Bill Nye and Boomerang. Or, The Tale of a Meek-Eyed Mule, and Some Other Literary Gems. Nye Bill

he looked around to see me fall to pieces with mirth, but I restrained myself and said:

      "You will please excuse me for not laughing at that joke. I cannot do it. It is too sacred.

      "Do you think I would laugh at the bones of the Pilgrim Fathers, where are they? or burst into wild hilarity over the grave of Noah and his family?

      "No, sir; their age and antiquity protect them. That is the way with your Phoenician joke.

      "Another reason why I cannot laugh at it is this: I am not a very easy and extemporaneous laughter, anyway. I am generally shrouded in gloom, especially when I am in hot pursuit of a wild and skittish joke for my own use. It takes a good, fair, average joke that hasn't been used much to make me laugh easy, and besides, I have used up the fund of laugh that I had laid aside for that particular joke. It has, in fact, overdrawn some now, and is behind.

      "I do not wish to intrench on the fund that I have concluded to offer as a purse for young jokes that have never made it in three minutes.

      "I want to encourage green jokes, too, that have never trotted in harness before, and, besides, I must insist on using my scanty fund of laugh on jokes of the nineteenth century. I have got to draw the line somewhere.

      "If I were making a collection of antique jokes of the vintage of 1400 years B. C., or arranging and classifying little bon-mots of the time of Cleopatra or King Solomon, I would give you a handsome sum for this one of yours, but I am just trying to worry along and pay expenses, and trying to be polite to every one I meet, and laughing at lots of things that I don't want to laugh at, and I am going to quit it.

      "That is why I have met your little witticism with cold and heartless gravity."

      A HAIRBREADTH ESCAPE

      To-day I got shaved at a barber-shop, where I begged the operator to kill me and put me out of my misery.

      I have been accustomed to gentle care and thoughtfulness at home, and my barber at Laramie handles me with the utmost tenderness. I was, therefore, poorly prepared to meet the man who this morning filled my soul with woe.

      I know that I have not deserved this, for while others have berated the poor barber and swore about his bad breath and never-ending clatter and his general heartlessness, I have never said anything that was not filled with child-like trust and hearty good will toward him.

      I have called the attention of the public to the fact that sometimes customers had bad breath and were restless and mean while being operated on, and then when they are all fixed up nicely, they put their hats on and light a cigar and hold up their finger to the weary barber and tell him that they will see him more subsequently.

      Now, however, I feel differently.

      This barber no doubt had never heard of me. He no doubt thought I was an ordinary plug who didn't know anything about luxury.

      I shall mark a copy of this paper and send it to him.

      Then while he is reading it I will steal up behind him with a pick handle and kill him. I want him to be reading this when I kill him, because it will assist the coroner in arriving at the immediate cause of his death.

      The first whiff I took of this man's breath, I knew that he was rum's maniac.

      He had the Jim James in an advanced stage. Now, I don't object to being shaved by a barber who is socially drunk, but when the mad glitter of the maniac is in his eye and I can see that he is debating the question of whether he will cut my head off and let it drop over the back of the chair or choke me to death with a lather brush, it makes me nervous and fidgetty.

      This man made up his mind three times that he would kill me, and some one came in just in time to save me.

      His chair was near a window, and there was a hole in the blind, so that when he was shaving the off side of my face he would turn my head over in such a position that I could look up into the middle of the sun. My attention had never before been called to the appearance of the sun as it looks to the naked eye, and I was a good deal surprised.

      The more I looked into the very center of the great orb of day the more I was filled with wonder at the might and power that could create it. I began to pine for death immediately, so that I could be far away among the heavenly bodies, and in a land where no barber with the delirium triangles can ever enter.