Chapter II: Part 2

|THE attention of the Rocky Mountain Detective Association is respectfully called to a large bay cow, who is hanging around this place under an assumed name. She has no visible means of support, and has been seen trying to catch the combination to the safes of several of our business men here. She has also stolen into our lot several times and eaten two or three lengths of stovepipe that we neglected to lock up.

PRESERVING EGGS.

|THE Scientific American gives this as an excellent mode of preserving eggs: "Take fresh, ones, put a dozen or more into a small willow basket, and immerse this for five seconds in boiling water, containing about five pounds of common brown sugar per gallon, then pack, when cool, small ends down, in an intimate mixture of one part of finely powdered charcoal and two of dry bran. In this way they will last six months or more. The scalding water causes the formation of a thin skin of hard albumen near the inner surface of the shell, and the sugar of syrup closes all the pores."

The Scientific American neglects, however, to add that when you open them six months after they were picked and preserved, the safest way is to open them out in the alley with a revolver, at sixteen paces. When you have succeeded in opening one, you can jump on a fleet horse and get out of the country before the nut brown flavor catches up with you.

HUMAN' NATURE ON THE HALF-SHELL.

|I AM up here in River Falls, Wisconsin, and patiently waiting for the snow-banks to wilt away and gentle spring to come again. Gentle spring, as I go to press, hath not yet loomed up. Nothing in fact hath loomed up, as yet, save the great Dakota boom. Everybody, from the servant girl with the symphony in smut on her face and the boundless waste of freckles athwart her nose, up to the normal school graduate, with enough knowledge to start a grist mill for the gods, has "a claim" in the promised land, the great wild goose orchard and tadpole aquarium of the new Northwest.

The honest farmer deserts his farm, around which clusters a thousand memories of the past, and buckling on his web feet, he flees to the frog ponds of the great northern watershed, to make a "tree claim," and be happy.

Such is life. We battle on bravely for years, cutting out white-oak grubs, and squashing army worms on a shingle, in order that we may dwell beneath our own vine and plum tree, and then we sell and take wings toward a wild, unknown country, where land is dirt cheap, where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest.

That is where we get left, if I may be allowed an Americanism, or whatever it is. We are never at rest. The more we emigrate the more worthless, unsatisfied and trifling we become. I have seen the same family go through Laramie City six times because they knew not of contentment. The first time they went west in a Pullman car "for their health." The husband rashly told a sad-eyed man that he lied, and in a little while the sun was obscured by loose teeth and hair. The ground was torn up and vegetation was killed where the discussion was held.

Then the family went home to Toledo. They went in a day coach and said a Pullman car was full of malaria and death. Their relatives made sport of them and lifted up their yawp and yawped at them insomuch that the yawpness thereof was as the town caucus for might. Then the tourists on the following spring packed up two pillows, and a pink comforter, and a change of raiment, and gat them onto the emigrant train and journeyed into the land which is called Arizona, where the tarantula climbeth up on the innerside of the pantaloon and tickleth the limb of the pilgrim as he journeyeth, and behold he getteth in his work, and the leg of that man is greater than it was aforetime, even like unto the leg of a piano.

A FRIGID ROUTE.

|THERE'S no doubt but that the Fort Collins route to the North Park, is a good, practicable route, but the only man who has started out over it this spring fetched up in the New Jerusalem.

The trouble with that line of travel is, that the temperature is too short. The summer on the Fort Collins route is noted mainly for its brevity. It lasts about as long as an ordinary eclipse of the sun.

The man who undertook to go over the road this spring on snow shoes, with a load consisting of ten cents' worth of fine cut tobacco, has not been heard from yet at either end of the line, and he is supposed to have perished, or else he is still in search of an open polar sea.

It is hoped that dog days will bring him to the surface, but if the winter comes on as early this fall as there are grave reasons to fear, a man couldn't get over the divide in the short space of time which will intervene between Decoration day and Christmas.

We hate to discourage people who have an idea of going over the Fort Collins road to North Park, but would suggest that preparations be made in advance for about five hundred St. Bernard dogs and a large supply of arctic whisky, to be placed on file where it can be got at without a moment's delay.

TOO CONTIGUOUS.

|THERE is a firm on Coyote creek, in New Jersey, that would like to advertise in _The Boomerang_, and the members of the firm are evidently good square men, although they are not large. They lack about four feet in stature of being large enough to come within the range of our vision.

They have got more pure gall to the superficial foot than anybody we ever heard of. It seems that the house has a lot of vermifuge to feed plants, and a bedbug tonic that it wants to bring before the public, and it wants us to devote a quarter of a column every day to the merits of these bug and worm discouragers, and then take our pay out of tickets in the drawing of a brindle dog next spring.

We might as well come right out end state that we are not publishing this paper for our health, nor because we like to loll around in luxury all day in the voluptuous office of the staff. We have mercenary motives, and we can't work off wheezy parlor organs and patent corn plasters and threshing machines very well. We desire the scads. We can use them in our business, and we are gathering them in just as fast as we can. At the present time we are pretty well supplied with rectangular churns and stem-winding mouse traps. We do not need them, It takes too much time to hypothecate them.

In closing, we will add, that New Jersey people will not be charged much more for advertising space than Wyoming people. We have made special rates so that we can give the patrons of the East almost as good terms as our home advertisers.

THE AMENDE HONORABLE.

|IT is rather interesting to watch the manner by which old customs have been slightly changed and handed down from age to age. Peculiarities of old traditions still linger among us, and are forked over to posterity like a wappy-jawed teapot or a long-time mortgage.. No one can explain it, but the fact still remains patent that some of the oddities of our ancestors continue to appear from time to time, clothed in the changing costumes of the prevailing fashion.

Along with these choice antiquities, and carrying the nut-brown flavor of the dead and relentless years, comes the amende honorable. From the original amende in which the offender appeared in public clothed only in a cotton-flannel shirt, and with a rope about his neck as an evidence a formal recantation, down to this day when (sometimes) the pale editor, in a stickful of type, admits that "his informant was in error," the amende honorable has marched along with the easy tread of time. The blue-eyed moulder of public opinion, with one suspender hanging down at his side, and writing on a sheet of news-copy paper, has a more extensive costume, perhaps, than the old-time offender who bowed in the dust in the midst of the great populace, and with a halter under his ear admitted his offense, but he does not feel any more cheerful over it.

I have been called upon several times to make the amende honorable, and I admit that it is not an occasion of mirth and merriment. People who come into the editorial office to invest in a retraction are generally very healthy, and have a stiff, reserved manner that no cheerfulness of hospitality can soften..

I remember of an accident of this kind which occurred last summer in my office, while I was writing something scathing. A large map with an air of profound perspiration about him, and a plaid flannel shirt, stepped into the middle of the room, and breathed in the air that I was not using. He said he would give me four minutes in which to retract, and pulled out a watch by which to ascertain the exact time.

I asked him if he would not allow me a moment or two to go over to the telegraph office and to wire my parents of my awful death. He said I could walk out of that door when I walked over his dead body. Then I waited a long time, until he told me my time was up, and asked what I was waiting for. I told him I was waiting for him to die, so that I could walk over his dead body. How could I walk over a corpse until life was extinct?

He stood and looked at me first in astonishment, afterward in pity. Finally tears welled up in his eyes, and plowed their way down his brown and grimy face. Then he said that I need not fear him. "You are safe," said he. "A youth who is so patient and so cheerful as you are--who would wait for a healthy man to die so that you could meander over his pulseless remnants, ought not to die a violent death. A soft-eyed seraph like you, who is no more conversant with the ways of this world than that, ought to be put in a glass vial of alcohol and preserved. I came up here to kill you and throw you into the rain-water barrel, but now that I know what a patient disposition you have, I shudder to think of the crime I was about to commit."

JOAQUIN AND JUNIATA.

|JOAQUIN MILLER has just published a new book called "The Shadows of Shasta." It is based on the Hiawatha, Blue Juniata romance, which the average poet seems competent to yank loose from the history of the sore-eyed savage at all times.

Whenever a dead-beat poet strikes bedrock and don't have shekels enough to buy a bowl of soup, he writes an inspired ode to the unfettered horse-thief of the west.

It is all right so far as we know. If the poet will wear out the smoke-tanned child of the forest writing poetry about him, and then if the child of the forest will rise up in his death struggle and mash the never-dying soul out of the white-livered poet, everything will be O.K., and we will pay the funeral expenses.

If it could be so arranged that the poet and the bright Alfarita bug-eater and the bilious wild-eyed bard of the backwoods could be shut up in a corral for six weeks together, with nothing to eat but each other, it would be a big thing for humanity. We said once that we wouldn't dictate to this administration, but let it flicker along alone. We just throw out the above as a suggestion, however, hoping that it will not be ignored.

SOME VAGUE THOUGHTS.

|SPRING, gentle, touchful, tuneful, breezeful, soothful spring is here. It has not been here more than twenty minutes, and my arctics stand where I can reach them in case it should change its mind.

The bobolink sits on the basswood vines, and the thrush in the gooseberry tree is as melodious as a hired man. The robin is building his nest--or rather her nest, I should say, perhaps--in the boughs of the old willow that was last year busted by thunder--I beg your pardon--by lightning, I should say. The speckled calf dines teat-a-teat with his mother, and strawberries are like a baldheaded man's brow--they come high, but we can't get along without them.

I never was more tickled to meet gentle spring than I am now. It stirs up my drug-soaked remains, and warms the genial current of life considerably. I frolicked around in the grass this afternoon and filled my pockets full of 1000-legged worms, and other little mementoes of the season. The little hare-foot boy now comes forth and walks with a cautious tread at first, like a blind horse; but toward the golden autumn the backs of his feet will look like a warty toad, and there will be big cracks in them, and one toe will be wrapped up in part of a bed quilt, and he will show it with pride to crowded houses.

Last night I lay awake for several hours thinking about Mr. Sherrod and how long we had been separated, and I was wondering how many weary days would have to elapse before we would again look into each other's eyes and hold each other by the hand, when the loud and violent concussion of a revolver shot near West Main street and Cascade avenue rent the sable robe of night. I rose and lit the gas to see if I had been hit. Then I examined my pockets to see if I had been robbed of my led pencil and season pass. I found that I had not.

This morning I learned that a young doctor, who had been watching his own house from a distance during the evening, had discovered that, taking advantage of the husband's absence, a blonde dry goods clerk had called to see the crooked but lonely wife. The doctor waited until the young man had been in the house long enough to get pretty well acquainted, and then he went in himself to see that the youth was making himself perfectly comfortable.

There was a wild dash toward the window, made by a blonde man with his pantaloons in his hand, the spatter of a bullet in the wall over the young man's head and then all was still for a moment save the low sob of a woman with her head covered up by the bed clothes. Then the two men clinched and the doctor injected the barrel of a thirty-two self-cocker up the bridge of the young man's nose, knocked him under the wash stand, yanked him out by the hem of his garment and jarred him into the coal bucket, kicked him up on a corner bracket and then swept the quivering ruins into the street with a stub-broom. He then lit the chandelier and told his sobbing wife that she wasn't just the temperament for him and he was afraid that their paths might diverge. He didn't care much for company and society while she seemed to yearn for such things constantly. He came right out and admitted that he was of a nervous temperament and quick tempered. He loved her, but he had such an irritable, fiery disposition that he guessed he would have to excuse her; so he escorted her out to the gate and told her where the best hotel was, came in, drove out the cat, blew out the light and retired.

Some men seem almost like brutes in their treatment of their wives. They come home at some eccentric hour of the night, and because they have to sleep on the lounge, they get mad and try to shoot holes in the lambrequins, and look at their wives in a harsh, rude tone of voice. I tell you it's tough.

THE YOUMORIST.

|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 purple-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 its 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 youmorous.

"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 nailing 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 flatchested, 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."

MY CABINET.

|I HAVE made a small collection of wild, western things during the past seven years, and have put them together, hoping some day, when I get feeble, to travel with the aggregation and erect a large monument of kopecks for my executors, administrators and assigns forever.

Beginning with the skull of old Hi-lo-Jack-and-the-game, a Sioux brave, the collection takes in my wonderful bird, known as the Walk-up-the-creek, and another _vara avis_, with carnivorous bill and web feet, which has astonished everyone except the taxidermist and myself. An old grizzly bear hunter--who has plowed corn all his life and don't know a coyote from a Maverick steer--looked at it last fall and pronounced it a "kingfisher," said he had killed one like it a year ago. Then I knew that he was a pilgrim and a stranger, and that he had bought his buckskin coat and bead-trimmed moccasins at Niagara Falls, for the bird is constructed of an eagle's head, a canvas back duck's bust and feet, with the balance sage hen and baled hay.

Last fall I desired to add to my rare collection a large hornet's nest. I had an embalmed tarantula and her porcelain-lined nest, and I desired to add to these the gray and airy home of the hornet. I procured one of the large size after cold weather and hung it in my cabinet by a string. I forgot about it until this spring. When warm weather came, something reminded me of it. I think it was a hornet. He jogged my memory in some way and called my attention to it. Memory is not located where I thought it was. It seemed as though whenever he touched me he awakened a memory--a warm memory with a red place all around it.

Then some more hornets came and began to rake up old personalities. I remember that one of them lit on my upper lip. He thought it was a rosebud. When he went away it looked like a gladiola bulb. I wrapped a wet sheet around it to take out the warmth and reduce the swelling so that I could go through the folding doors and tell my wife about it.

Hornets lit ah over me and walked around on my person. I did not dare to scrape them off because they are so sensitive. You have to be very guarded in your conduct toward a hornet.

I remember once while I was watching the busy little hornet gathering honey and June bugs from the bosom of a rose, years ago, I stirred him up with a club, more as a practical joke than anything else, and he came and lit in my sunny hair--that was when I wore my own hair and he walked around through my gleaming tresses quite awhile, making tracks as large as a watermelon all over my head. If he hadn't run out of tracks my head would have looked like a load of summer squashes. I remember I had to thump my head against the smoke-house in order to smash him, and I had to comb him out with a fine comb, and wear a waste-paper basket two weeks for a hat.

Much has been said of the hornet, but he has an odd, quaint way after all, that is forever new.

HEALTH FOOD.

|WHILE trying to reconstruct a telescoped spine and put some new copper rivets in the lumbar vertebrae, this spring, I have had occasion to thoroughly investigate the subject of so-called health food, such as gruels, beef tea inundations, toasts, oat meal mush, bran mash, soups, condition powders, graham gem, ground feed, pepsin, laudable mush, and other hen feed usually poked into the invalid who is too weak to defend himself.

Of course it stands to reason that the reluctant and fluttering spirit may not be won back to earth, and joy once more beam in the leaden eye unless due care be taken relative to the food by means of which nature may be made to assert herself.

I do not care to say to the world through the columns of the Free Press, that we may woo from eternity the trembling life with pie. Welsh rabbit and other wild game will not do at first. But I think I am speaking the sentiments of a large and emaciated constituency when I say, that there is getting to be a strong feeling against oat meal submerged in milk and in favor of strawberry short cake.

I almost ate myself into an early grave in April by flying into the face of Providence and demoralizing old Gastric with oat meal. I ate oat meal two weeks, and at the end of that time my friends were telegraphed for, but before it was too late, I threw off the shackles that bound me. With a desperation born of a terrible apprehension, I rose and shook off the fatal oat meal habit and began to eat beefsteak. At first life hung trembling in the balance and there was no change in the quotations of beef, but later on there was a slight, delicate bloom on the wan cheek, and range cattle that had barely escaped a long, severe winter on the plains, began to apprehend a new danger and to seek the secluded canyons of the inaccessible mountains.

I often thought while I was eating health food and waiting for death, how the doctor and other invited guests at the post mortem would start back in amazement to find the remnants of an eminent man filled with bran!

Through all the painful hours of the long, long night and the eventless day, while the mad throng rushed onward like a great river toward eternity's ocean, this thought was uppermost in my mind. I tried to get the physician to promise that he would not expose me, and show the world what a hollow mockery I had been, and how I had deceived my best friends. I told him the whole truth, and asked him to spare my family the humiliation of knowing that though I might have led a blameless life, my sunny exterior was only a thin covering for bran and shorts and middlings, cracked wheat and pearl barley.

I dreamed last night of being in a large city where the streets were paved with dry toast, and the buildings were roofed with toast, and the soil was bran and oat meal, and the water was beef tea and gruel. All at once it came over me that I had solved the great mystery of death, and had been consigned to a place of eternal punishment. The thought was horrible! A million eternities in a city built of dry toast and oat meal! A home for never-ending cycles of ages, where the principal hotel and the post-office building and the opera house were all built of toast, and the fire department squirted gruel at the devouring element forever!

It was only a dream, but it has made me more thoughtful, and people notice that I am not so giddy as I was.

A NEW POET.

|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. Hone 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.

How 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 pulling 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 effigy 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, he 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.

A WORD IN SELF-DEFENSE.

|IT might be well in closing to say a word in defense of myself.

The varied and uniformly erroneous notions expressed recently as to my plans for the future, naturally call for some kind of an expression on this point over my own signature. In the first place, it devolves upon me to regain my health in full if it takes fourteen years. I shall not, therefore, "publish a book,"

"prepare an youmorous lecture,"

"visit Florida,"

"probate the estate of Lydia E. Pinkham, deceased," nor make any other grand break till I have once more the old vigor and elasticity, and gurgling laugh of other days.

In the meantime, let it be remembered that my home is in Laramie City, and that unless the common council pass an ordinance against it, I shall return in July if I can make the trip between snow storms, and evade the peculiarities of a tardy and reluctant spring. Bill Nye.

PINES FOE HIS OLD HOME

|TOM FAGAN, of this city, has a wild horse that don't seem to take to the rush and hurry and turmoil of a metropolis. He has been so accustomed to the glad, free air of the plains and mountains that the hampered and false life of a throbbing city, with its myriad industries, makes him nervous and unhappy. He sighs for the boundless prairie and the pure breath of the lifegiving mountain atmosphere. So taciturn is he in fact, and so cursed by homesickness and weariness of an artificial and unnatural horse society here in Laramie, that he refuses to eat anything and is gradually pining away. Sometimes he takes a light lunch out of Mr. Fagan's arm, but for days and days he utterly loathes food. He also loathes those who try to go into the stable and fondle him. He isn't apparently very much on the fondle. He don't yearn for human society, but seems to want to be by himself and think it over.

The wild horse in stories soon learns to love his master and stay by him and carry him through flood or fire, and generally knows more than the Cyclopedia Brittanica; but this horse is not the historical horse that they put into wild Arabian falsehoods. He is just a plain, unassuming wild horse of Wyoming descent, whose pedigree is slightly clouded, and who is sensitive on the question of his ancestry. All he wants is just to be let alone, and most everybody has decided that he is right. They came do that conclusion after they had soaked their persons in arnica and glued themselves together with poultices.

Perhaps, after a while, he will conclude to eat hay and grow up with the country, but now he sighs for his native bunch-grass and the buffalo wallow wherein he has heretofore made his lair. We don't wonder much, though, that a horse who has lived in the country should be a little rattled here when he finds the electric light, and bicycles, and lawn mowers, and Uncle Tom's Cabin troupes, and baled hay at $20 per ton. It makes him as wild and skittish as it does an eighteen-year-old girl the first time she comes into town, and for the first time is met by the blare of trumpets, and the oriental wealth of the circus with its deformed camels and uniformed tramps driving its miles of cages with no animals in them. The great natural world and the giddy maelstrom of seething, perspiring humanity, peculiar to the city world, are two separate and distinct existences.

ONE TOUCH OF NATURE.

|UP in Polk county, Wisconsin, 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 that 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 its 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 welcome 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 of 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 PUT UP A STOVE-PIPE.

|PUTTING up stove-pipe is easy enough, if you only go at it right. In the morning, breakfast on some light, nutritious diet, and drink two cups of hot coffee; after which put on a suit of old clothes--or new ones, if you can get them on time--put on an old pair of buckskin gloves, and, when everything is ripe for the fatal blow, go and get a good hardware man who understands his business. If this rule be strictly adhered to, the gorgeous eighteen-karat-stem-winding profanity of the present day may be very largely diminished, and the world made better.

FUN OF BEING A PUBLISHER.

|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. the 2, 1881.

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 till he forgets that breakfast is ready, and follows the thrilling career of Algonquin and his own fair-haired Sciataca 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 Sciataca, 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 Sciataca'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 bursts 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 the 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 post-office 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.

LINGERIE.

|A LADY'S underwear is politely spoken of as "lingerie," but the great horrid man crawls into his decrepit last year's undershirt every Monday morning, and swears because his new underclothes are so "lingerie" about making their appearance.

FRUIT.

|A CLASS of croakers that one meets with everywhere, have steadily maintained that fruit cannot be raised in this Territory. In conversation with a small boy yesterday, we learned that this is not true. It is very simple and easy to do, even in this rigorous climate. He showed us how it is done. He has a small and delicately constructed harpoon with a tail to it--the apparatus attached to a long string. He goes into the nearest market, and while the clerk is cutting out some choice steaks for the man with the store teeth, the boy throws his harpoon and hauls in on the string. In this way he raises all kinds of fruit, not only for his own use, but he has some to sell.

He showed us some that he raised. It was as good as any of the fruit that we buy here, only that there was a little hole on one side, but that don't hurt the fruit for immediate use. He "puts some down," but don't can or dry any. He says that he applies his where he feels the worst. When he feels as though a Greening or a Bellflower would help him, he goes out and picks it. He showed us a string with a grappling hook attached, on which he had raised a bushel of assorted fruit this fall, and it wasn't a very good string, either.

THE BONE OF CONTENTION.

|TWO self-accused humorists of Ohio have had a fight over the authorship of the facetious phenomenon and laugh-jerking success, "Who ever saw a tree box?" The bone of contention between these two gigantic minds, evidently, is not their funny-bone.

CONGRATULATORY.

|I CANNOT close this letter without writing my congratulations to Mr. Raymond, of _Tribune_, upon the position of Notary Public, which he has secured. True merit cannot long go unrewarded. I, too, am a Notary Public. So is Patterson of the Georgetown _Miner_. And yet we were all once poor boys, unknown and unrecognized. Patterson was the son of a wealthy editor in Michigan, who wished "Sniktau" to be a minister of the everlasting gospel, but "Snik." knew that he was destined to enter upon a wider and more important field. He devoted himself to the study of profanity in all its various branches, until now he can swear more men, and do a bigger "so-help-me-God" business than any other go-as-you-please affidavit man in Colorado.

I have held my office through a part of the administration of Grant, and all of the Hayes administration, so far, and all through the countless political changes of the territorial administration. I state this with a pardonable pride. It shows it was not the result of political influence or party, but was the natural outgrowth of official rectitude and just dealing toward all. When a man comes before me to make affidavit or to acknowledge a deed, I recognize no party, no friend. They are all served alike and charged alike.

I was appointed to this high official position under the administration of Governor Thayer. At that time C. O. D. French was secretary. I had to lubricate the wheels of government before I could catch on, as it were. C. O. D. French wanted $5. I sent it to him. I wrote him that when the people seemed determined to foist upon me the high official honor of Notary Public, the paltry sum of $5 should not stand in the way. I have held the position ever since. Political enemies have endeavored to tear to pieces my record, both officially and socially, but through evil and good report, I have still held it.

The nation to-day looks to her notaries public for her crowning glory and successful future. In their hands rest the might and the grandeur and the glory which, like a halo, in the years to come, will encircle the brow of Columbia. I feel the responsibility that rests upon me, and I tremble with the mighty weight of weal or woe for a great nation which hangs upon my every official act. I presume Mr. Raymond feels the same way. He ought, certainly, for the eyes of a great republic watch us with feverish anxiety. It is an awful position to be placed in. Let those who tread the lower walks of life envy not the brain-and-nerve-destroying position of the notary public, whose every movement is portentous, and great with its burden of good or ill for nations unborn. That is what is making an old man of me before my time, and sprinkling my strawberry blonde hair with gray.

THE AGONY IS OVER.

|IT has occurred to us that the destruction of timber near the Continental Divide, in Colorado, which is also called, "The Backbone of the Continent," will naturally be a severe blow to the lumber region of Colorado.

We began studying on this joke last summer, and have wrestled prayerfully with it ever since, with the above result. Do not think, O gay, lighthearted reader, that these jokes are spontaneous, and that mirth is pumped out of the recesses of the editor's brain as a grocer pumps coal oil out of a tin tank. They come with fasting and sadness, and vexation of spirit, and groanings that cannot be uttered, and weeping and gnashing of teeth. Now that we are over this joke safely, no doubt that we shall begin to flesh up again.

OSTRICH CAVALRY.

|THE question of mounting the United States cavalry upon ostriches, as a matter of economy, is being agitated on the strength of their easy propagation in Arizona and New Mexico. There being now one hundred and seventeen of these birds in that region, the result of the increase from nine of them imported several years ago. However successful ostrich farming may be in and of itself, we cannot speak too highly of the feasibility of using the bird for cavalry purposes. It is an established fact that the ostrich is very swift and will live for days without food, and be verier viceable all the time.

A detachment of ostrich cavalry could light out across the enemy's country like the wind, and easily distance an equal force mounted upon horses, and after several days' march, instead of a weary, worn, and jaded-out lot of horses, there would be a flock of ostriches, hungry but in good spirits, and the quartermasters could issue some empty bottles, and some sardine boxes, and some government socks, and an old blue overcoat or two, and the irons from an old ambulance, to each bird; and at evening, while the white tents were glimmering in the twilight, the birds would lie in a little knot chewing their cud constantly, and snoring in a subdued way that would shake the earth for miles around.

One great difficulty would be to keep a sufficient guard around the arms and ammunition to prevent the cavalry from eating them up. Think of a half dozen ostriches breaking into an inclosure while the guard was asleep, or off duty, and devouring fifteen or twenty rounds of ammunition in one night, or stealing into the place where the artillery was encamped, and filling themselves up with shells and round shot, and Greek fire and gatling guns.

AN ELECTRIC BELT.

|A CHEYENNE man who was once mildly struck by lightning, calls it an "electric belt."

THE ANNUAL WAIL