on what you call a good living, S. Q. G. If your stomach would not revolt at plain fare, such as poor people use, come up and stop at our house awhile. We don't live high, but we aim to eke out an existence, as it were. Come and abide with us, S. Q. G. Here is where the prince of Wales comes when he gets weary of being heir apparently to the throne. Here is where Bert comes when he has stood a long time, first on one leg and then on the other, waiting for his mother to evacuate said throne. He bids dull care begone, and clothing himself in some of my own gaudy finery he threads a small Limerick hook through the vitals of a long-waisted worm, as we hie us to the bosky dell where the plash of the pleasant-voiced brook replies to the turtle dove's moan. There, where the pale green plush of the moss on[Pg 89] the big flat rocks deadens the footfall of Wales and me, where the tip of the long willow bough monkeys with the stream forever, where neither powers nor principalities, nor things present or things to come, can embitter us, we sit there, young Regina and me, and we live more happy years in twenty minutes than a man generally lives all his whole life socked up against a hard throne with the eagle eye of a warning constituency on him.

It's a good place to come, S. Q. G. Quiet but restful; full of balm for the wounded spirit and close up to nature's great North American heart. That's the idea. Perhaps I do not size you up accurately, S. Q. G. You may be a man who does not pant for the sylvan shade. Very likely you are a seaside resortist and do not care for pants, but I simply say to you that if you are a worthy young man weary with life's great battles—beaten back, perhaps, and wounded—with your neck knocked crooked like a tom-tit that has run against a telegraph wire in the night, come up here into northern Wisconsin, where the butternut gleams in the autumn sunshine and the ax-helve has her home. Come where the sky is a dark and glorious blue and the town a magnificent red. Come where the coral cranberry nestles in the green heart of the yielding marsh and the sand-hill crane stands idly on the sedgy brim of the lonely lake through all the long, idle[Pg 90] day with his hands in the tail pockets of his tan-colored coat, trying to remember what he did with his handkerchief.

Come up here, S. Q. G. and be my amanuensis. I want a man to go with me on a little private excursion from the Dallas of the St. Croix to the Sault Ste. Marie. I want him to go with me and act as my private secretary and carry my canoe for me. The salary would be small the first year, but you would have a good deal of fun. Most any one can have fun with me. We would go mostly for relaxation and to build up our systems. My system is pretty well built up, but it would be a pleasure to me to watch you build yours up. What I need is a private secretary to go with me and take down little thinklets that I may have thought. You would have nothing to carry but the canoe, a small tent, my gun and a type-writer. I would carry the field glass. I always carry the field glass because something might happen to it. One time an amanuensis who went with me insisted on carrying the field glass, and the second day he lost the cork out of it, so we had to come back and make a new observation before we could start.

You would be welcome, S. Q. G.; welcome here in the fastness of the forest; welcome where the resinous air of the spruce and the tamarack would kiss your wan cheek; welcome to the rocky shores[Pg 91] of the grand old fresh water monarch, the champion heavyweight of all the great lakes; welcome to the hazy, lazy days of our long voluptuous autumn, the twilight of the closing year; welcome to the shade of the elms, where the sunshine sneaks in on tiptoe and frolics with the dew and the daisies; welcome to the sombre depths of the ever regretful and repentant pines, whose venerable heads are first to greet the day, and whose heaving bosoms hold the night.

Come over, S. Q. G. Be my stenographer and I will show you where a friend of mine has concealed a watermelon patch in the very heart of his corn-field. Come over and we will show him how concealment, like a worm, may feed upon his damaged fruit. Till then, S. Q. G., ta-ta.

Bill Nye Preparing A Political Speech in Advance for a Time of Need.

Sept. 1.—I have just been preparing a speech for to-morrow evening at our convention. It is a good speech and will take