You can run a dummy drug store there with two dozen dreary old glass
bottles on the shelves, punctuated by the hand of time and the Kansas
fly of the period, and with a prohibitory law at your back and a tall,
red barrel in the back room filled with a mixture that will burn great
holes into nature's heart and make the cemetery blossom as the rose, and
in a few years you can sell enough of this justly celebrated preparation
for household, scientific and experimental purposes only to fill your
flabby pockets with wealth and paint the pure air of Kansas a bright and
inflammatory red.
If you sincerely and earnestly yearn for a field where you may go forth
and garner an honest harvest from the legitimate effort of an upright
soda fountain and free and open sale of slippery elm in its
unadulterated condition, I would go to some state where I would not have
to enter into competition with a style of pharmacy that has the unholy
instincts and ambitions of a blind pig, I would not go into the field
where red-eyed ruin simply waited for a prescription blank, not
necessarily for publication, but simply as a guaranty of good faith, in
order that it may bound forth from behind the prescription case and
populate the poor-houses and the paupers' nettle-grown addition to the
silent city of the dead.
The great question of how best to down the demon rum is before the
American people, and it will not be put aside until it is settled; but
while this is being attended to, Mr. Jaynes, I would start a drug store
farther away from the center of conflict and go on joyously, sacrificing
expensive tinctures, compounds, and syrups at bed-rock prices.
Go on, Mr. Jaynes, dealing out to the yearning, panting public, drugs,
paints, oils, glass, putty, varnish, patent medicines, and prescriptions
carefully compounded, with none to molest or make afraid, but shun, oh
shun the wild-eyed pharmacopeia that contains naught but the festering
fluid so popular in Kansas, a compound that holds crime in solution and
ruin in bulk, that shrivels up a man's gastric economy, and sears great
ragged holes into his immortal soul. Take this advice home to your heart
and you will ever command the hearty cooperation of "yours for health,"
as the late Lydia E. Pinkham so succinctly said.
_Bill Nye._
A WOULD-BE HOSTELRY.
BILL NYE STOPS AT A PLACE WHERE TWO ROADS FORK.
HIS MOURNFUL PILGRIMAGE THROUGH DESOLATE WILDS IN COMPANY WITH THE
SOULFUL HOOSIER POET--A TALE OF GLOOM WITHOUT A RAY OF HOPE.
We are moving about over the country, James Whitcomb Riley and I, in the
capacity of a moral and spectacular show, I attend to the spectacular
part of the business. That is more in my line.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account