BILL NYE EN ROUTE.

Manawatu Herald, 23 June 1896, Page 4

BILL NYE EN ROUTE.

MEETING A SISSY TRAVELING MAN ON THE TRAIN. Be Overhears the PathetU Wall of a Stoat lady and Deals TVitb a Bequest From j Alonzo Belcher of East Rawlse's Center. i [Copyright, 1803, by Edgar W. Nye.] j En Route. ' The able critic who has held out for years that Mrs. Stowe had excluded the jiObsibilities of poetic license vrh^n she represented Eliza as escaping over the Ohio river on cakes of ice is now dead. He died in Florida in January from exposure while skating on the St. John's river, and when they found him friends had to* cut out a square rod, perch or pole of ice with his body in order to send him home. He always maintained that the Ohio river never even froze enough to make a cake of ice between Cincinnati and Cairo. Last January Eliza with her infant child could have crossed over with bobsleds and a 4-horse team.

Id West Virginia we had to have all Itoves and a furnace going all day in the opera house, as well as the entire gas service, including footlights, in order to warm up for evening service, and even tben we wore white sweaters and •houlder breakfast shawls over our dress •nits on the stage. Natural gas is getting less plentiful, And the demand increased so that there was great suffering from cold among the "--vpoor, who had to return to the electric fight and cast aside their parlor gas log 3 for the time. Heavy manufacturing enterprises also decrease the quantity of gas for home consumption, and as usual toe corporation sails gayly on while the citizen has to go to bed to get warm. £s^*How strangely mankind does! We go and beg on bended knees for large corporations to come and build and do business in our town to raise the price of our lots, and yet how long is it before we write a piece for the county paper Baying that we are driven to the wall by these great corporations, and that we lute them like everything? We are only children in this life, dressed up in men's clothes, and I hope with Dr. Briggs that there is a chance in the future state for growth and development. I can see how I could grow in v future state and add to what I now know. During the terrible reign of the cold we met on a train one day bound west the rarest thing I ever saw on earth— viz., a "sissy" traveling man. TravelIng men are most generally business men. They have to be. They are mostly pretty rugged, masculine men, with Toices that yon can hear "the darkest night that ever blew." This one was constantly running up •gainst things that were just as rude as they could be. That was as far as he ever got. Some people were real hateful, and he claimed that once his blood boiled like everything. ■ Maybe it was the morning when he look a sponge bath in the north end of the sleeper at tHttsburg, ad the train look breakfast there. You must know ■oat the sponge bath facilities cannot be fact what one would wish on a sleeping F tar, especially when one has to do it in f BwT front doorway at a meal station with Ibe thermometer at 15 degrees below zero tad a great deal of passing in and out. Still he had probably promised some dear one solemnly that he would bathe Imry morning if it cost him his life. • People filed past him filled with wontter and amazement, and to each one he Mid in a light, thin, girlish voice, "Beg jpardon, but would you mind shutting that door?' i Nine of us, after we had passed by him, went to the other end of the car tad passed through again three times, •©joying it heartily. j Once we met the man who brings in the ice for the cooler. He was near the - yonng man who was trying to bathe. iwe had quite a long quarrel with the Iceman over the right of way, and one of bar party jostled him rudely against the voting man, who was trying to towel his back. The iceman slipped, and his large toko of ice and the great coarse tongs fkleo fell against him. i It was horrible. The young man gave k wild thriek, and with a moan of pain i Ida Boulanger whiskers went back inI' Mdc and it is said have never come out '•gain. i Later on after breakfast I tried to make up to him and be friendly, but he turned upon me like a wild beast and exclaimed, "Oh, bother!" j I overheard yesterday the wail of the ■tort, stout lady. She was looking at a fashion magazine, but she could not find ■ taything to suit her. F j "Did you ever notice," she said to her companion, a tall, lithe young woman, who was so long waisted that she never ■eemed to sit down at all, or to be sitting on her foot if she did sit down, "did you ever notice that nothing is ever designed for the abort, stout woman in these magmlsm, Ethel'r" | "Well, Ido not remember ever to have HMD any designs for short, plump peogk,* Mid Ethel, thooting her cool, gpW