"Mind you, I don't kick because I'm left alone here in the woods, and the sun don't seem to shine, and the birds seems a little backward about singin' this spring, and the house is so quiet, and she is still all the time and cries in the night when she thinks I am asleep. All that is tough, Mr. Nye--tough as old Harry, too--but its so, and I ain't murmurin', but when the board of health says to me that the Ruler of the Universe is makin' a tower of Northern Wisconsin, mowin' down little boys with sore throat because they say 'gosh,' I can't believe it. "I know that people who ain't familiar with the facts will shake their heads and say that I am a child of wrath, but I can't help it, All I can do is to go up there under the trees where them little graves is, and think how all-fired pleasant to me them little, short lives was, and how every one of them little fellers was welcome when he come, poor as I was, and how I rastled with poor crops and pine stumps to buy cloze for 'em, and didn't care a cent for style as long as they was well. That's the kind of heretic I am, and if God is like a father that settles it, He wouldn't wipe out my family just to establish discipline, I don't believe. The plan of creation must be on a bigger scale than that, it seems to me, or else it's more or less of a fizzle. "That board of health is better read than I am. It takes the papers and can add up figures, and do lots of things that I can't do; but when them fellers tell me that they represent the town of Balsam Lake and the Kingdom of Heaven, my morbid curiosity is aroused, and I want to see the stiffykits of election." HOW TO PUT UP A STOVE-PIPE. |PUTTING up stove-pipe is easy enough, if you only go at it right. In the morning, breakfast on some light, nutritious diet, and drink two cups of hot coffee; after which put on a suit of old clothes--or new ones, if you can get them on time--put on an old pair of buckskin gloves, and, when everything is ripe for the fatal blow, go and get a good hardware man who understands his business. If this rule be strictly adhered to, the gorgeous eighteen-karat-stem-winding profanity of the present day may be very largely diminished, and the world made better. FUN OF BEING A PUBLISHER. |BEING a publisher is not all sunshine, joy and johnny-jump-ups, although the gentle and tractable reader may at times think so. A letter was received two years ago by the publishers of this book, on the outside of which was the request to the "P. Master of Chicago to give to the most reliable man in Chicago and oblige." The P. Master thereupon gave the letter to Messrs. Belford, Clarke & Co., who have sent it to me as a literary curiosity. I want it to go down to posterity, so I put it in this great work. I simply change the names, and where words are too obscure, doctor them up a little: Butler, Bates county, Mo., Jan. the 2, 1881.