Chapter FOUR: Times (1)

|Henry Ward Beeeher let her weep till her surcharged orbs had ceased to give down, and then he brought out some valley tan that he had in the house for medicinal purposes and comforted her.

Then they got acquainted.

They sat in the gloaming, and Henry Ward Beecher turned the gas partly off, and held the hand of Oleander, and told her that Obejoyful had been a humorist on an Ohio paper, and otherwise destroyed the prospects of the absent lover in the eyes of Miss McTodd.

They looked into each other's eyes and knew that they were solid pards from that moment. Shortly afterward they rode away to the nearest justice of the peace, about 223 miles off, and were married.

Then they went home.

Obejoyful was there. He was also heeled; but H. W. B. got the drop on him. Then Obejoyful seemed filled with disgust, and he seemed oppressed and filled with nameless forebodings. He seemed to lose faith in mankind, also to some extent in womankind. He seemed to think that love wasn't exactly what it was represented to him by the agent. It didn't seem to be full weight, and there wasn't a prize in each and every package, as he had been led to suppose.

He then presented a bill to Henry Ward Beecher for $49.53, freight charges on Oleander McTodd; but H. W. B. swore with a great, blood-curdling, three-cornered oath that he would not pay it.

That night Obejoyful Jenkins procured some poison, and stole away to a quiet place, and wrote a note to tell his friends, when they found his body, why he had taken his own life. Then he commended his soul to Providence, poured out a glass of whisky, thought he would try it without the poison first. The draught revived him. He changed his mind and put the poison in Henry Ward Beecher's whisky, stole H. W. B.'s narrow-gauge mule Boomerang, and lit out for the North Park.

This is a true story. If the gentle reader has doubts about it I will produce the mule Boomerang, which is now in my possession and in a good state of preservation.

Hereafter, in order to save time and annoyance to my readers, true stories over my signature will be marked with a star, thus, *.

THE AUTOMATIC LIAR

|Laramie City, August 23.--He came in gently but firmly, and felt in his pocket for something.

Finally he found what looked a little like an egg-beater and some like a new kind of speed indicator.

"I want to show you," he said kindly, "an office-dial to hang on your door, so that when you are away your clients will know where you are, and when you will return. For instance, by turning the thumb-screw, the dial will show:

"At court,

"At dinner,

"At supper,

"At bank,

"At post-office, etc., etc., etc., with the time you will return. There are sixty-four combinations which cover all cases of this kind necessary for the man of business, and it is no doubt the greatest achievement of mechanical ingenuity. Price, $ 1.50."

"No," said Mr. Biteoffmorethanhecouldchaw, "there are twenty-seven reasons why it would not be advisable for me to purchase your automatic bulletin. Firstly, I have but one client, and he can not read. He would only come and look at the indicator and kick it all to pieces and swear and go away. Secondly, your machine is incomplete, anyway. The inventor has signally failed to meet the popular want. It would only be an aggravation to the average attorney.

"I can think of a hundred things that ought to be added to a truthful indicator. Supposing that I have gone to the circus, or to a meeting of the vestry, or suppose I am drunk, or at a reunion of the Y. M. C. A., or out to eat a clove with a member of the bar, or at a camp meeting, or putting up the clothes-line at home? Or, going still further, suppose I am wringing out the clothes, or setting bread, or taking a bath, or wrestling with the delirium tremens, or toning down a rebellious corn, or putting Paris green on my squash bugs, or inspecting microscopically the homoeopathic fragment of ice that the kind-hearted ice man has prescribed for me?

"Or, going still further into detail, supposing that I am dead and cannot state with any degree of accuracy where I am or when I shall return, do you suppose that I would herald a glittering $1.50 lie to the world by saying that I was at the barber shop and would be back at 10:30?

"Do you think I would pay $1.50 for a machine to vicariously proclaim to the broad universe that I was at the bank, when I have no business with the bank?

"Do you suppose that I would advertise that I was at the post office when I was at the beer garden, or assert that I was at the court house, when, as a matter of fact, I was at that moment having a preparation of lemon-peel and other chemicals arranged for myself and another invalid in a cool retreat down town?

"No, sir! I spurn you and your cast-iron prevaricator, I promised my dying mother, who afterwards recovered, that I would never lie by machinery.

"If I cannot lie enough to keep up with the growing demand, I will resign like a man, and not call to my aid a cheap Jim Crow, hand-me-down-liar, costing $1.50 only.

"Always do right, and then you will never be put to shame.

"If you wish, you can leave the hall door ajar as you go out the main entrance."

Exeunt advance agent at upper left hand entrance, orchestra playing something soft and yielding.

SOME POSTOFFICE FIENDS.

|The official count shows that only two and one-half per cent, of those who go to the postoffice transact their business and then go away. The other ninety-seven and one-half per cent, do various things to cheer up the postmaster and make him earn his money and wish that he had died when he was teething. They also make it exceedingly interesting for the other two and one-half per cent. When I go to the postoffice there is always one man who meets me at the door and pours out a large rippling laugh into my face, flavored with old beer and the fragrances of a royal Havana cabbage-leaf cigar that he is sucking. If he cannot be present himself he is vicariously on deck.

He asks me if my circus was a financial success, and how my custard pie plants are doing, and then fills the sultry air with another gurgling laugh preserved in alcohol.

I like to smell a hearty laugh laden with second-hand whisky. It revives me and intoxicates me. Still I am trying not to become a helpless slave to the appetite for strong drink in this form. There are other forms of intemperance that are more seductive than this one.

There is also a boy who never had any mail, and whose relatives never had any mail, and they couldn't read it if they did, and if some one read it to them they couldn't answer it. He is always there, too.

When he sees me he hails me with a glad smile of recognition, and comes up to me and stands on my toes and is just as sociable and artless and trusting and alive with childish glee and incurable cussedness as he can be. He stirs me up with his elbows, and crawls through between my legs until the mail is open, and then he wedges himself in front of my box so that I can't get the key into it.

Some day when the janitor sweeps out the postoffice he will find a short suspender and a lock of brindle hair and a handful of large freckles, and he will wonder what it means.

It will be what I am going to leave of that boy for the coroner to operate on.

Then there are two boys who come to the box delivery to settle the difficulties that arise during the day. They fight long and hard, but a permanent peace is never declared. It is only temporary, and the next day the old feud is ripe again, and they fight it all over once more.

There is also an amusing party who cheerfully stands up against the boxes and reads his letters, and laughs when he finds something facetious, or swears when the letter don't suit him. He also announces to the bystanders who each letter is from, and seems to think the great throbbing world is standing with bated breath quivering with anxiety to know whether his sister in Arkansas has successfully acquired triplets this year or only twins.

This, however, is an error, for the great, throbbing world, with characteristic selfishness, don't care a brass-mounted continental one way or the other. One day this man got a letter with a mourning envelope, and I heaved a sigh of relief, for, thought I, he will now go away and be alone with his great grief. But he did not. He stood up manfully and controlled his emotions through it all; and when he got through he broke into the old silvery laugh.

It seems that his brother in Oregon had run out of yellow envelopes, and had filled the one with the black border unusually full of convulsive mirth.

What a world of bitter disappointment this is anyhow!

Then there is the woman who playfully stands at the general delivery window, and gleefully sticks her fangs out into the subsequent week, and skittishly chides the clerk because he doesn't get her a letter, and he good naturedly tells her as he has done daily for seven years, that he will write her one to-morrow.

Then she reluctantly goes home to get rested so that she can come again and stand there the next day.

Then comes the literary cuss, who takes a weekly paper from Vermont with a patent inside to it. He reads it with the purest unselfishness to me, and points out the fresh, new-laid jokes that one always finds in the enterprising paper with the patent digestion.

He also explains the jokes to me, so that I need not grope along through life in hopeless ignorance of what is going on all about me.

There is a woman, too, who comes to the window and lavishly buys a three-cent stamp, and runs out her tongue, and hangs it over the stamp clerk's shoulder, and lays the stamp back against the glottis and moistens it, and has to run her skinny finger down her turkey gobbler neck to rescue it, and then she pastes it on the upper left-hand corner of the envelope, and asks the clerk to be sure and see that it goes. She then thoughtfully tells him who it is to go to, and gives a short biography of the sendee.

There can be no doubt that some women are more capable of doing certain kinds of business than men are. All classes of business requiring careful and minute explanations and concise and exhaustive directions can be better attended to by this class of women.

They enter joyfully upon the task of shedding collateral information in a way that would appall a man, and when they confide in you, you know that they are not keeping anything back. You almost wish sometimes that they would keep back a little of it and not rob themselvss.

Still, perhaps it is better that this class of women is not trusted with any great amount of business, for life is so brief, so evanescent, and so transitory.

It is but a step from the cradle to the grave anyway, and if a man stands on one leg an hour, and then on the other an hour, listening to extensive information every time he sells a stamp, he will die with his ambitions unfruitioned.

AGRICULTURE AT AN ALTITUDE OF 7500 FEET.

|I herewith acknowledge the receipt of two bags of cane-seed from the Agricultural Department.

Mr. Le Duc is always thinking of me and evidently knew that I was yearning for some cane-seed. It will grow luxuriantly here on the spinal column of the American continent where winter lingers in the lap of spring till after the Fourth of July.

William says that this breed of sugar-cane "originated in Minnesota, and is claimed to have been the result of accidental hybridization."

I shall not allow anything of this kind myself if I can by the most tireless watchfulness avoid it. Accidental hybridization is what is demoralizing the sugar-cane of the whole country.

I shall plant this seed in drills two feet apart, mulching with rich top-dressing of retired gum boots and dead cats. I will then wait till the plant has germinated and appears above the surface, when I shall remove the boots and dead cats and rub the plants with a Turkish towel to promote a healthy circulation.

Then next fall while others who have sneered at me and called me a horny-handed buckwheater from the rural districts, are running up heavy bills for groceries, I will go out into my molasses orchard and pick a milk pan full of granulated sugar from my trees, or shell out enough maple sugar for breakfast at a slight cost and with the blessed consciousness that I did it all myself.

William is going to send me some more seeds that he thinks will do well in this tropical climate. If he could send me something that would be more hardy, like the early Swedish lemon-squeezer, or the mammoth custard-pie plant, or the Northern Spy cucumber tree, my reports to the department would be more cheerful than they are, but where plants have to wear their heavy California underclothes all through August they get discouraged and prefer to bloom in the sweet fields of Eden.

Last year I tried the hot-bed process, but it was not a signal success. This summer I shall use the hot-bed as an ice cream freezer. It wanted to act in that capacity last summer, but I had a freezer that did very well, so I foolishly used the hot-bed to assist the plants, although I know of several days in midsummer when my cabbage-plants had to get out of that hot-bed and run up and down the garden walk to keep their feet from freezing.

THE GENTLE YOUTH FROM LEADVILLE.

|In addition to the other attractions about the depot, the old museum of curiosities from the Rocky Mountains has been re-opened. I like to go down and listen to the remarks of the overland passenger relative to these articles. There are two stuffed coyotes chained to the door, one on each side, and it amuses me to see a solicitous parent nearly yank his little son to pieces for going so near these ferocious animals. The coyotes look very life-like, and show their teeth a good deal, but it breaks a man all up when he finds that their digestive apparatus has been replaced with sawdust and plaster of Paris.

After a coyote gets to padding himself out with baled hay and cotton so as to look plump, he loses his elasticity of spirits, and we cease to respect him. Sometimes a tourist asks if these coyotes are prairie dogs.

A few days ago a man from Michigan, who has been here two weeks and wears a large buckskin patch where it will do the most good, and who is very bitter in his remarks about "tenderfeet," was standing at the depot, when a young man, evidently from a theological seminary, came along from the train whistling, "What a friend we have in Jesus." He walked up to the Michigan man, who began to look fierce, and timidly asked if he would tell him all about the coyote.

The Michigan man, who never had seen a live coyote in his life, volunteered to tell him some of the finest decorated lies, with Venetian blinds and other trimmings to them, while the young man stood there in open-mouthed wonder, with daylight visible between his legs as high as the fifth rib. I never saw such a picture of rapt attention in my life. As he became more interested, the Michigan man warmed up to his work and lied to this guileless youth till the perspiration rolled down his face. As the train started out, the delegate to the Young Men's Christian Association asked the Michigan man for his address. "I want the address of some good earnest liar," he said, "one who can lie by the day, or by the job, and endure the strain. I want a man to enter the field for the championship of America. Any communication you may wish to make will reach me at Leadville, Colorado. I have been in the Rocky Mountains ever since I was three years old, and have lived for weeks with no other diet but coyote on toast and raw Michigan man." He waved his hand at the M. man, and said: "If I don't see you again, hello!" and he was gone.

How many such little episodes we experience on our journey to the tomb!

A SNIDE JOURNALIST.

|Recent occurrences here have seemed to absolutely demand that something be said relative to newspaper-men.

During my residence here I have been brought face to face with more fraud journalists than ever before, and I am forced to lift up my voice against it. I have met the ordinary-tramp who is pleased and happy if he be allowed to eat cold-grub and sleep beneath the twinkling stars, but the newspaper-tramp is meaner, more self assumed and has brighter prospects for perdition than all the rest. He stands out ahead of the rank and file of tramps as a kind of Major-General tramp, fearless and self reliant.

He feels the nobility of the profession of journalism, and indeed it is a calling of which its followers may well be proud, but the snide representative of the press is too proud. He puts on too many frills.

Perhaps I am too easily picked up in this manner, but I cannot help sympathizing with deserving newspaper men who lack many of the comforts of life. I have been there. I know what it is to battle with a cold world and wrestle with hunger. But now in the midst of prosperity, my heart goes out for these vagrants in such a way that just as I begin to get affluent, I find some subject for my charity, and I have to begin over again.

On Monday last a young man with a hopeful light in his eye, alighted from the eastern-bound train, and going into the Thornburg House, registered his name, at least we will play that it was his name, for no one else has since called in to claim it.

We will call him Brown as a matter of convenience. His front name, as I afterward learned, was Ward. I might say that, in putting this report together, another Ward has been heard from, but I leave that for the docile reader to do as he or she may see fit.

Mr. Brown then proceeded to get acquainted with the people of Laramie and be sociable. He was not so reticent as some prominent newspaper men are, but seemed to be the rollicking, jovial kind. He said that he was the travelling correspondent of the Salt Lake _Tribune_ and also represented the Louisville _Courier-Journal_.

I wondered at the time what in the name of all that was handsome, the _Courier-Journal_ wanted to pay a man and send him to the front for, with Laramie City as his objective point. Bye-and-bye he crossed my path and made himself known. Said he knew me by reputation, and then I began to get alarmed. I was afraid he was a detective. But he wasn't. I drew him out on the subject of Harry Watterson. He knew blank. Knew him well. Had slept with him. He and Hank had been drunk together several times.

Then I felt proud. He was an intimate friend of a great man, and sitting there talking with an unsophisticated youth like me just as naturally as life. It sounds like a book. I asked him up to my office, and made him sit in my best chair--the one with the four good legs--while I took the foundered one. I told him to make himself perfectly free with the luxuriant furniture of the office, and invited him to spit on the floor whenever it came handy. I told him that I knew great men didn't want to feel hampered while chewing tobacco, and that I wanted my guests to feel at ease.

He then took his knife, cut off a piece of tobacco, about the size of a paper weight, threw it back till it struck the gable-end of his mouth with a hollow thud, and proceeded to unroll the most gorgeous panorama of falsehoods that I ever listened to. Casually, while putting the fresco work on my floor, he took out a letter from Watterson, and showed it to me. Watterson writes about the same kind of a copper-plate hand that I do.

I wanted to take the letter and make a plaster cast of it, but Mr. Brown said Hank wouldn't like it. The letter went on in a free and easy way to joke Brown about looking too often on the maddening bowl, and then asked him to be a correspondent for the C. J.

The next day I came down town thinking about how easy it was for any one, by a straightforward, honest course, to rise in the world, and get acquainted with prominent men. Bye and bye I met the Sheriff. He asked me if I didn't want to go up to the jail and take a last look at my journalistic friend. I went up. Brown lay there in an easy position on an old blanket, in one of the cells.

The surroundings seemed to be in perfect harmony with the general appearance of Mr. Brown. He had taken off the large satin arrangement which served partly as a necktie, and partly to throw the public off its guard in relation to his shirt. The shirt was there, slightly disfigured, but still in the ring. It was the same shirt that he had started out in life with. He had outgrown it, and it looked feeble, but it was evidently determined to stay by Mr. Brown.

I looked at him and then broke into tears. Large $2.00 sobs convulsed my frame. I told him that he had basely imposed upon me, and led me to believe that he was a Republican, and now he had removed the mask as it were, and I could see that he was a Democrat. With these stone walls and iron grates, and that soiled shirt, I could no longer doubt.

I left him, resolving that hereafter I would not be betrayed by appearances. He will drift away into the mighty, surging mass of humanity, and we shall forget it. Perhaps, when the Governor of Maine holds a mass meeting and re-union at Augusta, he will be there. But he will drop out of my horizon like the memory of a red-headed girl, and I shall go on my way until some other newspaper man with a letter from Whitelaw Reid, or George Washington, or Noah, or some other prominent man, comes along, and then I shall, no doubt, open up to his view the same untold wealth of confidence and generous trust.

Those who are looking anxiously every mail for a copy of the Louisville _Courier-Journal_ or the Salt Lake _Tribune_, containing a long letter about their town, will be disappointed. They will never come. Through the long visita of years and down through the mellow softened atmosphere of the Sweet Bye and Bye I hear the low, sad refrain, and it is refraining, "Never More." Instead of the merry prattle of Mr. Brown amid the loud echo of his expectorations as they fall with a startling crash upon the marble floor of my office, I only hear the rattle of the cast iron "come-alongs" and the tearful "Never More."

HE WAS BLIND.

|While engaged the other day in writing a little ode to the liver pad, I heard a slight noise, and on looking toward the door I saw a boy with his hat in his hand standing on one leg and thoughtfully scratching it with the superior toe of the other foot.

I asked the freckled youth what I could do for him, and he said that there was a man at the foot of the stairs who wished to see me. I asked him then why in the name of a great republic and a free people he didn't see me. Then I told the boy that there was no admission fee; that it was the regular afternoon matinee, and it was a free show.

The frank and manly little feilow then came forward and told me that the man was blind.

It was not intended as a joke. It was a horrible reality, and pretty soon a man into whose sightless orbs the cheerful light of day had not entered for many years came up the stairs and into the office.

I said: "Ah, sir, I see that you are a poor, blind man. You cannot see the green grass and waving trees. While others see the pleasant fields and lovely landscape you wander on year after year in the hopeless gloom. Poor man. Do you not at times yearn for immortality and pine to be among the angels where the light of a glorious eternity will enter upon your sightless vision like a beautiful dream?"

This was a little sentiment that I had committed to memory, being an extract from the _Youth's Companion_.

He wiped away three or four scalding tears with his sleeve and said that he did. He was getting means, he said, to enable him to go to New York, where he was going to have his eyes taken out and refilled. He also intended to have the cornea filed down and a new crystal put in.

I asked him how much he thought it would cost. He said he thought it could be arranged so that $1,000 would pay the bill. At first I started to draw a check for that amount, and then I thought I would try him with a dollar first.

He took the dollar and walked sadly away.

It always makes me feel bad when I see a fellow creature who is doomed with uncertain steps and sightless eyes to tread his weary way through life, and I cannot be happy when I know that such misery is abroad in the land. I thought how much I had to be thankful for, how fortunate I had been to have all my senses and my bright and beautiful intellect, that I wouldn't take $400 for.

Then I wandered out to a saloon on A street to get a cigar. The blind man was there. He had just poured out about six fingers of Jamaica rum and was setting them up for the boys. I thought I would stand in with the arrangement, so I leaned up against the bar in very classic style and took two cigars at twenty-five cents apiece.

When he came to pay for the goods he shoved out the dollar I gave him, which I recognized, because it was a pewter dollar, and a very inferior pewter dollar at that.

The bartender kicked like a roan cow, and while the excitement was at its height I stole away to where I could be alone with my surging thoughts.

The blind man is still in town, but he is not succeeding very well. Unfortunately he has told several large openfaced lies and the feeling of pity for him has petered out, if I may be allowed that expression.

When he is sober he is going to have his eyes operated on at New York, and when he is drunk he is going to have them attended to in San Francisco. This gives the general appearance of insincerity to his remarks, and the merciless public yearns for him to pack his night shirt, like the Arabs and silently steal away.

THOUGHTS OF THE MELLOW PREVIOUSLY.

|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 joy? 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.

Now I still get valentines, but they are different and they affect 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 can not 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 redheaded girl with the wart on her thumb. With 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, Nebraska, and wears out her sweet girlish nature working up her husband's underclothes into a rag carpet. It seems tough, but such is life.

MY TOMBSTONE MINE.

Camp on Alder Gulch, June 18, 1880.

|The general feeling of expectation and suspense which is the natural result of recent mineral discoveries near to any mining town, is still prevalent. If possible it is on the increase, and all the prevailing indications of profound mystery are visible everywhere. There is a general air of knowing something that other people do not. Almost every man is hugging to his bosom a ponderous secret which is slowly crushing him, while all his fellow men are trying to hold down the same secret.

Occasionally a man comes to me, takes my ear and wrapping it around his arm two or three times so that I can't get away, he tells me that he knows where there is the richest thing in America. Only he and his wife and another man and his wife know where this wonderful wealth is to be found.

He asks me to come into it so that capital will then be interested. I agree to it and on the way to the camp I overtake the able-bodied men of Wyoming, all of whom are trying in their poor, weak way to keep the same secret.

Such is life.

Sometimes I think that perhaps I had better give up mining. I do not seem to get the hang of the thing, somehow. All the claims I get hold of are rich in nothing but assessments, while less deserving men catch on to the bonanzas.

Once I located a vein which showed what I called good indications of a permanent vein, staked it out under the United States law and went to work on it. I paid out $11 for sharpening picks alone, in going down ten feet to hold it. It was mighty hard quartz, but the lead grew wider and better defined all the time till I got down ten feet and had an assay.

The assayer said that I had struck a marble quarry, but it was very inferior marble after all. Besides I found afterward that it was owned by Jay Gould and some other tender feet from New York.

Then I relocated the claim and called it The Marble-Top Cemetery Lode, and went away. Probably if I had gone down on it, the ore would have shown free milling tombstones and Power's Greek slaves and all that kind of business, but I felt kind of depressed all the time while I was at work on it. There was a kind of "Hark from the tombs a doleful sound," air about the whole mine.

Cummins City still booms. Building lots have gone up to $100 each. This for a place where a few weeks ago the song of the coyote was heard in the land, and where the valley of the river, and bald sides of the rugged mountains were unscarred, is a good showing.

The magical power of a mineral excitement to transform the bleak prairie and the rocky canyon into a thriving village at once, is something to command our admiration and wonder.

Two months ago, I might say, the little village of Cummins City was nothing but a little caucus of prairie dogs, and a ward meeting of woodticks.

Now look at it. Opera houses, orphan asylums, hurdy-gurdies, churches, barber shops, ice-cream saloons, dog-fights, musical _soirees_, spruce gum, bowling-allies, salvation, and three card monte. Everything in fact that the heart of man could yearn after.

As you drive up Euclid Avenue, you smell the tropical fragrance of frying bacon, and hear the recorder of the district murmuring with a profane murmur because his bread won't raise. Here and there along the river bank, like a lot of pic-nickers, the guileless miners are panning pounded quartz, or submitting their socks to the old process for freeing them from decomposed quartzite, and nonargentiferous clayite. Flying from the dome of the opera house is a red flannel shirt, while a pair of corpulent drawers of the same ruddy complexion, is gathering all the clear, bracing atmosphere of that locality.

As a picturesque tower on the roof of the Grand Central, the architect has erected a minaret or donjon keep, which is made to represent a salt barrel. So true to life is this new and unique design, that sometimes the cattle which roam up and down Euclid Avenue, climb up on the mansard roof of the Grand Central, and lick the salt off the donjon keep, and fall over the battlements into the moated culverin, or stick their feet through the roof and rattle the pay gravel into the custard pie and cottage pudding.

Bill Root, the stage driver, went out there during the early days of the camp, and with more or less red liquor stowed away among his vitals.

William is quite sociable and entertaining, even under ordinary circumstances, but when he has thawed out his digestion with fire-water, he talks a good deal. He is sociable to that extent that the bystander is steeped in profound silence while William proceeds to unfold his spring stock of information. On the following morning William awoke with a seal brown taste in his mouth, and wrapped in speechless misery. There was no cardinal liquor in the camp, (a condition of affairs which does not now exist,) so that William was silent. On the amputating table of the leading veterinary surgeon of Cummins City was found a tongue that had just been removed. It was really cut from the mouth of a horse that had nearly severed it himself, by drawing a lariat through it: but the story soon gained currency that an indignant camp had risen in its might, and visited its vengeance on William Root for turning loose his conversational powers on the previous day.

Great excitement was manifested throughout the camp, as William had not uttered a word as yet. Toward noon, however, a party of hardened miners, carrying a willow-covered lunch basket with a cork in the top, arrived in camp, and shortly after that it was ascertained that the conversational powers of Mr. Root still remained unimpaired.

The chaplain of the camp set a day for fasting and prayer, and the red flannel shirt on the dome of the opera house was hung at half-mast in token of the universal sorrow and distress.

This is a true story, which accounts for the awkward manner in which I have told it.

BANKRUPT SALE OF A CIRCUS.

|As I write these lines my heart is filled with bitterness and woe. There is a feeling of deep disappointment this morning that has cast my soul down into the very depths of sadness. Some years ago the legislature of Wyoming conceived the stupendous idea that the circus instead of being man's best friend and assistant in his onward march through life, was after all a snare and a delusion.

This august body then passed a law that fixed the licenses of circuses showing in Wyoming Territory at $250, which was of course an embargo on the show business that, as I might say, laid it out colder than a wedge so far as Wyoming Territory was concerned.

The history of that law is a history of repeated injury and usurpation. Our people were bowed down to the earth with the iron heel of an unjust legislature and forced to drag out the weary years without the pleasures which come to other States and other Territories.

In the midst of this overhanging gloom, there were two men who were not afraid of the all powerful legislature, but boldly lifted up their voices and denounced with clarion tone and dauntless eye the great wrong that had been done to our people.

One of these men was a tall, fine-looking man, with piercing eye and noble mein. He stood out at the front in this unequal war and with his silvery hair streaming in the mountain zephyrs, he told the legislature that a justly indignant people would claim at the hands of her law-makers a full and ample retribution for the tyrannical act.

Judge Blair, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of Wyoming, whether at the social gathering or the quarterly meeting, never lost an opportunity to condemn the unrighteous act or to labor for its abolishment. He fearlessly adjourned court time after time in order that the jury might go to Denver or Salt Lake to attend the circus, and embodied in one of his opinions on the bench the everlasting truth that "the usurpation of the people's prerogatives by the lawmakers of any State or Territory, in so far as to deprive them of a divine right inherent in their very natures, and compelling them to undergo a slavish isolation from the Mammoth Aggregation of Living Wonder? and Colossal Galaxy of Arenic Talent, was unjust in its conception and criminal in its enforcement." See Boggs vs. Boggs, 981. The other dauntless antagonist of the tyrannical law was a young man with pale seldom hair, and a broad open brow that bulged out into space like a sore thumb. He was slender in form like a parallel of longitude, with a nose on him that looked like a thing of life. This young man was myself.

Together we talked in season and out of season, laboring with the law-makers with an energy worthy of a better cause.

We met with scorn and rebuffs on every hand, and the cold, hard world laughed at us, and unfeelingly jeered at our ceaseless attempts. But we labored on till last winter, the welcome telegram was flashed over the wires that the despotic measure was no more.

Then there was a general joy all over the Territory. Judge Blair sang in that impassioned way of his, which makes a confirmed invalid reconciled to death, and I danced.

When I dance there is a wild originality about the gyrations that startles those who are timid, and causes the average, unprotected ballroom-belle to climb up on the platform with the orchestra, where she will be safe.

Bye-and-bye the young man with the step-ladder and the large oil paintings, and the long-handled paste brush came to town, and put some magnificent decalcomania pictures on the bill-boards and fences; and Judge Blair and I patted each other on the back; and laughed seven or eight silvery laughs.

But in the midst of our unfettered glee a telegram came from Denver that the circus that had billed our town had been attached by the sheriffs. It seems that the elephant had broken into a warehouse in Denver and had eaten 160 bales of hay, worth $100 each in the Leadville market. The owner of the hay then attached the show in order to secure pay for the hay.

This necessitated a long delay and finally a sale of the circus. Everything went, the big elephant and the baby elephant, the band chariot with a cross-eyed hyena painted on it, the steam calliope that couldn't play anything but "Silver Threads Among the Gold," the sacred jackass from North Park, the red-nosed babboon from New Jersey, the sore-eyed prairie dog from Jack Creek, the sway-backed grizzly bear from York State, and the second-hand clown from Dubuque, all had to go.

Then they opened a package of petrified jokes and antique conundrums that had been exhumed from the ruins of Pompeii. It seemed almost like sacrilege, but the ruthless auctioneer tore these prehistoric jokes from the sarcophagus and knocked them down to the gaping throng for whatever they would bring.

The show was valued at $2,000,000 on the large illustrated catalogues and bright-hued posters, but after the costs of attachment and sale had been paid there was only $231 left.

Oh! what a sacrifice. How little there is in this brief transitory life of ours that is abiding. How few of our bright hopes are ever realized. How many glad promises are held out to us for the roseate future that never reach fruition.

GREELEY VERSUS VALLEY TAN.

|I stopped over one day at Greeley on my return. Greeley is the town after which Horace Greeley was named. It is enclosed by a fence and embraces a large tract of very fine agricultural land.

The editor of the _Tribune_ had just received a brand new power press. I asked him to come out and take something. He did not seem to grasp my meaning exactly.

Afterward I wandered about the town thinking how much dryer the air is in Greeley than in Denver. The throat rapidly becomes parched, and yet the inducements for the visitor to step in at various places and chew a clove or two are very rare indeed. I thought what a dull, melancholy day the Fourth of July must be in Greeley, and how tame and dull life must be to those who experience a uniform size of head from year to year. The blessed novelty of rising in the morning with a dark brown taste in the mouth and the cheerful feeling that your head is so large that you can't possibly get it out through your bed-room door, are sensations that do not enter here.

All the water not used at Greeley for irrigating purposes is worked up into a light, nutritious drink for the people.

THE ETERNAL FITNESS OF THINGS.

|An exchange comes out with an article giving the former residence and occupation of those who are immediately connected with the Indian management. It will be seen that they are, almost without an exception, from the Atlantic coast, where they have had about the same opportunity to become acquainted with the duties pertaining to their appointment as Lucifer has had for the past two thousand years to form a warm personal acquaintance with the prophet Isaiah.

With all due respect to the worthy descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers, and not wishing to cast a slur upon the ability or the integrity of the dwellers along the rock-bound coast of New England, I will say in the mildest manner possible that these men are no more fit to manage hostile Indians than Perdition is naturally fitted for a powder house.

A man may successfully cope with the wild and fierce codfish in his native jungle, or beard the salt water clam in his den, and still signally fail as an Indian agent. The codfish is not treacherous. He may be bold, blood-thirsty and terrible, but he will never go back on a treaty. Who ever heard of a codfish going back on his word? Who ever heard of a codfish leaving the Reservation and spreading desolation over the land? No one. The expression on the face of a codfish shows that he is perfectly open and above board.

We might say the same of the clam. Of course if driven to the wall, as it were, he will fight; but we have yet to find a single instance in the annals of history where the clam--unless grossly insulted and openly put upon, ever made an open outbreak.

This is why we claim that clam culture and Indian management are not analogous. They are not simultaneous nor co-extensive. They are not identical nor homogeneous.

I feel that in treating this subject in my candid and truthful way, perhaps the Administration will feel hurt and grieved; but if so I can't help it. The great reading public seems to look to me, as much as to say: "What are your views on this great subject which is agitating the public mind?" I can't evade it, and even if President Hayes were an own brother, instead of being a warm, personal friend and admirer, I would certainly speak right out as I have spoken out, and tell the whole broad Republic of Columbia that to successfully steer a hostile tribe of nervous, refractory and irritable Indian bummers past the rocks and shoals of war is one thing, and to drive a salt water clam up a hickory tree and kill him with a club, is entirely another thing.

THEY UNANIMOUSLY AROSE AND HUNG HIM.

|I was talking the other day with a Laramie City man about Leadville, he said:

"In addition to the fact of Laramie money being now invested there, we have sent many good citizens there to build up homes and swell the boom of the young city. We also sent several there of whom we are not proud. We still hold them in loving remembrance. Sometimes we go through the motions of getting judgments against these men, and making transcripts with big seals on them, and sending to Leadville to be placed on the execution docket of Lake county.

"We also sent Edward Frodsham to Leadville. We intimated to him that life was very brief and that if he wanted to gather a little stake to leave his family perhaps he could do so faster in Leadville than anywhere else. So he went. He is there now. He at once won the notice of the public there and soon became the recipient of the most flattering attentions. A little band of American citizens one evening took him out on the plaza, or something of that kind, and hung him last fall.

"The maple turned to crimson and the sassafras to gold, and when the morning woke the song of the bunko-steerer and the robin, Mr. Frodsham was on his branch all right, but he couldn't seem to get in his work as a songster. There seemed to be a stricture in the glottis, and the diaphragm wouldn't buzz. The gorgeous dyes of the autumn sunrise seemed strangely at variance with the gen d'arm blue of Mr. Frodsham's countenance.

"His death calls to mind one sunny day in the midsummer of '78. It was one of those days when there is a lull in the struggle for existence, and the dreamy silence and hush of nature seem to be concurred in by a committee of the whole.

"It was one of those days when, in the language of the average magazine poet--=

```The flowers bloomed, the air was mild,

````The little birds poured forth their lay,

```And everything in nature smiled.=

"But soon from out the silence, bursting upon the quiet air, came the sharp report of a pistol. Then another and another in rapid succession. People who were going to trade in that locality suddenly thought of other places of business where the same articles could be obtained cheaper. Men who were not afraid of danger in any form, went away because they didn't want to be called as witnesses on the inquest.

"The shooting went on for some time. It sounded like the battle'of the Wilderness. After a while it ceased. A large party of men went out to gather up the dead and arrange for a grand funeral. But the remains were not so dead as they ought to be. There were bullet holes to be sure, penetrating various parts of the combatants, but the funeral had to be postponed. The sidewalks were plowed up, signs were riddled and windows shattered, but Edward Frodsham got off with a bullet hole through the side. The doctor pronounced it a very close call, but not necessarily fatal. It was a terrible disappointment to every one. As a shooting match it was a depressing failure, and as a double funeral it was not deserving of mention.

"The city council told Frodsham that if he couldn't shoot better than that he might select some young growing town outside of Wyoming and grow up with it. He did so. He favored Colorado with his stirring, energetic presence.

"His grave grows green to-day on the sunny hill-side 'neath the bending willow, and the soft, sweet breath that is sighing through the pines and stirring the delicate ferns beside the glassy depth of the mountain stream, is singing his requiem. [Perhaps, however, I am rushing the season for Leadville a little; if so the last refrain after the word 'presence,' may be wrapped up in warm flannels and stored away till July.]"

RHETORIC VS. WOODTICK.

Camp on the New Jerusalem Mine, June 15.

|It is impossible at present to say anything about what the future of this district may bring forth. Every lead shows up beautifully, and so much so, in fact, that claim owners are working first one and then another in order to hold them under the new law, which requires an amount of work to be done on the lead within sixty days which is generally only required within one year. This new regulation, which is the act of the district of course, may not stand any very severe test, but at present the miners are respecting it.

It is severe on me, however, and virtually leaves me out. What I need is a law that will not ride over and overthrow and freeze out the poor man. This law is passed in the interest of capital and in direct violation of the rights and privileges of the great surging mass of horny-handed workingmen like Brick Pomeroy and myself.

I havn't the time to particularize or describe the different mines visited, and if I were to do so the chances are that I wouldn't cover myself or the district with glory.

It is true that I know a foot wall from a windlass, with one hand tied behind me, but if I were buying a mine I would be about as apt to purchase a deposit of sulphurets of expectations, showing traces of free milling telluride of disappointment, as anything else.

The camp has about 300 miners and prospectors now within the city limits. All up and down the picturesque valley of the swift-flowing river the low cabin and white tent dot the green sward, and far above the everlasting hills rear their heads on high, torn by the Titanic power of giant heat in the days of the long ago.