In a letter from Staten Island, where he was residing, he rather plaintively tells how the house was struck by lightning. From Minneapolis he merrily tells of umpiring a baseball match. Under date of September 28, 1888, he writes a letter headed “In Hospital,” closing thus: “Yours with a heart full of gratitude and a system full of drugs, paints, oil, turpentine, glass, putty, and everything usually kept in a first-class drug store. “BILL NYE “P.S.--Open all night.” * * * * * From Buffalo, without other date than Friday, 1889, he writes: “Considering the fact that I have written to you so seldom, you have been real kind to write right on. ‘God bless you,’ as the feller says, ‘for your kind but wabbly heart.’ We are at the Iroquois, because it is ‘absolutely fireproof.’ We noticed that in Lynn and Boston the absolutely fireproof buildings were a little hotter while burning, and so we have chosen one for winter use whenever we could.” One of his letters was written at a railroad junction in Minnesota where he was waiting for the next through train to La Crosse, and had “only twenty-three and one-half hours to wait.” The railroads were then running in the interest of the “Hotel and Eating-House,” and made it a rule to avoid connections as much as possible. * * * * * “MY DEAR POND: “I am writing this at an imitation hotel where the roads fork. I will call it the Fifth Avenue Hotel, because the hotel at a railroad junction is generally called the Fifth Avenue, or the Gem City House, or the Palace Hotel. Just as the fond parent of a white-eyed, two-legged freak of Nature loves to name his mentally diluted son Napoleon, and for the same reason that a prominent horse owner in Illinois last year socked my name on a tall, buckskin-colored colt that did not resemble me, intellectually or physically--a colt that did not know enough to go around a barbed-wire fence, but sought to sift himself through it into an untimely grave--so this man has named his sway-backed wigwam the Fifth Avenue Hotel. “It is different from your Fifth Avenue in many ways. In the first place, there is not so much travel and business in its neighborhood. As I said before, this is where two railroads fork. In fact, it is the leading industry here. The growth of the town is naturally slow, but it is a healthy growth. There is nothing in the nature of dangerous or wild-cat speculation in the advancement of this place, and while there has been no noticeable or rapid advance in the principal business here, there has been no falling off at all, and the roads are forking as much to-day as they did before the war, while the same three men who were present for the first glad moment are still here to witness the operation.