Remarks

This subject has, indeed, attracted my attention for some years, and it has afforded me great pleasure to investigate it carefully.

Regarding the causes of dreams and somnambulism, there are many theories, all of which are more or less untenable. My own idea, given, of course, in a plain, crude way, is that thoughts originate on the inside of the brain and then go at once to the surface, where they have their photographs taken, with the understanding that the negatives are to be preserved. In this way the thought may afterward be duplicated back to the thinker in the form of a dream, and, if the impulse be strong enough, muscular action and somnambulism may result.

On the banks of Bitter Creek, some years ago, lived an open-mouthed man, who had risen from affluence by his unaided effort until he was entirely free from any incumbrance in the way of property. His mind dwelt on this matter a great deal during the day. Thoughts of manual labor flitted through his mind, but were cast aside as impracticable. Then other means of acquiring property suggested themselves. These thoughts were photographed on the delicate negative of the brain, where it is a rule to preserve all negatives. At night these thoughts were reversed within the think resort, if I may be allowed that term, and muscular action resulted. Yielding at last to the great desire for possessions and property the somnambulist groped his way to the corral of a total stranger, and selecting a choice mule with great dewy eyes and real camel’s hair tail, he fled. On and on he pressed, toward the dark, uncertain west, till at last rosy morn clomb the low, outlying hills and gilded the gray outlines of the sage-brush. The coyote slunk back to his home, but the somnambulist did not.

He awoke as day dawned, and, when he found himself astride the mule of another, a slight shudder passed the entire length of his frame. He then fully realized that he had made his debut as a somnambulist. He seemed to think that he who starts out to be a somnambulist should never turn back. So he pressed on, while the red sun stepped out into the awful quiet of the dusty waste and gradually moved up into the sky, and slowly added another day to those already filed away in the dark maw of ages.

Night came again at last, and with it other somnambulists similar to the first, only that they were riding on their own beasts. Some somnambulists ride their own animals, while others are content to bestride the steeds of strangers.

The man on the anonymous mule halted at last at the mouth of a deep canon. He did so at the request of other somnambulists. Mechanically he got down from the back of the mule and stood under a stunted mountain pine.

After awhile he began to ascend the tree by means of his neck. When he had reached the lower branch of the tree he made a few gestures with his feet by a lateral movement of the legs. He made several ineffectual efforts to kick some pieces out of the horizon, and then, after he had gently oscilliated a few times, he assumed a pendent and perpendicular position at right angles with the limb of the tree.

The other somnambulists then took the mule safely back to his corral, and the tragedy of a night was over.

The London Post very truly says that where somnambulism can be proved it is a good defense in a criminal action. It was so held in this case.

Various methods are suggested for rousing the somnambulist, such as tickling the feet, for instance; but in all my own experience, I never knew of a more radical or permanent cure than the one so imperfectly given above. It might do in some cases to tickle the feet of a somnambulist discovered in the act of riding away on an anonymous mule, but how could you successfully tickle the soles of his feet while he is standing on them? In such cases, the only true way would be to suspend the somnambulist in such a way as to give free access to the feet from below, and, at the same time, give him a good, wide horizon to kick at.

Modern Architecture

It may be premature, perhaps, but I desire to suggest to anyone who may be contemplating the erection of a summer residence for me, as a slight testimonial of his high regard for my sterling worth and symmetrical escutcheon—a testimonial more suggestive of earnest admiration and warm personal friendship than of great intrinsic value, etc., etc., etc., that I hope he will not construct it on the modern plan of mental hallucination and morbid delirium tremens peculiar to recent architecture.

Of course, a man ought not to look a gift house in the gable end, but if my friends don’t know me any better than to build me a summer cottage and throw in odd windows that nobody else wanted, and then daub it up with colors they have bought at auction and applied to the house after dark with a shotgun, I think it is time that we had a better understanding.

Such a structure does not come within either of the three classes of renaissance. It is neither Florentine, Roman, or Venetian. Any man can originate such a style if he will only drink the right kind of whiskey long enough and then describe the feelings to an amanuensis.

Imagine the sensation that one of these modern, sawed-off cottages would create a hundred years from now, if it should survive! But that is impossible. The only cheering feature of the whole matter is that these creatures of a disordered imagination must soon pass away, and the bright sunlight of hard horse sense shine in through the shattered dormers and gables and gnawed-off architecture of the average summer resort.

A friend of mine a few days ago showed me his new house with much pride. He asked me what I thought of it. I told him I liked it first-rate. Then I went home and wept all night. It was my first falsehood.

The house, taken as a whole, looked to me like a skating rink that had started out to make money, and then suddenly changed its mind and resolved to become a tannery. Then ten feet higher it lost all self-respect and blossomed into a full-blown drunk and disorderly, surrounded by the smokestack of a foundry and the bright future of thirty days ahead with the chain gang. That’s the way it looked to me.

The roofs were made of little odds and ends of misfit rafters and distorted shingles that somebody had purchased at a sheriff’s sale, and the rooms and stairs were giddy in the extreme.

I went in and rambled around among the cross-eyed staircases and other night-mares till reason tottered on her throne. Then I came out and stood on the architectural wart, called the side porch, to get fresh air. This porch was painted a dull red, and it had wooden rosettes at the corners that looked like a new carbuncle on the nose of a social wreck.

Farther up on the demoralized lumber pile I saw, now and then, places where the workman’s mind had wandered and he had nailed on his clapboards wrong side up, and then painted them with Paris green that he had intended to use on something else.

It was an odd looking structure, indeed. If my friend got all the material for nothing from people who had fragments of paint and lumber left over after they failed, and then if the workmen constructed it of night for mental relaxation and intellectual repose, without charge, of course the scheme was a financial success, but architecturally the house is a gross violation of the statutes in such cases made and provided, and against the peace and dignity of the State.

There is a look of extreme poverty about the structure which a man might struggle for years to acquire and then fail. No one could look upon it without a feeling of heartache for the man who built that house, and probably struggled on year after year, building a little at a time as he could steal the lumber, getting a new workman each year, building a knob here and a protuberance there, putting in a three-cornered window at one point and a yellow tile or a wad of broken glass and other debris at another, patiently filling in around the ranch with any old rubbish that other people had got through with, painting it as he went along, taking what was left in the bottom of the pots after his neighbors had painted their bob-sleds or their tree boxes—little favors thankfully received—and then surmounting the whole pile with a potpourri of roof, and grand farewell incubus of humps and hollows for the rain to wander through and seek out the different cells where the lunatics live who inhabit it.

I did tell my friend one thing that I thought would improve the looks of his house. He asked me eagerly what it could be. I said it would take a man of great courage to do it for him. He said he didn’t care for that. He would do it himself. If it only needed one thing he would never rest till he had it, whatever that might be.

Then I told him that if he had a friend—one he could trust—who would steal in there some night while the family were away, and scratch a match on the leg of his breeches, or on the breeches of any other gentleman who happened to be present, and hold it where it would ignite the alleged house, and then remain near there to see that the fire department did not meddle with it, he would confer a great favor on one who would cheerfully retaliate in kind on call.

Letter to a Communist

Dear Sir.—Your courteous letter of the 1st instant, in which you cordially consent to share my wealth and dwell together with me in fraternal sunshine, is duly received. While I dislike to appear cold and distant to one who seems so yearnful and so clinging, and while I do not wish to be regarded as purse-proud or arrogant, I must decline your kind offer to whack up. You had not heard, very likely, that I am not now a Communist. I used to be, I admit, and the society no doubt neglected to strike my name off the roll of active members. For a number of years I was quite active as a Communist. I would have been more active, but I had conscientious scruples against being active in anything then.

While you may be perfectly sincere in your belief that the great capitalists like Mr. Gould and Mr. Vanderbilt should divide with you, you will have great difficulty in making it perfectly clear to them. They will probably demur and delay, and hem and haw, and procrastinate, till finally they will get out of it in some way. Still, I do not wish to throw cold water on your enterprise. If the other capitalists look favorably on the plan, I will cheerfully co-operate with them. You go and see what you can do with Mr. Vanderbilt, and then come to me.

You go on at some length to tell me how the most of the wealth is in the hands of a few men, and then you attack those men and refer to them in a way that makes my blood run cold. You tell the millionaires of America to beware, for the hot breath of a bloody-handed Nemesis is already in the air.

You may say to Nemesis, if you please, that I have a double-barreled shotgun standing at the head of my bed every night, and that I am in the Nemesis business. You also refer to the fact that the sleuth-hounds of eternal justice are camped on the trail of the pampered millionaire, and you ask us to avaunt. If you see the other sleuth-hounds of your society within a week or two, I wish you would say to them that at a regular meeting of the millionaires of this country, after the minutes of the previous meeting had been read and approved, we voted almost unanimously to discourage any sleuth-hound that we found camped on our trail after ten o’clock, P.M. Sleuth-hounds who want to ramble over our trails during office hours may do so with the utmost impunity, but after ten o’clock we want to use our trails for other purposes. No man wants to go to the great expense of maintaining a trail winter and summer, and then leave it out nights for other people to use and return it when they get ready.

I do not censure you, however. If you could convince every one of the utility of Communism, it would certainly be a great boon—to you. To those who are now engaged in feeding themselves with flat beer out of a tomato can, such a change as you suggest would fall like a ray of sunshine in a rat-hole, but alas! it may never be. I tried it awhile, but my efforts were futile. The effect of my great struggle seemed to be that men’s hearts grew more and more stony, and my pantaloons got thinner and thinner on the seat, ‘till it seemed to me that the world never was so cold. Then I made some experiments in manual labor. As I began to work harder and sit down less, I found that the world was not so cold. It was only when I sat down a long time that I felt how cold and rough the world really was.

Perhaps it is so with you. Sedentary habits and stale beer are apt to make us morbid. Sitting on the stone door sills of hallways and public buildings during cold weather is apt to give you an erroneous impression of life.

Of course I am willing to put my money into a common fund if I can be convinced that it is best. I was an inside passenger on a Leadville coach some years ago, when a few of your friends suggested that we all put our money into a common fund, and I was almost the first one to see that they were right. They went away into the mountains to apportion the money they got from our party, but I never got any dividend. Probably they lost my post-office address.

The Warrior’s Oration

Warriors! We are met here to-day to celebrate the white man’s Fourth of July. I do not know what the Fourth of July has done for us that we should remember his birthday, but it matters not. Another summer is on the wane, and so are we. We are the walleyed waners from Wanetown. We have monopolized the wane business of the whole world.

Autumn is almost here, and we have not yet gone upon the war path. The pale face came among us with the corn planter and the Desert Land Act, and we bow before him.

What does the Fourth of July signify to us? It is a hollow mockery! Where the flag of the white man now waves in the breeze, a few years ago the scalp of our foe was hanging in the air. Now my people are seldom. Some are dead and others drunk.

Once we chased the deer and the buffalo across the plains, and lived high. Now we eat the condemned corned beef of the oppressor, and weep over the graves of our fallen braves. A few more moons and I, too, shall cross over to the Happy Reservation.

Once I could whoop a couple of times and fill the gulch with warlike athletes. Now I may whoop till the cows come home and only my sickly howl comes back to me from the hillsides. I am as lonely as the greenback party. I haven’t warriors enough to carry one precinct.

Where are the proud chieftains of my tribe? Where are Old Weasel Asleep and Orlando the Hie Jacet Promoter? Where are Prickly Ash Berry and The Avenging Wart? Where are The Roman-nosed Pelican and Goggle-eyed Aleck, The-man-who-rides-the-blizzard-bareback?

They are extremely gone. They are extensively whence. Ole Blackhawk, in whose veins flows the blood of many chiefs, is sawing wood for the Belle of the West deadfall for the whiskey. He once rode the war pony into the fray and buried his tomahawk in the phrenology of his foe. Now he straddles the saw-buck and yanks the woodsaw athwart the bosom of the basswood chunk.

My people once owned this broad land; but the Pilgrim Fathers (where are they?) came and planted the baked bean and the dried apple, and my tribe vamoosed. Once we were a nation. Now we are the tin can tied to the American eagle.

Warriors! This should be a day of jubilee, but how can the man rejoice who has a boil on his nose? How can the chief of a once proud people shoot firecrackers and dance over the graves of his race? How can I be hilarious with the victor, on whose hands are the blood of my children?

If we had known more of the white man, we would have made it red hot for him four hundred years ago when he came to our coast. We fed him and clothed him as a white-skinned curiosity then, but we didn’t know there were so many of him. All he wanted then was a little smoking tobacco and love. Now he feeds us on antique pork, and borrows our annuities to build a Queen Anne wigwam with a furnace in the bottom and a piano in the top.

Warriors! My words are few. Tears are idle and unavailing. If I had scalding tears enough for a mill site, I would not shed a blamed one. The warrior suffers, but he never squeals. He accepts the position and says nothing. He wraps his royal horse blanket around his Gothic bones and is silent.

But the pale face cannot tickle us with a barley straw on the Fourth of July and make us laugh. You can kill the red man, but you cannot make him hilarious over his own funeral. These are the words of truth, and my warriors will do well to paste them in their plug hats for future reference.

The Holy Terror

While in New England trying in my poor, weak way to represent the “rowdy west,” I met a sad young man who asked me if I lived in Chi-eene. I told him that if he referred to Cheyenne, I had been there off and on a good deal.

He said he was there not long ago, but did not remain. He bought some clothes in Chicago, so that he could appear in Chi-eene as a “holy terror” when he landed there, and thus in a whole town of “holy terrors” he would not attract attention.

I am not, said he, by birth or instinct, a holy terror, but I thought I would like to try it a little while, anyhow. I got one of those Chicago sombreros with a gilt fried cake twisted around it for a band. Then I got a yellow silk handkerchief on the ten cent counter to tie around my neck. Then I got a suit of smoke-tanned buckskin clothes and a pair of moccasins. I had never seen a bad, bad man from Chi-eene, but I had seen pictures of them and they all wore moccasins. The money that I had left I put into a large revolver and a butcher knife with a red Morocco sheath to it. The revolver was too heavy for me to hold in one hand and shoot, but by resting it on a fence I could kill a cow easy enough if she wasn’t too blamed restless.

I went out to the stock yards in Chicago one afternoon and practiced with my revolver. One of my thumbs is out there at the stock yards now.

At Omaha I put on my new suit and sent my human clothes home to my father. He told me when I came away that when I got out to Wyoming, probably I wouldn’t want to attract attention by wearing clothes, and so I could send my clothes back to him and he would be glad to have them.

At Sidney I put on my revolver and went into the eating house to get my dinner. A tall man met me at the door and threw me about forty feet in an oblique manner. I asked him if he meant anything personal by that and he said not at all, not at all. I then asked him if he would not allow me to eat my dinner and he said that depended on what I wanted for my dinner. If I would lay down my arms and come back to the reservation and remain neutral to the Government and eat cooked food, it would be all right, but if I insisted on eating raw dining-room girls and scalloped young ladies, he would bar me out.

We landed at Chi-eene in the evening. They had hacks and ‘busses and carriages till you couldn’t rest, all standing there at the depot, and a large colored man in a loud tone of voice remarked: “INTEROCEAN HO-TEL!!!!”

I went there myself. It had doors and windows to it, and carpets and gas. The young man who showed me to my room was very polite to me. He seemed to want to get acquainted. He said:

“You are from New Hampshire, are you not?”

I told him not to give it away, but I was from New Hampshire. Then I asked him how he knew.

He said that several New Hampshire people had been out there that summer, and they had worn the same style of revolver and generally had one thumb done up in a rag. Then he said that if I came from New Hampshire he would show me how to turn off the gas.

He also took my revolver down to the office with him and put it in the safe, because he said someone might get into my room in the night and kill me with it if he left it here. He was a perfect gentleman.

They have a big opera house there in Chi-eene, and while I was there they had the Eyetalian opera singers, Patty and Nevady there. The streets were lit up with electricity, and people seemed to kind of politely look down on me, I thought. Still, they acted as if they tried not to notice my clothes and dime museum hat.

They seemed to look at me as if I wasn’t to blame for it, and as if they felt sorry for me. If I’d had my United States clothes with me, I could have had a good deal of fun in Chi-eene, going to the opera and the lectures, and concerts, et cetera. But finally I decided to return, so I wrote to my parents how I had been knocked down and garroted, and left for dead with one thumb shot off, and they gladly sent the money to pay funeral expenses.

With this I got a cut-rate ticket home and surprised and horrified my parents by dropping in on them one morning just after prayers. I tried to get there prior to prayers, but was side-tracked by my father’s new anti-tramp bull dog.

Boston Common and Environs

Strolling through the Public Garden and the famous Boston Common, the untutored savage from the raw and unpolished West is awed and his wild spirit tamed by the magnificent harmony of nature and art. Everywhere the eye rests upon all that is beautiful in nature, while art has heightened the pleasing effect without having introduced the artistic jim-jams of a lost and undone world.

It is a delightful place through which to stroll in the gray morning while the early worm is getting his just desserts. There, in the midst of a great city, with the hum of industry and the low rumble of the throbbing Boston brain dimly heard in the distance, nature asserts herself, and the weary, sad-eyed stranger may ramble for hours and keep off the grass to his heart’s content.

Nearly every foot of Boston Common is hallowed by some historical incident. It is filled with reminiscences of a time when liberty was not overdone in this new world, and the tyrant’s heel was resting calmly on the neck of our forefathers.

In the winter of 1775-6, over 110 years ago, as the ready mathematician will perceive, 1,700 redcoats swarmed over Boston Common. Later on the local antipathy to these tourists became so great that they went away. They are still fled. A few of their descendants were there when I visited the Common, but they seemed amicable and did not wear red coats. Their coats this season are made of a large check, with sleeves in it. Their wardrobe generally stands a larger check than their bank account.

The fountains in the Common and the Public Garden attract the eye of the stranger, some of them being very beautiful. The Brewer fountain on Flagstaff hill, presented to the city by the late Gardner Brewer, is very handsome. It was cast in Paris, and is a bronze copy of a fountain designed by Lienard of that city. At the base there are figures representing Neptune with his fabled pickerel stabber, life size; also Amphitrite, Acis and Galatea. Surviving relatives of these parties may well feel pleased and gratified over the life-like expression which, the sculptor has so faithfully reproduced.

But the Coggswell fountain is probably the most eccentric squirt, and one which at once rivets the eye of the beholder. I do not know who designed it, but am told that it was modeled by a young man who attended the codfish autopsy at the market daytimes and gave his nights to art.

The fountain proper consists of two metallic bullheads rampart. They stand on their bosoms, with their tails tied together at the top. Their mouths are abnormally distended, and the water gushes forth from their tonsils in a beautiful stream.

The pose of these classical codfish or bullheads is sublime. In the spirited Graeco-Roman tussle which they seem to be having, with their tails abnormally elevated in their artistic catch-as-catch-can or can-can scuffle, the designer has certainly hit upon a unique and beautiful impossibility.

Each bullhead also has a tin dipper chained to his gills, and through the live-long day, till far into the night, he invites the cosmopolitan tramp to come and quench his never-dying thirst.

The frog pond is another celebrated watering place. I saw it in the early part of May, and if there had been any water in it, it would have been a fine sight. Nothing contributes to the success of a pond like water.

I ventured to say to a Boston man that I was a little surprised to find a little frog pond containing neither frogs or pond, but he said I would find it all right if I would call around during office hours.