THE RISE AND FALL OF THE MUSTACHE

AND OTHER “HAWK-EYETEMS.”

BY ROBERT J. BURDETTE, The Humorist of the Burlington “Hawk-Eye.”

ILLUSTRATED BY R. W. WALLIS.

BURLINGTON, IOWA: BURLINGTON PUBLISHING COMPANY. 1877.

COPYRIGHT. Burlington Publishing Company, 1877.

Bound by A. J. Cox & Co., Chicago. The Lakeside Press, Chicago.

TO FRANK HATTON, Editor-in-Chief, AND MY ASSOCIATES ON THE HAWKEYE, IN HAPPY REMEMBRANCE OF OUR PLEASANT FELLOWSHIP, THIS VOLUME IS INSCRIBED.

PREFACE.

The appearance of a new book is an indication that another man has found a mission, has entered upon the performance of a lofty duty, actuated only by the noblest impulses that can spur the soul of man to action. It is the proudest boast of the profession of literature, that no man ever published a book for selfish purposes or with ignoble aim. Books have been published for the consolation of the distressed; for the guidance of the wandering; for the relief of the destitute; for the hope of the penitent; for uplifting the burdened soul above its sorrows and fears; for the general amelioration of the condition of all mankind; for the right against the wrong; for the good against the bad; for the truth. This book is published for two dollars per volume.

R. J. B.

CONTENTS.

The Rise and Fall OF The Mustache.

WE open our eyes in this living world around us, in a wonder land, peopled with dreams, and haunted with wonderful shapes; and every day dawns upon us in a medley of new marvels. We are awakened from these dreams by contact with hard, stubborn facts, not rudely and harshly, but gradually and tenderly. So much that is bright and beautiful, and full of romance and wonder, passes away with the earlier years of life, that by the time we are able to earn our first salary we hold in our hands only the crumpled, withered leaves of childhood’s simple creeds and loving superstitions. Year after year, the iconoclastic hand of earnest, real life, tears from the lofty pedestals upon which our loving fancy had enshrined them, the gods of gold that crumble into worthless clay at our feet. We live to lose faith, at last, in “Puss in Boots;” we cease to weep over the sad tragedy of “Cock Robin;” there comes a time when we can read “Arabian Nights,” and then go to bed without a tremor; with one heart-breaking pang at last we give up darling “Jack the Giant Killer,” and acknowledge

[10]him to be the fraud he stands confessed; it is not long after that, we learn to look upon William Tell as a national myth, and then we come to know, in spite of all that orthodox theology has taught us to the contrary, that Adam was not the first man—that raised a mustache. Adam was too old—when he was born—to care very much about what our grander and more gradually developed civilization considers the crowning facial ornament. And after his natural human idleness got him into perfectly natural human trouble, he was kept too busy something to put under his lip, to think much about what grew above it. If Adam wore a mustache, he never raised it. It raised itself. It evolved itself out of its own inner consciousness, like a primordial germ. It grew, like the weeds on his farm, in spite of him, and to torment him. For Adam had hardly got his farm reduced to a kind of turbulent, weed producing, granger fighting, regular order of things—had scarcely settled down to the quiet, happy, care-free, independent life of a jocund farmer, with nothing under the canopy to molest

or make him afraid, with every thing on the plantation going on smoothly and lovelily, with a little rust in the oats; army worm in the corn; Colorado beetles swarming up and down the potato patch; cut-worms laying waste the cucumbers; curculio in the plums and borers in the apple trees; a new kind of bug that he didn’t know the name of desolating the wheat fields; dry weather burning up the wheat, wet weather blighting the corn; too cold for the melons, too dreadfully hot for the strawberries; chickens dying with the pip; hogs being gathered to their fathers with the cholera; sheep fading away with a complication of things that no man could remember; horses getting along as well as could be expected, with a little spavin, ring bone, wolf teeth, distemper, [11]heaves, blind staggers, collar chafes, saddle galls, colic now and then, founder occasionally, epizootic when there was nothing else; cattle going wild with the horn ail; moth in the bee hives; snakes in the milk house; moles in the kitchen garden—Adam had just about got through breaking wild land with a crooked stick, and

settled down comfortably, when the sound of the boy was heard in the land.

Did it ever occur to you that Adam was probably the most troubled and worried man that ever lived? We have always pictured Adam as a care-worn looking man; a puzzled looking granger who would sigh fifty times a day, and sit down on a log and run his irresolute fingers through his hair while he wondered what under the canopy he was going to do with those boys, and whatever was going to become of them. We have thought too, that as often as our esteemed parent asked himself this conundrum, he gave it up. They must have been a source of constant trouble and mystification to him. For you see they were the first boys that humanity ever had any experience with. And there was no one else in the neighborhood who had any boy, with whom Adam, in his moments of perplexity, could consult. There wasn’t a boy in the country with whom Adam’s boys were on speaking terms, and with whom they could play and fight. Adam, you see, labored under the most distressing disadvantages that ever opposed a married man and the father of a family. He had never been a boy himself, and what could he know

about boy nature or boy troubles and pleasure? His perplexity began at an early date. Imagine, if you can, the celerity with which he kicked off the leaves, and paced up and down in the moonlight the first time little Cain made the welkin ring when he had the colic. How [12]did Adam know what ailed him? He couldn’t tell Eve that she had been sticking the baby full of pins. He didn’t even know enough to turn the vociferous infant over on his face and jolt him into serenity. If the fence corners on his farm had been overgrown with catnip, never an idea would Adam have had what to do with it. It is probable that after he got down on his knees and felt for thorns or snakes or rats in the bed, and thoroughly examined young Cain for bites or scratches, he passed him over to Eve with the usual remark, “There, take him and hush him up, for heaven’s sake,” and then went off and sat down under a distant tree with his fingers in his ears, and perplexity in his brain. And young Cain just split the night with the most hideous howls the little world had ever listened to. It must

have stirred the animals up to a degree that no menagerie has ever since attained. There was no sleep in the vicinity of Eden that night for anybody, baby, beasts or Adam. And it is more than probable that the weeds got a long start of Adam the next day, while he lay around in shady places and slept in troubled dozes, disturbed, perhaps by awful visions of possible twins and more colic.

And when the other boy came along, and the boys got old enough to sleep in a bed by themselves, they had no pillows to fight with, and it is a moral impossibility for two brothers to go to bed without a fracas. And what comfort could two boys get out of pelting each other with fragments of moss or bundles of brush? What dismal views of future humanity Adam must have received from the glimpses of original sin which began to develop itself in his boys. How he must have wondered what put into their heads the thousand and one questions with which they plied their parents day after day. We wonder what [13]he thought when they first began to string buckeyes on the cat’s tail. And when night came, there was no hired girl to keep the boys quiet by telling them ghost stories, and Adam didn’t even know so much as an anecdote.

Cain, when he made his appearance, was the first and only boy in the fair young world. And all his education depended on his inexperienced parents, who had never in their lives seen a boy until they saw Cain. And there wasn’t an educational help in the market. There wasn’t an alphabet block in the county; not even a Centennial illustrated handkerchief. There were no other boys in the republic, to teach young Cain to lie, and swear, and smoke, and drink, fight, and steal, and thus develop the boy’s dormant statesmanship, and prepare him for the sterner political duties of his maturer years. There wasn’t a pocket knife in the universe that he could borrow—and lose, and when he wanted to cut his finger, as all boys must do, now and then, he had to cut it with a clam shell. There were no country relations upon whom little Cain could be inflicted for two or three weeks at a time, when his wearied parents wanted a little rest. There was nothing for him to play with. Adam couldn’t show him how to make a kite. He had a much better

idea of angels’ wings than he had of a kite. And if little Cain had even asked for such a simple bit of mechanism as a shinny club, Adam would have gone out into the depths of the primeval forest and wept in sheer mortification and helpless, confessed ignorance. I don’t wonder that Cain turned out bad. I always said he would. For his entire education depended upon a most ignorant man, a man in the very palmiest days of his ignorance, who couldn’t have known less if he had tried all his life on a high salary and had a man to help him. And the boy’s education had to be conducted entirely [14]upon the catechetical system; only, in this instance, the boy pupil asked the questions, and his parent teachers, heaven help them, tried to answer them. And they had to answer at them. For they could not take refuge from the steady stream of questions that poured in upon them day after day, by interpolating a fairy story, as you do when your boy asks you questions about something of which you never heard. For how could Adam begin, “Once upon a time,” when with one quick,

incisive question, Cain could pin him right back against the dead wall of creation, and make him either specify exactly what time, or acknowledge the fraud? How could Eve tell him about “Jack and the bean stalk,” when Cain, fairly crazy for some one to play with, knew perfectly well there was not, and never had been, another boy on the plantation? And as day by day Cain brought home things in his hands about which to ask questions that no mortal could answer, how grateful his bewildered parents must have been that he had no pockets in which to transport his collections. For many generations came into the fair young world, got into no end of trouble, and died out of it, before a boy’s pocket solved the problem how to make the thing contained seven times greater than the container. The only thing that saved Adam and Eve from interrogational insanity was the paucity of language. If little Cain had possessed the verbal abundance of the language in which men are to-day talked to death, his father’s bald head would have gone down in shining flight to the ends of the earth to escape

him, leaving Eve to look after the stock, save the crop, and raise her boy as best she could. Which would have been, 6,000 years ago, as to-day, just like a man.

Because, it was no off hand, absent-minded work answering questions about things in those spacious old [15]days, when there was crowds of room, and everything grew by the acre. When a placid, but exceedingly unanimous looking animal went rolling by, producing the general effect of an eclipse, and Cain would shout, “Oh, lookee, lookee pa! what’s that?” the patient Adam, trying to saw enough kitchen wood to last over Sunday, with a piece of flint, would have to pause and gather up words enough to say:

“That, my son? That is only a mastodon giganteus; he has a bad look, but a Christian temper.”

And then, presently:

“Oh, pop! pop! What’s that over yon?”

“Oh, bother,” Adam would reply; “it’s only a paleotherium, mammalia pachydermata.”

“Oh, yes; theliocomeafterus. Oh! lookee, lookee at this ’un!”

“Where, Cainny? Oh, that in the mud? That’s only an acephala lamelli branchiata. It won’t bite you, but you mustn’t eat it. It’s poison as politics.”

“Whee! See there! see, see, see! What’s him?”

“Oh, that? Looks like a plesiosaurus; keep out of his way; he has a jaw like your mother.”

“Oh yes; a plenosserus. And what’s that fellow, poppy?”

“That’s a silurus malapterus. Don’t you go near him, for he has the disposition of a Georgia mule.”

“Oh, yes; a slapterus. And what’s this little one?”

“Oh, it’s nothing but an aristolochioid. Where did you get it? There now, quit throwing stones at that acanthopterygian; do you want to be kicked? And keep away from the nothodenatrichomanoides. My stars, Eve! where did he get that anonaceo-hydrocharideo-nymphæoid? Do you never look after him at all? Here, you Cain, get right away down from there, and chase that [16]megalosaurius out of the melon patch, or I’ll set the monopleuro branchian on you.”

Just think of it, Christian man with a family to support, with last year’s stock on your shelves, and a draft as long as a clothes-line to pay to-morrow! Think of it, woman with all a woman’s love and constancy, and a mother’s sympathetic nature, with three meals a day 365 times a year to think of, and the flies to chase out of the sitting-room; think, if your cherub boy was the only boy in the wide wide world, and all his questions which now radiate in a thousand directions among other boys, who tell him lies and help him to cut his eye-teeth, were focused upon you! Adam had only one consolation that has been denied his more remote descendants. His boy never belonged to a base ball club, and never teased his father from the first of November till the last of March for a pair of skates.

Well, you have no time to pity Adam. You have your own boy to look after. Or, your neighbor has a boy, whom you can look after much more closely than his mother does, and much more to your own satisfaction than to the boy’s comfort. Your boy is, as Adam’s boy was, an animal that asks questions. If there were any truth in the old theory of the transmigration of souls, when a boy died he would pass into an interrogation point. And he’d stay there. He’d never get out of it; for he never gets through asking questions. The older he grows the more he asks, and the more perplexing his questions are, and the more unreasonable he is about wanting them answered to suit himself. Why, the oldest boy I ever knew—he was fifty-seven years old, and I went to school to him—could and did ask the longest, hardest, crookedest questions, that no fellow, who used to trade off all his books for a pair of skates and a knife with a corkscrew [17]in it, could answer. And when his questions were not answered to suit him, it was his custom—a custom

more honored in the breeches, we used to think, than in the observance—to take up a long, slender, but exceedingly tenacious rod, which lay ever near the big dictionary, and smite with it the boy whose naturally derived Adamic ignorance was made manifest. Ah me, if the boy could only do as he is done by, and ferule the man or the woman who fails to reply to his inquiries, as he is himself corrected for similar shortcomings, what a valley of tears, what a literally howling wilderness he could and would make of this world.

Your boy, asking to-day pretty much the same questions, with heaven knows how many additional ones, that Adam’s boy did, is told, every time he asks one that you don’t know any thing about, just as Adam told Cain fifty times a day, that he will know all about it when he is a man. And so from the days of Cain down to the present wickeder generation of boys, the boy ever looks forward to the time when he will be a man and know everything. That happy, far away, omniscient, unattainable manhood, which never comes to your boy; which would never come to him if he lived a thousand years; manhood, that like boyhood, ever looks forward from to-day to the morrow; still peering into the future for brighter light and broader knowledge; day after day, as its world opens before it, stumbling upon ever new and unsolved mysteries; manhood, whose wisdom is folly and whose light is often darkness, and whose knowledge is selfishness; manhood, that so often looks over its shoulder and glances back toward boyhood, when its knowledge was at least always equal to its day; manhood, that after

groping for years through tangled labyrinths of failing human theories and tottering human wisdom, at last [18]only rises to the sublimity of childhood, only reaches the grandeur of boyhood, and accepts the grandest, eternal truths of the universe, truths that it does not comprehend, truths that it can not, by searching, find out, accepting and believing them with the simple, unquestioning faith of childhood in Truth itself.

And now, your boy, not entirely ceasing to ask questions, begins to answer them, until you stand amazed at the breadth and depth of his knowledge. He asks questions and gets answers of teachers that you and the school board know not of. Day by day, great unprinted books, upon the broad pages of which the hand of nature has traced characters that only a boy can read, are spread out before him. He knows now where the first snow-drop lifts its tiny head, a pearl on the bosom of the barren earth, in the Spring; he knows where the last Indian pink lingers, a flame in the brown and rustling woods, in the autumn days. His pockets are cabinets, from which he drags curious fossils that he does not know the names of; monstrous and hideous beetles and bugs and things that you never saw before, and for which he has appropriate names of his own. He knows where there are three orioles’ nests, and so far back as you can remember, you never saw an oriole’s nest in your life. He can tell you how to distinguish the good mushrooms from the poisonous

ones, and poison grapes from good ones, and how he ever found out, except by eating both kinds, is a mystery to his mother. Every root, bud, leaf, berry or bark, that will make any bitter, horrible, semi-poisonous tea, reputed to have marvelous medicinal virtues, he knows where to find, and in the season he does find, and brings home, and all but sends the entire family to the cemetery by making practical tests of his teas.

And as his knowledge broadens, his human superstition [19]develops itself. He has a formula, repeating which nine times a day, while pointing his finger fixedly toward the sun, will cause warts to disappear from the hand, or, to use his own expression, will “knock warts.” If the eight day clock at home tells him it is two o’clock, and the flying leaves of the dandelion declare it is half-past five, he will stand or fall with the dandelion. He has a formula, by which any thing that has been lost may be found. He has, above all things, a natural, infallible instinct for the woods, and can no more be lost in them than a squirrel. If the cow does not come home—and if she is a town cow, like a town man, she does not come home, three nights in the week—you lose half a day of valuable time looking for her. Then you pay a man three dollars to look for her two days longer, or so long as the appropriation holds out. Finally, a quarter sends a boy to the woods; he comes back at milking time, whistling the tune that no man ever imitated, and the cow ambles