A FATHER'S LETTER
Table of Contents MY DEAR SOX: We got your last letter some three days ago. It found us all moderately well though not very frisky. Your letters now days are getting quite pretty as regards penmanship. You are certainly going to develop into a fine penman your mother thinks. She says that if you improve as fast in your writing next year as you have last, you will soon be writing for the papers.
In my mind's eye I can see you there in your room practicing for a long time on a spiral spring which you make with your pen. I believe you call it the whole arm movement. I think you got the idea from me. You remember I used to have a whole arm movement that I introduced into our family along in the summer of '69. You was at that time trying to learn to swim. Once or twice the neighbors brought you home with your lungs full of river water and your ears full of coarse sand. We pumped you dry several times, but it did not wean you from the river, so I introduced the whole arm movement, one day and used it from that on in what you would call our curric kulum. It worked well.
Your letters are now very attractive from a scientific standpoint. The letters all have pretty little curly tails on them, and though you do not always spell according to Gunter, the capital letters are as pretty as a picture. I never saw such a round O as you make when you hang your tongue out and begin to swing yourself. Your mother says that your great-uncle on her side was a good writer too. He could draw off a turtle dove without taking his pen from the paper, and most everybody would know as soon as they looked at it that it was a turtle dove or some such bird as that.
He could also draw a deer with coil spring horns on him, and a barbed wire fence to it, and a scolloped tail, and it looked as much like a deer as anything else you could think of.
He was a fine penman and wrote a good deal for the papers. Your mother has got a lot of his pieces in the house yet, which the papers sent back because they were busy and crowded full of other stuff. I read some of these letters, and any one can see that it was a great sacrifice for the editors to send the pieces back, but they had got used to it and conquered their own personal feelings, and sent them back because they were too good for the plain, untutored reader. One editor said that he did not want to print the enclosed pieces because he thought it would be a pity to place such pretty writing in the soiled hands of the practical printer. He said that the manuscript looked so pretty just as it was, that he hadn't the heart to send it into the composing room. So the day may not be far away, Henry, when you can write for the press, your mother thinks. I don't care so much about it myself, but she has her heart set on it. Your mother thinks that you are a great man, though I have not detected any symptoms of it yet. She has got that last pen scroll work here of yours in the bible, where she can look at it every day. Its the picture of a hen setting in a nest of curly-cues made with red ink, over a woven wire mattress of dewdads in blue ink, and some tall grass in violet ink. Your mother says that this fowl is also a turtle dove, but I think she is wrong.
She says the world has always got a warm place for one who can make such a beautiful picture without taking his pen off the paper. Perhaps she is right. I hope that you will not take me for an example, for I am no writer at all. My parents couldn't give me any advantages when I was young. When I ought to have been learning how to make a red ink bird of paradise swooping down on a violet ink butterfly with green horns, I was frittering away my time trying to keep my misguided parents out of the poor-house.
I tell you, Henry, there was mighty little fluff and bloom and funny business in my young life. While you are acquiring the rudiments of Long Dennis and polo and penmanship, and storing your mind with useful knowledge with which to parlize your poor parents when you come home, do not forget, Henry, that your old sway-back father never had those opportunities for soaking his system full of useful knowledge which you now enjoy. When I was your age, I was helping to jerk the smutty logs off of a new farm with a pair of red and restless steers, in the interest of your grandfather.
But, I do not repine. I just simply call your attention to your priviledges. Could you have a Summer in the heart of the primeval forest, thrown in contact with a pair of high-strung steers and a large number of black flies of the most malignant type, "snaking" half-burnt logs across yourself and fighting flies from early dawn till set of sun, you would be willing, nay tickled, to go back to your monotonous round of base ball and Suffolk jackets and pest-house cigarettes. .
We rather expected you home some time ago, but you said you needed sea air and change of scene, so you will not be home very likely till the latter part of the month. We will be glad to see you any time, Henry, and we will try to make it as pleasant as we can for you. Your mother got me to fill the big straw-tick for your bed again, so that you would have a nice tall place to sleep, and so that you could live high, as the feller said.
I tried on the old velocipede pants you sent home last week. They are too short for me with the style of legs I am using this Summer. Your bathing pants are also too short for me, so I gave them to a poor woman here who is trying to ameliorate the condition of her sex.
I send you our love and $9 in money. We will sell the other calf as soon as it is ripe. Chintz bugs are rather more robust than last year, and the mortgage on our place looks as if it might mature prematurely. We had a lecture on phrenology at the school-house Tuesday night, during which four of our this spring's roan turkies wandered so far away from home that they lost their bearings and never came back again. So good-by for this time. Your father,
Bill Nye
THE AZTEC AT HOME
Table of Contents IT HAS been my good fortune within the past ten years to witness a number of the remaining landmarks left to indicate the trail of the original inhabitant of this country. It has been a pleasure, and yet a kind of sad pleasure, to examine the crumbling ruins of what was once regarded, no doubt, as the very triumph of aboriginal taste and mechanical ingenuity.
I can take but a cursory glance at these earmarks of a forgotten age, for a short treatise like this cannot embrace minute details, of course.
We are told by the historian that there were originally two distinct classes of Indians occupying the territory now embraced by the United States, viz., the village Indians or horticultural Indians, and the extremely rural Indians or nonhorticultural variety.
The village Indians or horticulturalists subsisted upon fruits and grain, ground in a crude way, while the non-horticulturalists lived on wild game, berries, acorns and pilgrims.
Of the latter class few traces remain, excepting rude arrow heads and coarse stone weapons. These articles show very little skill as a rule, the only indication of brains that I ever discovered being on a large stone hammer or Mohawk swatter, and they were not the brains of the man who made it either.
The village Indians, however, were architects from away up the gulch.
They constructed a number of architectural works of great beauty, several of which I have visited. They were once, no doubt, regarded as very desirable residences, but now, alas, they have fallen into innocuous desuetude-at least that is what it looked like to me, and the odor reminded me of innocuous desuetude in a bad state of preservation.
In New Mexico, over 300 years ago, there were built a number of pereblos or villages which still stand up, in a measure, though some of them are in a recumbent position. These pereblos or villages are formed of three or four buildings constructed in the retrousse style of architecture, and made of adobe bricks. These bricks are generally of a beautiful, soft, black and tan color, and at a distance look like the first loaf of bread baked by a young lady who has been reared in luxury but whose father has been suddenly called away to Canada. The adobe brick is said to be so indigestible, in fact, that I am confident the day is not far distant when it will be found on every hotel bill of fare in our broad sin-cursed land.
One of these dwellings was generally about 200 feet long, with no stairways in the interior, but movable ladders on the outside instead. This manner of reaching the upper floor had its advantages, and yet it was not always convenient. One feature in its favor was the isolation which a man could pull around himself by going in at the second-story window and pulling the ladder up after him, as there was no entrance to the house on the ground floor. If a man really courted retirement, and wanted to write a humorous lecture or a $2 homily, he could insert himself through the second-story window, pull in the staircase and go to work. Then no one could disturb him without bribing a hook and ladder company to come along and let him in.
But the great drawback was the annoyance incident to ascending these ladders at a late hour in the night, while under the influence of Aztec rum, a very seductive yet violently intoxicating beverage, containing about eight parts cheer to ninety-two parts inebriate.
These residences were hardly gothic in style, being extremely rectangular, with a tendency toward the more modern dry-goods box. It is believed by abler men than I am, men who could believe more in two minutes than I could believe in a lifetime if I had nothing else to do, that those...
