Bill Nye's Chestnuts Old and New

Mr. Ives's Earnest Desire Not to Tell a Lie or Anything Else – Blighted Powers of Recalling the Past Put Him Alongside the Gentle Gould Himself – Touching Letter Received from a Patron of His Road.

The present age may be regarded as the age of investigation. This morbid curiosity on the part of the American people to know how large fortunes are acquired is a healthy sign, and the desire of the press, as well as the people, to investigate the parlor magic and funny business by which a man can buy two millions of dollars' worth of stock in the Aurora Borealis without paying for it, stick a quill in it and inflate the stock to twenty millions, then borrow thirty-five millions on the new stock by booming it, make an assignment, bust and slide a fifty-pound ledger up his sleeve, is most gratifying.

For the benefit and entertainment of those who still believe that the Sunday paper is not an engine of destruction, and for the consideration of those who may have been kept away from church on this summer Sabbath morning by sickness or insomnia, let us turn for a moment to the thoughtful scrutiny of Mr. Henry S. Ives, the young Napoleon of Wall street.

In the first place, Mr. Ives has done nothing new. Starting out, no doubt, with Mr. Gould as his model, he has kept up the imitation even to the loss of memory and blighted powers of recalling the past during an investigation. (I use Mr. Gould's name simply as an illustration – for I have no special antipathy toward Mr. Gould.) Personally we are friendly. He made his money by means of his comatose memory and flabby integrity, while I made mine by means of earnest, honest toil, and a lurid imagination.

But in the case of Mr. Ives, the gentle, polite failure to remember, the earnest desire not to tell a lie or anything else, the courteous and unobtrusive effort to avoid being too positive about anything that would assist anybody in ascertaining anything – all, all remind the close student of Mr. Jay Gould. The conversation during the investigation for one day ran something like this:

"Mr. Ives, did you in making your assignment turn over all the books connected with your business?"

"Do you mean my library?"

"No; the books of account, the daybook, cash book, ledger, etc., etc."

"Oh!"

"I ask if you turned over all such books on the date of your assignment?"

"I could hardly tell that. At least, I would only swear on information and belief."

"Well, to the best of your knowledge and belief, did you turn over those books at that time?"

"I think I did, but I am not positive as to the date?"

"What makes you think you did?"

"Because I did frequently turn the books over, in order to see how they looked on the other side."

"Mr. Ives, we find that several of the more important books connected with your office and the firm of Henry S. Ives & Co. are missing. Do you know where they are?"

"No, I do not,"

"Were they in your office prior to your assignment?"

"Yes, they were there, according to the best of my knowledge and belief, up to the time that they were not there."

"Have you any idea, Mr. Ives, where those books are now?"

"No sir; only in a general way?"

"How do you mean in a general way?"

"Well, I mean that I know only in what might be called a general way."

"Well, Mr. Ives, will you state then, in a general way, where those books are now?"

"Yes, sir; they are elsewhere."

"What makes you say they are elsewhere, Mr. Ives?"

"Because they are not there."

"Well, now, will you tell us whether you removed those books from the office of IH. S. Ives & Co. or not?"

"Do you ask me to answer that question personally?"

"Yes."

"Do you wish a verbal answer or would you rather have it in writing?"

"Answer orally."

"Well, then, I did not, to my knowledge."

"Would you have been apt to know of it if you had taken them away yourself?"

"Well, only in a general way."

"Would you have known about it if any one else had taken them away?"

"I think I would but I might not. There was a great deal of passing along our street, and they may have been taken while I was looking out of the window, waiting till the crowds rolled by."

And so Mr. Ives continued to shed information upon the inquiring mind in a courteous and opaque manner that must have endeared him to all.

Mr. Ives has in no transaction shown himself so thoroughly shrewd as he did when he swapped a doubtful reputation for a large sum of money. The only wonder is that there were so many men who wanted to invest in that kind of goods. He did a shrewd thing, but he will not be able to profit by it.

Success, however, should only be measured by the content it brings with it. While Henry S. Ives was lighting his mighty financial battles and winning for himself the title of the Young Napoleon of Wall street, dwelling in a little palace lined with ivory and gold, but cursed by the consuming desire to be rich, and forgetful, like Mr. Gould, how full of calm and soothing content is the following simple letter, written by a man who undertook last year to inaugurate a Shakesperian revival in southern Ohio:

Cincinnati, O., Aug. 3, 1886.

Mr. Henry S. Ives, New York, N. Y.

Dear Sir: I have just arrived in this city after a long and debilitating but rather enjoyable trip over your line, and I now take pen in hand to thank you for the use of your roadbed from Indianapolis to this place. It is a good road, and I was surprised to find it well ballasted and furnished with cool retreats and shady culverts every few miles wherein a man could rest.

It is a good route for the poor but pampered tragedian to take, and water-melons grow close to the fence. I have traveled over many other roads since the new and pernicious law, but nowhere have I found watermelons more succulent or less coy and secretive than on your justly celebrated line. I also notice with pleasure that green corn is still susceptible, and wild paw paws are growing in the summer sun.

I thought I saw you go by in your special car just north of the first trestle outside of town, but you went by so fast that I could not tell definitely till too late. Please excuse me for not speaking to you as you passed by. Success on the stage has not taught me to forget or ignore my friends whenever I am thrown in contact with them.

People write me that New York State is rapidly settling up, and that property is advancing rapidly in every direction. Is this so? Advancing rapidly in every direction is, I suppose, one of the most difficult feats known to calisthenics. I have tried it myself, years ago, but now I do not practice it, having quit drinking altogether.

I hope you will let me know any time that I can be of use to you, either in mowing weeds or gathering nuts that have ripened and fallen off your track. I enjoy, especially in the autumn when the hectic of the dying year has flooded the forests with its multiplied glories, and the cricket sings his sleepy song to the tired heart, and the locust lifts its lawn-mower voice in the boughs of the poplar, to go nutting along a prolific railroad track.

I would be glad, also, if you have not secured anyone else, to assist you in herding your stock on Wall street. Railroad stock frequently runs down and gets the hollow horn for lack of care during the winter months.

Always feel free to call on me at any time that I can be of service to you.

Yours truly,

A – B – .

The moral to be drawn from the career of Napoleon Bonaparte Ives is that they who make haste to be rich may not be innocent. As Gen. McClellan once said, there can be no better incentive to integrity than the generous approval accorded to honesty by those who are honest. All other kinds of approval are not worth struggling for. Money will buy a certain kind of applause, but it is the kind that turns to scorn when justice begins to get in her fine work.

And life itself is brief. Storied urn and animated bust may succeed well in society, but they cannot soothe the dull cold ear of death. Freckled granite and prevaricating marble may perpetuate the fraud of a lifetime, but they do not always indicate success.

For myself I would rather have more sincere and honest friends through life, and afterwards content myself with a plainer tomb.

Not many miles from the costly mausoleum of a great millionaire a sign-board by the roadside reads:

While I do not fully indorse this sentiment, there is food in it for earnest thought.

THE ANTI-CLINKER BASE-BURNER BEE

I have noticed bees very closely indeed, during my life. In fact I have several times been thrown into immediate juxtaposition with them, and have had a great many opportunities to observe their ways, and I am free to say that I have not been so forcibly struck with the difference in their size as the noticeable difference in their temperature. I remember at one time sitting by a hive watching the habits of the bees, and thinking how industrious they were, and what a wide difference there is between the toilsome life of the little insect, and the enervating, aimless, idle and luxurious life of the newspaper man, when an impulsive little bee lit in my hair. He seemed to be feverish. Wherever he settled down he seemed to leave a hot place. I learned afterward that it was a new kind of bee called the anti-clinker base-burner bee.

Why a man in a Soft Hat is not always Welcome – The Hotel Clerk and his Frigidity Apparatus – The Hotel Hog and his Habits – how he may be Headed Off – Drolleries of Shrewd Bonifaces.

America has made many gigantic strides, aside from those made at the battle of Bull Run, and her people spend much of their time pointing with pride to her remarkable progress; but we are prone to dwell too much upon our advantages as a summer resort, and our adroit methods of declining the Presidency before we are asked, while we forget some of our more important improvements, like the Elevated Railway and the American Hotel.

Let us, for a moment, look at the great changes that have been wrought in hotels during the past century. How marked has been the improvement and how wonderful the advancement. Everything has been changed. Even the towels have been changed.

Electric bells, consisting of a long and alert wire with an overcoat button at one end and a reticent boy at the other, have taken the place of the human voice and a low-browed red-elm club. Where once we were compelled to fall down a dark, narrow staircase, now we can go down the elevator or wander down the wrong stairway and ourselves in the laundry.

Where once we were mortified by being compelled to rise at table, reach nine feet and stab a porous pancake with our fork, meantime wiping the milk gravy out of a large yellow bowl with our coat-tails, now we can hire a tall, lithe gentleman in a full-dress suit to pass us the pancakes.

Even the bar-rooms of American hotels are changed. Once the bartender waited till his customer ran all his remarks into one long, hoarse word, with a hiccough on the end, and then he took him by the collar and threw him out into the cold and chaotic night. Now the bartender gradually rises on the price of drinks till his customer is frozen out, and while he is gone to the reading-room to borrow some more money the chemist moves the bar somewhere else, and when the guest returns he finds a barber-shop where he thought he left a bar-room.

One hundred years, on their swift pinions, have borne away the big and earnest dinner bell, and the sway-backed hair trunk that surprised a man so when he sat down upon it to consider what clothes he would put on first.

All these evidences of our crude, embryotic existence are gone, and in their places we have electric bells, and Saratoga trunks wherein we may conceal our hotel room and still have space left for our clothes.

It is very rare now that we see a United States senator snaking a two-year old Mambrino hair trunk up three flights of stairs to his room in order to secure the labor vote. Men, as well as hotels and hotel soap, have changed. Where once a cake of soap would only last a few weeks, science has come in and perfected a style of pink soap, flavored with vanilla, that will last for years, and a new slippery-elm towel that is absolutely impervious to moisture. Hand in hand, this soap and towel go gaily down the corridors of time, welcoming the coming and speeding the parting guest, jumping deftly out of the hands of the aristocracy into the hands of a receiver, but always calm, smooth and latherless.

Nature did not fit me to be the successful guest at a hotel. I can see why it is so. I do not know how to impress a hotel. I think all the way up from the depot, as I change hands with my hot-handled and heavy bag, how I will stride up to the counter and ask for the room that is generally given to Mr. Blaine; but when I get there I fall up against a cold wave, step back into a large india-rubber cuspidor, and my overtaxed valise bursts open. While the porter and I gather up my collars and gently press them in with our feet, the clerk decides that he hasn't got such a room as I would want.

I then go to another hotel and succeed in getting a room, which commands a view of a large red fire-escape, a long sweep of undulating eaves-trough and a lightning rod – usually No. 7 5/8s, near the laundry chimney and adjoining the baggage elevator.

After I have remained at the hotel several days and paid my bill whenever I have been asked to do so, and shown that I did not eat much and that I was willing to carry up my own coal, the proprietor relents and puts me in a room that is below timber line, and though it is a better room, I feel all the time as though I had driven out the night-watchman, for the bed is still warm, and knowing that he must be sleeping out in the cold hall all night as he patiently watches the hotel, I cannot sleep until three or four o'clock in the morning, and then I have to get up while the chambermaid makes my bed for the day.

I try hard when I enter a hotel to assume an air of arrogance and defiance, but I am all the time afraid that there is some one present who is acquainted with me.

Another thing that works against me is my apparel. In a strange hotel a man will do better, if he has fifty dollars only, and desires to remain two weeks, to go and buy a fifty-dollar suit of clothes with his money, taking his chances with the clerk, than to dress like a plain American citizen, and expect to be loved, on the grounds that he will pay his board.

But there is now a prospect for reform in this line, a scheme by which a man's name and record as a guest will be his credentials. When this plan becomes thoroughly understood and adopted, a modest man with money, who prefers to wear a soft hat, will not have to sleep in the Union depot, solely on the ground that the night clerk is opposed to a soft hat.

This scheme, to be brief, consists of a system of regular reports from tables and rooms, which reports are epitomized at the office and interchangeable with other hotels, on the principle of the R. G, Dun Commercial Agency. The guest is required to sign his order at the table or give the number of his room, whether the hotel is run on the European plan or not, and these orders in the aggregate, coming from head waiters, porters, chambermaids and bell-boys, make up a man's standing on a scale of from A to Z.

For instance, we will say a five-dollar-per-day house can afford to feed a man for a dollar a meal. The guest orders two dollars' worth, sticks his mustache into just enough of it to spoil it for stew or giblet purposes, and then goes to his room. Here he puts up the fire-escape rope for a clothes-line, does a week's washing, and hanging it out upon the improvised clothesline, he lights a strong pipe, puts his feet on the pillow-shams, and reads "As in a Looking Glass" while his wash is drying. When that man goes away he leaves a record at the hotel which confronts him at every hotel wherever he goes. As soon as he writes his name, the clerk, who has read it wrong side up just a little before he got it down, tells him that he is very sorry, but that the house is full, and people are sleeping on cots in the hall, and the proprietor himself has to sleep on the sideboard. The large white Suffolk hog, who has been in the habit of inaugurating a rain of terror and gravy in the dining-room and stealing the soap from the wash-room, just simply because he could out trump the clerk on diamonds, will thus have to go to the pound, where he belongs, and quiet, every day people, who rely on their integrity more than they do on their squeal, will get a chance.