CHAPTER IV.

|It is now the proper time to throw in the solitary horseman. The horizontal bars of golden light from the setting sun gleam and glitter from the dome of the court-house and bathe the green plains of Syracuse with mellow splendor. The billowy piles of fleecy bronze in the eastern sky look soft and yielding, like a Sarah Bernhardt. The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea, and all nature seems oppressed with the solemn hush and stillness of the surrounding and engulfing horror.

The solitary horseman is seen coming along the Albany and Syracuse toll road. He jabs the Mexican spurs into the foamy flank of his noble cay use plug, and the lash of the quirt as it moves through the air is singing a merry song. Damon has been, delayed by road agents and wash-outs, and he is a little behind time. Besides, he fooled a little too long and dallied in Albany with his fair gazelle. But he is making up time now and he sails into the jail yard just in time to take his part. He and Pythias fall into each other's arms, borrow a chew of fine-cut from each other and weep to slow music. Dionysius comes before the curtain, bows and says the exercises will be postponed. He orders the band to play something soothing, gives Damon the appointment of superintendent of public instruction, and Pythias the Syracuse post-office, and everything is lovely. Orchestra plays something touchful. Curtain comes down. Keno. _In hoc usufruct nux vomica est_.

A TRYING SITUATION.

|There are a great many things in life which go to atone for the disappointments and sorrows which one meets, but when a young man's rival takes the fair Matilda to see the base-ball game, and sits under an umbrella beside her, and is at the height of enjoyment, and gets the benefit of a "hot ball" in the pit of his stomach, there is a nameless joy settles down in the heart of the lonesome young man, such as the world can neither give nor take away.

CHESTNUT-BURR XIX--A STORY OF SPOTTED TAIL.

_Trifling Incidents Make Men Great.--Chief Big Mouth.--A Quarrel between Big Mouth and Spotted Tail.--The Tragic End._

|The popularity of the above-named chieftain dates from a very trifling little incident, as did that of many other men who are now great.

Spotted Tail had never won much distinction up to that time, except as the owner of an appetite, in the presence of which his tribe stood in dumb and terrible awe.

During the early days of what is now the great throbbing and ambitious West, the tribe camped near Fort Sedgwick, and Big Mouth, a chief of some importance, used to go over to the post regularly for the purpose of filling his brindle hide full of Fort Sedgwick Bloom of Youth.

As a consequence of Big Mouth's fatal yearning for liquid damnation, he generally got impudent, and openly announced on the parade ground that he could lick the entire regular army. This used to offend some of the blood-scarred heroes who had just arrived from West Point, and in the heat of the debate they would warm the venerable warrior about two feet below the back of his neck with the flat of their sabers.

This was a gross insult to Big Mouth, and he went back to the camp, where he found Spotted Tail eating a mule that had died of inflammatory rheumatism. Big Mouth tearfully told the wild epicure of the way he had been treated, and asked for a council of war. Spot picked his teeth with a tent pin, and then told the defeated relic of a mighty race that if he would quit strong drink, he would be subjected to fewer insults.

Big Mouth then got irritated, and told S. Tail that his remarks showed that he was standing in with the aggressor, and was no friend to his people.

Spotted Tail said that Mr. B. Mouth was a liar, by yon high heaven, and before there was time to think it over, he took a butcher knife, about four feet long, from its scabbard and cut Mr. Big Mouth plumb in two just between the umbilicus and the watch pocket.

As the reader who is familiar with anatomy has already surmised, Big Mouth died from the effects of this wound, and Spotted Tail was at once looked upon as the Moses of his tribe. He readily rose to prominence, and by his strict attention to the duties of his office, made for himself a name as a warrior and a pie biter, at which the world turned pale.

This should teach us the importance of taking the tide at its flood, which leads on to fortune, and to lay low when there is a hen on, as Benjamin Franklin has so truly said.

CHESTNUT-BURR XX--THE ROMANCE OF HORSE-SHOEING.

_Recreation with a Bronco--Careful Preparations--The Bronco humps Himself Like a Camel--The Bronco in a Sling--The Bronco Full of Spirit._

|Recently I have taken a little recreation when I felt despondent, by witnessing the difficult and dangerous feat of shoeing a bronco.

Whenever I get low-spirited and feel that a critical public don't appreciate my wonderful genius as a spring poet, I go around to Brown & Boole's blacksmith shop on A street, and watch them shoe a vicious bronco. I always go back to the office cheered and soothed, and better prepared to light the battle of life.

They have a new rig now for this purpose. It consists of two broad sinches, which together cover the thorax and abdomen of the bronco, to the ends of which--the sinches, I mean--are attached ropes, four in number, which each pass over a pulley above the animal, and then are wrapped about a windlass. The bronco is led to the proper position, like a young man who is going to have a photograph taken, the sinches slipped under his body and attached to the ropes.

Then the man at the wheel makes two or three turns in rapid succession.

The bronco is seen to hump himself, like the boss camel of the grand aggregation of living wonders. He grunts a good deal and switches his tail, while the ropes continue to work in the pulleys, and the man at the capstan spits on his hands and rolls up on the wheel. After a while the bronco hangs from the ceiling like a discouraged dish rag, and after trying for two or three hundred times unsuccessfully to kick a hole in the starry firmament, he yields, and hangs at half mast while the blacksmith shoes him.

Yesterday I felt as though I must see something cheerful, and so I went over to watch a bronco getting his shoes on for the round-up. I was fortunate. They led up a quiet, gentlemanly appearing plug with all the weary, despondent air of a disappointed bronco who has had aspirations for being a circus horse, and has "got left." When they put the sinches around him he sighed as though his heart would break, and his great, soulful eyes were wet with tears. One man said it was a shame to put a gentle pony into a sling like that in order to shoe him, and the general feeling seemed to be that a great wrong was being perpetrated.

Gradually the ropes tightened on him and his abdomen began to disappear. He rose till he looked like a dead dog that had been fished out of the river with a grappling iron. Then he gave a grunt that shook the walls of the firmament, and he reached out about five yards till his hind feet felt of a greaser's eye, and with an athletic movement he jumped through the sling and lit on the blacksmith's forge with his head about three feet up the chimney. He proceeded then to do some extra ground and lofty tumbling and kicking. A large anvil was held up for him to kick till he tired himself out, and then the blacksmith put a fire and burglar-proof safe over his head and shod him.

The bronco is full of spirit, and, although docile under ordinary circumstances, he will at times get enthusiastic, and do things which he afterward, in his sober moments, bitterly regrets.

Some broncos have formed the habit of bucking. They do not all buck. Only those that are alive do so. When they are dead they are-more subdued and gentle.

A bronco often becomes so attached to his master that he will lay down his life if necessary. His master's life, I mean.

When a bronco comes up to me and lays his head over my shoulder, and asks me to scratch his chilblain for him, I always excuse myself on the ground that I have a family dependent on mo, and furthermore, that I am a United States Commissioner, and to a certain extent the government hinges on me.

Think what a ghastly hole there would be in the official staff of the republic if I were launched into eternity now, when good men are so scarce.

Some days I worry a good deal over this question. Suppose that some In principled political enemy who wanted to be United States Commissioner or Notary Public in my place should assassinate me!!!

Lots of people never see this. They see how smoothly the machinery of government moves along, and they do not dream of possible harm. They do not know how quick she might slip a cog, or the eccentric get jammed through the indicator, if, some evening when I am at the opera house, or the minstrel show, the assassin should steal up on me, and shoot a large, irregular aperture into my cerebellum.

This may not happen, of course; but I suggest it, so that the public will, as it were, throw its protecting arms about me, and not neglect me while I am alive.

A CHILD'S FAITH.

|During a big thunder shower a while ago little Willie, who slept up stairs alone, got scared and called his mother, who came up and asked him what he was frightened about. Willie frankly admitted that the thunder was a little too much for a little boy who slept alone.

"Well, if you are afraid," said his mother, pushing back the curls from his forehead, "you should pray for courage."

"All right, ma," said Willie, an idea coming into his head; "suppose you stay up here and pray while I go down stairs and sleep with paw."

HOW TO PRESERVE TEETH.

|I find," said an old man to a _Boomerang_ reporter, yesterday, "that there is absolutely no limit to the durability of the teeth, if they are properly taken care of. I never drink hot drinks, always brush my teeth morning and evening, avoid all acids whatever, and although I am sixty-five years old, my teeth are as good as ever they were."

"And that is all you do to preserve your teeth, is it?"

"Yes, sir; that's all--barring, perhaps, the fact that I put them in a glass of soft water nights."

CHESTNUT-BURR XXI--EXPERIENCE ON THE FEVERISH HORNET.

_Every Profession Has Its Style--Not much Difference in Folks--Timber line and Katooter--Katooter Was a Very Smart Man._

|Yes, that's so," said Woodtick Williams thoughtfully, as he looked out across the divide and beyond the foothills, toward the top of the range where the eternal snow was glittering in the summer sun.

"You are eminently correct. The gentleman from Buckskin has stated the exact opinion of the subscriber, sure as death and semi-annual assessments.

"Every profession has its style of lead and its peculiar dip toward the horizon. From the towering congressman, down to the neglected advance agent of the everlasting gospel, every profession, I allow, has its peculiar lingo. Every pork-and-beans pilgrim from the States that's been in my camp for twenty-seven years has said that the miner slings more unnecessary professional racket than anybody else; but that ain't so. Take folks as they assay, from blossom rock to lower level, there ain't much difference.

"Nine years ago, I and Timberline Monroe and Katooter Lemons, from Zion, struck the Feverish Hornet up on Slippery Ellum. First we knew the prospecting season had closed up on us and, as the lay-out for surface had pinched out, we decided to sink on the Hornet, just for luck.

"So Timberline, Katooter and me went over to Huckleberry Oleson's store at at the lower camp and soaked our physiognomy for chuck, and valley-tan, and a blastin' outfit for the job.

"Down five foot she showed 150 colors to a hunk of rock no bigger'n a plug of tobacker, with wall rocks well defined both sides and foot wall slick as a confidence game in 'Frisco.

"The quartz, with a light coat of gouge, looked as if she'd been jammed through the formation like a Sabbath-school scholar's elbow through a custard pie, and it had crushed the prehistoric stuffin' and pre-adamite sawdust out of the geological crust in good shape.

"'Katooter,' says I, 'if she shows up this way all the way down, I be teetotally dodbuttered if I don't think we've cornered the sugar at last. We'll run her down to ten foot and see how she looks to the naked eye.'

"Ten foot down she'd widen to three foot between walls, with solid gray quartz as pretty as a bank book. Then we made a mill run of five pounds in a half-gallon mortar and cleared up a dollar's worth of dust on the blade of a long-handled shovel.

"The prospectus of the Feverish Hornet was very cheering indeed.

"I sat down on a candle-box and sang something. I always twitter a few notes when I feel tickled about anything.

"Katooter listened to my singing a little while, and then he went down the gulch murmuring, something about my music and intimating that prosperity always had its little drawbacks after all.

"He slid down to the Frescoed Hell and jammed his old freckled hide so full of horse liniment of the vintage of '49 that he got entirely off the lead, and drifted so far into poverty rock that he didn't know Timberline nor me from a stomach pump.

"That's generally the way with men that turn up their noses at vocal music.

"Well, he got no better so rapidly that next day he was occupying a front seat at the biggest delirium triangle matinee you ever heard of, and was the sole proprietor of the biggest aggregation of seal-brown tarantulas and variegated caterpillars and imported centipedes that ever exhibited in Columbia's fair domain.

"Every little while he'd nail some diabolical insect crawling up his sleeve or gently walking through his hair, and then he'd yell like a maniac and pray and swear like a hired man.

"The atmosphere seemed to be level-full of bumblebees as big as a cook-stove, and every time they'd cuddle up to him of sink on him with their sultry little gimlets, Katooter would jump up and whoop like a Piute medicine man trying to assuage a wide waste of turbulent cucumber.

"At these times Katooter would lay aside his wardrobe, and, throwing me into the fire-place and Timberline under the bed, he would wander forth into the starlight, with the thermometer down to 37 degrees, and wrapped in nothing but his surging thoughts.

"By the time Timberline and me would get up and swab the cobwebs and cinders out of our eyes, Katooter would be half way up the gulch and lighting out like a freckled Greek slave hunting for a clothing store.

"First along we used to run after him and try to tire him out and corral him, but he was most too skipful, and apparently so all-fired anxious to put all the intervening distance he could between himself and the fuzzy tarantulas and fall style of centipede, that he made some pretty tall time, considering the poor trail and the light mountain air.

"Then another thing; when we got to him he was so pesky mean to hang on to.

"You've probably tried before now, when you was small, to catch the boy who tied your shirt to the top limb of a dead tree, and you have thrown all your energy into the effort, but you decided after awhile to wait till he got his clothes on before you punished him.

"That's the way it was with Katooter. He was the smartest man I ever tried to gather into the fold. We'd think we had him, and all at once he'd glide between our legs like a yaller dog and laugh a wild kind of laugh that would run the thermometer down 13 degrees, and away he'd glimmer up the trail like a red-headed right of way.

"So I got mad at last, and used to chase him with a lariat and Yellow Fever.

"Yellow Fever was a sorrel mule that belonged to the firm. We called him Yellow Fever because he was so fatal.

"Well, when Yellow Fever and me got after Katooter with the lariat, we most always gathered him in.--[Bless my soul, how I'm stringing this yarn out.]

"Well, to make a long story short, Katooter rallied after a while, and during the spell his chilblains was convalescing, and some more new skin growing on his system where he had barked it off running through the sage-brush, and falling into old deserted prospect holes. I had an offer of $50,000 for my third in the Feverish Hornet, and sold.

"Then I went down to Truckee and bought a little house of an old railroad man down there, and grubstaked myself for the winter, and allowed I'd lay off till the snow left the range in the spring.

"One night, about half after 12, I judge, I heard somebody step along to the window of my boudoir. Hearing it at that time of night, I reckoned that something crooked was going on, so I slid out of bed and got my Great Blood Searcher and Liver Purifier, with the new style of center fire and cartridge ejector, and slid up to the window, calculating to shove a tonic into whoever it might be that was picnicking around my claim.

"I looked out so as to get a good idea of where I wanted to sink on him, and then I thought before I mangled him I'd ask him if he had any choice about which part of his vitals he wanted to preserve, so I sang out to him:

"Look out below there, pard, for I'm going to call the meeting to order in a minute! Just throw up your hands, if you please, and make the grand hailing sign of distress, or I'll have to mutilate you! Just show me about where you'd have the fatal wound, and be spry about it, too, because I've got my brief costume on, and the evening air is chill!"

"He didn't understand me, apparently, for a gurgling laugh welled up from below, and the party sings back:

"Hullo, Fatty, is that you? Just lookin' to see if you'd fired up yet. You know I was to come round and flag you if second seven was out Well, I've been down to the old man's to see what's on the board. Three is two hours late and four is on time. There's two sevens out and two sections of nine. Skinney'll take out first seven and Shorty'll pull her with 102. It's you and me for second seven, with Limber Jim on front end and French to hold down the caboose. First fire is wrong side up in a washout this side of Ogallalla, and old Whatshisname that runs 258 got his crown sheet caved in and telescoped his headlight into the middle of the New Jerusalem. You know the little Swede that used to run extra for Old Hotbox on the emigrant awhile? Well, he was firing on 258 and he's under three flats and a coal-oil tank, with a brake beam across his coupler, and his system more or less relaxed. He's gone to the sweet subsequently, too. Rest of the boys are more or less demoralized, and side-tracked for repairs. Now you don't want to monkey around much, for if you don't loom up like six bits and go out on the tick, the old man'll give you a time cheek and the oriental grand bounce. You hear the mellow trill of my bazoo?"

"Then I slowly uncorked the Great Blood Purifier, and moving to the footlights where the silvery moonbeams could touch up my dazzling outlines, I said: 'Partner, I am pleased and gratified to have met you. I don't know the first ding busted thing you have said to me, but that is my misfortune. I am a plain miner, and my home is in the digestive apparatus of the earth, but for professional melody of the chin, you certainly take the cake. You also take the cake basket and what cold pie there is in on the dump. My name is Wood-tick Williams. I discovered the Feverish Hornet up on Slippery Elm. I am proud, you know. Keep right on getting more and more familiar with your profession, and by and by, when nobody can understand you, you will be promoted and respected, and you will at last be a sleeping-car conductor, and revel in the biggest mental calm, and wide shoreless sea of intellectual stagnation that the world ever saw. You will----

"But he was gone.

"Then I took a pillow sham and wiped some pulverized crackers off the soles of my feet, and went to bed, enveloped in a large gob of gloom."

THE PICNIC PLANT.

|The picnic plant will soon lift its little head to the sunshine, and the picnic manager will go out and survey the country, to find where the most God-forsaken places are, and then he will get up an excursion to some of these picturesque mud-holes and sand-piles; and the man who swore last year that he would never go to another picnic, will pack up some mustard, and bay rum, and pickles, and glycerine, and a lap-robe, and some camphor, and a spy-glass, and some court-plaster; and he will heave a sigh and go out to the glens and rural retreats, and fill his skin full of Tolu, Rock and Rye, and hatred toward all mankind and womankind; and he will skin his hands, and try to rub the downy fluff and bloom from a cactus by sitting down on it.

CHESTNUT-BURR XXII--ANCIENT BRIC-A-BRAC

_A Mound in Medicine Bow Range--I Started to Dig Into the Vast Sarcophagus--A Glad Shout from, the Scene of Operations--A Large Queen Anne Tear Jug._

|During my rambles through the Medicine Bow range of the Rocky mountains recently, I was shown by an old frontiersman a mound which, although worn down somewhat and torn to pieces by the buffalo, the antelope and the coyote, still bore the appearance of having been at one time very large and high.

This, I was told, had, no doubt, been the burial place of some ancient tribe or race of men, the cemetery, perhaps, of a nation now unknown.

Here in the heart of a new world, where men who had known the region for fifteen or twenty years, are now called "old timers," where "new discoveries" had been made within my own recollection, we found the sepulcher of a nation that was old when the Pilgrims landed on the shores of Columbia.

I am something of an antiquarian, with all my numerous charms, and I resolved to excavate at this spot and learn the hidden secrets of those people who lived when our earth was young.

I started to dig into the vast sarcophagus. The ground was very hard. The more I worked the more I felt that I was desecrating the burial place of a mighty race of men, now powerless to defend themselves against the vandal hands that sought to mar their eternal slumber.

I resolved to continue my researches according to the vicarious plan. I secured the services of a hardened, soulless hireling, who did not wot of the solemn surroundings and who could dig faster than I could. He proceeded with the excavation business, while I sought a shady dell where I could weep alone.

It was a solemn thought, indeed. I murmured softly to myself--=

````The knights are dust,

````Their swords are rust;

````Their souls are with

````The saints, we trust.=

Just then a wood-tick ran up one of my alabaster limbs about nine feet, made a location and began to do some work on it under the United States mining laws.

I removed him by force and submitted him to the dry crushing process between a piece of micaceous slate and a fragment of deoderized, copper-stained manganese.

But we were speaking of the Aztecs, not the wood-ticks.

Nothing on earth is old save by comparison. The air we breathe, and which we are pleased to call fresh air, is only so comparatively. It is the same old air. As a recent air it is not so fresh as "Silver Threads Among the Gold."

It has been in one form and another through the ever-shifting ages all along the steady march of tireless time, but it is the same old union of various gaseous elements floating through space, only remodeled for the spring trade.

All we see or hear or feel, is old. Truth itself is old. Old and falling into disuse, too. Outside of what I am using in my business, perhaps not over two or three bales are now on the market.

Here in the primeval solitude, undisturbed by the foot of man, I had found the crumbling remnants of those who once walked the earth in their might and vaunted their strength among the powers of their world.

No doubt they had experienced the first wild thrill of all-powerful love, and thought that it was a new thing. They had known, with mingled pain and pleasure, when they struggled feebly against the omnipotent sway of consuming passion, that they were mashed, and they flattered themselves that they were the first in all the illimitable range of relentless years who had been fortunate enough to get hold of the genuine thing. All others had been base imitations.

Here, perhaps, on this very spot, the Aztec youth with a bright-eyed maiden on his arm had pledged lifelong fidelity to her shrine, and in the midnight silence had stolen away from her with a pang of vigorous regret, followed by the sobs of his soul's idol and the demoralizing, leaden rain of buckshot, with the compliments and best wishes of the old man.

While I was meditating upon these things, a glad shout from the scene of operations attracted my attention. I rose and went to the scene of excavation and found, to my unspeakable astonishment and pleasure, that the man had unearthed a large Queen Anne tear jug, with Etruscan work upon the exterior. It was simply one of the old-fashioned single-barreled tear jugs, made for a one eyed man to cry into. The vessel was about eighteen inches in height by five or six inches in diameter.

The graceful, yet perhaps severe pottery of the Aztecs, convinces me that they were fully abreast of the present century in their knowledge of the arts and sciences.

Space will not admit of an extended description of this ancient tear cooler, but I am still continuing the antiquarian researches,--vicariously, of course--and will give this subject more attention during the summer.

JOINT POWDER.

|It don't do to fool with joint powder. It's powerful stuff. I had a $10,000 mine over in the Queen of Shelby district in '51 called the Goshallhemlock claim. I was offered $10,000 for it, with $5,000 in sagebrush placer stock besides, if she opened up as well ten foot further down.

We put in a blast of joint powder, and when we went to make an examination, we couldn't find the Goshallhemlock with an assessor and a search warrant. The hole was there, but there wasn't quartz enough to throw at a yaller dog.

My idea is to sell a mine just before you put in the joint powder, and then if the buyer wants to blow the property into the middle of next Christmas let him do it.

CHESTNUT-BURR XIII--THE TWO-HEADED GIRL.

_The Power of a Two-headed Girl to Cheer the Sad--She Is not Beautiful, but her Color Is Distinct--As a Show She Draws Better than a Scientific Lecture._

|The cultivated two-headed girl has visited the West. It is very rare that a town the size of Laramie experiences the rare treat of witnessing anything so enjoyable. In addition to the mental feast which such a thing affords, one goes away feeling better--feeling that life has more in it to live for, and is not after all such a vale of tears as he had at times believed it.

Through the trials and disappointments of this earthly pilgrimage, the soul is at times cast down and discouraged. Man struggles against ill-fortune and unlooked-for woes, year after year, until he becomes misanthropical and soured, but when a two-headed girl comes along and he sees her it cheers him up. She speaks to his better nature in two different languages at one and the same time, and at one price.

When I went to the show I felt gloomy and apprehensive. The eighteenth ballot had been taken and the bulletins seemed to have a tiresome sameness. The future of the republic was not encouraging. I felt as though, if I could get first cost for the blasted thing, I would sell it.

I had also been breaking in a pair of new boots that day, and spectators had been betting wildly on the boots, while I had no backers at three o'clock in the afternoon, and had nearly decided to withdraw on the last ballot. I went to the entertainment feeling as though I should criticise it severely.

The two-headed girl is not beautiful. Neither one of her, in fact, is handsome. There is quite a similarity between the two, probably because they have been in each other's society a great deal and have adopted the same ways.

She is an Ethiopian by descent and natural choice being about the same complexion as Frank Miller's oil blacking, price ten cents.

She was at one time a poor slave, but by her winning ways and genuine integrity and genius, she has won her way to the hearts of the American people. She has thoroughly demonstrated the fact that two heads are better than one.

A good sized audience welcomed this popular favorites. When she came forward to the foot-lights and made her two-ply bow she was greeted by round after round of applause from the _elite_ of the city.

I felt pleased and gratified. The fact that a recent course of scientific lectures here was attended by from fifteen to thirty people, and the present brilliant success of the two-headed girl proved to me, beyond a doubt, that we live in an age of thought and philosophical progress.

Science may be all right in its place, but does it make the world better? Does it make a permanent improvement on the minds and thoughts of the listener? Do we go away from such a lecture feeling that we have made a grand stride toward a glad emancipation from the mental thraldom of ignorance and superstition? Do people want to be assailed, year after year, with a nebular theory, and the Professor Huxley theory of natural selections and things of that nature?

No! 1,000 time no!

They need to be led on quietly by an appeal to their better natures. They need to witness a first-class bureau of monstrosities, such as men with heads as big as a band wagon, women with two heads, Cardiff giants, men with limbs bristling out all over them like the velvety bloom on a prickly pear.

When I get a little leisure, and can attend to it, I am going to organize a grand constellation of living wonders of this kind, and make thirteen or fourteen hundred farewell tours with it, not so much to make money, but to meet a long-felt want of the American people, for something which will give a higher mental tone to the tastes of those who never lag in their tireless march toward perfection.

OUR COMPLIMENTS.

|We have nothing more to say of the editor of the Sweetwater _Gazette_. Aside from the fact that he is a squint-eyed, consumptive liar, with a breath like a buzzard and a record like a convict, we don't know anything against him. He means well enough, and if he can evade the penitentiary and the vigilance committee for a few more years, there is a chance for him to end his life in a natural way. If he don't tell the truth a little more plentifully, however, the Green River people will rise as one man and churn him up till there won't be anything left of him but a pair of suspenders and a wart.

CHESTNUT-BURR XIV--A PATHETIC EPISODE IN NORTHERN WISCONSIN.

_A Trip to Northern Wisconsin--How Foreign Lumber Is manufactured--Iron Dogs--A Sad Accident--? The Funeral Procession--A Solemn Moral._

|I have just returned from a trip up the North Wisconsin railway, where I went to catch a string of codfish, and anything else that might be contagious. The trip was a pleasant one, and productive of great good in many ways. I am hardening myself to railway traveling, like Timberline Jones' man, so that I can stand the return journey to Laramie in July.

Northern Wisconsin is the place where the "foreign lumber" comes from which we use in Laramie in the erection of our palatial residences. I visited the mill last week that furnished the lumber used in the Oasis hotel at Greeley. They yank a big wet log into that mill and turn it into cash as quick as a railroad man can draw his salary out of the pay car. The log is held on a carriage by means of iron dogs while it is being worked into lumber. These iron dogs are not like those we see on the front steps of a brown-stone house occasionally. They are another breed of dogs.

The managing editor of the mill lays out the log in his mind, and works it into dimension stuff, shingle bolts, slabs, edgings, two by fours, two by eights, two by sixes, etc., so as to use the goods to the best advantage, just as a woman takes a dress pattern and cuts it so she won't have to piece the front breadths, and will still have enough left to make a polonaise for the last-summer gown.

I stood there for a long time watching the various saws and listening to their monotonous growl, and wishing that I had been born a successful timber thief instead of a poor boy without a rag to my back.

At one of these mills, not long ago, a man backed up to get away from the carriage, and thoughtlessly backed against a large saw that was revolving at the rate of about 200 times a minute. The saw took a large chew of tobacco from the plug he had in his pistol pocket, and then began on him.

But there's no use going into details. Such things are not cheerful. They gathered him up out of the sawdust and put him in a nail keg and carried him away, but he did not speak again. Life was quite extinct. Whether it was the nervous shock that killed him, or the concussion of the cold saw against his liver that killed him, no one ever knew.

The mill shut down a couple of hours so that the head sawyer could file his saw, and then work was resumed once more.

We should learn from this never to lean on the buzz saw when it moveth itself aright.

THE SECRET OF HEALTH.

|Health journals are now asserting, that to maintain a sound constitution you should lie only on the right side. The health journals may mean well enough; but what are you going to do if you are editing a Democratic paper?

CHESTNUT-BURR XXV--BILL NYE ESSAYS A NOVELETTE.

_Harry Bevans--Fanny Buttonhook--True Love Takes its Usual Course--A Letter to Fanny--A Sweet, Short, Summer--A Happy Marriage--Little Birdie._

|I never wrote a novel, because I always thought it required more of a mashed raspberry imagination than I could muster, but I was the business manager, once, for a year and a half, of a little two-bit novelette that has never been published.

I now propose to publish it, because I cannot keep it to myself any longer.

Allow me, therefore, to reminisce.

Harry Bevans was an old schoolmate of mine in the days of ([x-y]/2)3, and although Bevans was not his sure-enough name, it will answer for the purposes herein set forth. At the time of which I now speak he was more bashful than a book agent, and was trying to promote a cream-colored mustache and buff "Done-gals" on the side.

Suffice it to say that he was madly in love with Fanny Buttonhook, and too bashful to say so by telephone.

Her name wasn't Buttonhook, but I will admit it for the sake of argument. Harry lived over at Kalamazoo, we will say, and Fanny at Oshkosh. These were not the exact names of the towns, but I desire to bewilder the public, in order to avoid any harrassing disclosures in the future. It is always well enough, I find, to deal gently with those who are alive and moderately muscular.

Young Bevans was not specially afraid of old man Buttonhook, or his wife. He didn't dread the enraged parent worth a cent. He wasn't afraid of anybody under the cerulean dome, in fact, except Miss Buttonhook, but when she sailed down the main street, Harry lowered his colors and dodged into the first place he found open, whether it was a millinery store or a livery stable.

Once, in an unguarded moment, he passed so near her that the gentle south wind caught up the cherry ribbon that Miss Buttonhook wore at her throat, and slapped Mr. Bevans across the cheek with it before he knew what ailed him. There was a little vision of straw hat, brown hair, and pink-and-white cuticle, as it were, a delicate odor of violets, the "swish" of a summer silk, and my friend, Mr. Bevans, put his hand to his head, like a man who has a sun-stroke, and fell into a drug store and a state of wild mash, ruin and hopeless chaos.

His bashfulness was not seated nor chronic. It was the varioloid, and didn't hurt him only when Miss Buttonhook was present, or in sight. He was polite and chatty with other girls, and even dared to be blithe and gay sometimes, too, but when Frances loomed up in the distance, he would climb a rail fence nine feet high to evade her.

He told me once that he wished I would erect the frame-work of a letter to Fanny, in which he desired to ask that he might open up a correspondence with her.

He would copy and mail it, he said, and he was sure that I. being a disinterested party, would be perfectly calm.

I wrote a letter for him of which I was moderately proud. It would melt the point on a lightning rod, it seemed to me, for it was just as full of gentleness and poetic soothe as it could be, and Tupper. Webster's Dictionary and my scrap book had to give down first rate. Still it was manly and square-toed. It was another man's confession, and I made it bulge out with frankness and candor.

As luck would have it, I went over to Oshkosh about the time Harry's prize epistle reached that metropolis, and having been a confidant of Miss B.'s from early childhood. I had the pleasure of reading Bev's letter, and advising the young lady about the correspondence.

Finally a bright thought struck her. She went over to an easy chair, and sat down on her foot, coolly proposing that I should outline a letter replying to Harry's, in a reserved and rather frigid manner, yet bidding him dare to hope that if his orthography and punctuation continued correct, he might write occasionally, though it must be considered entirely _sub rosa_ and abnormally _entre-nous_ on account of "Pa."

By the way. "Pa" was a druggist, and one of the salts of the earth--Epsom salts of course.

I agreed to write the letter, swore never to reveal the secret workings of the order, the grips, explanations, passwords and signals, and then wrote her a nice, demure, startled-fawn letter, as brief as the collar to a party dress, and as solemn as the Declaration of Independence.

Then I said good-by, and returned to my own home, which was neither in Kalamazoo nor Oshkosh. There I received a flat letter from William Henry Bevans, inclosing one from Fanny, and asking for suggestions as to a reply. Her letter was in Miss Buttonhook's best vein. I remember having written it myself.

Well, to cut a long story short, every other week I wrote a letter for Fanny, and on intervening weeks I wrote one for the lover at Kalamazoo. By keeping copies of all letters written, I had a record showing where I was, and avoided saying the same pleasant things twice.

Thus the short, sweet summer scooted past. The weeks were filled with gladness, and their memory even now comes back to me, like a wood-violet-scented vision. A wood-violet-scented vision comes high, but it is necessary in this place.

Toward winter the correspondence grew a little tedious, owing to the fact that I had a large and tropical boil on the back of my neck, which refused to declare its intentions or come to a focus, for three weeks. In looking over the letters of both lovers yesterday, I could tell by the tone of each just where this boil began to grow up, as it were, between two fond hearts.

This feeling grew till the middle of December, when there was a red-hot quarrel. It was exciting and spirited, and after I had alternately flattered myself first from Kalamazoo and then from Oshkosh, it was a genuine luxury to have a row with myself through the medium of the United States mails.

Then I made up and got reconciled. I thought it would be best to secure harmony before the holidays, so that Harry could go over to Oshkosh and spend Christmas. I therefore wrote a letter for Harry in which he said he had, no doubt, been hasty, and he was sorry. It should not occur again. The days had been like weary ages since their quarrel, he said--vicariously, of course--and the light had been shut out of his erstwhile joyous life. Death would be a luxury unless she forgave him, and Hades would be one long, sweet picnic and lawn festival unless she blessed him with her smile.

You can judge how an old newspaper reporter, with a scarlet imagination, would naturally dash the color into another man's picture of humility and woe.

She replied--by proxy--that he was not to blame. It was her waspish temper and cruel thoughtlessness. She wished he would come over and take dinner with them on Christmas day and she would tell him how sorry she was. When the man admits that he's a brute and the woman says she's sorry, it behooves the eagle eye of the casual spectator to look up into the blue sky for a quarter of an hour, till the reconciliation has had a chance and the brute has been given time to wipe a damp sob from his coat-collar.

I was invited to the Christmas dinner. As a successful reversible amanuensis I thought I deserved it. I was proud and happy. I had passed through a lover's quarrel and sailed in with white-winged peace on time, and now I reckoned that the second joint, with an irregular fragment of cranberry jelly, and some of the dressing, and a little of the white meat please, was nothing more than right.

Mr. Bevans forgot to be bashful twice during the day, and even smiled once also. He began to get acquainted with Fanny after dinner, and praised her beautiful letters. She blushed clear up under her "wave," and returned the compliment.

That was natural. When he praised her letters I did not wonder, and when she praised his I admitted that she was eminently correct. I never witnessed better taste on the part of two young and trusting hearts.

After Christmas I thought they would both feel like buying a manual and doing their own writing, but they did not dare to do so evidently. They seemed to be afraid the change would be detected, so I piloted them into the middle of the succeeding fall, and then introduced the crisis into both their lives.

It was a success.

I felt about as well as though I were to be cut down myself and married off in the very prime of life. Fanny wore the usual clothing adopted by young ladies who are about to be sacrificed to a great horrid man. I cannot give the exact description of her trousseau, but she looked like a hazel-eyed angel, with a freckle on the bridge of her nose. The groom looked a little scared, and moved his gloved hands as though they weighed twenty-one pounds apiece.

However, it's all over now. I was up there recently to see them. They are quite happy. Not too happy, but just happy enough. They call their oldest son Birdie. I wanted them to call him William, but they were headstrong and named him Birdie. That wounded my pride, and so I called him Earlie Birdie.

CHESTNUT-BURR XXVI--THE DAUGHTER OF BOB TAIL FLUSH.

_The Dusky Bride of Old Fly Up-the-Creek is a Lover of the Beautiful--The Indian Maiden in-Her Wild Simplicity--How She Appears to the Man of Sentiment--No Ruthless Hand Shall Tear the Cloak from the True Indian Maiden._

|One of the attractions of life at the Cheyenne Indian agency, is the reserved seat ticket to the regular slaughter-house matinee. The agency butchers kill at the rate of ten bullocks per hour while at work, and so great was the rush to the slaughter-pens for the internal economy of the slaughtered animals, that Major Love found it necessary to erect a box office and gate, where none but those holding tickets could enter and provide themselves with these delicacies.

This is not a sensation, it is the plain truth, and we desire to call the attention of those who love and admire the Indian at a distance of 2,000 miles, and to the æsthetic love for the beautiful which prompts the crooked-fanged and dusky bride of old Fly-up-the-Creek to rob the soap-grease man and the glue factory, that she may make a Cheyenne holiday. As a matter of fact, common decency will not permit us to enter into a discussion of this matter. Firstly, it would not be fit for the high order of readers who peruse these pages, and secondly, the Indian maiden at the present moment stands on a lofty crag of the Rocky mountains, beautiful in her wild simplicity, wearing the fringed garments of her tribe. To the sentimentalist she appears outlined against the glorious sky of the new West, wearing a coronet of eagle's feathers, and a health-corset trimmed with fantastic bead-work and wonderful and impossible designs in savage art.

Shall we then rush in and with ruthless hand shatter this beautiful picture? Shall we portray her as she appears on her return from the great slaughter-house benefit and moral aggregation of digestive mementos? Shall we draw a picture of her clothed in a horse-blanket, with a necklace of the false teeth of the paleface, and her coarse, unkempt hair hanging over her smoky features and clinging to her warty, bony neck? No, no. Far be it from us to destroy the lovely vision of copper-colored grace and smoke-tanned beauty, which the freckled student of the effete East has erected in the rose-hued chambers of fancy. Let her dwell there as the plump-limbed princess of a brave people. Let her adorn the hat-rack of his imagination--proud, beautiful, grand, gloomy and peculiar--while as a matter of fact, she is at that moment leaving the vestibule of the slaughter-house, conveying in the soiled laprobe--which is her sole adornment--the mangled lungs of a Texas steer.

No man shall ever say that we have busted the beau-ful Cigar Sign Vision that he has erected in his memory. Let the graceful Indian queen that has lived on in his heart ever since he studied history and saw the graphic picture of the landing of Columbus, in which Columbus is just unsheathing his bread knife, and the stage Indians are fleeing to the tall brush; let her, we say, still live on. The ruthless hand that writes nothing but everlasting truth, and the stub pencil that yanks the cloak of the false and artificial from cold and perhaps unpalatable fact, will spare this little imaginary Indian maiden with a back-comb and gold garters. Let her withstand the onward march of centuries, while the true Indian maiden eats the fricasseed locust of the plains, and wears the cavalry pants of progress. We may be rough and thoughtless many times, but we cannot come forward and ruthlessly shatter the red goddess at whose shrine the far-away student of Blackhawk, and other fourth-reader warriors, worship.

As we said, we decline to pull the cloak from the true Indian maiden of to-day and show her as she is. That cloak may be all she has on, and no gentleman will be rude even to the daughter of Old Bob-Tail-Flush, the Cheyenne brave.

LOAFING AROUND HOME.

|While other young men put on their seal-brown overalls and wrench the laurel wreath and other vegetables from cruel fate, the youth who dangles near the old nest, and eats the hard-earned groceries of his father, shivers on the brink of life's great current and sheds the scalding tear.

THE PLUMAGE OF THE OSTRICH.

|The ostrich is chiefly valuable for the plumage which he wears, and which, when introduced into the world of commerce, makes the husband almost wish that he were dead.

SOME EARNEST THOUGHTS.

|Young man, what are you living for? Have you an object dear to you as life, and without the attainment of which you feel that your life will have been a wide, shoreless waste of shadow, peopled by the specters of dead ambitions? Is it your consuming ambition to paddle quietly but firmly up the stream of time with manly strokes, against the current of public opinion, or to linger along the seductive banks, going in swimming, or, careless of the future, gathering shells and tadpoles along the shore?

Have you a distinct idea of a certain position in life which you wish to attain? Have you decided whether you will be a great man, and die in the poor-house, and have a nice comfortable monument after you are dead, for your destitute family to look at, or will you content yourself to plug along through life as a bank president?

These, young men, are questions of moment. They are questions of two moments. They come home to our hearts to-day with terrible earnestness.

You can take your choice in the great battle of life, whether you will bristle up and win a deathless name, and owe almost everybody, or be satisfied with scads and mediocrity.

Why do you linger and fritter away the heyday of life, when you might skirmish around and win some laurels? Many of those who now stand at the head of the nation as statesmen and logicians, were once unknown, unhonored and unsung. Now they saw the air in the halls of Congress, and their names are plastered on the temple of fame.

They were not born great. Some of them only weighed six pounds to start with. But they have rustled. They have peeled their coats and made rome howl.

You can do the same. You can win some laurels, too, if you will brace up and secure them when they are ripe.

Daniel Webster and President Garfield and Dr. Tanner and George Eliot were all, at one time, poor boys. They had to start at the foot of the ladder and toil upward.

They struggled against poverty and public opinion bravely, till they won a name in the annals of history, and secured to their loved ones palatial homes with lightning rods and mortgages on them.

So may you, if you will make the effort. All these things are within your reach. Live temperately on $9 per month. That's the way we got our start. Burn the midnight oil if necessary. Get some true, noble-minded young lady of your acquaintance to assist you. Tell her of your troubles and she will tell you what to do. She will gladly advise you.

Then you can marry her, and she will advise you some more. After that she will lay aside her work any time to advise you. You needn't be out of advice at all unless you want to. She, too, will tell you when you have made a mistake. She will come to you frankly and acknowledge that you have make a jackass of yourself.

CHESTNUT-BURR XXVII--OUR GREAT NATIONAL MOTTO.

_Billy Root Has an Enquiring Mind--Mr. Root Delighted with His Son's Ambition--A new Translation of Our National Motto._

|When Billy Root was a little boy he was of a philosophical and investigating turn of mind, and wanted to know almost everything. He also desired to know it immediately. He could not wait for time to develop his intellect, but he crowded things and wore out the patience of his father, a learned savant, who was president of a livery stable in Chicago.

One day Billy ran across the grand hailing sign, which is generally represented as a tape-worm in the beak of the American eagle, on which is inscribed "E Pluribus Unum." Billy, of course, asked his father what "E Pluribus Unum" meant. He wanted to gather in all the knowledge he could, so that when he came out West he could associate with some of our best men.

"I admire your strong appetite for knowledge, Billy," said Mr. Root; "you have a morbid craving for cold hunks of ancient history and cyclopedia that does my soul good; I am glad, too, that you write to your father to get accurate data for your collection. That is right. Your father will always lay aside his work at any time and gorge your young mind with knowledge that will be as useful to you as a farrow cow. 'E Pluribus Unum' is an old Greek inscription that has been handed down from generation to generation, preserved in brine, and signifies that 'the tail goes with the hide.'"

A GRAVE QUESTION.

|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.

THOUGHTS.

|It seems that quince seeds are now largely used by the girls in convincing their bangs to stay bung. That is, the quince seed is manufactured into a mucilage that holds a little flat curl in place a week. In consequence of this, quince seeds have increased in price and decreased in quantity till the girls pay seven prices for them or go without.

If they would adopt our style of bang, much trouble and expense would be avoided. We bang our hair with a damp towel, and it don't bother us again for two weeks. Being the proprietor, in the first place, of a style of hair of the delicate color peculiar to a streak of moonlight, it didn't at any time make much difference whether we did it up in tin foil every night or not, and now that cares like a wild deluge have come upon us thick and fast, we have enlarged our intellectual skating rink and we find, with unalloyed pleasure, that the time we once devoted to parting our pale, consumptive tresses can be entirely devoted to excessive mental effort, and pleasant memories of a well spent life.

CHESTNUT-BURR XVIII--BILL NYE AT A TOURNAMENT.

_A Tournament with Gloves--Dumb-bells--Horizontal Bars--Analysis of the Boxing-glove--A Clerical Error--My Young Brother's Beauty Preserved._

I have just returned from a little two-handed tournament with the gloves. I have filled my nose with cotton waste so that I shall not soak this sketch in gore as I write.

I needed a little healthful exercise and was looking for something that would be full of vigorous enthusiasm, and at the same time promote the healthful flow of blood to the muscles. This was rather difficult. I tried most everything, but failed. Being a sociable being (joke) I wanted other people to help me exercise or go along with me when I exercised. Some men can go away to a desert isle and have fun with dumb-bells and a horizontal bar, but to me it would seem dull and commonplace after a while, and I would yearn for more humanity.

Two of us finally concluded to play billiards; but we were only amateurs and the owner intimated that he would want the table for Fourth of July, so we broke off in the middle of the first game and I paid for it.

Then a younger brother said he had a set of boxing-gloves in his room, and although I was the taller and had longer arms, he would hold up as long as he could, and I might hammer him until I gained strength and finally got well.

I accepted this offer because I had often regretted that I had not made myself familiar with this art, and also because I knew it would create a thrill of interest and fire me with ambition, and that's what a holloweyed invalid needs to put him on the road to recovery.

The boxing-glove is a large fat mitten, with an abnormal thumb and a string at the wrist by which you tie it on, so that when you feed it to your adversary he cannot swallow it and choke himself. I had never seen any boxing-gloves before, but my brother said they were soft and wouldn't hurt anybody. So we took off some of our raiment and put them on. Then we shook hands. I can remember distinctly yet that we shook hands. That was to show that we were friendly and would not slay each other.

My brother is a great deal younger than I am and so I warned him not to get excited and come for me with anything that would look like wild and ungovernable fury, because I might, in the heat of debate, pile his jaw upon his forehead and fill his ear full of sore thumb. He said that was all right and he would try to be cool and collected.

Then we put our right toes together and I told him to be on his guard. At that moment I dealt him a terrific blow aimed at his nose, but through a clerical error of mine it went over his shoulder and spent itself in the wall of the room, shattering a small holly-wood bracket, for which I paid him $3.75 afterward. I did not wish to buy the bracket because I had two at home, but he was arbitrary about it and I bought it.

We then took another athletic posture, and in two seconds the air was full of poulticed thumb and buckskin mitten. I soon detected a chance to put one in where my brother could smell of it, but I never knew just where it struck, for at that moment I ran up against something with the pit of my stomach that made me throw up the sponge, along with some other groceries, the names of which I cannot now recall.

My brother then proposed that we take off the gloves, but I thought I had not sufficiently punished him, and that another round would complete the conquest, which was then almost within my grasp. I took a bismuth powder and squared myself, but in warding off a left-hander, I forgot about my adversary's right, and ran my nose into the middle of his boxing-glove. Fearing that I had injured him, I retreated rapidly on my elbows and shoulder-blades to the corner of the room, thus giving him ample time to recover. By this means my younger brother's features were saved, and are to-day as symmetrical as my own.

I can still cough up pieces of boxing-gloves, and when I close my eyes I can see calcium lights and blue phosphorescent gleams across the horizon; but I am thoroughly convinced that there is no physical exercise which yields the same amount of health and elastic vigor to the puncher that the manly art does. To the punchee, also, it affords a large wad of glad surprises and nose bleed, which cannot be hurtful to those who hanker for the pleasing nervous shock, the spinal jar, and the pyrotechnic concussion.

That is why I shall continue the exercises after I have practiced with a mule or a cow-catcher two or three weeks, and feel a little more confidence in myself.

CHESTNUT-BURR XXIX--A SOCIAL CURSE--THE MAN WHO INTERRUPTS.

_The Spirit of the "Red Vigilanter"--The Common Plug Who Thinks Aloud--The Man and his Wife Who Finish Your Story--Common Decency Ought to Rule Conversation._

|I do not, as a rule, thirst for the blood of my fellow-man. I am willing that the law should in all ordinary cases take its course, but when we begin to discuss the man who breaks into a conversation and ruins it with his own irrelevant ideas, regardless of the feelings of humanity, I am not a law and order man. The spirit of the "Red Vigilanter" is roused in my breast and I hunger for the blood of that man.

Interrupters are of two classes: First the common plug who thinks aloud, and whose conversation wanders with his so-called mind. He breaks into the saddest and sweetest of sentiment, and the choicest and most tearful of pathos, with the remorseless ignorance that marks a stump-tail cow in a dahlia bed. He is the bull in my china shop, the wormwood in my wine, and the kerosene in my maple syrup. I am shy in conversation, and my unfettered flights of poesy and sentiment are rare, but this man is always near to mar it all with a remark, or a marginal note, or a story, or a bit of politics, ready to bust my beautiful dream and make me wish that his name might be carved on a marble slab in some quiet cemetery, far away.

Dear reader, did you ever meet this man--or his wife? Did you ever strike some beautiful thought and begin to reel if off to your friends, only to be shut off in the middle of a sentence by this choice and banner idiot of conversation? If so, come and sit by me, and you may pour your woes into my ear, and I in turn will pour a few gallons into your listening ear.

I do not care to talk more than my share of the time, but I would be glad to arrive at a conclusion just to see how it would seem. I would be so pleased and so joyous to follow up an anecdote till I had reached the "nub," as it were, to chase argument home to conviction, and to clinch assertion with authority and evidence.

The second class of interrupters is even worse. It consists of the man--and, lam pained to state, his wife also--who see the general drift of your remarks and finish out your story, your gem of thought or your argument. It is very seldom that they do this as you would do it yourself, but they are kind and thoughtful and their services are always at hand. No matter how busy they may be, they will leave their own work and fly to your aid. With the light of sympathy in their eyes, they rush into the conversation, and, partaking of your own zeal, they take the words from your mouth, and cheerfully suck the juice out of your joke, handing back the rind and hoping for reward. That is where they get left, so far as I am concerned. I am almost always ready to repay rudeness with rudeness, and cold preserved gall with such acrid sarcasm as I may be able to secure at the moment. No one will ever know how I yearn for the blood of the interrupter. At night I camp on his trail, and all the day I thirst for his warm life's current. In my dreams I am cutting his scalp loose with a case-knife, while my fingers are twined in his clustering hair. I walk over him and promenade across his abdomen as I slumber. I hear his ribs crack, and I see his tongue hand over his shoulder as he smiles death's mirthful smile.

I do not interrupt a man no more than I would tell him he lied. I give him a chance to win applause or decomposed eggs from the audience, according to what he has to say, and according to the profundity of his profound. All I want is a similar chance and room according to my strength. Common decency ought to govern conversation without its being necessary to hire an umpire armed with a four-foot club, to announce who is at the bat and who is on deck.

It is only once in a week or two that the angel troubles the waters and stirs up the depths of my conversational powers, and then the chances are that some leprous old nasty toad who has been hanging on the brink of decent society for two weeks, slides in with a low kerplunk, and my fair blossom of thought that has been trying for weeks to bloom, withers and goes to seed, while the man with the chilled steel and copper-riveted brow, and a wad of self-esteem on his intellectual balcony as big as an inkstand, walks slowly away to think of some other dazzling gem, and thus be ready to bust my beautiful phantom, and tear out my high-priced bulbs of fancy the next time I open my mouth.

CHESTNUT-BURR XXX--A DISCOURSE ON CATS.

_Anybody Ought to Be Unhappy Enough Without a Cat-A Tramp Cat--he Only Wanted to be Loved a Little--He Was Too Much Given to Investigation--Mademoiselle Bridget O'Dooley--The Plaintive Voice Ceases._

|I am not fond of cats, as a general rule. I never yearned to have one around the house. My idea always was, that I could have trouble enough in a legitimate way without adding a cat to my woes. With a belligerent cook and a communistic laundress, it seems to me most anybody ought to be unhappy enough without a cat.

I never owned one until a tramp cat came to our house one day during the present autumn, and tearfully asked to be loved. He didn't have anything in his make-up that was calculated to win anybody's love, but he seemed contented with a little affection,--one ear was gone, and his tail was bald for six inches at the end, and he was otherwise well calculated to win confidence and sympathy. Though we could not be madly in love with him, we decided to be friends, and give him a chance to win the general respect.

Everything would have turned out all right if the bobtail waif had not been a little given to investigation. He wanted to know more about the great world in which he lived, so he began by inspecting my house. He got into the store-room closet, and found a place where the carpenter had not completed his job. This is a feature of the Laramie artisan's style. He leaves little places in unobserved corners generally, so that he can come back some day and finish it at an additional cost of fifty dollars. This cat observed that he could enter at this point and go all over the imposing structure between the flooring and the ceiling. He proceeded to do so.

*****

We will now suppose that a period of two days has passed. The wide halls and spacious _facades_ of the Nye mansion are still. The lights in the banquet-hall are extinguished, and the ice-cream freezer is hushed to rest in the wood-shed. A soft and tearful yowl, deepened into a regular ring-tail-peeler, splits the solemn night in twain. Nobody seemed to know where it came from. I rose softly and went to where the sound had seemed to well up from. It was not there.

I stood on a piece of cracker in the dining-room a moment, waiting for it to come again. This time it came from the boudoir of our French artist in soup-bone symphonies and pie--Mademoiselle Bridget O'Dooley. I went there and opened the door softly, so as to let the cat out without disturbing the giant mind that had worn itself out during the day in the kitchen, bestowing a dry shampoo to the china.

Then I changed my mind and came out. Several articles of _vertu_, beside Bridget, followed me with some degree of vigor.

The next time the tramp cat yowled he seemed to be in the recesses of the bath-room. I went down stairs and investigated. In doing so I drove my superior toe into my foot, out of sight, with a door that I encountered. My wife joined me in the search. She could not do much, but she aided me a thousand times by her counsel. If it had not been for her mature advice I might have lost much of the invigorating exercise of that memorable night.

Toward morning we discovered that the cat was between the floor of the children's play-room and the ceiling of the dining-room. We tried till daylight to persuade the cat to come out and get acquainted, but he would not.

At last we decided that the quickest way to get the poor little thing out was to let him die in there, and then we could tear up that portion of the house and get him out. While he lived we couldn't keep him still long enough to tear a hole in the house and get at him.

It was a little unpleasant for a day or two waiting for death to come to his relief, for he seemed to die hard, but at last the unearthly midnight yowl was still. The plaintive little voice ceased to vibrate on the still and pulseless air. Later, we found, however, that he was not dead. In a lucid interval he had discovered the hole in the store-room where he entered, and, as we found afterward a gallon of coal-oil spilled in a barrel of cut-loaf sugar, we concluded that he had escaped by that route.

That was the only time that I ever kept a cat, and I didn't do it then because I was suffering for something to fondle. I've got a good deal of surplus affection, I know, but I don't have to spread it out over a stump-tail orphan cat.

CHESTNUT-BURR XXXI--THE GREAT ORATION OF SPARTACUS.

_Adapted from the Original--Triumph in Capua--The Oration Begun--Spartacus Tells the Story of His Life--Scenes in the Arena._

|It had been a day of triumph in Capua. Lentulus returning with victorious eagles, had aroused the populace with the sports of the amphitheater, to an extent hitherto unknown even in that luxurious city. A large number of people from the rural districts had been in town to watch the conflict in the arena, and to listen with awe and veneration to the infirm and decrepit ring jokes.

The shouts of revelry had died away. The last loiterer had retired from the free-lunch counter, and the lights in the palace of the victor were extinguished. The moon piercing the tissue of fleecy clouds, tipped the dark waters of the Tiber with a wavy, tremulous light. The dark-browed Roman soldier moved on his homeward way, the sidewalk occasionally flying up and hitting him in the back.

No sound was heard save the low sob of some retiring wave, as it told its story to the smooth pebbles of the beach, or the unrelenting boot-jack struck the high board fence in the back yard, just missing the Roman Tom cat in its mad flight, and then all was still as the breast when the spirit has departed. Anon the Roman snore would steal in upon the deathly silence, and then die away like the sough of a summer breeze. In the green-room of the amphitheater a little band of gladiators were assembled. The foam of conflict yet lingered on their lips, the scowl of battle yet hang upon their brows, and the large knobs on their classic profiles indicated that it had been a busy day with them.

There was an embarassing silence of about five minutes, when Spartacus, borrowing a chew of tobacco from Aurelius, stepped forth and thus addressed them:

"Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen: Ye call me chief, and ye do well to call him chief who for twelve long years has met in the arena every shape of man or beast that the broad empire of Rome could furnish, and yet has never lowered his arm. I do not say this to brag, however, but simply to show that I am the star thumper of the entire outfit.

"If there be one among you who can say that ever in public fight or private brawl my actions did belie my words, let him stand forth and say it, and I will spread him around over the arena till the coroner will have to gather him up with blotting paper. If there be three in all your company dare face me on the bloody sands, let them come, and I will construct upon their physiogomy such cupolas, and royal cornices, and Corinthian capitols, and entablatures, that their own mothers would pass them by in the broad light of high noon, unrecognized.

"And yet I was not always thus--a hired butcher--the savage chief of still more savage men.

"My ancestors came from old Sparta, the county seat of Marcus Aurelius county, and settled among the vine-clad hills and cotton groves of Syrsilla. My early life ran quiet as the clear brook by which I sported. Aside from the gentle patter of the maternal slipper on my overalls, everything moved along with me like the silent oleaginous flow of the ordinary goose grease. My boyhood was one long, happy summer day. We stole the Roman muskmelon, and put split sticks on the tail of the Roman dog, and life was one continuous hallelujah.

"When at noon I led the sheep beneath the shade and played the Sweet Bye-and-Bye on my shepherd's flute, there was another Spartan youth, the son of a neighbor, to join me in the pastime. We led our flocks to the same pasture, and together picked the large red ants out of our indestructible sandwiches.

"One evening, after the sheep had been driven into the corral and we were all seated beneath the persimmon tree that shaded our humble cottage, my grand-sire, an old man, was telling of Marathon, and Leuctra, and George Francis Train, and Dr. Mary Walker and other great men, and how a little band of Spartans, under Sitting Bull, had withstood the entire regular army. I did not then know what war was, but my cheek burned, I knew not why, and I thought what a glorious thing it would be to leave the reservation and go on the warpath. But my mother kissed my throbbing temples and bade me go soak my head and think no more of those old tales and savage wars. That very night the Romans landed on our coasts. They pillaged the whole country, burned the agency buildings, demolished the ranch, rode off the stock, tore down the smoke-house, and rode their war horses over the cucumber vines.

"To-day I killed a man in the arena, and when I broke his helmet-clasps and looked upon him, behold! he was my friend. The same sweet smile was on his face that I had known when in adventurous boyhood we bathed in the glassy lake by our Spartan home and he had tied my shirt into 1,752 dangerous and difficult knots.

"He knew me, smiled some more, said 'Ta, ta,' and ascended the golden stair. I begged of the Prætor that I might be allowed to bear away the body and have it packed in ice and shipped to his friends near Syrsilla, but he couldn't see it.

"Ay, upon my bended knees, amidst the dust and blood of the arena, I begged this poor boon, and the Prætor answered: 'Let the carrion rot. There are no noble men but Romans and Ohio men. Let the show go on. Bring in the bobtail lion from Abyssinia.' And the assembled maids and matrons and the rabble shouted in derision and told me to 'brace up' and 'have some style about my clothes' and 'to give it to us easy,' with other Roman flings which I do not now call to mind.

"And so must you, fellow gladiators, and so must I, die like dogs.

"To-morrow we are billed to appear at the Coliseum at Rome, and reserved seats are being sold at the corner of Third and Corse streets for our moral and instructive performance while I am speaking to you.

"Ye stand here like giants as ye are, but to-morrow some Roman Adonis with a sealskin cap will pat your red brawn and bet his sesterces upon your blood.

"O Rome! Rome! Thou hast been indeed a tender nurse to me. Thou hast given to that gentle, timid shepherd lad who never knew a harsher tone than a flute note, muscles of iron, and a heart like the adamantine lemon pie of the railroad lunch-room. Thou hast taught him to drive his sword-through plated mail and links of rugged brass, and warm it in the palpitating gizzard of his foe, and to gaze into the glaring eyeballs of the fierce Numidian lion even as the smooth-cheeked Roman Senator looks into the laughing eyes of the girls in the treasury department.

"And he shall pay thee back till thy rushing Tiber is red as frothing wine; and in its deepest ooze thy lifeblood lies curdled. You doubtless hear the gentle murmur of my bazoo.

"Hark! Hear ye yon lion roaring in his den? 'Tis three days since he tasted flesh, but to-morrow he will have gladiator on toast, and don't you forget it; and he will fling your vertebræ about his cage like the star pitcher of a champion nine.

"If ye are brutes, then stand here like fat oxen waiting for the butcher's knife. If ye are men, arise and follow me. Strike down the warden and the turnkey, overpower the police, and cut for the tall timber. We will break through the city gate, capture the war-horse of the drunken Roman, flee away to the lava beds, and there do bloody work, as did our sires at old Thermopylae, scalp the western-bound emigrant, and make the hen-roosts around Capua look sick.

"O, comrades! warriors! gladiators!!

"If we be men, let us die like men, beneath the blue sky, and by the still waters, and be buried according to Gunter, instead of having our shin bones polished off by Numidian lions, amid the groans and hisses of a snide Roman populace."

CHESTNUT-BURR --WOMAN'S SUFFRAGE IN WYOMING.

_Some Pertinent Questions Asked--Answers Attempted--Valuable Testimonials._

|The managing editor of a Boston paper is getting material together relative to the practical workings of Woman's suffrage, and as Wyoming is at present working a scheme of that kind, he wants an answer to the following questions:

1. --Has it been of real benefit to the territory?

2. --If so, what has it accomplished?

3. --how does it affect education, morals, courts, etc.?

4. --What proportion of the women vote?

_Answers_.

1. --Yes, it has indeed been of real benefit to the territory in many ways. Until woman's suffrage came among us, life was a drag--a monotonous sameness, and simultaneous continuousness. How it is not that way. Woman comes forward with her ballot, and puts new life into the flagging energies of the great political circles. She purifies the political atmosphere, and comes to the polls with her suffrage done up in a little wad, and rammed down into her glove, and redeems the country.

2. --It has accomplished more than the great outside world wots of. Philosophers and statesmen may think that they wot; but they don't. Not a wot.

To others outside of Wyoming, woman's suffrage is a mellow dream; but here it is a continuous, mellow, yielding reality. We know what we are talking about. We are acquainted with a lady who came here with the light of immortality shining in her eye, and the music of the spheres was singing in her ears. She was apparently on her last limbs, if we may be allowed that expression. But woman's suffrage came to her with healing on its wings, and the rose of health again bloomed on her cheek, and her appetite came back like the famine in Ireland. Now she wrestles with the cast-iron majolica ware of the kitchen during the day, and in the evening works a cross-eyed elephant on a burlap tidy, and talks about the remonetization of the currency.

Without attempting to answer the last two questions in a short article like this, we will simply give a few certificates and testimonials of those who have tried it:

Prairie-Dog Ranche, Jan. 3, 1888.

"_Dear Sir_: I take great pleasure in bearing testimony to the efficacy of woman's suffrage. It is indeed a boon to thousands. I was troubled in the East beyond measure with an ingrowing nail on the most extensive toe. It caused me great pain and annoyance. I was compelled to do my work wearing an old gum overshoe of my husband's. Since using woman's suffrage only a few months, my toe is entirely well, and I now wear my husband's fine boots with perfect ease. As a remedy for ingrowing nails I can safely recommend the woman's suffrage.

"Sassafras Oleson."

Miner's Delight, Jan. 23, 1888.

"_Deer Sur_: Two year ago mi waife fell down into a nold sellar and droav her varyloid through the Sarah helium. I thot she was a Gonner. I woz then livin' in the sou west potion of Injeanny. I moved to where i now am leaving sevral onsettled accounts where i lived. Bat i wood do almost anything to recover mi waifs helth. She tried Woman's Suffrins and can now lick me with I hand tied behind hur back, everything to the free yuse of the femail ballot. So good bi at Present Union Forever McGilligin."

Rawhide, Feb. 2, 1888.

_Dear Sir_: I came to Wyoming one year ago today At that time I only weighed 153 pounds and felt all the time as though I might die. I was a walking skeleton. Coyotes followed me when I went away from the house.

"My husband told me to try Woman's Suffrage. I did so. I have now run up to my old weight of 213 pounds, and I feel that with the proper care and rest, and rich wholesome diet, I may be spared to my husband and family till next spring.

"I am now joyful and happy. I go about my work all day singing Old Zip Coon and other plaintive melodies. After using Woman's Suffrage two days I sat up in a rocking chair and ate one and three-fourths mince pies. Then I worried down a sugar-cured ham and have been gaining ever since.

"Ah! it is a pleasant thing to come back to life and its joys again.

"Yours truly,

"Ethel Lillian Kersikes."

PIGEON-TOED PETE.

|But stay! Let us catch a rapid outline of the solitary horseman, for he is the affianced lover and soft-eyed gazelle of Luella Frowzletop, the queen of the Skimmilk ranch. He is evidently a man of say twenty summers, with a sinister expression to the large, ambitious, imported, Italian mouth. A broad-brimmed white hat with a scarlet flannel band protects his gothic features from the burning sun, and a pale-brown ducking suit envelops his little form. A horsehair lariat hangs at his saddle bow, and the faint suspicion of a downy mustache on his chiselled upper lip is just beginning to ooze out into the air, as if ashamed of itself. It is one of those sickly mustaches, a kind of cross between blonde and brindle, which mean well enough, but never amount to anything. His eyes are fierce and restless, with short, expressive, white eyelashes, and his nose is short but wide out, gradually melting away into his bronzed and stalwart cheeks, like a dish of ice cream before a Sabbath school picnic. Such is the rough sketch of Pigeon-toed Pete, the swain who had stolen away the heart of Luella Frowzletop, the queen of the Skimmilk ranch.

CHESTNUT-BURR --CONCERNING THE SWALLOW.

_Discoveries in Ornithology--The Soft South Wind Blows--The Swallows Draw Near--"When Sparrows Build "--What the Swallows Bring._

|Lately I have made some valuable discoveries relative to ornithology, and I will give some of them to the public, for I love to shed information right and left like a normal school.

When the soft south wind began to kiss our cheeks, and the horse-radish and North Park prospector began to start, the swift-winged swallows drew near to my picturesque home on East Fifth street, and I hoped with a great, anxious, throbbing hope, that they would build beneath the Gothic eaves of my $200 ranche.

I would take my guitar at the sunset hour, and sit at my door in a camp-chair, with the fading glory of the dying day bathing me in a flood of golden light, and touching up my chubby form, and I would warble, "When Sparrows Build," an old solo in J, which seems to fit my voice, and the swallows would flit around me on tireless wing, and squeak, and sling mud over me till the cows came home.

This thing had gone on for several days, and the little mud houses under the eaves were pretty near ready, and in the mean time the spring bed-bug had come with his fragrant breath, and turpentine, and quicksilver, and lime, and aquafortis, and giant-powder, and a feather, has made my home a howling wilderness, that smelled like a city drug store.

But it didn't kill the bugs. It pleased them. They called a meeting and tendered me a vote of thanks for the kind attentions with which they had been received. They ate all these diabolical drugs, not only on regular days, but right along through Lent.

I got mad and resolved to Insure the house and burn it down. One evening I felt sad and worn, and was trying to solace myself by trilling a few snatches from Mendelssohn's "Wail," written in the key of G for a baritone voice. A neighbor came along and stopped to lean over the gate, and drink in the flood of melody which I was spilling out on the evening air. When I got through and stopped to tune my guitar anew, and scratch a warm place on my arm, he asked if I were not afraid that those swallows would bring bed-bugs to the house.

I had heard that before, but I thought it was a campaign lie. I acted on the suggestion, however, and taking a long pole from behind the door, where I keep it for pictorial Bible men, I knocked down a 'dobe cottage and proceeded to examine it.

It was level full of imported Merino and Cotswold and Southdown and Early Bose and Duchess of Oldenburg and twenty-ounce Pippins and Seek-no-further bedbugs. There were bed-bugs in modest gray ulsters and bed-bugs in dregs of wine and old gold, bed-bugs in ashes of roses and bed-bugs in elephants' breath, bedbugs with their night-clothes on and in morning wrappers, bed-bugs that were just going on the night-shift, and bed-bugs that had been at work all day and were just going to bed.

I killed all I could and then drove the rest into a pan of coal oil. When one undertook to get out of the pan I shot him. This conflict lasted several days. I neglected my other business and omitted morning prayers until there was a great calm and the swift-winged swallows homeward flew. When these feathered songsters come around my humble cot another spring they will meet with a cold, unwelcome reception. I shall not even ask them to take off their things.

I have formed the idea somehow from watching the eccentric, nervous flight of the swallow, that when he makes one of those swift flank movements with the speed of chain lightning, he must be acting from the impulse of a large, earnest, triangular bed-bug of the boarding-house variety. I may be wrong, but I have given this matter a good deal of attention, and whether this theory be correct or not I do not care. It is good enough for me.

THE HAPPY CODFISH.

|A distinguished scientist informs us that "the cod subsists largely on the sea cherry." Those who have not had the pleasure of seeing the codfish climb the sea cherry tree in search of food, or clubbing the fruit from the heavily-laden branches with chunks of coral have missed a very fine sight. The codfish, when at home rambling through the submarine forests, does not wear his vest unbuttoned, as he does while loafing around the grocery stores of the United States.

CHESTNUT-BURR XXXIV--A NOVEL WAY OF MARKING CLOTHES.

_An Unobtrusive Taciturn Man--The Importance of Marking Clothes--A Sad End for the Taciturn Alan--A Crude Autopsy._

|The most quiet, unobtrusive man I ever knew," said Buck Bramel, "was a young fellow who went into North Park in an early day from the Salmon river. He was also reserved and taciturn among the miners, and never made any suggestions if he could avoid it. He was also the most thoughtful man about other people's comfort I ever knew.

"I went into the cabin one day where he was lying on the bed, and told him I had decided to go into Laramie for a couple of weeks to do some trading. I put my valise down on the floor and was going out, when he asked me if my clothes were marked. I told him that I never marked my clothes. If the washerwoman wanted to mix up my wardrobe with that of a female seminary, I would have to stand it, I supposed.

"He thought I ought to mark my clothes before I went away, and said he would attend to it for me. So he took down his revolver and put three shots through the valise.

"After that a coolness sprang up between us, and the warm friendship that had existed so long was more or less busted. After that he marked a man's clothes over in Leadville in the same way, only the man had them on at the time. He seemed to have a mania on that subject, and as they had no insanity experts at Leadville in those days, they thought the most economical way to examine his brain would be to hang him, and then send the brain to New York in a baking powder can.

"So they hung him one night to the bough of a sighing mountain pine.

"The autopsy was, of course, crude; but they sawed open his head and scooped out the brain with a long handled spoon and sent it on to New York. By some mistake or other it got mixed up with some sample specimens of ore from 'The Brindle Tom Cat' discovery, and was sent to the assayer in New York instead of the insanity smelter and refiner, as was intended.

"The result was that the assayer wrote a very touching and grieved letter to the boys, saying that he was an old man anyway, and he wished they would consider his gray hairs and not try to palm off their old groceries on him. He might have made errors in his assays, perhaps--all men were more or less liable to mistakes--but he flattered himself that he could still distinguish between a piece of blossom rock and a can of decomposed lobster salad, even if it was in a baking-powder can. He hoped they would not try to be facetious at his expense any more, but use him as they would like to be treated themselves when they got old and began to totter down toward the silent tomb.

"This is why we never knew to a dead moral certainty, whether he was O. K. in the upper story, or not."

CHESTNUT-BURR XXXV--THE UNHAPPY HUMORIST.

_A Blasted Life--Regarded as a Professional--No Jog in Being "The Life of the Party"--Parents Should Discourage the First Signs of Humor in Their Children._

|You are an youmorist, are you not?" queried a long-billed pelican addressing a thoughtful, mental athlete, on the Milwaukee & St. Paul road the other day.

"Yes, sir," said the sorrowful man, brushing away a tear. "I am an youmorist. I am not very much so, but still I can see that I am drifting that way. And yet I was once joyous and happy as you are. Only a few years ago, before I was exposed to this malady, I was as blithe as a speckled yearling, and recked not of aught--nor anything else, either. Now my whole life is blasted. I do not dare to eat pie or preserves, and no one tells funny stories when I am near They regard me as a professional, and when I get in sight the 'scrub nine' close up and wait for me to entertain the crowd and waddle around the ring."

"What do you mean by that?" murmured the pur-pie-nosed interrogation point.

"Mean? Why, I mean that whether I'm drawing a salary or not, I'm expected to be the 'life of the party.' I don't want to be the life of the party I want to let some one else be the life of the party. I want to get up the reputation of being as cross as a bear with a sore head. I want people to watch their children for fear I'll swallow them. I want to take my low-cut-evening-dress smile and put it in the bureau drawer, and tell the world I've got a cancer in my stomach, and the heaves and hypochondria, and a malignant case of leprosy."

"Do you mean to say that you do not feel facetious all the time, and that you get weary of being an youmorist?"

"Yes, hungry interlocutor. Yes, low-browed student, yes. I am not always tickled. Did you ever have a large, angry, and abnormally protuberent boil somewhere on your person where it seemed to be in the way? Did you ever have such a boil as a traveling companion, and then get introduced to people as an youmorist? You have not? Well, then, you do not know all there is of suffering in this sorrow-streaked world. When wealthy people die why don't they endow a cast-iron castle with a draw-bridge to it and call it the youmorists' retreat? Why don't they do some good with their money instead of fooling it away on those who are comparatively happy?"

"But how did you come to git to be an youmorist?"

"Well, I don't know. I blame my parents some. They might have prevented it if they'd taken it in time, but they didn't. They let it run on till it got established, and now it's no use to go to the Hot Springs or to the mountains, or have an operation performed. You let a man get the name of being an youmorist and he doesn't dare to register at the hotels, and he has to travel anonymously, and mark his clothes with his wife's name, or the public will lynch him if he doesn't say something youmorist.

"Where is your boy to-night?" continued the gloomy humorist. "Do you know where he is? Is he at home under your watchful eye, or is he away somewhere jailing the handles on his first little joke? Parent, beware. Teach your boy to beware. Watch him night and day, or all at once, when he is beyond your jurisdiction, he will grow pale. He will have a far-away look in his eye, and the bright, rosy lad will have become the flat-chested, joyless youmorist.

"It's hard to speak unkindly of our parents, but mingled with my own remorse I shall always murmur to myself, and ask over and over, why did not my parents rescue me while they could? Why did they allow my chubby little feet to waddle down to the dangerous ground on which the sad-eyed youmorist must forever stand?

"Partner, do not forget what I have said to-day. Whether your child be a son or daughter, it matters not. Discourage the first sign of approaching humor. It is easier to bust the backbone of the first little tender jokelet that sticks its head through the virgin soil, than it is to allow the slimy folds of your son's youmorous lecture to be wrapped about you, and to bring your gray hairs with sorrow to the grave."

LARAMIE'S HANDKERCHIEF.

|Laramie has the champion mean man. He has a Sunday handkerchief made to order with scarlet spots on it, which he sticks up to his nose just before the plate starts round, and leaves the church like a house on fire.

CHESTNUT-BURR XXXVI--THE SODA LAKES OF WYOMING.

_The Lakes near Sheep Mountain--Three Tons of Soda at the Centennial--A Yield of 104,544 Tons of Soda per Annum--Should Provide an Income of $1,062,864,000 per Annum._

|Some days ago, in company with several other eminent men of this place, I paid a visit to the soda lakes of Wyoming, and will give a short, truthful and concise description of their general appearance.

The lake or soda beds are situated about twelve miles southwest of Laramie, in a direct line according to official survey, but the road makes a slight variation from a direct line and therefore makes the distance about fourteen miles.

In a kind of basin toward Sheep Mountain, the finest of a series of hills intervening between the broad Laramie Plains and the Snowy Range, lie these lakes, four in number, with no outlet whatever.

Just as you get plumb discouraged and have ceased to look for the lakes, they all at once lie at your feet in all their glistening, dazzling, snowy whiteness.

One of these lakes, to all appearances, is the source of water supply for the balance, and from the exterior the water is constantly crystallizing in the sun and forming a thick crust of sulphate of soda.

When we went out, it was one of those dry, clear, bracing days in the month of July, in Wyoming, when the crisp air fans your cheek and fills every vein, artery and capillary and pore with a glad exhilarating sense that you are freezing to death.

Well, the day we went out to the lakes it was that way only not so much so.

It was not, therefore, difficult to imagine the broad, white crust over those lakes to be ice and snow. They are of the purest snowy white, and when cut into, the crust has that deep sea blue of ice when cut in like manner.

This crust of sulphate of soda is nearly three feet in depth and is perfectly firm, so that the heaviest loads drive over it with safety.

The water which oozes up through the crust at intervals is quite warm, being at the surface on a cool day about blood temperature, and of course at a considerable depth much higher.

In 1876--the year which the gentle reader will call to mind as the centennial--a slight fragment of this lode, weighing over three tons, was cut in the form of a cube and sent to the Centennial, where it attracted very much attention.

Six weeks afterward the unsightly hole in the deposit at the lake was entirely filled up with a new formation.

This goes to show how inexhaustible is the mighty reservoir, and the gentle reader may give it his earnest thought as a mathematical question, what amount of this formation might be secured to the enterprising manufacturer who might see fit to purchase and develop it.

Suppose there are sixty-four tons to every 400 superficial feet, and suppose there are four lakes averaging forty acres, which is a low estimate, then we have at present on hand 17,424 tons, with a capacity to reproduce itself every two months, we will say, or at the rate of 104,544 tons per annum.

Suppose, then, we take a ten years' working test of the lakes, and we have 1,002,864 tons of soda.

This soda is not adulterated with alum or other injurious substances, and would therefore sell very rapidly.

It might be put in half-pound and pound cans which would sell at, we will say, twenty-five and fifty cents per can.

Taking the very low estimate made above, as a basis we have the neat little income of $1,062,864,000.

This is more than I am now clearing, I find, over and above expenses, and I am thinking seriously of opening up this vast avenue to wealth myself.

I would have done so long ere this, were it not that I am now developing the Boomerang mine.

This mine is named after my favorite mule, and I am very anxious that it should succeed.

I have already sunk $10 in this mine, and I cannot therefore abandon it, as the casual observer will notice, without great loss to me.

THE COSTLY WATERMELON.

|Once a bonanza man took out his check book and asked the market man how much he wanted for meat, and when he was told he burst into tears, and said he would have to deny himself the pleasure of a watermelon or put off going to Europe till next year.

CHESTNUT-BURR XXXVII--VIEWS OF CHICAGO.

_Chicago the Rival of Laramie--The Wonderful Parks--A Chicago Funeral Procession--In Search of Watermelons--Changes Amongst Old Friends--The Vitality Restoring Revolver._

Chicago, June 20, 1887.

|I arrived here from the North on Tuesday evening. The demonstration was on a larger scale than I had even looked for. It was gratifying, indeed, to one who loves the spontaneous approval of his fellow-citizens. I do. The procession was very fine, consisting of 'busses, hacks, carriages, express wagons and the police, followed up by promiscuous citizens. There was a little misunderstanding about who should deliver the address of welcome. So about two hundred healthy orators, of the Denis Kearney decoction, all started in at one and the same time to give me the freedom of the city, at twenty-five cents per freedom. There is a good deal of this class of freedom now on the Chicago market.

Chicago is a thriving, enterprising town on the Lake Michigan coast. It is the county seat of Cook county, so that all the county officers live here.

If a young man with the recuisite degree of pluck and determination were to start a paper here, and could get the county printing and go without a hired girl, he could do first-rate.

Chicago is a rival of Laramie as the most desirable outfitting point for North Park. It also does some outfitting for South Park and several other parks.

Yesterday I went to South Park to drive along the boulevards and see the fountains squirt. The boulevards are now in good shape. They are about the bouliest boulevards I have seen for five years. Some days when I feel frolicsome, it seems to me as though if I couldn't have a nice large park of my own, with velvet lawns and cool retreats in it, where I could be alone and roll around over the green sward, and kick up my heels in the chastened sunlight, I would certainly bust.

South Park has an antelope, a bison, an elk and several other ferocious animals. They seem lonely, and time hangs heavy on their hands, so to speak.

Going out to the park we met a funeral procession headed by a remains. When we were coming out of the driveway on our return, we met the same procession. It had transplanted the deceased in good shape, and was racing horses on its way home through the park. The minister belonged to the same family with the United Grand Junction Ebeneezer Temperance Association, and although he was ostensibly holding on to his horse with all the reserve forces on hand, he seemed to keep the rest of the procession at a respectful distance all the way.

It was about the most cheerful funeral I ever saw, with the officiating minister leading down the homestretch and the hearse at a Maud S. gait rattling along at his heels, followed by the bereaved family coming down the quarter-stretch in '45. It reconciled me a great deal to death to see this. If I could be positively certain that my friends and acquaintances would take it that easy I could die happy, but I know they won't. I have seemed to work my way into the affections of those who come in contact with me from day to day, so that when I die I know just how it will be. There will be one of the wildest panics ever known in the history of civilized nations. Groceries and all kinds of provisions will depreciate in value fifty per cent, and watermelons will be almost a drug on the market.

Allow me to digress for a moment. Watermelons are very high at Laramie, and there is the standing joke that for three years I haven't had sufficient decision of character and spinal column to make up my mind whether I would build or buy a watermelon. Here watermelons are more plentiful. They grow low down on the branches of the melon trees, so that on a still evening one can easily knock them off with a club. So easy in fact is that feat that I could hardly restrain myself from taking a little stroll one pleasant evening to pick one or two luscious specimens from the heavy laden boughs. So strong was this feeling at least that I could not overcome it without an unusual strain, and my physicians tell me not to do anything that will overtax my moral nature. They are afraid that something would break and tear the whole vast fabric of integrity from its foundation.

So I went out with a brother of mine who could be depended upon. I took along my old pocket-knife that I have had for fifteen years, and which has received the silver medal, sweepstakes prize and handicap silver service in a score of go-as-you-please melon-plugging matches for the championship of the known world.

But we were not very fortunate. The world is growing cynical and fast losing faith in mankind, I fear. People have quit putting their money into savings banks and are beginning to plant their watermelons in new and obscure places. Just as the casual observer learns the position of an eligible melon patch the proprietor changes the combination on him.

I found multitudinous changes among old friends and associates when I got home, and was struck with the ceaseless work of time's effacing fingers, but nowhere did I find such cause for sorrow and regret as in the falling off and change of base which I found in the matter of melon cultivation.

We were exposed to the night air until past 1 o'clock, coming home tired and disappointed with three small ones apiece, which we hid in the hay-mow, according to a time-honored custom in the family, and retired.

The next day we both made a noble resolution to discard this unfortunate habit which we had contracted, partly because we were old enough to know better, and partly because we had in the hurry and precipitation of the evening previous, stolen and carried four miles a half dozen melons of the citron variety, that tasted like a premature pumpkin and smelled like cod liver oil and convalescent glue.

I had also lost my revolver. When I go out nights I always go armed, and for that reason I have gained the unenviable reputation of being a bold, bad man. Many people think that I am thirsting for the lives of my fellow-men and feel low-spirited and wretched unless I am shooting large, irregular holes through the human family, but this is not true.

I never killed any one in my life, unless death was richly merited. I have never taken a human life that society was not made better and safer by the act.

This revolver was the same one that I used four years ago when I shot at a burglar in Laramie. He was endeavoring, at the dead hour of midnight, to get into the window, and I feared that his intentions were not honorable. He knew that I was alone in the house, my wife having gone away on a visit, and so taking advantage of her absence and my timidity, he was endeavoring to force an entrance into the house. I don't know what ever nerved me to such an act of lofty heroism, but I marched softly out of the front door with noiseless tread and shot him.

Then I went back to bed and wondered what action the authorities would take with me. Whether it would be considered justifiable homicide and I exonorated, or whether I would be held without bail to answer at the next term of court for murder. Then I wondered what I had better do with the corpse. At first I thought I would run down and notify the coroner; then I concluded to go and see the victim, and see if life were extinct. Finally I compromised the matter by falling into a troubled sleep, from which I awoke on the following morning. I went out to the place where the burglar had been shot, but he was not there. With a superhuman will-power he had dragged himself away somewhere to die. He had also destroyed all traces of blood before getting away.

This was the last of the matter till the following September, when I received this letter:

Omaha.

Dear Sir:--You doubtless think that I harbor ill-will and bitterness toward you because you shot me last summer, but such is not the case. I write to express my gratitude and everlasting friendship.

For years I had been an invalid, and last summer owing to my weak and helpless condition and consequent loss of employment, I became deranged. That accounts for my wild and insane idea that your residence was the abode of wealth and affluence.

It was the delirium that precedes death. Ah, my benefactor, my noble deliverer from death, how shall I tell you of my never-ending gratitude?

How like an angel of mercy you stood up before me that night in your _robe de nuit_ and shot me!

How like a blessed seraph you looked at me, with your polished joints glittering in the flash and dazzle of your peerless beauty!

I have been rapidly gaining ever since in weight and strength. I am now married and happy, and I cheerfully point you out to my friends as the one who, by your health-promoting markmanship and vitality-restoring revolver, brought me back from death to hope, health and happiness.

Yours truly,

The-Man-You-Shot.

Since then I have called that revolver my Great Health Invigorator and Blood Purifier.

CHESTNUT-BURR XXXVIII--A SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM.

_An Important Movement.--The Requirements of a True Journalist.--Hold He Should be Educated.--The Journalist at the Age of 95._

|A number of friends having personally asked me to express an opinion upon the matter of an established school of journalism, as spoken of by ex-Mayor Henry C. Robinson, of Hartford, Conn., and many more through the West, who are strangers to me personally, having written me to give my views upon the subject. I have consented in so far that I will undertake a simple synopsis of what the course should embrace.

I most heartily indorse the movement, if it may be called such at this early stage. Knowing a little of the intricacies of this branch of the profession, I am going to state fully my belief as to its importance, and the necessity for a thorough training upon it. We meet almost everywhere newspaper men who are totally unfitted for the high office of public educators through the all-powerful press. The woods is full of them. We know that not one out of a thousand of those who are to-day classed as journalists is fit for that position.

I know that to be the case, because people tell me so. I cannot call to mind to-day, in all my wide journalistic acquaintance, a solitary man who has not been pronounced an ass by one or more of my fellow-men. This is indeed a terrible state of affairs.

In many instances these harsh criticisms are made by those who do not know, without submitting themselves to a tremendous mental strain, the difference between a "lower case" q and the old Calvinistic doctrine of unanimous damnation, but that makes no difference; the true journalist should strive to please the masses. He should make his whole life a study of human nature and an earnest effort to serve the great reading world collectively and individually.

This requires a man, of course, with similar characteristics and the same general information possessed by the Almighty, but who would be willing to work at a much more moderate salary.

The reader will instantly see how difficult it is to obtain this class of men. Outside of the mental giant who writes these lines and two or three others, perhaps----

But never mind. I leave a grateful world to say that, while I map out a plan for the ambitious young journalist who might be entering upon the broad arena of newspaperdom, and preparing himself at a regularly established school for that purpose.

Let the first two years be devoted to meditation and prayer. This will prepare the young editor for the surprise and consequent profanity which in a few years he may experience when he finds in his boss editorial that God is spelled with a little g, and the peroration of the article has been taken out and carefully locked up between a death notice and the announcement of the birth of a cross-eyed infant.

The ensuing five years should be spent in becoming familiar with the surprising and mirth-provoking orthography of the English language.

Then would follow three years devoted to practice with dumb bells, sand bags and slung shots, in order to become an athlete. I have found in my own journalistic history more cause for regret over my neglect of this branch than any other. I am a pretty good runner, but aside from that I regret to say that as an athlete I am not a dazzling success.

The above course of intermediate training would fit the student to enter upon the regular curriculum.

Then set aside ten years for learning the typographical art perfectly, so that when visitors wish to look at the composing room, and ask the editor to explain the use of the "hell box," he will not have to blush and tell a gauzy lie about its being a composing-stick. Let the young journalist study the mysteries of type setting, distributing, press work, galleys, italic, shooting-sticks, type lice and other mechanical implements of the printer's department.

Five years should be spent in learning to properly read and correct proof, as well as how to mark it on the margin like a Chinese map of the Gunnison country.

At least fifteen years should then be devoted to the study of American politics and the whole civil service. This time could be extended five years with great profit to the careful student who wishes, of course, to know thoroughly the names and records of all public men, together with the relative political strength of each party.

He should then take a medical course and learn how to bind up contusions, apply arnica, court plaster or bandages, plug up bullet holes and prospect through the human system for buck shot. The reason of this course, which should embrace five years of close study, is apparent to the thinking mind.

Ten years should then be devoted to the study of law. No thorough metropolitan editor wants to enter upon his profession without knowing the difference between a writ of _mandamus_ and other styles of profanity. He should thoroughly understand the entire system of American jurisprudence.

The student will by this time begin to see what is required of him and will enter with greater zeal upon his adopted profession.

He will now enter upon a theological course of ten years. He can then write a telling editorial on the great question of What We Shall Do To Be Saved without mixing up Calvin and Tom Paine with Judas Iscariot and Ben Butler.

The closing ten years of the regular course might be profitably used in learning a practical knowledge of cutting cord wood, baking beans, making shirts, lecturing, turning double handsprings, preaching the gospel, learning how to make a good adhesive paste that will not sour in hot weather, learning the art of scissors grinding, punctuation, capitalization, prosody, plain sewing, music, dancing, sculping, etiquette, how to win the affections of the opposite sex, the ten commandments, every man his own teacher on the violin, croquet, rules of the prize ring, parlor magic, civil engineering, decorative art, calsomining, bicycling, baseball, hydraulics, botany, poker, calisthenics, high-low-jack, international law, faro, rhetoric, fifteen-ball pool, drawing and painting, mule skinning, vocal music, horsemanship, plastering, bull whacking, etc., etc., etc.

At the age of 95 the student will have lost that wild, reckless and impulsive style so common among younger and less experienced journalists. He will emerge from the school with a light heart and a knowledge-box loaded up to the muzzle with the most useful information.

The heyday and spring-time of life will, of course, be past, but the graduate will have nothing to worry him any more, except the horrible question which is ever rising up before the journalist, as to whether he shall put his money into government four per cents or purchase real estate in some growing town.

MODERN FICTION IS UNRELIABLE.

|Modern fiction has reached that pass where the twentieth chapter may wind up with a funeral of twins. Death or dyspepsia may befall the hero at any moment, and the old-time schedule has been abandoned. It is as delightfully surprising as prospecting for a quartz lead. You may discover a bonanza or sit down on a tarantula at any moment. You may tumble out of an ore bucket and reach the foot of the shaft with your shoulder blade in your pistol pocket, or you may sit down on an ostensibly extinct blast to think over your past life and the next moment go crashing through the milky way without clothes enough to keep off the night air.

CHESTNUT-BURR XXXIX--SOME FACTS OF SCIENCE.

_An Interesting Diary--Corn and Small Fruits Suffer--A Fourth of July Dinner--A Good Ice Cream Country--The Diary Abruptly Ends._

|A reporter sent out to find the North Pole some years ago, has just been heard from. An exploring party recently found portions of his remains in latitude 4-11-14, longitude sou'west by sou' from the pole, and near the remains the following fragment of a diary: July 1, 1884.--Have just been out searching for a sunstroke and signs of a thaw. Saw nothing but ice floe and snow as far as the eye could reach. Think we will have snow this evening unless the wind changes.

July 2.--Spent the forenoon exploring to the northwest for right of way for a new equatorial and North Pole railroad that I think would be of immense value to commerce. The grade is easy and the expense would be slight. Ate my last dog to-day. Had intended him for the 4th, but got too hungry, and ate him raw with vinegar. I wish I was at home eating pie.

July 3.--We had quite a frost last night, and it looks this morning as though the corn and small fruits must have suffered. It is now two weeks since the last of the crew died and left me alone. Ate the leather ends of my suspenders to-day for dinner. I did not need the suspenders, anyway, for by tightening up my pants I find they will stay on all right, and I don't look for any ladies to call, so that even if my pants came off by some oversight or other, nobody would be shocked.

July 4.--Saved up some tar roofing and a bottle of mucilage for my Fourth of July dinner, and gorged myself to day. The exercises were very poorly attended and the celebration rather a failure. It is clouding up in the west, and I'm afraid we're going to have snow. Seems to me we're having an all-fired late spring here this year.

July 5.--Didn't drink a drop yesterday. It was the quietest Fourth I ever put in. I never felt so little remorse over the way I celebrated as I do to-day. I didn't do a thing yesterday that I was ashamed of except to eat the remainder of a box of shoe blacking for supper. To-day I ate my last boot-heel, stewed. Looks as though we might have a hard winter.

July 6.--Feel a little apprehension about something to eat. My credit is all right here, but there is no competition, and prices are therefore very high. Ice, however, is still firm. This would be a good ice-cream country if there were any demand, but the country is so sparsely settled that a man feels as lonesome here as a greenbacker at a presidential election. Ate a pound of cotton waste soaked in machine oil, to-day. There is nothing left for to-morrow but ice-water and an old pocket-book for dinner. Looks as though we might have snow.

July 7.--This is a good, cool place to spend the summer if provisions were more plenty. I am wearing a seal-skin undershirt, with three woolen overshirts and two bear-skin vests, to-day, and when the dew begins to fall I have to put on my buffalo ulster to keep off the night air. I wish I was home. It seems pretty lonesome here since the other boys died. I do not know what I will get for dinner to-morrow, unless the neighbors bring in something. A big bear is coming down the hatchway as I write. I wish I could eat him. It would be the first square meal for two months. It is, however, a little mixed whether I will eat him or he eat me. It will be a cold day for me if he----

*****

Here the diary breaks off abruptly, and from the chewed-up appearance of the book, we are led to entertain a horrible fear as to his safety.

A HAT DEPOSIT IN THE BLACK HILLS.

|An old hunter was out among the Black Hills, east of town, last summer, hunting for cotton-tails and sage hens, and he ran across a little gulch where the abrupt rocks closed together and formed a little atmospheric eddy, so to speak. There in that lonely reservoir he found what he at first considered a petrified hat store. It was a genuine deposit of escaped straw hats and plug hats that the frolicsome zephyrs had caught up and carried for ten miles, until this natural hat-rack had secured them. Of course there were other articles of apparel, and some debilitated umbrellas, but the deposit seemed to assay mostly hats.

CHESTNUT-BURR XL--SORROWS OF A ONE-LEGGED MAN.

_The Man with a Cork Leg and a Chastened Air--Remarks on Home Government--A Happy Time in Contemplation--A Wife's Prerogatives--What is to Become of the One-Legged Minority?_

|Yesterday morning, while the main guy of the sanctum was putting some carbolic acid in the paste pot, and unlimbering his genius, and turning his lyre preparatory to yanking loose a few stanzas on the midsummer cucumber, a man with a cork leg, and the chastened air of one who is second lieutenant in the home circle under the able and efficient command of his wife, came softly in and sat down on a volume containing the complete poems of Noah webster.

He waited patiently till he could catch the eye of the speaker, humming softly to himself--=

``"Green grows the grave by the wild, dashing river

``Where sleeps the brave with his arrow and quiver."=

When the time had arrived for the lodge to open up unfinished business, communications and new business, he ran his wooden leg through the rounds of a chair and said:

"I desire to make a few remarks on the subject of home government, and the rights a husband may have which his wife is bound to respect."

"Yes; but we don't enter the family circle with our all-pervading influence. We simply attack evils of a public or general nature. You should pour your tale of woe into the ears of an attorney. He will dish out the required balm to you at so much per balm."

"I know, but this is not strictly a case for the courts. It's a case which raises the question of the husband's priority, and agitates the whole social fabric.

"Last week I celebrated my 43d birthday, or I started to celebrate it, and circumstances over which I had no control arose and busted the programme, as mapped out by the committee of arrangements.

"It was the intention of the party, consisting of myself and several others of our most eminent men, to go over to Sabille canyon with a mountain wagon and a pair of pinto plugs for a little wholesome recreation. We had some weapons for slaying the frolicsome jack rabbit and the timid sage hen, and had provided ourselves against every possible rattlesnake contingency also. We had taken more precautions in this direction, perhaps, than in any other, and were in shape to enjoy the wild grandeur of the eternal hills without fear from the poisonous reptile of the rugged gulches and alkali bottoms of this picturesque western country.

"We were all loaded up in good shape for the trip and drove around to my house to get a camp kettle and some lemons. I went into the pantry to get a couple of pounds of sugar and a nutmeg.

"My wife met me in the pantry and roughly and brutally smelled of my breath.

"This was not the prerogative of a true wife, but she weighs 200 and is middling resolute, so I allowed her to do so, although every man's breath is his own property, and if he allows his wife to take advantage of her marital vows to smell his breath on the most unlooked-for occasions, what is to become of our boasted freedom?

"I then went upstairs into a closet after a lap robe and a pillow to use in case any of us got sunstruck.

"My wife came in just then, and as I started away with the pillow, she tripped me up so I fell inside the closet, and before I could recover from my surprise, she sat down on me in such a solemn and impressive manner that my eyes hung out on my cheeks like the bronze door knobs on a Pullman car.

"There I was in the impenetrable gloom of a closet, with the trusting companion of my home life flattening out my stomach till I could feel my watch chain against my spinal column. She then unscrewed my cork leg in a mechanical kind of a way and locked it up in the bureau drawer, putting the key in her pocket.

"After that she fastened the closet door on the outside, and told the party that I would be unable, owing to the inclemency of the weather, to take part in the exercises at Sabille canyon.

"All through that long, long, weary day, I stood around on one leg and looked out of the window, thinking what a potent spell is exerted over the wooden-legged man by an able-bodied wife.

"It is a question, sir, which is of vital interest to us all. Must the one-legged minority continue thus to subserve the interests of the two-legged majority? I ask you, as the representative of the all civilizing, all leveling, all powerful and all jewhillikin press, how long the cork-limbed, taxation-without-representation masses must limp around the house and sew carpet rags, writhing in the death-like grip of a two-legged oligarchy?"

He did not wait for an answer. He simply gathered up a few of our freshest exchanges and stole softly down the stairs.

We decline to make any comment one way or the other, because we do not know that the country is ripe for the discussion of this question, but it deserves cold, calm, candid thought on the part of all thinking men, to say the least.

THE TRUE POET LOVES SECLUSION.

|The true poet loves seclusion and soothing rest. That is the secret of his even numbers and smooth cadences. Look at Dryden, and Walt Whitman, and Milton, and Burns, and the Sweet Singer of Michigan. What could any of them have done with the house full of children of the forest who were hankering for a fresh pail of gore for lunch?

A PIE OPENER

|A handsome competence is in store for the man who will invent a neat, durable and portable pie opener that will successfully reach the true inwardness of the average, box-toed, Bessemer steel, gooseberry pie which the hired girl casts in her kitchen foundry.

CHESTNUT-BURR XLI--REVELATION IN UTAH.

_A Vacancy Amongst the Twelve Apostles--The Place Filled by Revelation--How Would this System Work in Politics--There are Drawbacks in this System._

|An esteemed and extremely connubial contemporary, says in a recent editorial: "The Latter Day Saints will rejoice to learn that the vacancies which have existed in the quorums ol the twelve apostles and the first seven presidents of seventies are now filled. During the conference recently held, Elder Abram II. Cannon was unanimously chosen to be one of the first seven presidents of seventies, and he was ordained to that office on Monday, October 9. Subsequently! the Lord, by revelation through His servant, President John Taylor, designated by name Brothers George Teasdale and Heber J. Grant, to be ordained to the apostleship, and Brother Seymour B. Young to fill the remaining vacancy in the presidency of the seventies. These brethren were ordained on Monday, October 16, the two apostles, under the hands of the first presidency and twelve, and the other under the hands of the twelve and the presidency of the seventies."

Now, that's a convenient system of politics and civil service. When there is a vacancy, the president, John Taylor, goes into his closet and has a revelation, which settles it all right. If the man appointed vicariously by the Lord is not in every way satisfactory, he may be discharged by the same process. Instead, therefore, of being required to rally a large force of his friends to aid him in getting an appointment, the aspirant arranges solely with the party who runs the revelation business. It will be seen at a glance, therefore, that the man who can get the job of revelating in Zion, has it pretty much his own way. We would not care who made the laws of Utah if we could do its revelating at so much per revelate.

Think of the power it gives a man in a community of blind believers. Imagine, if you please, the glorious possibilities in store for the man who can successfully reveal the word of the Lord in an easy, extemporaneous manner on five minutes' notice.

This prerogative does not confine itself to politics alone. The Impromptu revelator of the Jordan has revelations when he wants to evade the payment of a bill. He gets a divine order also if he desires to marry a beautiful maid or seal the new school ma'am to himself. He has a leverage which he can bring to bear upon the people of his diocese at all times, even more potent than the press, and it does not possess the drawbacks that a newspaper does. You can run an aggressive paper if you want to in this country, and up to the time of the funeral you have a pretty active and enjoyable time, but after the grave has been filled up with the clods of the valley and your widow has drawn her insurance, you naturally ask, "What is the advantage to be gained by this fearless style of journalism?"

Still, even the inspired racket has its drawbacks. Last year a little incident occurred in a Mormon family down in southern Utah, which weighed about nine pounds, and when the _ex officio_ husband, who had been absent two years, returned, he acted kind of wild and surprised, somehow, and as he went through the daily round of his work he could be seen counting his fingers back and forth and looking at the almanac, and adding up little amounts on the side of the barn with a piece of red chalk.

Finally, one of the inspired mob of that part of the vineyard thought it was about time to get a revelation and go down there, so he did so. He sailed up to the _de facto_ husband and _quasi_ parent and solemnly straight ened up some little irregularities as to dates, but the revelation was received with disdain, and the revelator was sent home in an old ore sack and buried in a peach basket.

Sometimes there is, even in Utah, a manifestation of such irreverence and open hostility to the church that it makes us shudder.

THE MODEL SLEEPING-CAR.

|One of these days they will invent a sleeper with a quart of pure air for each person, instead of only a mouthful. If there could be more pure air, and less mahogany corners on which to bump the system, and the porter received a regular salary instead of mobbing the train with a whisk broom, and garroting the passengers for $1 each, life would be more desirable.

CHESTNUT-BURR XLII--THE TONGUE-DESTROYING FRENCH LANGUAGE.

_The Rue de la Sitting Bull Difficulty in Getting the Drink, You Want--Paris an Old Town--The Exposition Not Very Enjoyable._

|I am going to rest myself by writing a few pages in the language spoken in the United States, for I am tired of the infernal lingo of this God-forsaken country and feel like talking in my own mother tongue and on some other subject than the Exposition. I have very foolishly tried to talk a little of this tongue-destroying French, but my teeth are so loose now that I am going to let them tighten up again before I try it any more.

Day before yesterday it was very warm, and I asked two or three friends to step into a big drug store on the Rue de la Sitting Bull, to get a glass of soda. (I don't remember the names of these streets, so in some cases I give them Wyoming names.) I think the man who kept the place probably came from Canada. Most all the people in Paris are Canadians. He came forward, and had a slight attack of delirium tremens, and said:

"Ze vooly voo a la boomerang?"

I patted the soda fountain and said:

"No, not so bad as that, if you please. Just squeeze a little of your truck into a tumbler, and flavor it to suit the boys. As for myself, I will take about two fingers of bug juice in mine to sweeten my breath."

But he didn't understand me. His parents had neglected his education, no doubt, and got him a job in a drug store. So I said:

"Look here, you frog-hunting, red-headed Communist, I will give you just five minutes to fix up my beverage, and if you will put a little tangle-foot into it I will pay you; otherwise I will pick up a pound weight and paralyze you. Now, you understand. Flavor it with _spirituous frumenti_, old rye, benzine--bay rum--anything! _Parley voo, e pluribus unum, sic semper go braugh!_ Do you understand _that?_"

But he didn't understand it, so I had to kill him. I am having him stuffed. The taxidermist who is doing the job lives down on the Rue de la Crazy Woman's Fork. I think that is the name of the Rue that he lives on.

Paris is quite an old town. It is older and wickeder than Cheyenne, I think, but I may be prejudiced against the place. It is very warm here this summer, and there are a good many odors that I don't know the names of. It is a great national congress of rare imported smells. I have detected and catalogued 1,350 out of a possible 1,400.

I have not enjoyed the Exposition so much as I thought I was going to; partly because it has been so infernally hot, and partly because I have been a little homesick. I was very homesick on board ship; very homesick indeed. About all the amusement that we had crossing the wide waste of waters was to go and lean over the ship's railing by the hour, and telescope the duodenum into the æsophagus. I used to stand that way and look down into the dark green depths of old ocean, and wonder what mysterious secrets were hidden beneath the green, cold waves and the wide rushing waste of swirling, foamy waters. I learned to love this weird picture at last, and used to go out on deck every morning and swap my breakfast to this priceless panorama for the privilege of watching it all day.

I can't say that I hanker very much for a life on the ocean wave. I am trying to arrange it so as to go home by land. I think I can make up for the additional expense in food. I bought more condemned sustenance, and turned it over to the Atlantic ocean for inspection, than I have eaten since I came here.

CARVING SCHOOLS.

|They are agitating the matter of instituting carving schools, in the East, so that the rising generation will be able to pass down through the corridors of time without its lap full of dressing and its bosom laden with gravy and remorse. The students at this school will wear barbed-wire masks while practicing. These masks will be similar to those worn by German students, who slice each other up while obtaining an education.

CHESTNUT-BURR XLIV--ONE TOUCH OF NATURE.

_Terrible Loss of Children--Strange Sympathy of the Health Officer--The Old Man's Defense of his Boys--He Gives Free Utterance to his Heresies._

|Up in Polk county, Wis., not long ago, a man who had lost eight children by diphtheria, while the ninth hovered between life and death with the same disease, went to the health officer of the town and asked aid to prevent the spread of the terrible scourge. The health officer was cool and collected. He did not get excited over the anguish of the father whose last child was at the moment hovering upon the outskirts of immortality. He calmly investigated the matter, and never for a moment lost sight of the fact that he was a town officer and a professed Christian.

"You ask aid, I understand," said he, "to prevent the spread of the disease, and also that the town shall assist you in procuring new and necessary clothing, to replace that which you have been compelled to burn in order to stop the further inroads of diphtheria. Am I right?"

The poor man answered affirmatively.

"May I ask if your boys who died were Christian boys, and whether they improved their gospel opportunities and attended the Sabbath school, or whether they were profane and given over to Sabbath-breaking?"

The bereft father said that his boys had never made a profession of Christianity; that they were hardly old enough to do so, and that they might have missed some gospel opportunities owing to the fact that they were poor, and hadn't clothes fit to wear to Sabbath school. Possibly, too, they had met with wicked companions, and had been taught to swear; he could not say but they might have sworn, although he thought they would have turned out to be good boys had they lived.

"I am sorry that the case is so bad," said the health officer. "I am led to believe that God has seen fit to visit you with affliction in order to express His divine disapproval of profanity, and I cannot help you. It ill becomes us poor, weak worms of the dust to meddle with the just judgments of God. Whether as an individual or as a _quasi corporation_, it is well to allow the Almighty to work out His great plan of salvation, and to avoid all carnal interference with the works of God."

The old man went back to his desolated home and to the bedside of his only living child. I met him yesterday and he told me all about it.

"I am not a professor of religion," said he, "but I tell you, Mr. Nye, I can't believe that this board of health has used me right. Somehow I ain't worried about my little fellers that is gone. They was little fellers, anyway, and they wasn't posted on the plan of salvation, but they was always kind and they always minded me and their mother. If God is using diphtheria agin perfanity this season they didn't know it. They was too young to know about it and I was too poor to take the papers, so I didn't know it nuther, i just thought that Christ was partial to kids like mine, just the same as He used to be 2,000 years ago when the country was new. I admit that my little shavers never went to Sabbath school much, and I wasn't scholar enough to throw much light onto God's system of retribution, but I told 'em to behave themselves, and they did, and we had a good deal of fun together--me and the boys--and they was so bright, and square, and cute that I didn't see how they could fall under divine wrath, and I don't believe they did.

"I could tell you lots of smart little things that they used to do, Mr. nye, but they wa'n't mean and cussed. They was just frolicky and gay sometimes because they felt good. I don't believe God had it in for'em bekuz they was like other boys, do you? Fer if I thought so it would kind o' harden me and the old lady and make us sour on all creation.

"Mind you, I don't kick because I'm left alone here in the woods, and the sun don't seem to shine, and the birds seems a little backward about singin' this spring, and the house is so quiet, and she is still all the time and cries in the night when she thinks I am asleep. All that is tough, Mr. Nye--tough as old Harry, too--but it's so, and I ain't murmurin', but when the board of health says to me that the Ruler of the Universe is makin' a tower of northern Wisconsin, mowin' down little boys with sore throat because they say 'gosh,' I can't believe it.

"I know that people who ain't familiar with the facts will shake their heads and say that I am a child of wrath, but I can't help it. All I can do is to go up there under the trees where them little graves is, and think how all-fired pleasant to me them little, short lives was, and how every one of them little fellers was when he come, poor as I was, and how I rastled with poor crops and pine stumps to buy cloze for'em, and didn't care a cent for style as long as they was well. That's the kind of heretic I am, and if God is like a father that settles it. he wouldn't wipe out my family just to establish discipline, I don't believe. The plan of creation must be on a bigger scale than that, it seems to me, or else it's more or less a fizzle.

"That board of health is better read than I am. It takes the papers and can add up figures, and do lots of things that I can't do; but when them fellers tell me that they represent the town of Balsam Lake and the Kingdom of Heaven, my morbid curiosity is aroused, and I want to see the stiffykits of election."

HOW TO DEAL WITH THE REVOLVER DIFFICULTY.

|If revolvers could not be sold for less than $500 a piece, with a guarantee on the part of the vendee, signed by good sureties, that he would support the widows and orphans, you would see more longevity lying around loose, and Western cemeteries would cease to roll up such mighty majorities.

THE FEMALE ARTISTE.

|Along the dreary pathway of this cloud-environed life of ours there is no joy so pure, no triumph so complete, no success so fraught with rapture, as that of the female artiste who hangs on the flying trapeze by her chilblain and kisses her hand to the perspiring throng.

CHESTNUT-BURR XLV--FUN OF BEING A PUBLISHER.

_Publishing Is Not All Joy and Johnny jump-ups--A Singular Letter--Plot of a Novel--Algonquin and Sciatica._

|Being a publisher is not all sunshine, joy and johnny-jump-ups, although the gentle and tractable reader may at times think so.

A letter was received two years ago by the publishers of this book, on the outside of which was the request to the "P. Master of Chicago to give to the most reliable man in Chicago and oblige."

The P. Master thereupon gave the letter to Messrs. Belford, Clarke & Co., who have sent it to me as a literary curiosity. I want it to go down to posterity, so I put it in this great work. I simply change the names, and where words are too obscure, doctor them up a little:

Butler, Bates county, Mo., Jan., 1886.

I have a novle fresh and pure from the pen, wich i would like to be examined by you. I wish to bring it before the public the ensuing summer. I have wrote a good deal for the press, and always with great success. I wrote once an article on the growth of pie plant wich was copied fur and wide. You may have heard of me through my poem on "The Cold, Damp Sea or the Murmuring Wave and its Sad Kerplunk."

I dashed it off one summer day for the Scabtown _Herald_.

In it, I enter the fair field of fancy and with exquisite word painting, I lead the reader on and on until he forgets that breakfast is ready, and follows the thrilling career of Algonquin and his own fair-haired Sciatica through page after page of delirious joy and poetic rithum.

In this novle I have wove a woof of possibilities criss-crossed with pictures of my own wild, unfettered fancy, which makes it a work at once truthful and yet sufficiently unnatural to make it egorly sot for by the great reading world.

The plot of the novle is this:

Algonquin is a poor artist, who paints lovely sunsets and things, nights, and cuts cordwood during the day, struggling to win a competence so that he can sue for the hand of Sciatica, the wealthy daughter of a plumber.

She does not love him much, and treats him coldly; but he perseveres till one of his exquisite pictures is egorly snapt up by a wealthy man at $2. The man afterwards turns out to be Sciatica's pa.

He says unkind things of Algonquin, and intimates that he is a better artist in four-foot wood than he is as a sunset man. He says that Algonquin is more of a Michael Angelo in basswood than anywhere else, and puts a wet blanket on Sciataca's love for Algonquin.

Then Sciataca grows colder than ever to Algonquin, and engages herself to a wealthy journalist.

Just as the wedding is about to take place, Algonquin finds that he is by birth an Ohio man. Sciataca repents and marries her first love. He secures the appointment of governor of Wyoming, and they remove to Cheyenne.

Then there are many little oursts of pictureskness and other things that I would like to see in print.

I send also a picture of myself which I would like to have in the book. Tell the artist to tone down the freckles so that the features may be seen by the observer and put on a diamond pin so that it will have an appearance of wealth, which the author of a book generally wears.

It is not wrote very good, but that won't make any difference when it is in print.

When the reading public begins to devour it, and the scads come rolling in, you can deduct enough for to pay your expenses of printing and pressing, and send me the balance by postoffice money order. Please get it on the market as soon as possible, as I need a Swiss muzzlin and some other togs suitable to my position in liturary circles. Yours truly,

Luella Blinker.

A LESSON FROM THE MULE.

|We may often learn a valuable lesson from the stubborn mule, and guard against the too protuberant use of our own ideas in opposition to other powers against which it is useless to contend. It may be wrong for giant powder to blow the top of a man's head off without cause, but repeated contests have proved that even when giant powder is in the wrong, it is eventually victorious.

CHESTNUT-BURR XLVI--PERFORMANCE OF THE PHOENIX.

_Mr. Blackburn, the Heavy Villian--Difficulties With the Scenery--The Play in New York--The Military Parade._

|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 theaters 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."

FIRMNESS.

|Firmness is a good thing in its place, but we should early learn that to be firm, we need not stand up against a cyclone till our internal economy is blown into the tops of the neighboring trees. Moral courage is a good thing, but it is useless unless you have a liver to go along with it. Sometimes a man is required to lay down his life for his principles, but the cases where he is expected to lay down his digester on the altar of his belief, are comparatively seldom.

PUGILIST OR STATESMAN.

|Thousands of our own boys, who to-day are spearing frogs, or bathing in the rivers of their native land and parading on the shingly beach with no clothes on to speak of, are left to chose between such a career of usefulness and greatness of brow, and the humdrum life of a bilious student and pale, sad congressman. Will you rise to the proud pinnacle of fame as a pugilist, boys, or will you plug along as a sorrowing, overworked statesman? Now, in the spring-time of your lives, choose between the two, and abide the consequences.

CHESTNUT-BURR NYE AS A CRITIC AND NYE AS A POET.

_POETIC CHESTNUTS_

_The Poet of the Greeley Eye--The Dying Cowboy and the Preacher--A Mournful Stanza--Poems by Nye--Apostrophe to an Orphan Mule--Ode to Spring--The Picnic Snoozeds Lament--Ode to the Cucumber--Apostrophe to Oscar Wilde--An Adjustable Campaign Song--The Beautiful Snow._

A new and dazzling literary star has risen above the horizon, and is just about to shoot athwart the starry vault of poesy. How wisely are all things ordered, and how promptly does the new star begin to beam, upon the decline of the old.

Hardly had the sweet singer of Michigan commenced to wane and to flicker, when, rising above the western hills, the glad light of the rising star is seen, and adown the canyons and gulches of the Rocky mountains comes the melodious cadences of the poet of the Greeley Eye.

Couched in the rough terms of the West, robed in the untutored language of the Michael Angelo slang of the miner and the cowboy, the poet at first twitters a little on a bough far up the canyon, gradually waking the echoes, until the song is taken up and handed back by every rock and crag along the rugged ramparts of the mighty mountain barrier.

Listen to the opening stanza of "The Dying Cowboy and the Preacher:"=

``So, old gospel shark, they tell me I must die;

``That the wheels of life's wagon have rolled into their last rut,

``Well, I will "pass in my checks" without a whimper or a cry,

``And die as I have lived--"a hard nut."=

This is no time-worn simile, no hackneyed illustration or bald-headed decrepit comparison, but a new, fresh illustration that appeals to the Western character, and lifts the very soul out of the kinks, as it were.

Wheels of life's wagon have rolled into their last rut.

Ah! how true to nature and yet how grand. How broad and sweeping. How melodious and yet how real. None but the true poet would have thought to compare the close of life to the sudden and unfortunate chuck of the off hind wheel of a lumber wagon into a rut.

In fancy we can see it all. We hear the low, sad kerplunk of the wheel, the loud burst of earnest, logical profanity, and then all is still.

Now and then the swish of a mule's tail through the air, or the sigh of the rawhide as it shimmers and hurtles through the silent air, and then a calm falls upon the scene. Anon, the driver bangs the mule that is ostensibly pulling his daylights out, but who is, in fact, humping up like an angle worm, without nulling a pound.

Then the poet comes to the close of the cowboy's career in this style:

"Do I repent?

"No--of nothing present or past;

"So skip, old preach, on gospel pap I won't be fed;

"My breath comes hard; I--am going--but--I--am game to the--last."

And reckless of the future, as the present, the cowboy was dead.

If we could write poetry like that, do you think we would plod along the dreary pathway of the journalist? Do you suppose that if we had the heaven-born gift of song to such a degree, that we could take hold of the hearts of millions and warble two or three little ditties like that, or write an elegy before breakfast, or construct an ionic, anapestic twitter like the foregoing, that we would carry in our own coal, and trim our own lamps, and wear a shirt two weeks at a time?

No, sir. We would hie us away to Europe or Salt Lake, and let our hair grow long, and we would write some obituary truck that would make people disgusted with life, and they would sigh for death that they might leave their insurance and their obituaries to their survivors.

POEMS BY BILL NYE

APOSTROPHE TO AN ORPHAN MULE.=

```Oh! lonely, gentle, unobtrusive mule!

```Thou standest idly 'gainst the azure sky,

```And sweetly, sadly singeth like a hired man.

````Who taught thee thus to warble

```In the noontide heat and wrestle with

```Thy deep, corroding grief and joyless woe?

```Who taught thy simple heart

````Its pent-up, wildly-warring waste

```Of wanton woe to carol forth upon

`````The silent air?

````I chide thee not, because thy

```Song is fraught with grief-embittered

```Monotony and joyless minor chords

```Of wild, imported melody, for thou

```Art restless, woe begirt and

```Compassed round about with gloom,

````Thou timid, trusting, orphan mule!

`````Few joys, indeed, are thine,

```Thou thrice-bestricken, madly

```Mournful, melancholy mule.

```And he alone who strews

```Thy pathway with his cold remains

```Can give thee recompense

`````Of lemoncholy woe.

```He who hath sought to steer

```Thy limber, yielding tail

```Fernist thy crupper-band

````Hath given thee joy, and he alone.

```'Tis true, he may have shot

```Athwart the Zodiac, and, looking

```O'er the outer walls upon

`````The New Jerusalem,

```Have uttered vain regrets.

```Thou reekest not. O orphan mule,

```For it hath given thee joy, and

```Bound about thy bursting heart,

```And held thy tottering reason

`````To its throne.

```Sing on, O mule, and warble

```In the twilight gray,

```Unchidden by th heartless throng.

```Sing of thy parents on thy father's side.

```Yearn for the days now past and gone;

```For he who pens these halting,

```Limping lines to thee

```Doth bid thee yearn, and yearn, and yearn.=

ODE TO SPRING.

FANTASIA FOR THE BASS DRUM; ADAPTED FROM THE GERMAN BY WILLIAM VON NYE.=

```In the days of laughing spring time,

````Comes the mild-eyed sorrel cow,

```With bald-headed patches on her,

````Poor and lousy, I allow;

```And she waddles through your garden

````O'er the radish-beds, I trow.=

```Then the red-nosed, wild-eyed orphan,

````With his cyclopædiee,

```Hies him to the rural districts

````With more or less alacrity.

```And he showeth up its merits

````To the bright eternitee.=

```How the bumble-bee doth bumble

````Bumbling in the fragrant air,

```Bumbling with his little bumbler,

````Till he climbs the golden stair.

```Then the angels will provide him

````With another bumbilaire.=`

THE PICNIC SNOOZER'S LAMENT.=

```Gently lay aside the picnic,

````For its usefulness is o'er,

```And the winter style of misery

````Stands and knocks upon your door.=

```Lariat the lonely oyster,

````Drifting on some foreign shore;

```Zion needs him in her business--

````She can use him o'er and o'er.=

```Bring along the lonely oyster,

````With the winter style of gloom,

```And the supper for the pastor,

````With its victims for the tomb.=

```Cast the pudding for the pastor,

````With its double iron door;

```It will gather in the pastor

````For the bright and shining shore.=

```Put away the little picnic

````Till the coming of the spring;

```Useless now the swaying hammock

````And the idle picnic swing.=

```Put away the pickled spider

````And the cold pressed picnic fly,

```And the decorated trousers

````With their wealth of custard pie.=

ODE TO THE CUCUMBER.=

```O, a cucumber grew by the deep rolling sea,

```And it tumbled about in reckless glee

```Till the summer waned and the grass turned brown.

```And the farmer plucked it and took it to town.=

```Wrinkled and warty and bilious and blue,

```It lay in the market the autumn through;

```Till a woman with freckles on her cheek

```Led in her husband, so mild and meek.=

```He purchased the fruit, at her request,

```And hid it forever under his vest,

```For it doubled him up like a kangaroo,

```And now he sleeps 'neath the violets blue.=

APOSTROPHE ADDRESSED TO O. WILDE.=

````Soft eyed seraphic kuss

```With limber legs and lily on the side,

```We greet you from the raw

```And uncouth West.=

```The cowboy yearns to yank thee

```To his brawny breast and squeeze

```Thy palpitating gizzard

```Through thy vest.=

```Come to the mountain fastness,

```Oscar, with thy low neck shirt

```And high neck pants;

```Fly to the coyote's home,

```Thou son of Albion,

```James Crow bard and champion aesthete

```From o'er the summer sea.=

```Sit on the fuzzy cactus, king of poesy,

```And song,

```Ride the fierce broncho o'er the dusty plain,

```And le' the zephyr sigh among thy buttery locks.

```Welcome thou genius of dyspeptic song,

```Thou bilious lunatic from far-off lands.

```Come to the home of genius,

```By the snowy hills.

```And wrestle with the alcoholic inspiration

```Of our cordial home.

````We yearn

```To put the bloom upon thy alabaster nose,

```And plant the jim-jams

```In thy clustering hair.

```Hail, mighty snoozer from across the main!

````We greet thee

```With our free, untutored ways and wild

```Peculiar style of deadly beverage.

```Come to the broad, free West and mingle

```With our high-toned mob.=

```Come to the glorious Occident

```And dally with the pack-mule's whisk-broom tail;

```Study his odd yet soft demeanor,

```And peculiar mien.=

```Tickle his gambrel with a sunflower bud

```And scoot across the blue horizon

```To the tooness of the sweet and succulent beyond.=

````We'll gladly

```Gather up thy shattered remnants

```With a broom and ship thee to thy beauteous home.

```Forget us not,

```Thou bilious pelican from o'er the sea.=

````Thou blue-nosed clam

```With pimply, bulging brow, but

```Come and we will welcome thee

```With ancient omelet and fragrant sausage

````Of forgotten years.=

ADJUSTABLE CAMPAIGN SONG.=

```(Air--_Rally Round the Flag, Boys_.)=

```Oh, we'll gather from the hillsides,

````We'll gather from the glen,

```Shouting the battle cry of....

```And we'll round up our voters.

```Our brave and trusty men,

````Shouting the battle cry of.....=

`````Chorus.=

````Oh, our candidate forever,

`````Te doodle daddy a,

````Down with old....

````Turn a foodie diddy a,

````And we'll whoop de dooden do,

`````Fal de adden adden a,

````And don't you never forget it.=

````Ob, we'll meet the craven foe

`````On the fall election day,

````Shouting the battle cry of...

````And we'll try to let him know

````That we're going to have our way,

````Shouting the battle cry of...=

`````Chorus.=

````Oh, our candidate forever, etc.=

````Oh, we're the people's friends,

`````As all can plainly see,

````Shouting the battle cry of....

````And we'll whoop de dooden doo,

````With our big majority,

````And don't you never forget it.=

`````Chorus.=

```Oh. our candidate forever, etc.=

THE BEAUTIFUL SNOW.=

```O drifted whiteness covering

```The fair face of nature.

```Pure as the sigh of a blessed spirit

```On the eternal shores, you

```Glitter in the summer sun

```Considerable. My mortal

```Ken seems weak and

```Helpless in the midst of

```Your dazzling splendor,

```And I would hide my

```Diminished head like

```Serf unclothed in presence

```Of his mighty King.

````You lie engulphed

```Within the cold embrace

```Of rocky walls and giant

```Cliffs. You spread out

```Your white mantle and

```Enwrap the whole broad

```Universe, and a portion

```Of York State.

````You seem content

```Resting in silent whiteness

```On the frozen breast of

```The cold, dead earth. You

```Think apparently that

```You are middling white;

```But once I was in the

```Same condition. I was

```Pure as the beautiful snow,

```But I fell. It was a

```Right smart fall, too.

```It churned me up a

```Good deal and nearly

```Knocked the supreme

```Duplex from its intellectual

```Throne. It occurred in

```Washington, D. C.

````But thou

```Snow, lying so spotless

```On the frozen earth, as

```I remarked before, thou

```Hast indeed a soft,

```Soft thing. Thou comest

```Down like the silent

```Movements of a specter,

```And thy fall upon the

```Earth is like the tread

```Of those who walk the

```Shores of immortality.

```You lie around all

```Winter drawing your

```Annuities till spring,

```And then the soft

```Breath from the south with

```Touch seductive bids you

```Go, and you light out

```With more or less alacrity.=

A BUSHEL OF SMALLER CHESTNUTS.

THE TRUE TALE OF WILLIAM TELL.

|William Tell ran a hay ranche near Bergelen, about 580 years ago. Tell had lived in the mountains all his life, and shot chamois and chipmunks with a cross-gun, till he was a bad man to stir up.

At that time Switzerland was run principally by a lot of carpet-baggers from Austria, and Tell got down on them about the year 1307. It seems that Tell wanted the government contract to furnish hay, at $45 a ton, for the Year 1306, and Gessler, who was controlling the patronage of Switzerland, let the contract to an Austrian who had a big lot of condemned hay, farther up the gulch.

One day Gessler put his plug hat up on a telegraph pole, and issued order 236, regular series, to the effect that every snoozer who passed down the toll road should bow to it.

Gessler happened to be in behind the brush when Tell Went by, and he noticed that Bill said "Shoot the hat," and didn't salute it; so he told his men to gather Mr. Tell in, and put him in the refrigerator.

Gessler told him that if he Would shoot a crab-apple from the head of his only son at 200 yards, with a cross-gun, he would give him his liberty.

Tell consented, and knocked the apple higher than Gilroy's kite. Old Gessler, however, noticed another arrow sticking in William's girdle, and he asked what kind of a flowery break that was.

Tell told him that if he had killed the kid instead of busting the apple, he intended to drill a hole through the stomach of Mr. Gessler. This made Gessler mad again, and he took Tell on a picnic up the river, in irons.

Tell jumped off when he got a good chance, and cut across a bend in the river, and when the picnic party came down, he shot Gessler deader than a mackeral.

This opened the ball for freedom, and weakened the Austrian government so much that in the following November they elected Tell to fill the long term, and a half-breed for the short term.

After that, Tell was recognized by the ruling power, and he could get most any contract that he wanted to. He got the service on the stage line up into the Alps increased to a daily, and had the contracts in the name of his son Albert.

The appropriation was increased $150,000 per year, and he had a good thing.

Tell lived many years after this, and was loved by the Swiss people because he had freed their land.

Whenever he felt lonesome, he would take his crossgun and go out and kill a tyrant. He had tyrant on toast most every day till Switzerland was free, and the peasants blessed him as their deliverer.

When Tell got to be an old man he would go out into the mountains and apostrophize them in these memorable words:

"Ye crags and peaks, I'm with you once again. I hold to you the hands I held to you on previous occasions, to show you they are free. The tyrant's crust is busted, so to speak. His race is run, and he himself hath scooted up the flume. _Sic semper McGinnis, terra Anna, nux vomica, Schweitzer lease, Timbuctoo, erysipelas, e pluribus unum, sciataca, multum in parvo, vox populi, vox snockomonthegob_."

WHY WE WEEP.

|In justice to ourself we desire to state that the Cheyenne _Sun_ has villified us and placed us in a false position before the public. It has stated that while at Rock Creek station, in the early part of the week, we were taken for a peanutter, and otherwise ill-treated at the railroad eating corral and omelette emporium, and that in consequence of such treatment we shed great, scalding tears as large as watermelons. This is not true. We did shed the tears as above set forth, but not because of ill-treatment on the part of the eating-house proprietor.

It was the presence of death that broke our heart and opened the fountains of our great deep, so to speak, when we poured the glucose syrup on our pancakes, the stiff and cold remains of a large beetle and two cunning little twin cockroaches fell out into our plate, and lay there hushed in an eternal repose.

Death to us is all powerful. The King of Terrors is to us the mighty sovereign before whom we must all bow, from the mighty emperor down to the meanest slave, from the railroad superintendent, riding in his special car, down to the humblest humorist, all alike must some day curl up and die. This saddens us at all times, but more peculiarly so when Death, with his relentless lawn-mower, has gathered in the young anu innocent. This was the case where two little twin cockroaches, whose lives had been unspotted, and whose years had been unclouded by wrong and selfishness were called upon to meet death together. In the stillness of the night, when others slept, these affectionate little twins crept into the glucose syrup and died.

We hope no one will misrepresent this matter. We did weep, and we are not ashamed to own it. We sat there and sobbed until the tablecloth was wet for four feet, and the venerable ham was floating around in tears. It was not for ourself, however, that we wept. No unkindness on the part of an eating house ever provoked such a tornado of woe. We just weep when we see death and are brought in close contact with it. And we were not the only one that shed tears. Dickinson and Warren wept, strong men as they were. Even the butter wept. Strong as it was it could not control its emotions.

We don't very often answer a newspaper attack, but when we are accused of weeping till people have to take off their boots and wring out their socks, we want the public to know what it is for.

ETIQUETTE FOR THE YOUNG.

|Young children who have to wait till older people have eaten all there is in the house, should not open the dining-room door during the meal and ask the host if he is going to eat all day. It makes the company feel ill at ease, and lays up wrath in the parents' heart.

Children should not appear displeased with the regular courses at dinner, and then fill up on pie. Eat the less expensive food first, and then organize a picnic in the preserves afterward.

Do not close out the last of your soup by taking the plate in your mouth and pouring the liquid down your childish neck. You might spill it on your bosom, and it enlarges and distorts the mouth unnecessarily.

When asked what part of the fowl you prefer, do not say you will take the part that goes over the fence last. This remark is very humorous, but the rising generation ought to originate some new table jokes that will be worthy of the age in which we live.

Children should early learn the use of the fork, and how to handle it. This knowledge can be acquired by allowing them to pry up the carpet tacks with this instrument, and other little exercises, such as the parent mind may suggest.

The child should be taught at once not to wave his bread around over the table, while in conversation, or to fill his mouth full of potatoes, and then converse in a rich tone of voice with someone out in the yard. He might get his dinner down his trochea and cause his parents great anxiety.

In picking up a plate or saucer filled with soup or with moist food, the child should be taught not to parboil his thumb in the contents of the dish, and to avoid swallowing soup bones or other indigestible debris.

Toothpicks are generally the last course, and children should not be permitted to pick their teeth and kick the table through the other exercises. While grace is being said at table, children should know that it is a breach of good breeding to smouge fruit cake, just because their parents' heads are bowed down, and their attention for the moment turned in another direction. Children ought not to be permitted to find fault with the dinner, or fool with the cat while they are eating. Boys should, before going to the table, empty all the frogs and grasshoppers out of their pockets, or those insects might crawl out during the festivities, and jump into the gravy.

If a fly wades into your jelly up to his gambrels, do not mash him with your spoon before all the guests, as death is at all times depressing to those who are at dinner, and retards digestion. Take the fly out carefully, with what naturally adheres to his person, and wipe him on the table cloth. It will demonstrate your perfect command of yourself, and afford much amusement for the company. Do not stand up in your chair and try to spear a roll with your fork. It is not good manners to do so, and you might slip and bust your crust, by so doing. Say "thank you," and "much obliged," and "beg pardon," wherever you can work in these remarks, as it throws people off their guard, and gives you an opportunity to get in your work on the pastry and other bric-a-brac near you at the time.

SWEET SAINT VALENTINE.

|It is the evening of St. Valentine's Day, and I am thinking of the long ago. St. Valentine's Day is nothing now but a blessed memory. Another landmark has been left behind in our onward march toward the great hereafter. We come upon the earth, battle a little while with its joys and its griefs, and then we pass away to give place to other actors on the mighty stage.

Only a few short years ago what an era St. Valentine's Day was to me. How I still get valentines, but they are different and they effect me differently. They are not of so high an order of merit artistically, and the poetry is more impudent and less on the turtle-dove order.

Some may be neglected on St. Valentine's Day, but I am not. I never go away by myself and get mad because I have been overlooked. I generally get valentines enough to paper a large hall. I file them away carefully and sell them back to the dealer for next year. Then the following St. Valentine's Day I love to look at the familiar features of those I have received in the years agone.

One of these blessed valentines I have learned to love as I do my life. I received it first in 1870. It represents a newspaper reporter with a nose on him like the woman's suffrage movement. It is a large, enthusiastic nose of a bright bay color with bias folds of the same, shirred with dregs of wine. How well I know that nose. The reporter is represented in tight green pants and orange coat. The vest is scarlet and the necktie is maroon, shot with old gold.

The picture represents the young journalist as a little bit disposed to be brainy. The intellect is large and abnormally prominent. It hangs out over the deep-set eyes like the minority juror on the average panel.

I cannot help contrasting this dazzling five-cent valentine with the delicate little poem in pale blue and Torchon lace which I received in the days of yore from the red-headed girl with the wart on her thumb. Ah! how little of genuine pleasure have fame and fortune to offer us compared with that of sitting behind the same school desk with the Bismarck blonde of the school and with her alternately masticating the same hunk of spruce gum.

I sometimes chew gum nowadays to see if it will bring back the old pleasant sensations, but it don't. The teacher is not watching me now. There is too little restraint, and the companion, too, who then assisted in operating the gum business, and used to spit on her slate with such elegance and abandon, and wipe it thoughtfully off with her apron, she too is gone. One summer day when the little birds were pouring forth their lay, and the little lambs were frisking on the green sward, and yanking their tails athwart the ambient air, she lit out for the great untried West with a grasshopper sufferer. The fluff and bloom of existence for her too is gone. She bangs eternal punishment out of thirteen consecutive children near Ogallalla, Neb., and wears out her sweet girlish nature working up her husband's underclothes into a rag carpet. It seems tough, but such is life.

CARRYING REVOLVERS.

|The righteous war against the carrying of pistols is still going bravely on all over the country, and the mayors of the larger cities are making it red hot for every one who violates the law.

This is right. No man ever carried one that he did not intend to kill some one with it. If he does not intend to kill some one, why does he carry a deadly weapon? The result is that very often a man who, if he had gone unarmed as he ought to, would have been a respected citizen, becomes a caged murderer with a weeping, widowed wife and worse than orphaned children at home.

We used to feel at times as though here in this western country we were having a pretty lonesome time of it, never having killed anybody, and we began to think that in order to command respect we would have to start a private cemetery, so one time when we had a good opportunity we drew our pop on a man and shot at him.

He often writes to us now and tells us how healthy he is. Before we shot at him he used to have trouble with his digestion, and every spring he was so bilious that he didn't care whether he lived or not. How he weighs 200 and looks forward to a long and useful life.

Still the revolver is not always a health promoter. It is more deadly as a general rule for the owner than any one else. Half at least of the distressing accidents that occur as a result of carrying a pistol, are distressing mainly to the man who carries the weapon.

We sometimes think that if editors would set the example, and instead of going around armed to the teeth, would rely on the strength of their noble manhood and a white oak club, others would follow and discard the pistol. For a year we have been using a club, with the best results, and although the exercise has been pretty severe at times, the death rate has been considerably reduced, and many of our citizens have been spared to bless the community with their presence.

Let the press of the country take hold of this thing, and the day will come when a man may enter the editorial office as fearlessly as now he goes into the postoffice.

Nothing unnerves a man like going into a sanctum and finding fragments of an old acquaintance scattered over the velvet carpet, or ruthlessly jammed into a porcelain cuspidore.

THE AGITATED HEN.

|Dear reader, did you ever wrestle with a hen that had a wild, uncontrollable desire to incubate? Did you ever struggle on, day after day, trying to convince her that her mission was to furnish eggs for your table instead of hovering all day on a door knob, trying to hatch out a litter of front doors?

William II. Root, of this place, who has made the hen a study, both in her home life and while lying in the embrace of death, has struck upon an argument which the average hen will pay more attention to than any other he has discovered in his researches.

He says the modern hen ignores almost everything when she once gets the notion that she has received a call to incubate. You can deluge her with the garden hose, or throw old umbrellas at her, or change her nest, but that don't count with the firm and stubborn hen. You can take the eggs out of the nest and put a blooded bull-dog or a nest of new-laid bumblebees in place of them, and she will hover over them as assiduously as she did before.

William H. Root's hen had shown some signs of this mania, so he took out the eggs and let her try her incubate on a horse rake awhile, just so she could kind of taper off gradual and not have her mind shattered. Then he tried her at hatching out four-tined forks, and at last her taste got so vitiated that she took the contract to furnish the country with bustles by hatching out an old hoop skirt that had gone to seed.

Mr. Boot then made an experiment. We were one of a board of scientists who assisted in the consultation. The owner of the hen got a strip of red flannel and tied it around her tail.

The hen seemed annoyed as soon as she discovered it, No hen cares to have a sash hung on her system that doesn't match her complexion. A seal-brown hen with a red flannel polonaise don't seem to harmonize, and she is aware of it just as much as anybody is.

That hen seemed to have thought of something all at once that had escaped her mind before, and so she went away.

She stepped about nine feet at a lick on the start and gained time as she proceeded. When she bumped her nose against the corner of the stable she changed her mind about her direction. She altered her course a little, but continued her rapid style of movement.

Her eyes began to look wild. She seemed to be losing her reason. She got so pretty soon that she did'nt recognize the faces of her friends. She passed Mr. Root without being able to distinguish him from a total stranger.

These peculiar movements were kept up during the entire afternoon, till the hen got so fatigued that she crawled into a length of old stovepipe, and the committee retired to prepare a report.

It is the opinion of the press that this is a triumph of genius in hen culture. It is not severe, though linn, in its treatment and while it of course annoys and unmans the hen temporarily, it is salutary in its results, and at the same time it furnishes a pleasant little matinee for the spectators. We say to those upon whose hands time hangs heavily these long-days, that there is nothing that soothes the ruffled mind and fills the soul with a glad thrill of pleasure like the erratic movements of a decorated hen. It may not be a high order of enjoyment, but it affords a great deal of laugh to the superficial foot to those who are not very accomplished, and who laugh at things and then consider its propriety afterward.

A FRONTIER INCIDENT.

|Calamity is the name of a man who lives in the gold camp of Cummins City. He has another name, but nobody seems to know what it is. It has been torn off the wrapper some way, and so the boys call him Calamity.

He is a man of singular mind and construction. The most noticeable feature about Calamity is his superstitious dread of muscular activity. Some people will not tackle any kind of business enterprise on Friday. Calamity is even more the victim of this vague superstition, and has a dread of beginning work on any day of the week, for fear that some disaster may befall him.

Last spring he had a little domestic trouble, and his wife made complaints that Calamity had worn out an old long-handled shovel on her, trying to convince her about some abstruse theory of his.

The testimony seemed rather against Calamity, and the miners told him that as soon as they got over the rush a little and had the leisure they would have to hang him.

They hoped he would take advantage of the hurry of business and go away, because they didn't want to hang him so early in the season. But Calamity didn't go away. He stayed because it was easier to stay than it was to go. He did not, of course, pine for the notoriety of being the first man hung in the young camp, but rather than pull up stakes and move away from a place where there were so many pleasant associations, he concluded to stay and meet death calmly in whatever form he might come.

One evening, after the work of the day was done and the boys had eaten their suppers, one of them suggested that it would be a good time to hang Calamity. So they got things in shape and went down to the Big Laramie bridge.

Calamity was with them. They got things ready for the exercise to begin, and then asked the victim if he had anything to say. He loosened the rope around his neck a little with one hand, so that he could speak with more freedom, and holding his pantaloons on with the other, said:

"Gentlemen of the convention, I call you to witness that this public demonstration toward me is entirely unsought on my part. I have never courted notoriety.

"Plugging along in comparative obscurity is good enough for me. This is the first time I have ever addressed an audience. That is why I am embarrassed and ill at ease.

"You have brought me here to hang me because I seem harsh and severe with my wife. You have entered the hallowed presence of my home life and assumed the prerogative of subverting my household discipline.

"It is well. I do not care to live, so long as my authority is questioned. You have already changed my submissive wife to an arrogant and self-reliant woman.

"Yesterday I told her to go out and grease the wagon, and she straightened up to her full height and told me to grease it myself.

"I have always been kind and thoughtful to her. When she had to go up in the gulch in the winter after firewood, my coat shielded her from the storm while I sat in the cabin through the long hours. I could name other instances of unselfishness on my part, but I will not take up your time.

"She uses my smoking tobacco, and kicks my vertebræ into my hat on the most unlooked-for occasions. She does not love me any more, and life to me is only a hollow mockery.

"Death, with its wide waste of eternal calm, and its shoreless sea of rest, is a glad relief to me. I go, but I leave in your midst a skittish and able-bodied widow who will make Rome howl. I bequeath her to this camp. She is yours, gentlemen. She is all I have to give, but in giving her to you, I feel that my untimely death will always be looked upon in this gulch as a dire calamity.

"The day will come when you will look back upon this awful night and wish that I was alive again; but it will be too late. I will be far away. My soul will be in the land where domestic infelicity and cold feet can never enter.

"Bury me at the foot of Vinegar Hill, where the sage hen and the fuzzy bumblebee may gambol o'er my lowly grave."

When Calamity had finished, an impromptu caucus was called, and when it was adjourned, Calamity went home to his cabin to surprise his wife. She hasn't fully recovered from the surprise as we go to press.

BANKRUPT SALE OF LITERARY GEMS.

OFFICE OF THE MORMAN BAZOO.

|Little boys who are required by their teacher to write compositions at school can save a great deal of unnecessary worry and anxiety by calling on the editor of this paper, and glancing over the holiday stock of second-hand poems and essays. Debating clubs and juvenile lyceums supplied at a large reduction. The following are a few selections, with price:

"Old Age," a poem written in red ink, price ten cents. "The Dog," blank verse, written on foolscap with a hard pencil, five cents. "Who will love me all the while?" a tale, price three cents per pound. "Hold me in your clean, white arms," song and dance, by the author of "Beautiful Snow," price very reasonable; it must be sold. "She ain't no longer mine, nor I ain't hern," or the sad story of two sundered hearts; spruce gum and licorice taken in exchange for this piece. "God: His attributes and peculiarities," will be sold at a cent and a half per pound, or traded for a tin dipper for the office. Give us a call before purchasing elsewhere.

The stock on hand must be disposed of, in order to give place to the new stock of odes and sonnets on spring, and contributions on the "the violet" and the "skipful lamb."

HINTS ON LETTER-WRITING.

|Neat and beautiful penmanship is very desirable in business correspondence, but it is most important that you should not spell God with a little g or codfish with a k. Ornamental penmanship is good, but it will not take the cuss off if you don't know how to spell. Read your letter over carefully after you have written it, if you can; if not send it with an apology about the rush of business. In ordering goods, state whether you will remit soon or whether the account should be placed in the refrigerator.

SUDDEN FAME.

|A man works twenty years to become known as a scholar, a newspaper man and a gentleman, while the illiterate murderer springs into immediate notoriety in a day, and the widow of his victim cannot even get her life insurance. These things are what make people misanthropic and tenacious of their belief in a hell.

THE ENGLISH JOKE.

|The average English joke has its peculiarities. A sort of mellow distance. A kind of chastened reluctance. A coy and timid, yet trusting, though evanescent intangibility which softly lingers in the untroubled air, and lulls the tired senses to dreamy rest, like the subdued murmur of a hoarse jackass about nine miles up the gulch.

He must be a hardened wretch, indeed, who has not felt his bosom heave and the scalding tear steal down his furrowed cheek after he has read an English joke. There can be no hope for the man who has not been touched by the gentle, pleading, yet all potent sadness embodied in the humorous paragraph of the true Englishman.

End of Project Gutenberg's Bill Nye's Chestnuts Old and New, by Bill Nye