A rancher came into town and telegraphed to Curtis' father, and then a half dozen citizens went out to help capture the herder, who had fled to the sage brush of the foot-hills.

They didn't get back till toward daybreak, but they brought the herder with them, I saw him in the gray of the morning, lying in a coarse gray blanket, on the floor of the engine house. He was dead.

I asked, as a reporter, how he came to his death, and they told me—opium! I said, did I understand you to say "ropium?" They said no, it was opium. The murderer had taken poison when he found that escape was impossible.

I was present at the inquest, so that I could report the case. There was very little testimony, but all the evidence seemed to point to the fact that life was extinct, and a verdict of death by his own hand was rendered.

It was the first opium work I had ever seen, and it aroused my curiosity. Death by opium, it seems, leaves a dark purple ring around the neck. I did not know this before. People who die by opium also tie their hands together before they die. This is one of the eccentricities of opium poisoning that I have never seen laid down in the books. I bequeath it to medical science. Whenever I run up against a new scientific discovery, I just hand it right over to the public without cost.

Ever since the above incident, I have been very apprehensive about people who seem to be likely to form the opium habit. It is one of the most deadly of narcotics, especially in a new country. High up in the pure mountain atmosphere, this man could not secure enough air to prolong life, and he expired. In a land where clear, crisp air and delightful scenery are abundant, he turned his back upon them both and passed away. Is it not sad to contemplate?



More Paternal Correspondence.

My dear son.—I tried to write to you last week, but didn't get around to it, owing to circumstances. I went away on a little business tower for a few days on the cars, and then when I got home the sociable broke loose in our once happy home.

While on my commercial tower down the Omehaw railroad buying a new well-diggin' machine of which I had heard a good deal pro and con, I had the pleasure of riding on one of them sleeping-cars that we read so much about.

I am going on 50 years old, and that's the first time I ever slumbered at the rate of forty-five miles per hour, including stops.

I got acquainted with the porter, and he blacked my boots in the night unbeknownst to me, while I was engaged in slumber. He must have thought that I was your father, and that we rolled in luxury at home all the time, and that it was a common thing for us to have our boots blacked by menials. When I left the car this porter brushed my clothes till the hot flashes ran up my spinal column, and I told him that he had treated me square, and I rung his hand when he held it out toards me, and I told him that at any time he wanted a good, cool drink of buttermilk, to just holler through our telephone. We had the sociable at our house last week, and when I got home your mother set me right to work borryin' chairs and dishes. She had solicited some cakes and other things. I don't know whether you are on the skedjule by which these sociables are run or not. The idea is a novel one to me.

The sisters in our set, onct in so often, turn their houses wrong side out for the purpose of raising four dollars to apply on the church debt. When I was a boy we worshiped with less frills than they do now. Now it seems that the debt is a part of the worship.

Well, we had a good time and used up 150 cookies in a short time. Part of these cookies was devoured and the balance was trod into our all-wool carpet. Several of the young people got to playing Copenhagen in the setting-room and stepped on the old cat in such a way as to disfigure him for life. They also had a disturbance in the front room and knocked off some of the plastering.

So your mother is feeling slim and I am not very chipper myself. I hope that you are working hard at your books so that you will be an ornament to society. Society is needing some ornaments very much. I sincerely hope that you will not begin to monkey with rum. I should hate to have you with a felon's doom or fill a drunkard's grave. If anybody has got to fill a drunkard's grave, let him do it himself. What has the drunkard ever done for you, that you should fill his grave for him?



I expect you to do right, as near as possible. You will not do exactly right all the time, but try to strike a good average. I do not expect you to let your studies encroach, too much on your polo, but try to unite the two so that you will not break down under the strain. I should feel sad and mortified to have you come home a physical wreck. I think one physical wreck in a family is enough, and I am rapidly getting where I can do the entire physical wreck business for our neighborhood.

I see by your picture that you have got one of them pleated coats with a belt around it, and short pants. They make you look as you did when I used to spank you in years gone by, and I feel the same old desire to do it now that I did then. Old and feeble as I am, it seems to me as though I could spank a boy that wears knickerbocker pants buttoned onto a Garabaldy waist and a pleated jacket. If it wasn't for them cute little camel's hair whiskers of yours I would not believe that you had grown to be a large, expensive boy, grown up with thoughts. Some of the thoughts you express in your letters are far beyond your years. Do you think them yourself, or is there some boy in the school that thinks all the thoughts for the rest?

Some of your letters are so deep that your mother and I can hardly grapple with them. One of them, especially, was so full of foreign stuff that you had got out of a bill of fare, that we will have to wait till you come home before we can take it in. I can talk a little Chippewa, but that is all the foreign language I am familiar with. When I was young we had to get our foreign languages the best we could, so I studied Chippewa without a master. A Chippewa chief took me into his camp and kept me there for some time while I acquired his language. He became so much attached to me that I had great difficulty in coming away. I wish you would write in the United States dialect as much as possible, and not try to paralize your parents with imported expressions that come too high for poor people.

Remember that you are the only boy we've got, and we are only going through the motions of living here for your sake. For us the day is wearing out, and it is now way long into the shank of the evening. All we ask of you is to improve on the old people. You can see where I fooled myself, and you can do better. Read and write, and sifer, and polo, and get nolledge, and try not to be ashamed of your uncultivated parents.

When you get that checkered little sawed-off coat on, and that pair of knee panties, and that poker-dot necktie, and the sassy little boys holler "rats" when you pass by, and your heart is bowed down, remember that, no matter how foolish you may look, your parents will never sour on you.

Your Father.



Twombley's Tale.

My name is Twombley, G.O.P. Twombley is my full name and I have had a checkered career. I thought it would be best to have my career checked right through, so I did so.

My home is in the Wasatch Mountains. Far up, where I can see the long, green, winding valley of the Jordan, like a glorious panorama below me, I dwell. I keep a large herd of Angora goats. That is my business. The Angora goat is a beautiful animal—in a picture. But out of a picture he has a style of perspiration that invites adverse criticism.

Still, it is an independent life, and one that has its advantages, too.

When I first came to Utah, I saw one day, in Salt Lake City, a young girl arrive. She was in the heyday of life, but she couldn't talk our language. Her face was oval; rather longer than it was wide, I noticed, and, though she was still young, there were traces of care and other foreign substances plainly written there.

She was an emigrant, about seventeen years of age, and, though she had been in Salt Lake City an hour and a half, she was still unmarried.

She was about the medium height, with blue eyes, that somehow, as you examined them carefully in the full, ruddy light of a glorious September afternoon, seemed to resemble each other. Both of them were that way,

I know not what gave me the courage, but I stepped to her side, and in a low voice told her of my love and asked her to be mine.

She looked askance at me. Nobody ever did that to me before and lived to tell the tale. But her sex made me overlook it. Had she been any other sex that I can think of, I would have resented it. But I would not strike a woman, especially when I had not been married to her and had no right to do so.

I turned on my heel and I went away. I most always turn on my heel when I go away. If I did not turn on my own heel when I went away, whose heel would a lonely man like me turn upon?

Years rolled by. I did nothing to prevent it. Still that face came to me in my lonely hut far up in the mountains. That look still rankled in my memory. Before that my memory had been all right. Nothing had ever rankled in it very much. Let the careless reader who never had his memory rankle in hot weather, pass this by. This story is not for him.

After our first conversation we did not meet again for three years, and then by the merest accident. I had been out for a whole afternoon, hunting an elderly goat that had grown childish and irresponsible. He had wandered away, and for several days I had been unable to find him. So I sought for him till darkness found me several miles from my cabin. I realized at once that I must hurry back, or lose my way and spend the night in the mountains. The darkness became more rapidly obvious. My way became more and more uncertain.

Finally I fell down an old prospect shaft. I then resolved to remain where I was until I could decide what was best to be done. If I had known that the prospect shaft was there, I would have gone another way. There was another way that I could have gone, but it did not occur to me until too late.

I hated to spend the next few weeks in the shaft, for I had not locked up my cabin when I left it, and I feared that someone might get in while I was absent and play on the piano. I had also set a batch of bread and two hens that morning, and all of these would be in sad knead of me before I could get my business into such shape that I could return.

I could not tell accurately how long I had been in the shaft, for I had no matches by which to see my watch. I also had no watch.

All at once, someone fell down the shaft. I knew that it was a woman, because she did not swear when she landed at the bottom. Still, this could be accounted for in another way. She was unconscious when I picked her up.

I did not know what to do, I was perfectly beside myself, and so was she. I had read in novels that when a woman became unconscious people generally chafed her hands, but I did not know whether I ought to chafe the hands of a person to whom I had never been introduced.

I could have administered alcoholic stimulants to her but I had neglected to provide myself with them when I fell down the shaft. This should be a warning to people who habitually go around the country without alcoholic stimulants.

Finally she breathed a long sigh and murmured, "where am I?" I told her that I did not know, but wherever it might be, we were safe, and that whatever she might say to me, I would promise her, should go no farther.

Then there was a long pause.

To encourage further conversation I asked her if she did not think we had been having a rather backward spring. She said we had, but she prophesied a long, open fall.

Then there was another pause, after which I offered her a seat on an old red empty powder can. Still, she seemed shy and reserved. I would make a remark to which she would reply briefly, and then there would be a pause of a little over an hour. Still it seemed longer.

Suddenly the idea of marriage presented itself to my mind. If we never got out of the shaft, of course an engagement need not be announced. No one had ever plighted his or her troth at the bottom of a prospect shaft before. It was certainly unique, to say the least. I suggested it to her.

She demurred to this on the ground that our acquaintance had been so brief, and that we had never been thrown together before. I told her that this would be no objection, and that my parents were so far away that I did not think they would make any trouble about it.

She said that she did not mind her parents so much as she did the violent temper of her husband.

I asked her if her husband had ever indulged in polygamy. She replied that he had, frequently. He had several previous wives. I convinced her that in the eyes of the law, and under the Edmunds bill, she was not bound to him. Still she feared the consequences of his wrath.

Then I suggested a desperate plan. We would elope!

I was now thirty-seven years old, and yet had never eloped. Neither had she. So, when the first streaks of rosy dawn crept across the soft, autumnal sky and touched the rich and royal coloring on the rugged sides of the grim old mountains, we got out of the shaft and eloped.



On Cyclones.

I desire to state that my position as United States Cyclonist for this Judicial District is now vacant. I resigned on the 9th day of September, A.D. 1884.

I have not the necessary personal magnetism to look a cyclone in the eye and make it quail. I am stern and even haughty in my intercourse with men, but when a Manitoba simoon takes me by the brow of my pantaloons and throws me across Township 28, Range 18, West of the 5th Principal Meridian, I lose my mental reserve and become anxious and even taciturn. For thirty years I had yearned to see a grown up cyclone, of the ring-tail-puller variety, mop up the green earth with huge forest trees and make the landscape look tired. On the 9th day of September, A.D. 1884, my morbid curiosity was gratified.

As the people came out into the forest with lanterns and pulled me out of the crotch of a basswood tree with a "tackle and fall," I remember I told them I didn't yearn for any more atmospheric phenomena. The old desire for a hurricane that would blow a cow through a penitentiary was satiated. I remember when the doctor pried the bones of my leg together, in order to kind of draw my attention away from the limb, he asked me how I liked the fall style of Zephyr in that locality.

I said it was all right, what there was of it. I said this in a tone of bitter irony.

Cyclones are of two kinds, viz: the dark maroon cyclone; and the iron gray cyclone with pale green mane and tail. It was the latter kind I frolicked with on the above-named date.

My brother and I were riding along in the grand old forest, and I had just been singing a few bars from the opera of "Whoop 'em Up, Lizzie Jane," when I noticed that the wind was beginning to sough through the trees. Soon after that, I noticed that I was soughing through the trees also, and I am really no slouch of a sougher, either, when I get started.

The horse was hanging by the breeching from the bough of a large butternut tree, waiting for some one to come and pick him.



I did not see my brother at first, but after a while he disengaged himself from a rail fence and came where I was hanging, wrong end up, with my personal effects spilling out of my pockets. I told him that as soon as the wind kind of softened down, I wished he would go and pick the horse. He did so, and at midnight a party of friends carried me into town on a stretcher. It was quite an ovation. To think of a torchlight procession coming way out there into the woods at midnight, and carrying me into town on their shoulders in triumph! And yet I was once only a poor boy!

It shows what may be accomplished by anyone if he will persevere and insist on living a different life.

The cyclone is a natural phenomenon, enjoying the most robust health. It may be a pleasure for a man with great will power and an iron constitution to study more carefully into the habits of the cyclone, but as far as I am concerned, individually, I could worry along some way if we didn't have a phenomenon in the house from one year's end to another.

As I sit here, with my leg in a silicate of soda corset, and watch the merry throng promenading down the street, or mingling in the giddy torchlight procession, I cannot repress a feeling toward a cyclone that almost amounts to disgust.



The Arabian Language.

The Arabian language belongs to what is called the Semitic or Shemitic family of languages, and, when written, presents the appearance of a general riot among the tadpoles and wrigglers of the United States.

The Arabian letter "jeem" or "jim," which corresponds with our J, resembles some of the spectacular wonders seen by the delirium tremons expert. I do not know whether that is the reason the letter is called jeem or jim, or not.

The letter "sheen" or "shin," which is some like our "sh" in its effect, is a very pretty letter, and enough of them would make very attractive trimming for pantalets or other clothing. The entire Arabic alphabet, I think, would work up first-rate into trimming for aprons, skirts, and so forth.

Still it is not so rich in variety as the Chinese language. A Chinaman who desires to publish a paper in order to fill a long felt want, must have a small fortune in order to buy himself an alphabet. In this country we get a press, and then, if we have any money left, we lay it out in type; but in China the editor buys himself an alphabet and then regards the press as a mere annex. If you go to a Chinese type maker and ask him to show you his goods, he will ask you whether you want a two or a three story alphabet.

The Chinese compositor spends most of his time riding up and down the elevator, seeking for letters and dusting them off with a feather duster. In large and wealthy offices the compositor sits at his case with the copy before him, and has five or six boys running from one floor to another, bringing him the letters of this wild and peculiar alphabet.

Sometimes they have to stop in the middle of a long editorial and send down to Hong Kong and have a letter cast specially for that editorial.

Chinese compositors soon die from heart disease, because they have to run up stairs and down so much in order to get the different letters needed.

One large publisher tried to have his case arranged in a high building without floors, so that the compositor could reach each type by means of a long pole, but one day there was a slight earthquake shock that spilled the entire alphabet out of the case, all over the floor, and although that was ninety-seven years ago last April, there are still two bushels of pi on the floor of that office. The paper employs rat printers, and as they have been engaged in assorting and distributing this mass of pi, it is called rat pi in China, and the term is quite popular.

When the editor underscores a word, the Chinese compositor charges $9 extra for italicizing it. This is nothing more than fair, for he may have to go all over the empire, and climb twenty-seven flights of stairs to find the necessary italics. So it is much more economical in China to use body type mostly in setting up a paper, and the old journalist will avoid caps and italics, unless he is very wealthy.

Arabian literature is very rich, and more especially so in verse. How the Arabian poets succeeded so well in writing their verse in their own language, I can hardly understand. I find it very difficult to write poetry which will be greedily snapped up and paid for, even when written in the English language, but if I had to paw around for an hour to get a button-hook for the end of the fourth line, so that it would rhyme with the button-hook in the second line of the same verse, I believe it would drive me mad.

The Arabian writer is very successful in a tale of fiction. He loves to take a tale and re-write it for the press by carefully expunging the facts. It is in lyric and romantic writing that he seems to excel.

The Arabian Nights is the most popular work that has survived the harsh touch of time. Its age is not fully known, and as the author has been dead several hundred years, I feel safe in saying that a number of the incidents contained in this book are grossly inaccurate.

It has been translated several times with more or less success by various writers, and some of the statements contained in the book are well worthy of the advanced civilization, and wild word painting incident to a heated presidential campaign.



Verona.

We arrived in Verona day before yesterday. Most every one has heard of the Two Gentlemen of Verona. This is the place they came from. They have never returned. Verona is not noted for its gentlemen now. Perhaps that is the reason I was regarded as such a curiosity when I came here.



Verona is a good deal older town than Chicago, but the two cities have points of resemblance after all. When the southern simoon from the stock yards is wafted across the vinegar orchards of Chicago, and a load of Mormon emigrants get out at the Rock Island depot and begin to move around and squirm and emit the fragrance of crushed Limburger cheese, it reminds one of Verona.

The sky is similar, too. At night, when it is raining hard, the sky of Chicago and Verona is not dissimilar. Chicago is the largest place, however, and my sympathies are with her. Verona has about 68,000 people now, aside from myself. This census includes foreigners and Indians not taxed.

Verona has an ancient skating rink, known in history as the amphitheatre, It is 404-1/2 feet by 516 in size, and the wall is still 100 feet high in places. The people of Verona wanted me to lecture there, but I refrained. I was afraid that some late comers might elbow their way in and leave one end of the amphitheatre open and then there would be a draft. I will speak more fully on the subject of amphitheatres in another letter. There isn't room in this one.

Verona is noted for the Capitular library, as it is called. This is said to be the largest collection of rejected manuscripts in the world. I stood in with the librarian and he gave me an opportunity to examine this wonderful store of literary work. I found a Virgil that was certainly over 1,600 years old. I also found a well preserved copy of "Beautiful Snow." I read it. It was very touching indeed. Experts said it was 1,700 years old, which is no doubt correct. I am no judge of the age of MSS. Some can look at the teeth of a literary production and tell within two weeks how old it is, but I can't. You can also fool me on the age of wine. My rule used to be to observe how old I felt the next day and to fix that as the age of the wine, but this rule I find is not infallible. One time I found myself feeling the next day as though I might be 138 years old, but on investigation we found that the wine was extremely new, having been made at a drug store in Cheyenne that same day.



Looking these venerable MSS. over, I noticed that the custom of writing with a violet pencil on both sides of the large foolscap sheet, and then folding it in sixteen directions and carrying it around in the pocket for two or three centuries, is not a late American invention, as I had been led to suppose. They did it in Italy fifteen centuries ago. I was permitted also to examine the celebrated institutes of Gaius. Gaius was a poor penman, and I am convinced from a close examination of his work that he was in the habit of carrying his manuscript around in his pocket with his smoking tobacco. The guide said that was impossible, for smoking tobacco was not introduced into Italy until a comparatively late day. That's all right, however. You can't fool me much on the odor of smoking tobacco.

The churches of Verona are numerous, and although they seem to me a little different from our own in many ways, they resemble ours in others. One thing that pleased me about the churches of Verona was the total absence of the church fair and festival as conducted in America. Salvation seems to be handed out in Verona without ice cream and cake, and the odor of sancity and stewed oysters do not go inevitably hand in hand. I have already been in the place more than two days and I have not yet been invited to help lift the old church debt on the cathedral. Perhaps they think I am not wealthy, however. In fact there is nothing about my dress or manner that would betray my wealth. I have been in Europe now six weeks and have kept my secret well. Even my most intimate traveling companions do not know that I am the Laramie City postmaster in disguise.

The cathedral is a most imposing and massive pile. I quote this from the guide book. This beautiful structure contains a baptismal font cut out of one solid block of stone and made for immersion, with an inside diameter of ten feet. A man nine feet high could be baptized there without injury. The Venetians have a great respect for water. They believe it ought not to be used for anything else but to wash away sins, and even then they are very economical about it.



There is a nice picture here by Titian. It looks as though it had been left in the smoke house 900 years and overlooked. Titian painted a great deal. You find his works here ever and anon. He must have had all he could do in Italy in an early day, when the country was new. I like his pictures first rate, but I haven't found one yet that I could secure at anything like a bed rock price.



A Great Upheaval.

I have just received the following letter, which I take the liberty of publishing, in order that good may come out of it, and that the public generally may be on the watch:

William Nye, Esq.—

Dear Sir: There has been a great religious upheaval here, and great anxiety on the part of our entire congregation, and I write to you, hoping that you may have some suggestions to offer that we could use at this time beneficially.

All the bitter and irreverent remarks of Bob Ingersoll have fallen harmlessly upon the minds of our people. The flippant sneers and wicked sarcasms of the modern infidel, wise in his own conceit, have alike passed over our heads without damage or disaster. These times that have tried men's souls have only rooted us more firmly in the faith, and united us more closely as brothers and sisters.

We do not care whether the earth was made in two billion years or two minutes, so long as it was made and we are satisfied with it. We do not care whether Jonah swallowed the whale or the whale swallowed Jonah. None of these things worry us in the least. We do not pin our faith on such little matters as those, but we try to so live that when we pass on beyond the flood we may have a record to which we may point with pride.

But last Sabbath our entire congregation was visibly moved. People who had grown gray in this church got right up during the service and went out, and did not come in again. Brothers who had heard all kinds of infidelity and scorned to be moved by it, got up, and kicked the pews, and slammed the doors, and created a young riot.

For many years we have sailed along in the most peaceful faith, and through joy or sorrow we came to the church together to worship. We have laughed and wept as one family for a quarter of a century, and an humble dignity and Christian style of etiquette have pervaded our incomings and our outgoings.

That is the reason why a clear case of disorderly conduct in our church has attracted attention and newspaper comment. That is the reason why we want in some public way to have the church set right before we suffer from unjust criticism and worldly scorn.

It has been reported that one of the brothers, who is sixty years of age, and a model Christian, and a good provider, rose during the first prayer, and, waving his plug hat in the air, gave a wild and blood-curdling whoop, jumped over the back of his pew, and lit out. While this is in a measure true, it is not accurate. He did do some wild and startling jumping, but he did not jump over the pew. He tried to, but failed. He was too old.

It has also been stated that another brother, who has done more to build up the church and society here than any other one man of his size, threw his hymn book across the church, and, with a loud wail that sounded like the word "Gosh!" hissed through clenched teeth, got out through the window and went away. This is overdrawn, though there is an element of truth in it, and I do not try to deny it.

There were other similar strong evidences of feeling throughout the congregation, none of which had ever been noticed before in this place. Our clergyman was amazed and horrified. He tried to ignore the action of the brethren, but when a sister who has grown old in our church, and been such a model and example of rectitude that all the girls in the county were perfectly discouraged about trying to be anywhere near equal to her; when she rose with a wild snort, got up on the pew with her feet, and swung her parasol in a way that indicated that she would not go home till morning, he paused and briefly wound up the services.

Of course there were other little eccentricities on the part of the congregation, but these were the ones that people have talked about the most, and have done us the most damage abroad.

Now, my desire is that through the medium of the press you will state that this great trouble which has come upon us, by reason of which the ungodly have spoken lightly of us, was not the result of a general tendency to dissent from the statements made by our pastor, and therefore an exhibition of our disapproval of his doctrines, but that the janitor had started a light fire in the furnace, and that had revived a large nest of common, streaked, hot-nosed wasps in the warm air pipe, and when they came up through the register and united in the services, there was more or less of an ovation.

Sometimes Christianity gets sluggish and comatose, but not under the above circumstances. A man may slumber on softly with his bosom gently rising and falling, and his breath coming and going through one corner of his mouth like the death rattle of a bath-tub, while the pastor opens out a new box of theological thunders and fills the air full of the sullen roar of sulphurous waves, licking the shores of eternity and swallowing up the great multitudes of the eternally lost; but when one little wasp, with a red-hot revelation, goes gently up the leg of that same man's pantaloons, leaving large, hot tracks whenever he stopped and sat down to think it over, you will see a sudden awakening and a revival that will attract attention.

I wish that you would take this letter, Mr. Nye, and write something from it in your own way, for publication, showing how we happened to have more zeal than usual in the church last Sabbath, and that it was not directly the result of the sermon which was preached on that day.

Yours, with great respect,

William Lemons.



The Weeping Woman.

I have not written much for publication lately, because I did not feel well, I was fatigued. I took a ride on the cars last week and it shook me up a good deal.

The train was crowded somewhat, and so I sat in a seat with a woman who got aboard at Minkin's Siding. I noticed as we pulled out of Minkin's Siding, that this woman raised the window so that she could bid adieu to a man in a dyed moustache. I do not know whether he was her dolce far niente, or her grandson by her second husband. I know that if he had been a relative of mine, however, I would have cheerfully concealed the fact.



She waved a little 2x6 handkerchief out of the window, said "good-bye," allowed a fresh zephyr from Cape Sabine to come in and play a xylophone interlude on my spinal column, and then burst into a paroxysm of damp, hot tears.

I had to go into another car for a moment, and when I returned a pugilist from Chicago had my seat. When I travel I am uniformly courteous, especially to pugilists. A pugilist who has started out as an obscure boy with no money, no friends, and no one to practice on, except his wife or his mother, with no capital aside from his bare hands; a man who has had to fight his way through life, as it were, and yet who has come out of obscurity and attracted the attention of the authorities, and won the good will of those with whom he came in contact, will always find me cordial and pacific. So I allowed this self-made man with the broad, high, intellectual shoulder blades, to sit in my seat with his feet on my new and expensive traveling bag, while I sat with the tear-bedewed memento from Minkin's Siding.

She sobbed several more times, then hove a sigh that rattled the windows in the car, and sat up. I asked her if I might sit by her side for a few miles and share her great sorrow. She looked at me askance. I did not resent it. She allowed me to take the seat, and I looked at a paper for a few moments so that she could look me over through the corners of her eyes. I also scrutinized her lineaments some.

She was dressed up considerably, and, when a woman dresses up to ride in a railway train, she advertises the fact that her intellect is beginning to totter on its throne. People who have more than one suit of clothes should not pick out the fine raiment for traveling purposes. This person was not handsomely dressed, but she had the kind of clothes that look as though they had tried to present the appearance of affluence and had failed to do so.

This leads me to say, in all seriousness, that there is nothing so sad as the sight of a man or woman who would scorn to tell a wrong story, but who will persist in wearing bogus clothes and bogus jewelry that wouldn't fool anybody.

My seat-mate wore a cloak that had started out to bamboozle the American people with the idea that it was worth $100, but it wouldn't mislead anyone who might be nearer than half a mile. I also discovered, that it had an air about it that would indicate that she wore it while she cooked the pancakes and fried the doughnuts. It hardly seems possible that she would do this, but the garment, I say, had that air about it.

She seemed to want to converse after awhile, and she began on the subject of literature, picking up a volume that had been left in her seat by the train boy, entitled: "Shadowed to Skowhegan and Back; or, The Child Fiend; price $2," we drifted on pleasantly into the broad domain of letters.

Incidentally I asked her what authors she read mostly.

"O, I don't remember the authors so much as I do the books," said she; "I am a great reader. If I should tell you how much I have read, you wouldn't believe it."

I said I certainly would. I had frequently been called upon to believe things that would make the ordinary rooster quail.

If she discovered the true inwardness of this Anglo-American "Jewdesprit," she refrained from saying anything about it.

"I read a good deal," she continued, "and it keeps me all strung up. I weep, O so easily." Just then she lightly laid her hand on my arm, and I could see that the tears were rising to her eyes. I felt like asking her if she had ever tried running herself through a clothes wringer every morning? I did feel that someone ought to chirk her up, so I asked her if she remembered the advice of the editor who received a letter from a young lady troubled the same way. She stated that she couldn't explain it, but every little while, without any apparent cause, she would shed tears, and the editor asked her why she didn't lock up the shed.

We conversed for a long time about literature, but every little while she would get me into deep water by quoting some author or work that I had never read. I never realized what a hopeless ignoramus I was till I heard about the scores of books that had made her shed the scalding, and yet that I had never, never read. When she looked at me with that far-away expression in her eyes, and with her hand resting lightly on my arm in such a way as to give the gorgeous two karat Rhinestone from Pittsburg full play, and told me how such works as "The New Made Grave; or The Twin Murderers" had cost her many and many a copious tear, I told her I was glad of it. If it be a blessed boon for the student of such books to weep at home and work up their honest perspiration into scalding tears, far be it from me to grudge that poor boon.

I hope that all who may read these lines, and who may feel that the pores of their skin are getting torpid and sluggish, owing to an inherited antipathy toward physical exertion, and who feel that they would rather work up their perspiration into woe and shed it in the shape of common red-eyed weep, will keep themselves to this poor boon. People have different ways of enjoying themselves, and I hope no one will hesitate about accepting this or any other poor boon that I do not happen to be using at the time.



The Crops.

I have just been through Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin, on a tour of inspection. I rode for over ten days in these States in a sleeping-car, examining crops, so that I could write an intelligent report.



Grain in Northern Wisconsin suffered severely in the latter part of the season from rust, chintz bug, Hessian fly and trichina. In the St. Croix valley wheat will not average a half crop. I do not know why farmers should insist upon leaving their grain out nights in July, when they know from the experience of former years that it will surely rust.

In Southern Wisconsin too much rain has almost destroyed many crops, and cattle have been unable to get enough to eat, unless they were fed, for several weeks. This is a sad outlook for the farmer at this season.

In the northern part of the State many fields of grain were not worth cutting, while others barely yielded the seed, and even that of a very inferior quality.

The ruta-baga is looking unusually well this fall, but we cannot subsist entirely upon the ruta-baga. It is juicy and rich if eaten in large quantities, but it is too bulky to be popular with the aristocracy.

Cabbages in most places are looking well, though in some quarters I notice an epidemic of worms. To successfully raise the cabbage, it will be necessary at all times to be well supplied with vermifuge that can be readily administered at any hour of the day or night.

The crook-neck squash in the Northwest is a great success this season. And what can be more beautiful, as it calmly lies in its bower of green vines in the crisp and golden haze of autumn, than the cute little crook-neck squash, with yellow, warty skin, all cuddled up together in the cool morning, like the discarded wife of an old Mormon elder—his first attempt in the matrimonial line, so to speak, ere he had gained wisdom by experience.

The full-dress, low-neck-and-short-sleeve summer squash will be worn as usual this fall, with trimmings of salt and pepper in front and revers of butter down the back.

N.B.—It will not be used much as an outside wrap, but will be worn mostly inside.

Hop-poles in some parts of Wisconsin are entirely killed. I suppose that continued dry weather in the early summer did it.

Hop-lice, however, are looking well. Many of our best hop-breeders thought that when the hop-pole began to wither and die, the hop-louse could not survive the intense dry heat; but hop-lice have never looked better in this State than they do this fall.

I can remember very well when Wisconsin had to send to Ohio for hop-lice. Now she could almost supply Ohio and still have enough to fill her own coffers.



I do not know that hop-lice are kept in coffers, and I may be wrong in speaking thus freely of these two subjects, never having seen either a hop-louse or a coffer, but I feel that the public must certainly and naturally expect me to say something on these subjects. Fruit in the Northwest this season is not a great success. Aside from the cranberry and choke-cherry, the fruit yield in the northern district is light. The early dwarf crab, with or without, worms, as desired—but mostly with—is unusually poor this fall. They make good cider. This cider when put into a brandy flask that has not been drained too dry, and allowed to stand until Christmas, puts a great deal of expression into a country dance. I have tried it once myself, so that I could write it up for your valuable paper.

People who were present at that dance, and who saw me frolic around there like a thing of life, say that it was well worth the price of admission. Stone fence always flies right to the weakest spot. So it goes right to my head and makes me eccentric.

The violin virtuoso who "fiddled," "called off" and acted as justice of the peace that evening, said that I threw aside all reserve and entered with great zest into the dance, and seemed to enjoy it much better than those who danced in the same set with me. Since that, the very sight of a common crab apple makes my head reel. I learned afterward that this cider had frozen, so that the alleged cider which we drank that night was the clear, old-fashioned brandy, which of course would not freeze.

We should strive, however, to lead such lives that we will never be ashamed to look a cider barrel square in the bung.



Literary Freaks.

People who write for a livelihood get some queer propositions from those who have crude ideas about the operation of the literary machine. There is a prevailing idea among those who have never dabbled in literature very much, that the divine afflatus works a good deal like a corn sheller. This is erroneous.

To put a bushel of words into the hopper and have them come out a poem or a sermon, is a more complicated process than it would seem to the casual observer.

I can hardly be called literary, though I admit that my tastes lie in that direction, and yet I have had some singular experiences in that line. For instance, last year I received flattering overtures from three young men who wanted me to write speeches for them to deliver on the Fourth of July. They could do it themselves, but hadn't the time. If I would write the speeches they would be willing to revise them. They seemed to think it would be a good idea to write the speeches a little longer than necessary and then the poorer parts of the effort could be cut out. Various prices were set on these efforts, from a dollar to "the kindest regards." People who have squeezed through one of our adult winters in this latitude, subsisting on kind regards, will please communicate with the writer, stating how they like it.

One gentleman, who was in the confectionery business, wanted a lot of "humorous notices wrote for to put into conversation candy." It was a big temptation to write something that would be in every lady's mouth, but I refrained. Writing gum drop epitaphs may properly belong to the domain of literature, but I doubt it. Surely I do not want to be haughty and above my business, but it seems to me that this is irrelevant.

Another man wanted me to write a "piece for his boy to speak," and if I would do so, I could come to his house some Saturday night and stay over Sunday. He said that the boy was "a perfect little case to carry on and folks didn't know whether he would develop into a condemb fool or a youmerist." So he wanted a piece of one of them tomfoolery kind for the little cuss to speak the last day of school.



A coal dealer who had risen to affluence by selling coal to the poor by apothecaries' weight, wrote to ask me for a design to be used as a family crest and a motto to emblazon on his arms. I told him I had run out of crests, but that "weight for the wagon, we'll all take a ride," would be a good motto; or he might use the following: "The fuel and his money are soon parted." He might emblazon this on his arms, or tattoo it on any other part of his system where he thought it would be becoming to his complexion. I never heard from him again, and I do not know whether he was offended or not.

Two young men in Massachusetts wrote me a letter in which they said they "had a good thing on mother." They wanted it written up in a facetious vein. They said that their father had been on the coast a few weeks before, engaged in the eeling industry. Being a good man, but partially full, he had mingled himself in the flowing tide and got drowned. Finally, after several days' search, the neighbors came in sadly and told the old lady thai they had found all that was mortal of James, and there were two eels in the remains. They asked for further instructions as to deceased. The old lady swabbed out her weeping eyes, braced herself against the sink and told the men to "bring in the eels and set him again."

The boys thought that if this could be properly written up, "it would be a mighty good joke on mother." I was greatly shocked when I received this letter. It seemed to me heartless for young men to speak lightly of their widowed mother's great woe. I wrote them how I felt about it, and rebuked them severely for treating their mother's grief so lightly. Also for trying to impose upon me with an old chestnut.



A Father's Advice to His Son.

My dear Henry.—Your pensive favor of the 20th inst., asking for more means with which to persecute your studies, and also a young man from Ohio, is at hand and carefully noted.

I would not be ashamed to have you show the foregoing sentence to your teacher, if it could be worked, in a quiet way, so as not to look egotistic on my part. I think myself that it is pretty fair for a man that never had any advantages.

But, Henry, why will you insist on fighting the young man from Ohio? It is not only rude and wrong, but you invariably get licked. There's where the enormity of the thing comes in.

It was this young man from Ohio, named Williams, that you hazed last year, or at least that's what I gether from a letter sent me by your warden. He maintains that you started in to mix Mr. Williams up with the campus in some way, and that in some way Mr. Williams resented it and got his fangs tangled up in the bridge of your nose.

You never wrote this to me or to your mother, but I know how busy you are with your studies, and I hope you won't ever neglect your books just to write to us.

Your warden, or whoever he is, said that Mr. Williams also hung a hand-painted marine view over your eye and put an extra eyelid on one of your ears.

I wish that, if you get time, you would write us about it, because, if there's anything I can do for you in the arnica line, I would be pleased to do so.

The president also says that in the scuffle you and Mr. Williams swapped belts as follows, to-wit: That Williams snatched off the belt of your little Norfolk jacket, and then gave you one in the eye.

From this I gether that the old prez, as you faseshusly call him, is an youmorist. He is not a very good penman, however; though, so far, his words have all been spelled correct.

I would hate to see you permanently injured, Henry, but I hope that when you try to tramp on the toes of a good boy simply because you are a seanyour and he is a fresh, as you frequently state, that he will arise and rip your little pleated jacket up the back and make your spinal colyum look like a corderoy bridge in the spring tra la. (This is from a Japan show I was to last week.)

Why should a seanyour in a colledge tromp onto the young chaps that come in there to learn? Have you forgot how I fatted up the old cow and beefed her so that you could go and monkey with youclid and algebray? Have you forgot how the other boys pulled you through a mill pond and made you tobogin down hill in a salt barrel with brads in it? Do you remember how your mother went down there to nuss you for two weeks and I stayed to home, and done my own work and the housework too and cooked my own vittles for the whole two weeks?

And now, Henry, you call yourself a seanyour, and therefore, because you are simply older in crime, you want to muss up Mr. Williams's features so that his mother will have to come over and nuss him. I am glad that your little pleated coat is ripped up the back, Henry, under the circumstances, and I am also glad that you are wearing the belt—over your off eye. If there's anything I can do to add to the hilarity of the occasion, please let me know and I will tend to it.

The lop-horned heifer is a parent once more, and I am trying in my poor, weak way to learn her wayward offspring how to drink out of a patent pail without pushing your old father over into the hay-mow. He is a cute little quadruped, with a wild desire to have fun at my expense. He loves to swaller a part of my coat-tail Sunday morning, when I am dressed up, and then return it to me in a moist condition. He seems to know that when I address the sabbath school the children will see the joke and enjoy it.

Your mother is about the same, trying in her meek way to adjust herself to a new set of teeth that are a size too large for her. She has one large bunion in the roof of her mouth already, but is still resolved to hold out faithful, and hopes these few lines will find you enjoying the same great blessing.

You will find inclosed a dark-blue money-order for four eighty-five. It is money that I had set aside to pay my taxes, but there is no novelty about paying taxes. I've done that before, so it don't thrill me as it used to.

Give my congratulations to Mr. Williams. He has got the elements of greatness to a wonderful degree. If I happened to be participating in that colledge of yours, I would gently but firmly decline to be tromped onto.

So good-bye for this time.

Your Father.



Eccentricity in Lunch.

Over at Kasota Junction, the other day, I found a living curiosity. He was a man of about medium height, perhaps 45 years of age, of a quiet disposition, and not noticeable or peculiar in his general manner. He runs the railroad eating-house at that point, and the one odd characteristic which he has, makes him well known all through three or four States. I could not illustrate his eccentricity any better than by relating a circumstance that occurred to me at the Junction last week. I had just eaten breakfast there and paid for it. I stepped up to the cigar case and asked this man if he had "a rattling good cigar."



Without knowing it I had struck the very point upon which this man seems to be a crank, if you will allow me that expression, though it doesn't fit very well in this place. He looked at me in a sad and subdued manner and said, "No, sir; I haven't a rattling good cigar in the house. I have some cigars there that I bought for Havana fillers, but they are mostly filled with pieces of Colorado Maduro overalls. There's a box over yonder that I bought for good, straight ten cent cigars, but they are only a chaos of hay and Flora, Fino and Damfino, all socked into a Wisconsin wrapper. Over in the other end of the case is a brand of cigars that were to knock the tar out of all other kinds of weeds, according to the urbane rustler who sold them to me, and then drew on me before I could light one of them. Well, instead of being a fine Colorado Claro with a high-priced wrapper, they are common Mexicano stinkaros in a Mother Hubbard wrapper. The commercial tourist who sold me those cigars and then drew on me at sight was a good deal better on the draw than his cigars are. If you will notice, you will see that each cigar has a spinal column to it, and this outer debris is wrapped around it. One man bought a cigar out of that box last week. I told him, though, just as I am telling you, that they were no good, and if he bought one he would regret it. But he took one and went out on the veranda to smoke it. Then he stepped on a melon rind and fell with great force on his side. When we picked him up he gasped once or twice and expired. We opened his vest hurriedly and found that, in falling, this bouquet de Gluefactoro cigar, with the spinal column, had been driven through his breast bone and had penetrated his heart. The wrapper of the cigar never so much as cracked."

"But doesn't it impair your trade to run on in this wild, reckless way about your cigars?"

"It may at first, but not after awhile. I always tell people what my cigars are made of, and then they can't blame me; so, after awhile they get to believe what I say about them. I often wonder that no cigar man ever tried this way before. I do just the same way about my lunch counter. If a man steps up and wants a fresh ham sandwich I give it to him if I've got it, and if I haven't it I tell him so. If you turn my sandwiches over, you will find the date of its publication on every one. If they are not fresh, and I have no fresh ones, I tell the customer that they are not so blamed fresh as the young man with the gauze moustache, but that I can remember very well when they were fresh, and if his artificial teeth fit him pretty well he can try one.

"It's just the same with boiled eggs. I have a rubber dating stamp, and as soon as the eggs are turned over to me by the hen for inspection, I date them. Then they are boiled and another date in red is stamped on them. If one of my clerks should date an egg ahead, I would fire him too quick.

"On this account, people who know me will skip a meal at Missouri Junction, in order to come here and eat things that are not clouded with mystery. I do not keep any poor stuff when I can help it, but if I do, I don't conceal the horrible fact.

"Of course a new cook will sometimes smuggle a late date onto a mediaeval egg and sell it, but he has to change his name and flee.

"I suppose that if every eating-house should date everything, and be square with the public, it would be an old story and wouldn't pay; but as it is, no one trying to compete with me, I do well out of it, and people come here out of curiosity a good deal.

"The reason I try to do right and win the public esteem is that the general public never did me any harm and the majority of people who travel are a kind that I may meet in a future state. I should hate to have a thousand traveling men holding nuggets of rancid ham sandwiches under my nose through all eternity, and know that I had lied about it. It's an honest fact, if I knew I'd got to stand up and apologize for my hand-made, all-around, seamless pies, and quarantine cigars, Heaven would be no object."



Insomnia in Domestic Animals.

If there be one thing above another that I revel in, it is science. I have devoted much of my life to scientific research, and though it hasn't made much stir in the scientific world so far, I am positive that when I am gone the scientists of our day will miss me, and the red-nosed theorist will come and shed the scalding tear over my humble tomb.

My attention was first attracted to insomnia as the foe of the domestic animal, by the strange appearance of a favorite dog named Lucretia Borgia. I did not name this animal Lucretia Borgia. He was named when I purchased him. In his eccentric and abnormal thirst for blood he favored Lucretia, but in sex he did not. I got him partly because he loved children. The owner said Lucretia Borgia was an ardent lover of children, and I found that he was. He seemed to love them best in the spring of the year, when they were tender. He would have eaten up a favorite child of mine, if the youngster hadn't left a rubber ball in his pocket which clogged the glottis of Lucretia till I could get there and disengage what was left of the child.

Lucretia soon after this began to be restless. He would come to my casement and lift up his voice, and howl into the bosom of the silent night. At first I thought that he had found some one in distress, or wanted to get me out of doors and save my life. I went out several nights in a weird costume that I had made up of garments belonging to different members of my family. I dressed carefully in the dark and stole out to kill the assassin referred to by Lucretia, but he was not there. Then the faithful animal would run up to me and with almost human, pleading eyes, bark and run away toward a distant alley. I immediately decided that some one was suffering there. I had read in books about dogs that led their masters away to the suffering and saved people's lives; so, when Lucretia came to me with his great, honest eyes and took little mementoes out of the calf of my leg, and then galloped off seven or eight blocks, I followed him in the chill air of night and my Mosaic clothes. I wandered away to where the dog stopped behind a livery stable, and there, lying in a shuddering heap on the frosty ground, lay the still, white features of a soup bone that had outlived its usefulness.

On the way back, I met a physician who had been up town to swear in an American citizen who would vote twenty-one years later, if he lived. The physician stopped me and was going to take me to the home of the friendless, when he discovered who I was.



You wrap a tall man, with a William H. Seward nose, in a flannel robe, cut plain, and then put a plug hat and a sealskin sacque and Arctic overshoes on him, and put him out in the street, under the gaslight, with his trim, purple ankles just revealing themselves as he madly gallops after a hydrophobia infested dog, and it is not, after all, surprising that people's curiosity should be a little bit excited.

After I had introduced myself to the physician and asked him for a cigar, explaining that I could not find any in the clothes I had on, I asked him about Lucretia Borgia. I told the doctor how Lucretia seemed restless nights and nervous and irritable days, and how he seemed to be almost a mental wreck, and asked him what the trouble was.

He said it was undoubtedly "insomnia." He said that it was a bad case of it, too. I told him I thought so myself. I said I didn't mind the insomnia that Lucretia had so much as I did my own. I was getting more insomnia on my hands than I could use.

He gave me something to administer to Lucretia. He said I must put it in a link of sausage and leave the sausage where it would appear that I didn't want the dog to get it, and then Lucretia would eat it greedily.

I did so. It worked well so far as the administration of the remedy was concerned, but it was fatal to my little, high strung, yearnful dog. It must have contained something of a deleterious character, for the next morning a coarse man took Lucretia Borgia by the tail and laid him where the violets blow. Malignant insomnia is fast becoming the great foe to the modern American dog.



Along Lake Superior.

I have just returned from a brief visit to Duluth. After strolling along the Bay of Naples and watching old Vesuvius vomit red-hot mud, vapor and other campaign documents, Duluth is quite a change. The ice in the bay at Duluth was thirty-eight inches in depth when I left there the last week in March, and we rode across it with the utmost impunity. By the time these lines fall beneath the eye of the genial, courteous and urbane reader, the new railroad bridge across the bay, over a mile and a half long, will have been completed, so that you may ride from Chicago to Duluth over the Northwestern and Omaha railroads with great comfort. I would be glad to digress here and tell about the beauty of the summer scenery along the Omaha road, and the shy and beautiful troutlet, and the dark and silent Chippewa squawlet and her little bleached out pappooselet, were it not for the unkind and cruel thrusts that I would invoke from the scenery cynic who believes that a newspaper man's opinions may be largely warped with a pass.

Duluth has been joked a good deal, but she stands it first-rate and takes it good naturedly. She claims 16,000 people, some of whom I met at the opera house there. If the rest of the 16,000 are as pleasant as those I conversed with that evening, Duluth must be a pleasant place to live in. Duluth has a very pleasant and beautiful opera house that seats 1,000 people. A few more could have elbowed their way into the opera house the evening that I spoke there, but they preferred to suffer on at home.

Lake Superior is one of the largest aggregations of fresh wetness in the world, if not the largest. When I stop to think that some day all this cold, cold water will have to be absorbed by mankind, it gives me a cramp in the geographical center.

Around the west end of Lake Superior there is a string of towns which stretches along the shore for miles under one name or another, all waiting for the boom to strike and make the northern Chicago. You cannot visit Duluth or Superior without feeling that at any moment the tide of trade will rise and designate the point where the future metropolis of the northern lakes is to be. I firmly believe that this summer will decide it, and my guess is that what is now known as West Superior is to get the benefit. For many years destiny has been hovering over the west end of this mighty lake, and now the favored point is going to be designated. Duluth has past prosperity and expensive improvements in her favor, and in fact the whole locality is going to be benefited, but if I had a block in West Superior with a roller rink on it, I would wear my best clothes every day and claim to be a millionaire in disguise. Ex-President R. B. Hayes has a large brick block in Duluth, but he does not occupy it. Those who go to Duluth hoping to meet Mr. Hayes will be bitterly disappointed.

The streams that run into Lake Superior are alive with trout, and next summer I propose to go up there and roast until I have so thoroughly saturated my system with trout that the trout bones will stick out through my clothes in every direction and people will regard me as a beautiful toothpick holder.

Still there will be a few left for those who think of going up there. All I will need will be barely enough to feed Albert Victor and myself from day to day. People who have never seen a crowned head with a peeled nose on it are cordially invited to come over and see us during office hours. Albert is not at all haughty, and I intend to throw aside my usual reserve this summer also—for the time. P. Wales' son and I will be far from the cares that crowd so thick and fast on greatness. People who come to our cedar bark wigwam to show us their mosquito bites, will be received as cordially as though no great social chasm yawned between us.

Many will meet us in the depths of the forest and go away thinking that we are just common plugs of whom the world wots not; but there is where they will fool themselves.

Then, when the season is over, we will come back into the great maelstrom of life, he to wait for his grandmother's overshoes and I to thrill waiting millions from the rostrum with my "Tale of the Broncho Cow." And so it goes with us all. Adown life's rugged pathway some must toil on from daylight to dark to earn their meagre pittance as kings, while others are born to wear a swallow-tail coat every evening and wring tears of genuine anguish from their audiences.

They tell some rather wide stories about people who have gone up there total physical wrecks and returned strong and well. One man said that he knew a young college student, who was all run down and weak, go up there on the Brule and eat trout and fight mosquitoes a few months, and when he returned to his Boston home he was so stout and well and tanned up that his parents did not know him. There was a man in our car who weighed 300 pounds. He seemed to be boiling out through his clothes everywhere. He was the happiest looking man I ever saw. All he seemed to do in this life was to sit all day and whistle and laugh and trot his stomach, first on one knee and then on the other.

He said that he went up into the pine forests of the Great Lake region a broken-down hypochondriac and confirmed consumptive. He had been measured for a funeral sermon three times, he said, and had never used either of them. He knew a clergyman named Brayley who went up into that region with Bright's justly celebrated disease. He was so emaciated that he couldn't carry a watch. The ticking of the watch rattled his bones so that it made him nervous, and at night they had to pack him in cotton so that he wouldn't break a leg when he turned over. He got to sleeping out nights on a bed of balsam and spruce boughs and eating venison and trout.

When he came down in the spring, he passed through a car of lumbermen and one of them put a warm, wet quid of tobacco in his plug hat for a joke. There were a hundred of these lumbermen when the preacher began, and when the train got into Eau Claire there were only three of them well enough to go around to the office and draw their pay.

This is just as the story was given to me and I repeat it to show how bracing the climate near Superior is. Remember, if you please, that I do not want the story to be repeated as coming from me, for I have nothing left now but my reputation for veracity, and that has had a very hard winter of it.



I Tried Milling.

I think I was about 18 years of age when I decided that I would be a miller, with flour on my clothes and a salary of $200 per month. This was not the first thing I had decided to be, and afterward changed my mind about.

I engaged to learn my profession of a man called Sam Newton, I believe; at least I will call him that for the sake of argument. My business was to weigh wheat, deduct as much as possible on account of cockle, pigeon grass and wild buckwheat, and to chisel the honest farmer out of all he would stand. This was the programme with Mr. Newton; but I am happy to say that it met with its reward, and the sheriff afterward operated the mill.

On stormy days I did the book-keeping, with a scoop shovel behind my ear, in a pile of middlings on the fifth floor. Gradually I drifted into doing a good deal of this kind of brain work. I would chop the ice out of the turbine wheel at 5 o'clock A.M., and then frolic up six flights of stairs and shovel shorts till 9 o'clock P.M.

By shoveling bran and other vegetables 16 hours a day, a general knowledge of the milling business may be readily obtained. I used to scoop middlings till I could see stars, and then I would look out at the landscape and ponder.

I got so that I piled up more ponder, after a while, than I did middlings.

One day the proprietor came up stairs and discovered me in a brown study, whereupon he cursed me in a subdued Presbyterian way, abbreviated my salary from $26 per month to $18 and reduced me to the ranks.

Afterward I got together enough desultory information so that I could superintend the feed stone. The feed stone is used to grind hen feed and other luxuries. One day I noticed an odor that reminded me of a hot overshoe trying to smother a glue factory at the close of a tropical day. I spoke to the chief floor walker of the mill about it, and he said "dod gammit" or something that sounded like that, in a course and brutal manner. He then kicked my person in a rude and hurried tone of voice, and told me that the feed stone was burning up.

He was a very fierce man, with a violent and ungovernable temper, and, finding that I was only increasing his brutal fury, I afterward resigned my position. I talked it over with the proprietor, and both agreed that it would be best. He agreed to it before I did, and rather hurried up my determination to go.



I rather hated to go so soon, but he made it an object for me to go, and I went. I started in with the idea that I would begin at the bottom of the ladder, as it were, and gradually climb to the bran bin by my own exertions, hoping by honesty, industry, and carrying two bushels of wheat up nine flights of stairs, to become a wealthy man, with corn meal in my hair and cracked wheat in my coat pocket, but I did not seem to accomplish it.

Instead of having ink on my fingers and a chastened look of woe on my clear-cut Grecian features, I might have poured No. 1 hard wheat and buckwheat flour out of my long taper ears every night, if I had stuck to the profession. Still, as I say, it was for another man's best good that I resigned. The head miller had no control over himself and the proprietor had rather set his heart on my resignation, so it was better that way.

Still I like to roll around in the bran pile, and monkey in the cracked wheat. I love also to go out in the kitchen and put corn meal down the back of the cook's neck while my wife is working a purple silk Kensington dog, with navy blue mane and tail, on a gothic lambrequin.

I can never cease to hanker for the rumble and grumble of the busy mill, and the solemn murmur of the millstones and the machinery are music to me. More so than the solemn murmur of the proprietor used to be when he came in at an inopportune moment, and in that impromptu and extemporaneous manner of his, and found me admiring the wild and beautiful scenery. He may have been a good miller, but he had no love for the beautiful. Perhaps that is why he was always so cold and cruel toward me. My slender, willowy grace and mellow, bird-like voice never seemed to melt his stony heart.



Our Forefathers.

Seattle, W.T., December 12.—I am up here on the Sound in two senses. I rode down to-day from Tacoma on the Sound, and to-night I shall lecture at Frye's Opera House.

Seattle is a good town. The name lacks poetic warmth, but some day the man who has invested in Seattle real estate will have reason to pat himself on the back and say "ha ha," or words to that effect. The city is situated on the side of a large hill and commands a very fine view of that world's most calm and beautiful collection of water, Puget Sound.

I cannot speak too highly of any sheet of water on which I can ride all day with no compunction of digestion. He who has tossed for days upon the briny deep, will understand this and appreciate it; even if he never tossed upon the angry deep, if it happened to be all he had, he will be glad to know that the Sound is a good piece of water to ride on. The gentle reader who has crossed the raging main and borrowed high-priced meals of the steamship company for days and days, will agree with me that when we can find a smooth piece of water to ride on we should lose no time in crossing it.

In Washington Territory the women vote. That is no novelty to me, of course, for I lived in Wyoming for seven years where women vote, and I held office all the time. And still they say that female voters are poor judges of men, and that any pleasing $2 adonis who comes along and asks for their suffrages will get them.

Not much!!!

Woman is a keen and correct judge of mental and moral worth. Without stopping to give logical reasons for her course, perhaps, she still chooses with unerring judgment at the polls.

Anyone who doubts this statement, will do well to go to the old poll books in Wyoming and examine my overwhelming majorities—with a powerful magnifier.

I have just received from Boston a warm invitation to be present in that city on Forefathers' day, to take part in the ceremonies and join in the festivities of that occasion.

Forefathers, I thank you! Though this reply will not reach you for a long time, perhaps, I desire to express to you my deep appreciation of your kindness, and, though I can hardly be regarded as a forefather myself, I assure you that I sympathize with you.

Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to be with you on this day of your general jubilee and to talk over old times with you.

One who has never experienced the thrill of genuine joy that wakens a man to a glad realization of the fact that he is a forefather, cannot understand its full significance. You alone know how it is yourself, you can speak from experience.

In fancy's dim corridors I see you stand, away back in the early dawn of our national day, with the tallow candle drooping and dying in its socket, as you waited for the physician to come and announce to you that you were a forefather.

Forefathers; you have done well. Others have sought to outdo you and wrest the laurels from your brow, but they did not succeed. As forefathers you have never been successfully scooped.

I hope that you will keep up your justly celebrated organization. If a forefather allows his dues to get in arrears, go to him kindly and ask him like a brother to put up. If he refuses to do so, fire him. There is no reason why a man should presume upon his long standing as a forefather to become insolent to other forefathers who are far his seniors. As a rule, I notice it is the young amateur forefather who has only been so a few days, in fact, who is arrogant and disobedient.

I have often wished that we could observe Forefathers' day more generally in the West. Why we should allow the Eastern cities to outdo us in this matter while we hold over them in other ways, I cannot understand. Our church sociables and homicides in the West will compare favorably with those of the effeter cities of the Atlantic slope. Our educational institutions and embezzlers are making rapid strides, especially our embezzlers. We are cultivating a certain air of refinement and haughty reserve which enables us at times to fool the best judges. Many of our Western people have been to the Atlantic seaboard and remained all summer without falling into the hands of the bunko artist. A cow gentleman friend of mine who bathed his plump limbs in the Atlantic last summer during the day, and mixed himself up in the mazy dance at night, told me on his return that he had enjoyed the summer immensely, but that he had returned financially depressed.

"Ah," said I, with an air of superiority which I often assume while talking to men who know more than I do, "you fell into the hands of the cultivated confidence man?"

"No, William," he said sadly, "worse than that. I stopped at a seaside hotel. Had I gone to New York City and hunted up the gentlemanly bunko man and the Wall street dealer in lamb's pelts, as my better judgment prompted, I might have returned with funds. Now I am almost insolvent. I begin life again with great sorrow, and the same old Texas steer with which I went into the cattle industry five years ago."

But why should we, here in the West, take readily to all other institutions common to the cultured East and ignore the forefather industry? I now make this public announcement, and will stick to it, viz: I will be one of ten full-blooded American citizens to establish a branch forefather's lodge in the West, with a separate fund set aside for the benefit of forefathers who are no longer young. Forefathers are just as apt to become old and helpless as anyone else. Young men who contemplate becoming forefathers should remember this.



In Acknowledgement.

To The Metropolitan Guide Publishing Co., New York.

Gentlemen.—I received the copy of your justly celebrated "Guide to rapid Affluence, or How to Acquire Wealth Without Mental Exertion," price twenty-five cents. It is a great boon.

I have now had this book sixteen weeks, and, as I am wealthy enough, I return it. It is not much worn, and if you will allow me fifteen cents for it, I would be very grateful. It is not the intrinsic value of the fifteen cents that I care for so much, but I would like it as a curiosity.

The book is wonderfully graphic and thorough in all its details, and I was especially pleased with its careful and useful recipe for ointments. One style of ointment spoken of and recommended by your valuable book, is worthy of a place in history. I made some of it according to your formula. I tried it on a friend of mine. He wore it when he went away, and he has not as yet returned. I heard, incidentally, that it adhered to him. People who have examined it say that it retains its position on his person similar to a birthmark.

Your cement does not have the same peculiarity. It does everything but adhere. Among other specialties it effects a singular odor. It has a fragrance that ought to be utilized in some way. Men have harnessed the lightning, and it seems to me that the day is not far distant when a man will be raised up who can control this latent power. Do you not think that possibly you have made a mistake and got your ointment and cement formula mixed? Your cement certainly smells like a corrupt administration in a warm room.

Your revelations in the liquor manufacture, and how to make any mixed drink with one hand tied, is well worth the price of the book. The chapter on bar etiquette is also excellent. Very few men know how to properly enter a bar-room and what to do after they arrive. How to get into a bar-room without attracting attention, and how to get out without police interference, are points upon which our American drunkards are lamentably ignorant. How to properly address a bar tender, is also a page that no student of good breeding could well omit.

I was greatly surprised to read how simple the manufacture of drinks under your formula is. You construct a cocktail without liquor and then rob intemperance of its sting. You also make all kinds of liquor without the use of alcohol, that demon under whose iron heel thousands of our sons and brothers go down to death and delirium annually. Thus you are doing a good work.

You also unite aloes, tobacco and Rough on Rats, and, by a happy combination, construct a style of beer that is non-intoxicating.

No one could, by any possible means, become intoxicated on your justly celebrated beer. He would not have time. Before he could get inebriated he would be in the New Jerusalem.

Those who drink your beer will not fill drunkards' graves. They will close their career and march out of this life with perforated stomachs and a look of intense anguish.

Your method of making cider without apples is also frugal and ingenious. Thousands of innocent apple worms annually lose their lives in the manufacture of cider. They are also, in most instances, wholly unprepared to die. By your method, a style of wormless cider is constructed that would not fool anyone. It tastes a good deal like rain water that was rained about the first time that any raining was ever done, and was deprived of air ever since.



The closing chapter on the subject of "How to win the affections of the opposite sex at sixty yards," is first-rate. It is wonderful what triumph science and inventions have wrenched from obdurate conditions! Only a few years ago, a young man had to work hard for weeks and months in order to win the love of a noble young woman. Now, with your valuable and scholarly work, price twenty-five cents, he studies over the closing chapter an hour or two, then goes out into society and gathers in his victim. And yet I do not grudge the long, long hours I squandered in those years when people were in heathenish darkness. I had no book like yours to tell me how to win the affections of the opposite sex. I could only blunder on, week after week and yet I do not regret it. It was just the school I needed. It did me good.

Your book will, no doubt, be a good thing for those who now grope, but I have groped so long that I have formed the habit and prefer it. Let me go right on groping. Those who desire to win the affections of the opposite sex at one sitting, will do well to send two bits for your great work, but I am in no hurry. My time is not valuable.



Preventing a Scandal.

Boys should never be afraid or ashamed to do little odd jobs by which to acquire money. Too many boys are afraid, or at least seem to be embarrassed when asked to do chores, and thus earn small sums of money. In order to appreciate wealth we must earn it ourselves. That is the reason I labor. I do not need to labor. My parents are still living, and they certainly would not see me suffer for the necessities of life. But life in that way would not have the keen relish that it would if I earned the money myself.

Sawing wood used to be a favorite pastime with boys twenty years ago. I remember the first money I ever earned was by sawing wood. My brother and myself were to receive $5 for sawing five cords of wood. We allowed the job to stand, however, until the weather got quite warm, and then we decided to hire a foreigner who came along that way one glorious summer day when all nature seemed tickled and we knew that the fish would be apt to bite. So we hired the foreigner, and while he sawed, we would bet with him on various "dead sure things" until he got the wood sawed, when he went away owing us fifty cents.

We had a neighbor who was very wealthy. He noticed that we boys earned our own spending money, and he yearned to have his son try to ditto. So he told the boy that he was going away for a few weeks and that he would give him $2 per cord, or double price, to saw the wood. He wanted to teach the boy to earn and appreciate his money. So, when the old man went away, the boy secured a colored man to do the job at $1 per cord, by which process the youth made $10. This he judiciously invested in clothes, meeting his father at the train in a new summer suit and a speckled cane. The old man said he could see by the sparkle in the boy's clear, honest eyes, that healthful exercise was what boys needed.

When I was a boy I frequently acquired large sums of money by carrying coal up two flights of stairs for wealthy people who were too fat to do it themselves. This money I invested from time to time in side shows and other zoological attractions.

One day I saw a coal cart back up and unload itself on the walk in such a way as to indicate that the coal would have to be manually elevated inside the building. I waited till I nearly froze to death, for the owner to come along and solicit my aid. Finally he came. He smelled strong of carbolic acid, and I afterward learned that he was a physician and surgeon.

We haggled over the price for some time, as I had to carry the coal up two flights in an old waste paper basket and it was quite a task. Finally we agreed. I proceeded with the work. About dusk I went up the last flight of stairs with the last load. My feet seemed to weigh about nineteen pounds apiece and my face was very sombre.

In the gloaming I saw my employer. He was writing a prescription by the dim, uncertain light. He told me to put the last basketful in the little closet off the hall and then come and get my pay. I took the coal into the closet, but I do not know what I did with it. As I opened the door and stepped in, a tall skeleton got down off the nail and embraced me like a prodigal son. It fell on my neck and draped itself all over me. Its glittering phalanges entered the bosom of my gingham shirt and rested lightly on the pit of my stomach. I could feel the pelvis bone in the small of my back. The room was dark, but I did not light the gas. Whether it was the skeleton of a lady or gentleman, I never knew; but I thought, for the sake of my good name, I would not remain. My good name and a strong yearning for home were all that I had at that time.

So I went home. Afterwards, I learned that this physician got all his coal carried up stairs for nothing in this way, and he had tried to get rooms two flights further up in the building, so that the boys would have further to fall when they made their egress.



About Portraits.

Hudson, Wis., August 25, 1885.

Hon. William F. Vilas, Postmaster-General, Washington, D.C.

Dear Sir,—For some time I have been thinking of writing to you and asking you how you were getting along with your department since I left it. I did not wish to write you for the purpose of currying favor with an administration against which I squandered a ballot last fall. Neither do I desire to convey the impression that I would like to open a correspondence with you for the purpose of killing time. If you ever feel like sitting down and answering this letter in an off-hand way it would please me very much, but do not put yourself out to do so. I wanted to ask you, however, how you like the pictures of yourself recently published by the patent insides. That was my principal object in writing. Having seen you before this great calamity befell you, I wanted to inquire whether you had really changed so much. As I remember your face, it was rather unusually intellectual and attractive for a great man. Great men are very rarely pretty. I guess that, aside from yourself, myself, and Mr. Evarts, there is hardly an eminent man in the country who would be considered handsome. But the engraver has done you a great injustice, or else you have sadly changed since I saw you. It hardly seems possible that your nose has drifted around to leeward and swelled up at the end, as the engraver would have us believe. I do not believe that in a few short months the look of firmness and conscious rectitude that I noticed could have changed to that of indecision and vacuity which we see in some of your late portraits as printed.



I saw one yesterday, with your name attached to it, and it made my heart ache for your family. As a resident in your State I felt humiliated. Two of Wisconsin's ablest men have been thus slaughtered by the rude broad-axe of the engraver. Last fall, Senator Spooner, who is also a man with a first-class head and face, was libeled in this same reckless way. It makes me mad, and in that way impairs my usefulness. I am not a good citizen, husband or father when I am mad. I am a perfect simoom of wrath at such times, and I am not responsible for what I do.

Nothing can arouse the indignation of your friends, regardless of party, so much as the thought that while you are working so hard in the postoffice at Washington with your coat off, collecting box rent and making up the Western mail, the remorseless engraver and electrotyper are seeking to down you by making pictures of you in which you appear either as a dude or a tough.

While I have not the pleasure of being a member of your party, having belonged to what has been sneeringly alluded to as the g.o.p., I cannot refrain from expressing my sympathy at this time. Though we may have differed heretofore upon important questions of political economy, I cannot exult over these portraits. Others may gloat over these efforts to injure you, but I do not. I am not much of a gloater, anyhow.

I leave those to gloat who are in the gloat business.

Still, it is one of the drawbacks incident to greatness. We struggle hard through life that we may win the confidence of our fellow-men, only at last to have pictures of ourselves printed and distributed where they will injure us.



I desire to add before closing this letter, Mr. Vilas, that with those who are acquainted with you and know your sterling worth, these portraits will make no difference. We will not allow them to influence us socially or politically. What the effect may be upon offensive partisans who are total strangers to you, I do not know.

My theory in relation to these cuts is, that they are combined and interchangeable, so that, with slight modifications, they are used for all great men. The cut, with the extras that go with it, consists of one head with hair (front view), one bald head (front view), one head with hair (side view), one bald head (side view), one pair eyes (with glasses), one pair eyes (plain), one Roman nose, one Grecian nose, one turn-up nose, one set whiskers (full), one moustache, one pair side-whiskers, one chin, one set large ears, one set medium ears, one set small ears, one set shoulders, with collar and necktie for above, one monkey-wrench, one set quoins, one galley, one oil can, one screwdriver. These different features are then arranged so that a great variety of clergymen, murderers, senators, embezzlers, artists, dynamiters, humorists, arsonists, larcenists, poets, statesmen, base ball players, rinkists, pianists, capitalists, bigamists and sluggists are easily represented. No newspaper office should be without them. They are very simple, and any child can easily learn to operate it. They are invaluable in all cases, for no one knows at what moment a revolting crime may be committed by a comparatively unknown man, whose portrait you wish to give, and in this age of rapid political transformations, presentations and combinations, no enterprising paper should delay the acquisition of a combined portrait for the use of its readers.

Hoping that you are well, and that you will at once proceed to let no guilty man escape, I remain, yours truly,

Bill Nye.



The Old South.

The Old South Meeting House, in Boston, is the most remarkable structure in many respects to be found in that remarkable city. Always eager wherever I go to search out at once the gospel privileges, it is not to be wondered at, that I should have gone to the Old South the first day after I landed in Boston.

It is hardly necessary to go over the history of the Old South, except, perhaps, to refresh the memory of those who live outside of Boston. The Old South Society was organized in 1669, and the ground on which the old meetinghouse now stands was given by Mrs. Norton, the widow of Rev. John Norton, since deceased. The first structure was of wood, and in 1729 the present brick building succeeded it. King's Handbook of Boston says: "It is one of the few historic buildings that have been allowed to remain in this iconoclastic age."

So it seems that they are troubled with iconoclasts in Boston, too. I thought I saw one hanging around the Old South on the day I was there, and had a good notion to point him out to the authorities, but thought it was none of my business.

I went into the building and registered, and then from force of habit or absent-mindedness handed my umbrella over the counter and asked how soon supper would be ready. Everybody registers, but very few, I am told, ask how soon supper will be ready. The Old South is now run on the European plan, however.

The old meeting-house is chiefly remarkable for the associations that cluster around it. Two centuries hover about the ancient weather-vane and look down upon the visitor when the weather is favorable.

Benjamin Franklin was baptized and attended worship here, prior to his wonderful invention of lightning. Here on each succeeding Sabbath sat the man who afterwards snared the forked lightning with a string and put it in a jug for future generations. Here Whitefield preached and the rebels discussed the tyranny of the British king. Warren delivered his famous speech here upon the anniversary of the Boston massacre and the "tea party" organized in this same building. Two hundred years ago exactly, the British used the Old South as a military riding school, although a majority of the people of Boston were not in favor of it.

It would be well to pause here and consider the trying situation in which our ancestors were placed at that time. Coming to Massachusetts as they did, at a time when the country was new and prices extremely high, they had hoped to escape from oppression and establish themselves so far away from the tyrant that he could not come over here and disturb them without suffering from the extreme nausea incident to a long sea voyage. Alas, however, when they landed at Plymouth rock there was not a decent hotel in the place. The same stern and rock-bound coast which may be discovered along the Atlantic sea-board to-day was there, and a cruel, relentless sky frowned upon their endeavors.

Where prosperous cities now flaunt to the sky their proud domes and floating debts, the rank jimson weed nodded in the wind and the pumpkin pie of to-day still slumbered in the bosom of the future. What glorious facts have, under the benign influence of fostering centuries, been born of apparent impossibility. What giant certainties have grown through these years from the seeds of doubt and discouragement and uncertainty! (Big firecrackers and applause.)



At that time our ancestors had but timidly embarked in the forefather business. They did not know that future generations in four-button cutaways would rise up and call them blessed and pass resolutions of respect on their untimely death. If they stayed at home the king taxed them all out of shape, and if they went out of Boston a few rods to get enough huckleberries for breakfast, they would frequently come home so full of Indian arrows that they could not get through a common door without great pain.

Such was the early history of the country where now cultivation and education and refinement run rampant and people sit up all night to print newspapers so that we can have them in the morning.

The land on which the Old South stands is very valuable for business purposes, and $400,000 will have to be raised in order to preserve the old landmark to future generations. I earnestly hope that it will be secured, and that the old meeting-house—dear not alone to the people of Boston, but to the millions of Americans scattered from sea to sea, who cannot forget where first universal freedom plumed its wings—will be spared to entertain within its hospitable walls, enthusiastic and reverential visitors for ages without end.



Knights of the Pen.

When you come to think of it, it is surprising that so many newspaper men write so that any one but an expert can read it. The rapid and voluminous work, especially of daily journalism, knocks the beautiful business college penman, as a rule, higher than a kite. I still have specimens of my own handwriting that a total stranger could read.

I do not remember a newspaper acquaintance whose penmanship is so characteristic of the exacting neatness and sharp, clear cut style of the man, as is that of Eugene Field, of the Chicago News. As the "Nonpareil Writer" of the Denver Tribune, it was a mystery to me when he did the work which the paper showed each day as his own. You would sometimes find him at his desk, writing on large sheets of "print paper" with a pen and violet ink, in a hand that was as delicate as the steel plate of a bank note and the kind of work that printers would skirmish for. He would ask you to sit down in the chair opposite his desk, which had two or three old exchanges thrown on it. He would probably say, "Never mind those papers. I've read them. Just sit down on them if you want to." Encouraged by his hearty manner, you would sit down, and you would continue to sit down till you had protruded about three-fourths of your system through that hollow mockery of a chair. Then he would run to help you out and curse the chair, and feel pained because he had erroneously given you the ruin with no seat to it. He always felt pained over such things. He always suffered keenly and felt shocked over the accident until you had gone away, and then he would sigh heavily and "set" the chair again.



Frank Pixley, the editor of the San Francisco Argonaut, is not beautiful, though the Argonaut is. He is grim and rather on the Moses Montefiore style of countenance, but his hand-writing does not convey the idea of the man personally, or his style of dealing with the Chinese question. It is rather young looking, and has the uncertain manner of an eighteen-year-old boy.

Robert J. Burdette writes a small but plain hand, though he sometimes suffers from the savage typographical error that steals forth at such a moment as ye think not, and disfigures and tears and mangles the bright eyed children of the brain.

Very often we read a man's work and imagine we shall find him like it, cheery, bright and entertaining; but we know him and find that personally he is a refrigerator, or an egotist, or a man with a torpid liver and a nose like a rose geranium. You will not be disappointed in Bob Burdette, however, You think you will like him, and you always do. He will never be too famous to be a gentleman.

George W. Peck's hand is of the free and independent order of chirography. It is easy and natural, but not handsome. He writes very voluminously, doing his editorial writing in two days of the week, generally Friday and Saturday. Then he takes a rapid horse, a zealous bird dog and an improved double barrel duck destroyer and communes with nature.

Sam Davis, an old time Californian, and now in Nevada, writes the freest of any penman I know. When he is deliberate, he may be betrayed into making a deformed letter and a crooked mark attached to it, which he characterizes as a word. He puts a lot of these together and actually pays postage on the collection under the delusion that it is a letter, that it will reach its destination, and that it will accomplish its object.

He makes up for his bad writing, however, by being an unpublished volume of old time anecdotes and funny experiences.

Goodwin, of the old Territorial Enterprise, and Mark Twain's old employer, writes with a pencil in a methodical manner and very plainly. The way he sharpens a "hard medium" lead pencil and skins the apostle of the so-called Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, makes my heart glad. Hardly a day passes that his life is not threatened by the low browed thumpers of Mormondom, and yet the old war horse raises the standard of monogamy and under the motto, "One country, one flag and one wife at a time," he smokes his old meerschaum pipe and writes a column of razor blades every day. He is the buzz saw upon which polygamy has tried to sit. Fighting these rotten institutions hand to hand and fighting a religious eccentricity through an annual message, or a feeble act of congress, are two separate and distinct things.

If I had a little more confidence in my longevity than I now have, I would go down there to the Valley of the Jordan, and I would gird up my loins, and I would write with that lonely warrior at Salt Lake, and with the aid and encouragement of our brethren of the press who do not favor the right of one man to marry an old woman's home, we would rotten egg the bogus Temple of Zion till the civilized world, with a patent clothes pin on its nose, would come and see what was the matter.

I see that my zeal has led me away from my original subject, but I haven't time to regret it now.



The Wild Cow.

When I was young and used to roam around over the country, gathering water-melons in the light of the moon, I used to think I could milk anybody's cow, but I do not think so now. I do not milk a cow now unless the sign is right, and it hasn't been right for a good many years. The last cow I tried to milk was a common cow, born in obscurity; kind of a self-made cow. I remember her brow was low, but she wore her tail high and she was haughty, oh, so haughty.

I made a common-place remark to her, one that is used in the very best of society, one that need not have given offence anywhere. I said "So"—and she "soed." Then I told her to "hist" and she histed. But I thought she overdid it. She put too much expression in it.