Bill Nye and Boomerang: Or, The Tale of a Meek-Eyed Mule, and Some Other Literary GemsNye, Bill
General
Bill Nye and Boomerang: Or, The Tale of a Meek-Eyed Mule, and Some Other Literary Gems
Nye, Bill
American wit and humor
|Secretary Spates, the silver-tongued orator and gilt-edged mouth organ
of Wyoming, acting general superintendent and governor extraordinary of
Wyoming, expressed a wish the other day for a dog. He had a light yellow
cane, and wanted a dog to match. He said that he wanted something to
love. If he could wake up in the stillness of the night and hear his
faithful dog fighting fleas, and licking his chops, and coughing, he
(the secretary) would feel as though he was loved, at least? by one.
Some friends thought it would be a pleasant thing to surprise Mr. Spates
with a dog. So they procured a duplicate key to his room and organized
themselves into a dog vigilance committee. There were several yellow
dogs around Cheyenne that were not in use, and their owners consented to
part with them and try to control their grief while they worried along
from day to day without them. These dogs were collected and placed in
the secretary's room.
Throwing a heterogeneous mass of dogs together in that way, and all
of them total strangers to each other, in the natural course of things
creates something of a disturbance, and that was the result in this
case. When the secretary arrived, the dogs were holding a session with
closed doors. The presiding officer had lost control, and a surging
crowd of yellow dogs had the floor. Only one dog was excepted. He was
struggling with all his strength against the most collossal attack of
colic that ever convulsed a pale, yellow dog. Just as he would get to
feeling kind of comfortable, a spasm would catch him on the starboard
quarter and his back would hump itself like a 1,000-legged worm, and
with such force as to thump the floor with the stumpy tail of the
demoralized dog and jar the bric-a-brac on the brackets and what-nots of
the Secretary of Wyoming Territory.
Just then the secretary arrived. He was whistling a trill or two from
the "Turkish Patrol," when he got within earshot of the convention.
Several people met him and asked him what was going on up in his room.
The secretary blushed and said he guessed there was nothing out of
character, and wondered if someone was putting up a Conkling story on
him, to kill a Spates boom.
When he got to the door and went in, thirty-seven dogs ran between his
legs? and went out the door with a good deal of intensity. More of them
would have run between the secretary's legs, but they couldn't all make
it.
Mr. Spates was mad. He felt hurt and grieved. The dogs had jumped on the
bed and torn the pillow shams into minute bandages, and wiped their feet
on the coverlid. They had licked the blacking off his boots, and eaten
his toilet soap. One of them had tried on the secretary's dressing gown;
but it was not large enough, and he had taken it off in a good deal of a
hurry.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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