ROBERT J. BURDETTE.
HE American people have a kindly feeling for the men who make them laugh, and in no other country does a humorist have a more appreciative public. The result has been, that in a country in which the average native has a clearly marked vein of humor, the genuine “funny man” is always sure of a hearty welcome. We have a long list of writers and lecturers who have gained a wide popularity through their mirth-provoking powers, and “Bob Burdette” holds an honorable place in this guild of “funny men.”
He was born in Greensborough, Pennsylvania, July 30, 1844, though he removed early in life to Peoria, Ill., where he received his education in the public schools.
He enlisted in the Civil War and served as a private from 1862 to the end of the war.
He began his journalistic career on the Peoria “Transcript,” and, after periods of editorial connection with other local newspapers, he became associate editor of the Burlington “Hawkeye,” Iowa. His humorous contributions to this journal were widely copied and they gave him a general reputation. His reputation as a writer had prepared the way for his success as a lecturer, and in 1877 he entered the lecture field, in which he has been eminently successful. He has lectured in nearly all the cities of the United States, and he never fails to amuse his listeners.
He is a lay preacher of the Baptist Church, and it is often a surprise to those who have heard only his humorous sayings to hear him speak with earnestness and serious persuasiveness of the deeper things of life, for he is a man of deep experiences and of pure ideals.
His most popular lectures have been those on “The Rise and Fall of the Mustache,” “Home,” and “The Pilgrimage of the Funny Man.” He has published in book-form, “The Rise and Fall of the Mustache and Other Hawkeyetems” (Burlington, 1877), “Hawkeyes” (1880), “Life of William Penn” (New York, 1882), a volume in the series of “Comic Biographies;” and “Innach Garden and other Comic Sketches” (1886).
He has been a frequent contributor to the Ladies’ Home Journal and other current literature, and he has recently written a convulsive description of “How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle,” which appeared in the Wheelmen.
He has for some years made his home at Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, and he enjoys a large circle of friends.
THE MOVEMENT CURE FOR RHEUMATISM.[¹]
[¹] Copyright, R. J. Burdette.
NE day, not a great while ago, Mr. Middlerib read in his favorite paper a paragraph copied from the Præger Landwirthschaftliches Wochenblatt, a German paper, which is an accepted authority on such points, stating that the sting of a bee was a sure cure for rheumatism, and citing several remarkable instances in which [♦]people had been perfectly cured by this abrupt remedy. Mr. Middlerib did not stop to reflect that a paper with such a name as that would be very apt to say anything; he only thought of the rheumatic twinges that grappled his knees once in a while, and made life a burden to him.
[♦] ‘peo-’ replaced with ‘people’
He read the article several times, and pondered over it. He understood that the stinging must be done scientifically and thoroughly. The bee, as he understood the article, was to be gripped by the ears and set down upon the rheumatic joint, and held there until it stung itself stingless. He had some misgivings about the matter. He knew it would hurt. He hardly thought it could hurt any worse than the rheumatism, and it had been so many years since he was stung by a bee that he had almost forgotten what it felt like. He had, however, a general feeling that it would hurt some. But desperate diseases required desperate remedies, and Mr. Middlerib was willing to undergo any amount of suffering if it would cure his rheumatism.
He contracted with Master Middlerib for a limited supply of bees. There were bees and bees, humming and buzzing about in the summer air, but Mr. Middlerib did not know how to get them. He felt, however, that he could depend upon the instincts and methods of boyhood. He knew that if there was any way in heaven or earth whereby the shyest bee that ever lifted a 200-pound man off the clover, could be induced to enter a wide-mouthed glass bottle, his son knew that way.
For the small sum of one dime Master Middlerib agreed to procure several, to-wit: six bees, age not specified; but as Mr. Middlerib was left in uncertainty as to the race, it was made obligatory upon the contractor to have three of them honey, and three humble, or in the generally accepted vernacular, bumble bees. Mr. Middlerib did not tell his son what he wanted those bees for, and the boy went off on his mission, with his head so full of astonishment that it fairly whirled. Evening brings all home, and the last rays of the declining sun fell upon Master Middlerib with a short, wide-mouthed bottle comfortably populated with hot, ill-natured bees, and Mr. Middlerib and a dime. The dime and the bottle changed hands and the boy was happy.
Mr. Middlerib put the bottle in his coat pocket and went into the house, eyeing everybody he met very suspiciously, as though he had made up his mind to sting to death the first person that said “bee” to him. He confided his guilty secret to none of his family. He hid his bees in his bedroom, and as he looked at them just before putting them away, he half wished the experiment was safely over. He wished the imprisoned bees didn’t look so hot and cross. With exquisite care he submerged the bottle in a basin of water, and let a few drops in on the heated inmates, to cool them off.
At the tea-table he had a great fight. Miss Middlerib, in the artless simplicity of her romantic nature said: “I smell bees. How the odor brings up——”
But her father glared at her, and said, with superfluous harshness and execrable grammar:
“Hush up! You don’t smell nothing.”
“Whereupon Mrs. Middlerib asked him if he had eaten anything that disagreed with him, and Miss Middlerib said: “Why, pa!” and Master Middlerib smiled as he wondered.
Bedtime came at last, and the night was warm and sultry. Under various false pretences, Mr. Middlerib strolled about the house until everybody else was in bed, and then he sought his room. He turned the night-lamp down until its feeble rays shone dimly as a death-light.
Mr. Middlerib disrobed slowly—very slowly. When at last he was ready to go lumbering into his peaceful couch, he heaved a profound sigh, so full of apprehension and grief that Mrs. Middlerib, who was awakened by it, said if it gave him so much pain to come to bed, perhaps he had better sit up all night. Mr. Middlerib checked another sigh, but said nothing and crept into bed. After lying still a few moments he reached out and got his bottle of bees.
It is not an easy thing to do, to pick one bee out of a bottle full, with his fingers, and not get into trouble. The first bee Mr. Middlerib got was a little brown honey-bee that wouldn’t weigh half an ounce if you picked him up by the ears, but if you lifted him by the hind leg as Mr. Middlerib did, would weigh as much as the last end of a bay mule. Mr. Middlerib could not repress a groan.
“What’s the matter with you?” sleepily asked his wife.
It was very hard for Mr. Middlerib to say; he only knew his temperature had risen to 86 all over, and to 197 on the end of his thumb. He reversed the bee and pressed the warlike terminus of it firmly against his rheumatic knee.
It didn’t hurt so badly as he thought it would.
It didn’t hurt at all!
Then Mr. Middlerib remembered that when the honey-bee stabs a human foe it generally leaves its harpoon in the wound, and the invalid knew then the only thing the bee had to sting with was doing its work at the end of his thumb.
He reached his arm out from under the sheet, and dropped this disabled atom of rheumatism liniment on the carpet. Then, after a second of blank wonder, he began to feel around for the bottle, and wished he knew what he had done with it.
In the meantime, strange things had been going on. When he caught hold of the first bee, Mr. Middlerib, for reasons, drew it out in such haste that for the time he forgot all about the bottle and its remedial contents, and left it lying uncorked in the bed. In the darkness there had been a quiet but general emigration from that bottle. The bees, their wings clogged with the water Mr. Middlerib had poured upon them to cool and tranquilize them, were crawling aimlessly about over the sheet. While Mr. Middlerib was feeling around for it, his ears were suddenly thrilled and his heart frozen by a wild, piercing scream from his wife.
“Murder!” she screamed, “murder! Oh, help me! Help! help!”
Mr. Middlerib sat bold upright in bed. His hair stood on end. The night was very warm, but he turned to ice in a minute.
“Where, oh, where,” he said, with pallid lips, as he felt all over the bed in frenzied haste—“where in the world are those infernal bees?”
And a large “bumble,” with a sting as pitiless as the finger of scorn, just then lighted between Mr. Middlerib’s shoulders, and went for his marrow, and said calmly: “Here is one of them.”
And Mrs. Middlerib felt ashamed of her feeble screams when Mr. Middlerib threw up both arms, and, with a howl that made the windows rattle, roared:
“Take him off! Oh, land of Scott, somebody take him off!”
And when a little honey-bee began tickling the sole of Mrs. Middlerib’s foot, she shrieked that the house was bewitched, and immediately went into spasms.
The household was aroused by this time. Miss Middlerib, and Master Middlerib and the servants were pouring into the room, adding to the general confusion, by howling at random and asking irrelevant questions, while they gazed at the figure of a man, a little on in years, pawing fiercely at the unattainable spot in the middle of his back, while he danced an unnatural, weird, wicked-looking jig by the dim religious light of the night lamp.
And while he danced and howled, and while they gazed and shouted, a navy-blue wasp, that Master Middlerib had put in the bottle for good measure and variety, and to keep the menagerie stirred up, had dried his legs and wings with a corner of the sheet, after a preliminary circle or two around the bed, to get up his motion and settle down to a working gait, fired himself across the room, and to his dying day Mr. Middlerib will always believe that one of the servants mistook him for a burglar, and shot him.
No one, not even Mr. Middlerib himself, could doubt that he was, at least for the time, most thoroughly cured of rheumatism. His own boy could not have carried himself more lightly or with greater agility. But the cure was not permanent, and Mr. Middlerib does not like to talk about it.