Part 11

|OLD CHIEF POCOTELLO, now at the Fort Hall agency, in answer to an inquiry relative to the true Christian character of a former Indian agent at that place, gave in very terse language the most accurate description of a hypocrite that was ever given to the public. "Ugh! Too much God and no flour."

WE ARE GETTING CYNICAL

|IT begins to look now as though Major F. G. Wilson, who stopped here a short time last week and week before, might be a gentleman in disguise. He has done several things since he left here, that look to a man up a tree like something irregular and peculiar. The major has not only prevaricated, but he has done so in such a way as to beat his friends and to make them yearn for his person in order that they may kick him over into the inky night of space. He has represented himself as confidential adviser and literary tourist of several prominent New York, Chicago, Omaha and Tie Siding dailies, and had such good documents to show in proof of his identity in that capacity that he has received many courtesies which, as an ordinary American dead-beat, he might have experienced great difficulty in securing. We simply state this in order to put our esteemed contemporaries on their guard, so that they will not let him spit in their overshoes and enjoy himself as he did here. He wears a white hat on his head and a crooked tooth in the piazza of his mouth. This pearly fang he uses to masticate and reduce little delicate irregular fragments of plug tobacco, which he borrows of people who have time to listen to the silvery tinkle of his bazoo.

When last seen he was headed west, and will probably strike Eureka, Nevada, in a week or two. His mission seems to be mainly to make people feel a goneness in their exchequer, and to distribute tobacco dados over the office stoves of our great land. He is a man who writes long letters to the New York _Herald_ that are never printed. His freshly blown nose is red, but his newspaper articles are not. He claims to represent the Mutual Reserve Fund Life Association lately, too. The company represents the Insurance and he attends to the Mutual Reserve Fund. He has mutually reserved all the funds he could get hold of since he struck the west, besides mutually reserving enough strong drink to eat a hole through the Ames monument.

Such men as Major Wilson make us suspicious of humanity, and very likely the next man who comes along here and represents that he is a great man, and wants five dollars on his well-rounded figure and fair fame will have to be identified. We have helped forty or fifty such men to make a bridal tour of Wyoming and now we are going to saw off and quit. When a great journalist comes into this office again with an internal revenue tax on his breath and nineteen dollars back on his baggage, we will probably pick up a fifty pound chunk of North Park quartz and spread his intellectual faculties around this building till it looks like the Custer massacre.

ASK US SOMETHING DIFFICULT.

|WHAT becomes of our bodies?" asks a soft eyed scientist, and we answer in stentorian tones, that they get inside of a red flannel undershirt as the maple turns to crimson and the sassafras to gold. Ask us something difficult, ethereal being, if you want to see us get up and claw for our library of public documents.

A MINING EXPERIMENT

|A MILD-EYED youth, wearing a dessert-spoon hat and polka-dot socks, went into Middle Park the other day and claimed to be a mining expert. The boys inveigled him into driving a stick of giant powder into a drill-hole at the bottom of a shaft with an old axe, and now they are trying to get him out of the ground with ammonia and a tooth-brush.

A NEW INDUSTRY.

|THE want column of the Chicago _News_ for October 10th has the following: "Twelve frightful examples' wanted, to travel with Scott Marble's new drama and appear in the realistic bar-room scene of the 'Drunkard's Daughter.' Arthur G. Cambridge, dramatic agent, 75 South Clark street."

This throws open a field of usefulness to a class of men who hitherto have seen no prospect whatever for the future. It brings within the reach of such men a business which, requiring no capital, still gives the actor much time to do as he chooses. Beauty often wins for itself a place in the great theatrical world, but it is rare that the tomato nose and the watery eye secure a salary for their proprietors. Business must be picking up when the wiggly legs and danger-signal nose will bring so much per week and railroad fare. Perhaps prohibition has got the "frightful example" business down to where it commands the notice of the world because of its seldom condition.

THE MIMIC STAGE.

|AT the performance of "The Phoenix" here, the other night, there was a very affecting place where the play is transferred very quickly from a street scene to the elegant apartments of Mr. Blackburn, the heavy villain. The street scene had to be raised out of the way, and the effect of the transition was somewhat marred by the reluctance of the scenery in rolling up out of the way. It got about half way up, and stopped there in an undecided manner, which annoyed the heavy villain a good deal. He started to make some blood-curdling remarks about Mr. Bludsoe, and had got pretty well warmed up when the scenery came down with a bang on the stage. The artist who pulls up the curtain and fills the hall lamps, then pulled the scene up so as to show the villain's feet for fifteen or twenty minutes, but he couldn't get it any farther. It seemed that the clothes line, by which the elaborate scenery is operated, got tangled up some way, and this caused the delay. After that another effort was made, and this time the street scene rolled up to about the third story of a brick hotel shown in the foreground, and stopped there, while the clarionet and first violin continued a kind of sad tremulo. Then a dark hand, with a wart on one finger and an oriental dollar store ring on another, came out from behind the wings and began to wind the clothes-line carefully around the pole at the foot of the scene. The villain then proceeded with his soliloquy, while the street scene hung by one corner in such a way as to make a large warehouse on the corner of the street stand at an angle of about forty-five degrees.

Laramie will never feel perfectly happy until these little hitches are dispensed with. Supposing that at some place in the play, where the heroine is speaking soft and low to her lover and the proper moment has arrived for her to pillow her sunny head upon his bosom, that street scene should fetch loose, and come down with such momentum as to knock the lovers over into the arms of the bass-viol player. Or suppose that in some death-bed act this same scene, loaded with a telegraph pole at the bottom, should settle down all at once in such a way as to leave the death-bed out on the corner of Monroe and Clark streets, in front of a candy store.

Modern stage mechanism has now reached such a degree of perfection that the stage carpenter does not go up on a step ladder, in the middle of a play, and nail the corner of a scene to a stick of 2x4 scantling, while a duel is going on near the step ladder. In all the larger theatres and opera houses, now, they are not doing that way.

Of course little incidents occur, however, even on the best stages, and where the whole thing works all right. For instance, the other day, a young actor, who was kneeling to a beautiful heiress down east, got a little too far front, and some scenery, which was to come together in the middle of the stage to pianissimo music, shut him outside and divided the tableau in two, leaving the young actor apparently kneeling at the foot of a street lamp, as though he might be hunting for a half a dollar that he had just dropped on the sidewalk.

There was a play in New York, not long ago, in which there was a kind of military parade introduced, and the leader of a file of soldiers had his instructions to march three times around the stage to martial music, and then file off at the left, the whole column, of course, following him. After marching once around, the stage manager was surprised to see the leader deliberately wheel, and walk off the stage, at the left, with the whole battalion following at his heels. The manager went to him and abused him shamefully for his haste, and told him he had a mind to discharge him; but the talented hack driver, who thus acted as the military leader, and who had over-played himself by marching off the stage ahead of time, said:

"Well, confound it, you can discharge me if you want to, but what was a man to do? Would you have me march around three times when my military pants were coming off, and I knew it? Military pride, pomp, parade, and circumstance, are all right; but it can be overdone. A military squadron, detachment, or whatever it is, can make more of a parade, under certain circumstances, than is advertised. I didn't want to give people more show than they paid for, and I ask you to put yourself in my place. When a man is paid three dollars a week to play a Roman soldier, would you have him play the Greek slave? No, sir; I guess I know what I'm hired to play, and I'm going to play it. When you want me to play Adam in the Garden of Eden, just give me my fig leaf and salary enough to make it interesting, and I will try and properly interpret the character for you, or refund the money at the door."

DECLINE OF AMERICAN HUMOR

|DEAR, mellow-voiced, starry-eyed reader, did you ever see something about "the decline of American humor?" Well, we got a gob of American humor, yesterday, written by a yahoo with pale pink hair, which was entitled "Marriage in Mormondom on the Tontine Plan." Well, we declined it. Decline of American humor. _Sabe?_

CHICAGO CUSTOM HOUSE

|THE Chicago custom house and post office, built from designs by Oscar Wild, and other delirum tremens artists, is getting wiggly, and bids fair to some day fall down and scrunch about 500 United States employes into the great billowy sea of the eternal hence. It is a sick looking structure, with little gothic warts on top, and red window sashes, and little half-grown smoke houses sprouting out of it in different places. It is grand, gloomy and peculiar, and looks as though it might be cursed with an inward pain.

FOREIGN OPINION

|WE are indebted to Fred J. Prouting, correspondent of the foreign and British newspaper press, for a copy of the London _Daily_ of the 9th inst., containing the following editorial notice:

"If ever celebrity were attained unexpectedly, most assuredly it was that thrust upon Bill Nye by Truthful James. It is just possible, however, that the innumerable readers of Mr. Bret Harte's 'Heathen Chinee' may have imagined Bill Nye and Ah Sin to be purely mythical personages. So far as the former is concerned, any such conclusion now appears to have been erroneous. Bill Nye is no more a phantom than any other journalist, although the name of the organ which he 'runs' savors more of fiction than of fact. But there is no doubt about the matter, for the Washington correspondent of the New York _Tribune_ telegraphed on the 29th instant, that Bill Nye had accepted a post under the government. He has lately been domiciled in Laramie City, Wyoming territory, and is editor of The Daily Boomerang. In reference to Acting-Postmaster-Gen. Hatton's appointment of him as postmaster at Laramie City, the opponent of Ah Sin writes an extremely humorous letter, 'extending' his thanks, and advising his chief of his opinion that his 'appointment is a triumph of eternal truth over error and wrong.' Nye continues: 'It is one of the epochs, I may say, in the nation's onward march toward political purity and perfection. I don't know when I have noticed any stride in the affairs of state which has so thoroughly impressed me with its wisdom.' In this quiet strain of banter, Bill Nye continues to the end of his letter, which suggests the opinion that whatever the official qualifications of the new postmaster may be, the inhabitants of Laramie City must have a very readable newspaper in The Daily Boomerang."

While thanking our London contemporary for its gentle and harmless remarks, we desire to correct an erroneous impression that the seems to have as to our general style: The British press has in some way arrived at the conclusion that the editor of this fashion-guide and mental lighthouse on the rocky shores of time (terms cash), is a party with wild tangled hair, and an like a tongue of flame.

That is not the case, and therefore our English co-worker in the great field of journalism is, no doubt, laboring under a popular misapprehension. Could the editor of the _News_ look in upon us as we pull down tome after tome of forgotten lore in our study; or, with a glad smile, glance hurriedly over the postal card in transit through our postoffice, he would see, not as he supposes, a wild and cruel slayer of his fellow men, but a thoughtful, scholarly and choice fragment of modern architecture, with lines of care about the firmly chiseled mouth, and with the subdued and chastened air of a man who has run for the legislature and failed to get there, Eli.

The London _News_ is an older paper than ours, and we therefore recognize the value of its kind notice. _The Boomerang_ is a young paper, and has therefore only begun fairly to do much damage as a national misfortune, but the time is not far distant, when, from Greenland's icy mountains to India's coral strand, we propose to search out suffering humanity and make death easier and more desirable, by introducing this choice malady.

Regarding the postoffice, we wish to state that we shall aim to make it a great financial success, and furnish mail at all times to all who desire it, whether they have any or not. We shall be pretty busy, of course, attending to the office during the day, and writing scathing editorials during the night, but we will try to snatch a moment now and then to write a few letters for those who have been inquiring sadly and hopelessly for letters during the past ten years. It is, indeed, a dark and dreary world to the man who has looked in at the same general delivery window nine times a day for ten years, and yet never received a letter, nor even a confidential postal card from a commercial man, stating that on the 5th of the following month he would strike the town with a new and attractive line of samples.

We should early learn to find put such suffering as that, and if we are in the postoffice department we may be the means of much good by putting new envelopes on our own dunning letters and mailing them to the suffering and distressed. Let us, in our abundance, remember those who have not been dunned for many a weary year. It will do them good, and we will not feel the loss.

THEY HAVE CURBED THEIR WOE.

|THEY say that Brigham Young's grave is looking as bare and desolate as a boulevard now. At first, while her grief was fresh, his widow used to march out there five abreast, and just naturally deluge the grave with scalding tears, and at that time the green grass grew luxuriantly, and the pig-weed waved in the soft summer air; but as she learned to control her emotions, the humidity of the atmosphere disappeared, and grief's grand irrigation failed to give down. We should learn from this that the man who flatters himself that in marrying a whole precinct during life, he is piling up for the future a large invoice of ungovernable woe, is liable to get left. The prophet's tomb looks to-day like a deserted buffalo wallow, while his widow has dried her tears, and is trying to make a mash on the Utah commission. Such is life in the far west, and such the fitting resting place of a red-headed old galvanized prophet, who marries a squint-eyed fly-up-the-creek, and afterward gets a special revelation requiring him to marry a female mass-meeting. Let us be thankful for what we have, instead of yearning for a great wealth of wife. Then the life insurance will not have to be scattered so, and our friends will be spared the humiliating spectacle of a bereft and sorrowing herd of widow, turned loose by the cold hand of death to monkey o'er our tomb.

HUNG BY REQUEST.

|THIS county has had two hemp carnivals during the past few weeks, and it begins to look like old times again. In each case the murder was unprovoked, and the victim a quiet gentleman. That is why there was a popular feeling against the murderer, and a spontaneous ropestretching benefit as a result. While we deplore the existence of a state of affairs that would warrant these little expressions of feeling, we cannot come right out and condemn the exercises which followed.

The more we read the political record of the candidate for office, as set forth in opposing journals, the more we feel that there are already few enough good men in this country, so that we do not care to spare any of them. If, therefore, the mischievous bad man is permitted to thin them out this way, the day is not distant when we won't have good men enough to run the newspapers, to say nothing of other avocations.

We know that eastern people will speak of us as a ferocious tribe on the Wyoming reservation, but we desire to call the attention of our more law-abiding brethren to the fact that there has been in the past year a lynching in almost every state in the Union, to say nothing of several hundred cases where there should have been. Do you suppose Wyoming young ladies would consent to play the waltz known as "Under the Elms," composed by Walter Malley, if Walter had been as frolicsome here as he was down on the Atlantic coast? Scarcely. We may be the creatures of impulse here, but not that kind of impulse.

Minneapolis hung a man during the past year, and so did Bloomington and other high-toned towns, and shall we, because we are poor and lonely, be denied this poor boon? We hope not. Because we have left the East and moved out here to make some money and build up a new country, shall we be refused the privileges we would have enjoyed if we had remained in the states. We trow not.

A telegraph pole with a remains hanging on it is not a cheerful sight, but it has a tendency to annoy and mentally disturb those who contemplate the violent death of some good man. It unnerves the brave assassin and makes him restless and apprehensive. Death is always depressing, but it is doubly so when it has that purple and suffocated appearance which is noticeable in the features of the early fall fruit of the telegraph pole. Lately, we will state, however, the telegraph pole has fallen into disfavor, and is not much used, owing to a rumor which gained circulation some time ago, to the effect that Jay Gould intended to charge the vigilance committee rent.

A COLORED GREEK SLATE.

|A NUDE colored woman, as wild as a gorilla, startling the people of the Marvel section of Missouri. She has been seen several times, and the last time threw a young lady, who was horseback riding, into hysteria, and with a grunt--not unlike that of a wild hog--jumped up and ran into the forest. At the time of her discovery she was burrowing into the side of the road, catching and eating crawfish, which she ate claws, hide and all. She is very black, and foams at the mouth when angry, like a wild animal at bay. She is probably a colored Greek slave in search of an umbrella and the remainder of her wardrobe. Still, she may be a brunette society belle, who went in swimming where a mud-turtle caught her by the pink toe, and the nervous shock has unsettled her mind.

THE MELVILLES.

|AN exchange says that Mrs. Melville has become deranged through excess of joy over the unexpected return of her husband. Another one says that it is thought that Lieutenant Melville is off his basement as a result of exposure to the vigorous and bracing air of the north pole. Still another says that Mr. Melville was always mean and hateful toward his wife, and that when he was at home, she had to do her own washing and wind the clock herself. From the different stories now floating about relative to the Melville family, we are led to believe that he is a kind and considerate husband, pleasant and good-natured toward his wife--while asleep; and that she is a kind, beautiful and accomplished wife--when she is sober. How many of our best wives are falling victims to the alcoholic habit recently! How sad to think that, as husbands, we will soon be left to wait and watch and vigil through the long, weary night for that one to return who promised us on the nuptial day that she would protect and love us. Ah, what a silent, but seductive foe to the husband is rum! How it creeps into the home circle and snatches the wife in the full blush and bloom of womanhood, while the pale, sad-eyed husband sits at the sewing machine and barely makes enough to keep the little ones from want.

No one can fully realize, but he who has been there, so to speak, the terrible shock that Mr. Melville received on the first evening that his wife came staggering home. No one can tell how the pain froze his throbbing gizzard, or how he shuddered in the darkness, and filled the pillow-sham full of sobs when he first knew that she had got it up her nose. Ah, what a picture of woe we see before us. There in the solemn night, robed in? long, plainly constructed garment of pure white, buttoned at the throat in a negligent manner, stands Mr. Melville with his bare, tall brow glistening in the flickering rays of a kerosene lamp, which he holds in his hand, while on the front porch stands the wife who a few years ago promised to defend and protect him. She is a little unsteady on her feet, and her hat is out of plumb. She tries to be facetious, and asks him if that is where Mr. Melville lives. He looks at her coldly and says it is, but unfortunately it is not an inebriate's home and refuge for the budge demolisher. Then he bursts into tears, and his sobs shake the entire ranch. But we draw a curtain over the scene. *****

A year later he may be discovered about two miles southwest of the north pole. Cool, but happy. He is trying to forget his woe. He smells like sperm-oil and looks like a bald-headed sausage, but the woe of drink is forgotten.'

How sad that he has returned and suffered again. What a mistake that he did not remain where, instead of his wife's coolness, he would have had only that of nature to contend against.

MENDING BROKEN NECKS.

|THEY have successfully set a boy's broken neck, in Connecticut, and now it looks as though the only way to kill a man is to take him about 200 miles from any physician, and run him through a Hoe Perfecting Press. If this thing continues, they will some day put some electricity into Pharaoh's daughter and engage her as a ballet-dancer, along with other tender pullets of her own age.

ARE YOU A MORMON?

|WE are indebted to Elder Wilkins, of Logan, Utah, first-assistant-general-tooly-muck-a-hi Z. C. M. I. and Z. W. of T. U. O. M. and B. company, and president of the cache stake of Zion, constituting last in the quorum of seventies, for the late edition of the Mormon Guide and Hand Book of the Endowment House. It is a very pleasant work to read, and makes the whole endowment scheme as clear to the average mind as though he had been through it personally.

Pictures of the endowment chemiloon and Z. C. M. I. bib are given to show the novice exactly how they appear to the unclothed and unregenerate vision. The convert, it seems, first goes to the desk, on entering, and registers. Then she leaves her every-day clothes in the baggage room and gets a check for them. The next thing on the programme is a bath, called the farewell bath, because it is the last one taken by the endowment victim.