"One awful winter he was compelled to quit work in the middle of the season here and go South for his health and to escape the rigors of this climate. That was the winter that quit right in the middle of its business here and struck for the South, where they had the coldest weather they had ever known prior to Mr. Nye's advent. And there, though he was nearly dead, his syndicate letters had to go on just the same; and in fancy I can see that heroic, almost dying man on the flat of his back, writing laboriously upon a scratch-pad, with the wind blowing the rag carpet on the floor up in billows. He suffered all the hardship of rigorous winter in summer quarters.
"And while thus ill word reached him of the sudden death of his father in Wisconsin, so far away that even if he had been able to make the journey it would have been a physical impossibility for him to have reached his father's house before the burial. It was a peculiarly hard blow to him, for they had been friends and chums, as well as father and son. Yet by the time the news reached him his father had been buried.
"To the last this perverse fate denied to him and his wife that one pleasure that married couples usually enjoy if they have nothing else—a wedding journey. He was very poor to begin with, but of a sanguine temperament, and at the time of his marriage goodnaturedly informed his bride fully of his circumstances. She, a brave woman and worthy partner, probably foresaw the force of the man and his coming recognition in time; at any rate she had great faith in him, and very cheerfully accepted the situation. Their wedding journey, denied them in the beginning by their poverty, was deferred from one cause and another for years, so long that they came to refer to it as to be taken upon the marriage of their eldest child, when the two couples could take the journey together.
"But Nye was yet an invalid, and one year when California had been prescribed for him, we had made a line of engagements toward the Pacific slope after the regular season. It had been arranged that Mrs. Nye was to meet us in Kansas City and the trip from there to the coast was to be the long-deferred wedding journey. He had built great hopes upon this prospect, and in the pleasure of anticipation had devised a dozen little schemes for the surprise and entertainment of his wife, who had already left their home, on Staten Island, to join us. She had left their four children in care of her niece, a very worthy young woman, and was somewhere on her way to Kansas City when we arrived there.
"Nye had expected to find her there, but instead he was confronted with a telegram from his Staten Island physician stating that all four of the children had been stricken with scarlet fever. Through the influence of the physician, who was a great friend of Nye, they had not been removed to the hospital, as the regulations required, but had been permitted to remain at home, with the house quarantined. During the next few hours prior to Mrs. Nye's arrival, and in all agony of suspense and apprehension, Mr. Nye busied himself with canceling all further lecture dates, and when Mrs. Nye finally arrived he broke to her the painful news of their children's illness, and took the next train back East, not knowing if their little ones would be alive to greet them when they came.
"Arriving home after that terrible journey, they found the children so ill that they could not be told of the arrival of the father and mother; and Nye, with his heart breaking, sat downstairs and wrote to the children he was not permitted to see in their rooms above, long and happy letters from California, telling them what jolly lovely times their mother and father were having in the land of flowers.
"And, therefore," said Mr. Riley, in conclusion, again fondly referring to the volume, "I am especially rejoiced to see my old comrade at his best in this last published utterance, and the book itself so befittingly presented—so handsome and so dignified a volume, that I am certain a sight of it could but have been highly gratifying to the gentle humorist himself."
Russel M. Seeds.
