Chapter I: DESIRE to state that my position as United States cyclonist for this

judicial district is now vacant. I resigned on the 9th day of September, A.D. 1884.

I have not the necessary personal magnetism to look a cyclone in the eye and make it quail. I am stern and even haughty in my intercourse with men, but when a Manitoba simoon takes me by the brow of my pantaloons and throws me across township 28, range 18, west of the 5th principal meridian, I lose my mental reserve and become anxious and even taciturn. For thirty years I had yearned to see a grown-up cyclone, of the ring-tail-puller variety, mop up the green earth with huge forest trees and make the landscape look tired. On the 9th day of September, A.D. 1884, my morbid curiosity was gratified.

As the people came out into the forest with lanterns and pulled me out of the crotch of a basswood tree with a “tackle and fall,” I remember I told them I didn’t yearn for any more atmospheric phenomena.

The old desire for a hurricane that could blow a cow through a penitentiary was satiated. I remember when the doctor pried the bones of my leg together, in order to kind of draw my attention away from the limb, he asked me how I liked the fall style of zephyr in that locality.

I said it was all right, what there was of it. I said this in a tone of bitter irony.

Cyclones are of two kinds—viz., the dark maroon cyclone, and the iron grey cyclone with pale green mane and tail. It was the latter kind I frolicked with on the above-named date.

My brother and I were riding along in the grand old forest, and I had just been singing a few bars from the opera of “Whoop ’em up, Lizzie Jane,” when I noticed that the wind was beginning to sough through the trees. Soon after that I noticed that I was soughing through the trees also, and I am really no slouch of a sougher either when I get started.

The horse was hanging by the breeching from the bough of a large butternut tree, waiting for some one to come and pick him.

I did not see my brother at first, but after a while he disengaged himself from a rail fence, and came where I was hanging, wrong end up, with my personal effects spilling out of my pockets. I told him that as soon as the wind kind of softened down, I wished he would go and pick the horse. He did so, and at midnight a party of friends carried me into town on a stretcher. It was quite an ovation. To think of a torchlight procession coming out way out there into the woods at midnight, and carrying me into town on their shoulders in triumph! And yet I was once a poor boy!

It shows what may be accomplished by any one if he will persevere and insist on living a different life.

The cyclone is a natural phenomenon, enjoying the most robust health. It may be a pleasure for a man with great will power and an iron constitution to study more carefully into the habits of the cyclone, but as far as I am concerned, individually, I could worry along some way if we didn’t have a phenomenon in the house from one year’s end to another.

As I sit here, with my leg in a silicate of soda corset, and watch the merry throng promenading down the street, or mingling in the giddy torchlight procession, I cannot repress a feeling toward a cyclone that almost amounts to disgust.

_Bill Nye._

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_OUR CORRESPONDENT HAS THE HONOUR TO BE._

WASHINGTON, D.C., _March 20, 1861_.

JUDGE not by appearances, for appearances are very deceptive,—as the old lady cholerically remarked when one, who was really a virgin unto forty, blushingly informed her that she was “just twenty-five this month.”

Though you find me in Washington now, I was born of respectable parents, and gave every indication, in my satchel and apron days, of coming to something better than this.

Slightly northward of the Connecticut river, where a pleasant little conservative village mediates between two opposition hills, you may behold the landscape on which my infantile New England eyes first traced the courses of future railroads.

Near the centre of this village in the valley, and a little back from its principal road, stood the residence of my worthy sire, and a very pretty residence it was. From the frequent addition of a new upper room here, a new dormer window there, and an innovating skylight elsewhere, the roof of the mansion had gradually assumed an alpine variety of juts and peaks somewhat confusing to behold. Local tradition related that, on a certain showery occasion, a streak of lightning was seen to descend upon that roof, skip vaguely about from one peak to another, and finally slink ignominiously down the water-pipe, as though utterly disgusted with its own inability to determine, where there were so many, which peak it should particularly perforate.

Such was the house in which I came to life a certain number of years ago, entering the world like a human exclamation point between two of the angriest sentences of a September storm, and adding materially to the uproar prevailing at the time.

Next to my parents, the person I can best remember, as I look back, was our family physician. A very obese man was he, with certain sweet-oiliness of manner, and never put out of patience. I think I can see him still, as he arose from his chair after a profound study of the case before him, and wrote a prescription so circumlocutory in its effect that it sent a servant half-a-mile to his friend the druggist for articles she might have found in her own kitchen, _aqua pumpaginis_ and sugar being the sole ingredients required.

The doctor had started business in our village as a veterinary surgeon, but as the entire extent of his practice for six months in that line was a call to mend one of Colt’s revolvers, he finally turned his attention to the ailings of his fellows, and wrought many cures with sugar and water latinised.

At first, my father did not patronise the new doctor, having very little faith in the efficacy of sugar and water, without the addition of certain other composites often seen in bottles; but the doctor’s neat speech at a Sunday-school festival won his heart at last. The festival was held near a series of small water-falls just out of the village, and the doctor, who was an invited guest, was called upon for a few appropriate remarks. In compliance with the demand, he made a speech of some compass, ending with a peroration that is still quoted in my native place. He pointed impressively to the water-falls, and says he—

“All the works of nature is somewhat beautiful, with a good moral. Even them cataracts,” says he sagely, “have a moral, and seems eternally whispering to the young, that ‘those what err falls.’”

The effect of this happy illustration was very pleasing, my boy; especially with those who prefer morality to grammar; and after that the physician had the run of all the pious families—our own included.

It was a handsome compliment this worthy man paid me when I was about six months old. Having just received from my father the amount of his last bill, he was complacent to the last degree, and felt inclined to do the handsome thing. He patted my head as I sat upon my mother’s lap, and says he—

“How beautiful is babes! So small and yet so much like human beings, only not so large. This boy,” says he fatly, looking down at me, “will make a noise in the world yet. He has a long head, a very long head.”

“Do you think so?” says my father.

“Indeed I do,” says the doctor. “The little fellow,” says he in a sudden fit of abstraction, “has a long head, a very long head—and it’s as thick as it is long.”

There was some coolness between the doctor and my father after that, and on the following Sunday my mother refused to look at his wife’s new bonnet in church.

So far as I can trace back, we never had a literary character in our family, save a venerable aunt of mine, on my mother’s side, who commenced her writing career by refusing to contribute to the Sunday papers, and subsequently won much fame as the authoress of a set of copy-books. When this gifted relative found herself acquiring a reputation she came in state to visit us, and so disgusted my very practical father, by wearing slipshod gaiters, inking her right-hand thumb-nail every morning, calling all things by European names, and insisting upon giving our oldest plough-horse the romantic and literary title of “Lord Byron,” that my exasperated parent incurred a most tremendous prejudice against authorship, and vowed, when she went away, that he never would invite her presence again.

I was only twenty years old at that time, and the novelty of my aunt’s conduct had a rather infatuating effect upon me. With the perversity often observable in youngsters before they have seen much of the world, I became deeply interested in my literary relative as soon as my father began speaking contemptuously of her pursuits, and it took very little time to invest me with a longing and determination to be a writer.

Thenceforth I wore negligent linen; frequently rested my head upon the forefinger of my right hand, with a lofty and abstracted air; assumed an expression of settled and mysterious gloom when at church, and suffered my hair to grow long and uncombed.

My bearing during this period of infatuation could hardly fail to attract considerable attention in our village, and there were two opinions about me. One was that I had been jilted; the other that I was likely to become a vagabond and an actor. My father inclined to the former, and left me, as he thought, to get over my disappointment in the natural way.

My peripatetic spell had lasted about six weeks, when I formed the acquaintance of the editor of the _Lily of the Valley_, who permitted me to mope in his office now and then, and soothed my literary inflammation by allowing me to write “puffs” for the village milliner.

While looking over some old magazines in the _Lily_ office one day, I found in an ancient British periodical a raking article upon American literature, wherein the critic affirmed that all our writers were but weak imitators of English authors, and that such a thing as a Distinctly American Poem, _sui generis_, had not yet been produced.

This radical sneer at the United States of America fired my Yankee blood, and I vowed within myself to write a poem, not only distinctively American, but of such a character that only America could have produced it. In the solitude of my room, that night, I wooed the aboriginal muse, and two days thereafter the _Lily of the Valley_ contained my distinctive American poem of

“THE AMERICAN TRAVELLER.”

To Lake Aghmoogenegamook,
All in the State of Maine,
A man from Wittequergaugaum came
One evening in the rain.

“I am a traveller,” said he,
“Just started on a tour,
And go to Nomjamskillicook
To-morrow morn at four.”

He took a tavern bed that night,
And with the morrow’s sun,
By way of Sekledobskus went,
With carpet-bag and gun.

A week passed on; and next we find
Our native tourist come,
To that sequestered village called
Genasagarnagum.

From thence he went to Absequoit,
And there—quite tired of Maine—
He sought the mountains of Vermont,
Upon a railroad train.

Dog Hollow, in the Green Mount State,
Was his first stopping-place,
And then Skunk’s Misery displayed
Its sweetness and its grace.

By easy stages then he went
To visit Devil’s Den;
And Scrabble Hollow, by the way
Did come within his ken.

Then, _viâ_ Nine Holes and Goose Green,
He travelled through the State,
And to Virginia, finally,
Was guided by his fate.

Within the Old Dominion’s bounds,
He wandered up and down,
To-day, at Buzzard Roost ensconced,
To-morrow at Hell Town.

At Pole Cat, too, he spent a week,
Till friends from Bull Ring came,
And made him spend the day with them,
In hunting forest game.

Then with his carpet-bag in hand,
To Dog Town next he went;
Though stopping at Free Negro Town,
Where half a day he spent.

From thence into Negationburg
His route of travel lay,
Which having gained, he left the State
And took a southward way.

North Carolina’s friendly soil
He trod at fall of night,
And, on a bed of softest down,
He slept at Hell’s Delight.

Morn found him on the road again,
To Slouchy Level bound;
At Bull’s Tail, and Lick Lizzard, too,
Good provender he found.

But the plantations near Burnt Coat
Were even finer still,
And made the wondering tourist feel
A soft, delicious thrill.

At Tear Shirt, too, the scenery
Most charming did appear,
With Snatch It in the distance far
And Purgatory near.

But spite of all these pleasant scenes
The tourist stoutly swore
That home is brightest after all,
And travel is a bore.

So back he went to Maine straightway.
A little wife he took;
And now is making nutmegs at
Moosehicmagunticook.

In his note introductory of this poem the editor of the _Lily_ affirmed that I had named none but veritable localities (which was strictly true), and ventured the belief that the composition would remind his readers of Goldsmith. Upon which his scorpion contemporary in the next village observed that there was rather more smith than gold about the poem.

Up to the time when this poem appeared in print, I had succeeded in concealing from my father the nature of my incidental occupation; but now he must know all.

He _did_ know all; and the result was that he gave me ten dollars, and sent me to New York to look out for myself.

“It’s the only thing that will save him,” says he to my mother; “and I must either send him off or expect to see him sink by degrees to editorship and begin wearing disgraceful clothes.”

I went to New York; I became private secretary and speech-scribe to an unscrupulous and, therefore, rising politician, and now I am in Washington.

I had a certain postmastership in my eye when I first came hither; but war’s alarms indicate that I may do better as an amateur hero.

_R. H. Newell_ (“_Orpheus C. Kerr_”).

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_YAWCOB STRAUSS._