Chapter FOUR: Times (2)

I said this to Professor Paige, the scientific correspondent of the _Inter-Ocean_, who accompanied me. I thought that perhaps it would tickle him to know that I could reel off a sentence like that, but it didn't affect him in that way. On the contrary, he seemed to think that the heat must have affected me in some way.

We climbed Jehu mountain on the evening that we arrived in camp. We thought it would be the proper thing to do, so we dug our toe-nails into the prehistoric granite and the micacious what's-his-name and climbed to the top.

For a few minutes we didn't mind it much and got along first-rate, trying to make each believe that climbing mountains was our regular business.

I began to tell the Professor a little harmless lie about how I had travelled among the Alps, but I didn't finish it. Somehow I felt like breathing in what atmosphere was not in actual use, but I didn't have any place to put it.

The air at Jehu Mountain is good enough what there is of it, but it is too rare. If a man could let out the back straps of his vest and breathe in the unoccupied atmosphere lying between the Laramie river and the Zodiac it would be all right, but he can't do it. His intentions are good, but his skin isn't elastic enough to hold the diluted fluid.

We climbed up to where we could see the silvery moon rising like a pale schoolma'am and looking sadly across the dark valley asleep in night's embrace. I thought it was time to say something.

"Professor," said I, as my brow lighted up like a torchlight procession, and my voice broke upon the hush and solitude of evening like the tremulous notes of the buzz saw, "do you not think that far away amid the unknown worlds which drift through space and along whose track the drifting systems of planets wheel and circle through countless ages, while man, clothed in a little brief authority, cuts such fantastic tricks Before high heaven as makes the angels weep, regarding himself as the center of the solar system, planning to frustrate the immutable laws of nature, violating the prime and co-ordinate common law of universes, going behind the returns, as it were, trying to peer behind the veil, as I might say, prognosticating the unprognosticatable, evading the axioms and by-laws which not only regulate worlds and their creation, but link the phantasmagoria of diagonal animalculæ and cast broadcast the oleaginous incongruity of prehistoric usufruct?"

The Professor didn't say anything. He didn't seem to have followed me. Somewhere the thread had been broken, and the glowing truths couched in such language as would light up the pages of history and astronomy, were lost upon the silent air.

The Professor seemed sad and anxious and preoccupied. There was a look of apprehension and doubt and distrust in his eye, and he moved about uneasily. I asked him if there were any last words that I could carry to his friends, and ii there were any little acts of humanity and friendship which I could perform to render his last moments more pleasant.

He said there were.

*****

Then he told me that a wood-tick was slowly but surely boring a hole into his spinal column, near where the off scapula forms a junction with the nigh one, and asked me to help bring him to justice.

We should learn from this that heaven-born genius, with the music of poetic language and aflame with an inspiration almost miraculous, sometimes makes less impression upon the listener than a little insect no larger than a grain of mustard seed.

THE MODEL WIFE.

|Dr. Westwood lectured here on Wednesday evening on the Model Husband. He wanted me to sit upon the stage as the horrible example, but I declined. He was quite pointed in his remarks all the way through, and seemed to have me in his mind when he described the model husband, although of course he used a fictitious name. The lecture was a good one, and very well liked by the husbands who had to sit and take it for an hour and a half. Let the gentle male reader imagine himself sitting for that length of time with his own wife on one side of him and another man's wife on the other side of him, and when the speaker makes a point on the old man to get alternate jabs in the side from the delighted ladies.

I shall lecture here during the winter on the subject of the "Model Wife." I will then get even. I will tell how the young man with bright hopes, and thinking only of the great, consuming love he has for his new spouse, is torn away from the hallowed ties of home and the sunny influences of young companions, and buried in the poverty-stricken cottage of a woman who cannot begin to support him in the style in which he has been accustomed.

It is high time that this course of disgraceful misrepresentation on the part of young women should be exposed. I once knew a young man with the most gentle and trustful nature. He had never known care or sorrow. But an adventuress with winsome smile and loving voice crossed his path and allowed him to think that she could maintain a husband like other women, and in his blind adoration for her he bade good-bye to his home and its joys and madly walked out with her into the great, untried future. She told him that he should never know the cruel sting of poverty, and other romantic trash, and look at him to-day. He is a broken-hearted man. His wife does not take him into society; does not keep him clothed as other men are clothed, and grudgingly gives him the little pittance from week to week which she earns by washing.

Is it strange that his pillow is wet with tears, and in his agony he cries out upon the still air of night, "Oh, mother, why did I leave thy kindly protection and overshadowing love and marry a total stranger?"

Then the woman who has sworn to protect and love and cherish him kicks him in the pit of the stomach and harshly tells him to "dry up."

I sometimes think that if mothers knew to what sorrow and gross and shameless treatment their sons were to submit all through their lives, they would put them out of their misery with a base-ball club. Some mothers do try this but they postpone it too long and the sons get too large and more difficult to kill than when their skulls are young and tender.

I have alwavs maintained that a kind word and a caress will do more for the great yearning nature of the husband than harshness and severity. The tuue wife may reprove her husband when he spills coal all over the Brussels carpet and then steps on it and grinds it in, but how much better even that is than to kick him under the bed and then sit down on him and gouge out his eyes with a pinking iron.

I know that men are too often misunderstood. They may be rough on the exterior but they can love Oh, so earnestly, so warmly, so truly, so deeply, so intensely, so yearningly, so fondly and so universally!

Always kiss your husband good-bye when you go down town to your work. It may be the last time. I once knew a wife who went down town to price a new dolman, and because she was vexed about something she did not kiss her husband but slammed the door and left him. When she returned he was a corpse!

* * * * *

While peeling the potatoes for dinner with the carving knife, he had stepped on a clothes pin, which threw him forward over the baby carriage, the knife entering at the northeast corner of the gizzard and sticking out beneath the shoulder blade about two feet into space. What a scene for the now repentant wife. There, in the full vigor of his manhood, lay all that was mortal of her companion--dead as a mackerel!!!

Let us take this home to ourselves, and ask ourselves today if we are doing the square thing by the only husband we have. Are we loving him as we should, or are we turning this task over to the hired girl?

Intemperance, too, is a fruitful cause of connubial unhappiness. Young man, beware of a wife who loves the flowing bowl. I once knew a beautiful young lady, talented and with good business ability. The entire circle of her acquaintance admired and respected her, but alas! one evening at a banquet her companion, with a heavenly smile, asked her to drink wine. Gradually the taste grew upon her, and although she married, she could not support her husband, and he gradually pined away and died brokenhearted. He used to sit up nights for her to come home, and he caught the inflammatory rheumatism and swelled up and died. It was a terrible thing. I tell you we cannot be too careful. You take a handsome young man like the author of these lines and his power for good or evil is untold. I sometimes wish that I had not been constructed with so much dazzling beauty to the square inch, and I am almost tempted to go and disfigure myself some way. If I were to ask a fair gazelle on New Year's day to come and join me in a social glass and then throw one of those melting 2 by 8 glances of mine on her, I know for a moral certainty that before night she would be in the calaboose. But I shall guard against that. Nothing of that kind shall ever be laid at my door. I promised my aged parents when I left the old homestead that I would never set 'em up for anyone.

SOME OVERLAND TOURISTS.

|The varied classes of tourists passing over the Union Pacific Railroad, representing as they do all classes of humanity, seem to call for a brief notice from the nimble pen of a great man.

During my short but eventful life I have given a large portion of my time to studying human nature. Studying human nature and rustling for grub, as the Psalmist has it, have occupied my time ever since I arrived at man's estate.

There is one style of tourist which I am more particularly devoted to, perhaps, than any other. It is the young man who is in search of health for his invalid mustache. Only last week I saw one of these gentle youths who was going to try sea air and California fruit to see if he couldn't rescue his consumptive mustache from the jaws of death.

When he got off here and took the poor thing out to where it could look about and see the green plains and snow-capped mountains, I felt sorry for him. It is hard for one to be a successful tourist with a pale invalid along with him night and day, and I could imagine how that young man would have to get up nights when his mustache got restless and needed fresh air or wanted to take its tonic.

It was certainly the most gentle, retiring, modest mustache I ever saw. It didn't seem to care for anything only to be loved.

Every little while the youth would reach up to where it was and feel around nervously to see if it had climbed the golden stairs or was still on deck.

It was not a heavy mustache at all. It was about as voluptuous as a buffalo gnat's eye-brow.

I never saw a mustache before that brought the scalding tears to my eyes like that one. I thought how lonely the young man would be when it had glided up the flume and left him in this cold, uncharitable world with nothing to love and cling to but an earnest and unhappy boil on the back of his neck that wouldn't come to a focus.

Sometimes I go down to the train to see some fair young girl who is on the overland trip. But I am not always gratified.

A short time ago I went over, feeling as though I would like to see a fair young creature full of life and joy and with the light of a joyous future shining in her lustrous eyes.

It didn't seem to be her train. It was the day that a woman was on board with a Russia iron alapaca dress and white eyes. She was from Winnipewankiegingersuappetymagoggery, Maine.

She had a little sore-eyed boy with cream-colored hair and freckles on his face as large as a veal cutlet.

The boy would occasionally walk along the platform with his fore finger rammed into his mouth and hooked around his wisdom tooth. He would walk along looking up into the sky, and running into everybody and falling over the baggage truck till his mother got quite irritated, and I told the boy that the future looked dark for him unless he braced up and stopped pulverizing people's corns.

Bye and bye the boy ran into a blind man and knocked the wind out of him, so that all he could do for ten minutes was to stand there and gasp for breath as though he wanted to breathe in the vast realms of space.

Then his mother extended a long, bony hand with a large silver ferule on the biggest finger, and she laid hold of that lemon-colored kid of her's and gathered in as much of his ear as her hand would hold. She churned him up pretty good, and it didn't seem to be very much exertion for her either. Every little while he would make an aerial flight and back he would come, his boots banging against the car with a loud report. Finally the woman with the white eye, from Winnipewankiegingersuappetymagoggery, Me., consolidated her efforts for one grand flourish, but while in mid-air the boy's ear unscrewed and he lit out through the firmament, falling in a shapeless mass on the other side of the second-class car, where his gentle mother found him and gathered him up in her gingham apron.

There are lots of these little queer and amusing circumstances taking place here almost every day, and I have often thought that if some one with a taste for the ridiculous would turn his attention in that direction he would make an interesting sketch of them.

During the month of June we had a heavy snow storm, and it pleased the average tourist very much to be able to snow ball in mid-summer, so that he could tell his friends about it when he got home.

One intellectual Hercules, with a head about as large as a gum drop and a linen hat like the dome of the Mormon Temple, thought it would be a frisky little thing to throw some snow in the face of a sensible man engaged in conversation on the hotel pavement. The sensible man mopped the snow out of his face and went on with his conversation till the train was ready to start and the mental giant had forgotten all about it.

Then the large man walked up to the watery-eyed youth with a big lunch basket full of snow and proceeded to stow it away around the features of the youthful snide with the skim-milk optic. He used what he could get near by, trying to fill his ears full, but couldn't get snow enough. Then he took what he had left and worked it down inside the voluptuous shirt collar of the bilious young man from the Normal school.

I enjoyed it first-rate because I can not bear to see a feminine tourist like this young man, wearing men's clothes and trying to play himself for a man. When a man wants to be a merry laughing girl and can't, and he stands trembling on the dividing line between manhood and womanhood and hesitating which way to fall, I often wish that I had a foot like Brigham Young's tombstone with a swing to it like a pile driver and I would like to kick the young man with the old gold hat band and the polka dotted necktie so far into the realms of space that when he fell people would think he was a red-headed meteor looking for a soft place to fall into.

CATCHING MOUNTAIN TROUT AT AN ELEVATION OF 8000 FEET.

|A few days ago, in company with Dr. Hayford, I went over to Dale Creek on a brief extempore trouting expedition. Dale Creek is a beautiful and romantic stream running through a rugged canon and crossed by the beautiful iron bridge of the Union Pacific Railroad.

[9241]

We went up Dale Creek at this season of the year is not very much of a torrent, and on the day we went over there all the trout had gone down to the mouth of the stream to get a drink.

Every little while the Doctor would put on his glasses and hunt for the creek while I caught grasshoppers and looked at the scenery. I did not catch any trout myself, but the Doctor drove one into a prairie-dog hole and killed him. I am frantically fond of field sports although I am not always successful in securing game. I love to wander through the fragrant grass and wild flowers, listening to the song of the bobolink as he sways to and fro on some slender weed; but it delays me a good deal to stop every little while and cut on No. 4 and returned on No. 3.

TROUT FISHING.

|My fly hooks out of my clothes. I throw a fly very grace, fully, but when it catches under my shoulder-blades, and I try to lift myself up in that manner, my companions laugh at me and make me mad.

Dr. Hayford, who had command of the expedition, told me that we would have an hour and three quarters to fish and then we would have to go back and catch the train. Therefore we hurried a good deal, and I had to leave a decrepit trout that I had found in a dead pine tree and was almost sure of. We gathered a bouquet of wild roses and ferns and cut worms and went back to the bridge to wait for No. 3. We sat there for an hour or two on a voluptuous triangular fragment of granite, telling large three-ply falsehoods about catching fish and shooting elephants in Michigan. Then we waited two or three more long weary hours, and still the train didn't come.

After a while it occurred to me that I had been made the victim of the man who had spent the most of his life telling the public about the pleasant weather of Wyoming. He enjoyed my misery and cheered me up by saying that perhaps our train had gone, and we would have to wait for the emigrant-train. We ate what lunch we had left, told a few more lies, and suffered on.

At last the thunder of the train in the distance was borne down to us, and we rose with a sigh of relief, gathered up our bouquets and decomposed trout, and prepared to board the car. But it was a work train and didn't stop.

Then I went away by myself and tried to control my fiendish temper. I thought of the doctor's interesting family at home, and how they would mourn if I were to throw him over Dale Creek bridge, and pulverize him on the rocks below. So my better nature conquered and I went back to wait a few more weeks.

The next train that came along was a freight train, and it made better time going past us than at any other point on the road.

Toward evening the regular passenger train came along. I found out which coach the doctor was going to ride in, and I got into another one. I look my poor withered little bouquet and looked at it. All the flowers were dead and so were the bugs that were in it. It was a ghostly ruin that had cost me $9.25. An idea struck me, and I gave the bouquet to the train boy to sell. I told him what the entire array of ghastliness had cost me, and asked him to get what he could out of it.

He took the collection and sold it out to the passengers, realizing, $21.35. Passengers bought them and sent them home as flowers collected at Dale Creek bridge in the Rocky mountains. Then a kind hearted gentleman on the train, who saw how sad I looked, and how ragged my clothes were, where I had cut fish-hooks out of them, took up a collection for me.

Hereafter when a man asks me to join a fishing excursion to the mountains, I hope that I shall have the moral courage and strength of character to refuse.

HOME-MADE INDIAN RELICS.

|Sherman, on the Union Pacific Railroad, is the loftiest by a considerable majority of any point on the road. This fact has occasioned some little notoriety for Sherman, and on the strength of it a small reservoir of Western curiosities has been established there.

I went over to the curiosity ranche while the train was taking breath, to see what I could see and buy it if the price were not too high.

There were a great many Western curiosities from various parts of the country, and I got deeply interested in them.

I love to find some old relic of ancient times or some antique weapon of warfare peculiar to the noble Aztecs. I can ponder over them by the hour and enjoy it first-rate.

Among the living wonders I noticed a bale of Indian arrows. These arrows are beautiful to look upon, and are remarkably well preserved. They are as good as new. I asked, simply as a matter of form, if they were Indian arrows. The man said they were. Then I asked who made them, and he got mad and wouldn't speak to me.

I do not think I am unreasonable to want to know who makes my Indian arrows, am I?

I am willing to pay a fair price for the genuine Connecticut made arrow with cane shaft, and warranted cast steel point, but the Indian arrow made at Omaha is not durable.

This curiosity man would make more money and command a larger trade if he were not so quick-tempered.

He had also some Western cactus as a curiosity for the tenderfoot who had never fooled with a cactus much.

It was the clear thing, however. I sat down on one to test its genuineness. It stood the test better than I did. When you have doubts about a cactus and don't know whether it is a genuine cactus or a young watermelon with its hair banged, you can test it by sitting down on it. It may surprise you at first, but it tickles the cactus almost to death.

For a high-priced house plant and gentle meek-eyed exotic that don't care much for affection, the Rocky Mountain cactus takes the cake.

It is very easy to live, and don't require much fondling. It will enjoy life better if you will get mad at it about once a week and pull it up by the roots, and kick it around the yard. Water it carefully every four years; if you water it oftener than that, it will be surprised, and gradually pine away and die.

Another item I must not forget in giving directions for the cultivation of this rare tropical plant: get some one to sit down on it occasionally--if you don't feel equal to it yourself. There's nothing that makes a cactus thrive and flourish so much as to have a victim with linen pants on, sit down on it and then get up impulsively like. If a cactus can have these little attentions bestowed upon it, it will live to a good old age, and insinuate itself through the pantaloons of generations yet unborn. Plant in a gravelly, coarse soil, and kick it every time you think of it.

Returning to our subject, however, I think the Indian is a trifle uncertain and at times tricky by nature. Of course I do not wish to say anything that would have a tendency to injure the reputation of the Indian, for in all candor I will say that he means well.

I do not wish to have what I may say published as coming from me, because the Indian has always used me well, perhaps because I never allow myself to stray into his jurisdiction, but he has little, hateful, mean ways which I despise. Some think that if he were to have more chance to learn, more normal schools and base-ball clubs and upright pianos, he would have more ambition to do right and get ahead, but I almost doubt it.

I am very humane myself, but I am more apt to be harsh in my measures with the Indian than most Eastern people of culture are. Perhaps this is because I have seen people who had been shot full of large size bullet holes by the red man. This makes a difference, and I may be prejudiced.

When the average philanthropist has seen a family lying scattered around promiscuous and shot so full of holes that even the coarsest kind of food is of no use, he begins to ask in his mind whether a more severe method of treatment would not be beneficial to the Indian.

I want to look this matter calmly in the face, and ask whether night shirts and civilization and suspenders will make good citizens out of these unfettered children of the forest or not? Is it the opinion of the gentle reader that a nation of flea-bitten, smoke-tanned beggars will come forward and submit to the ennobling influences of Christianity and duck vests and horse-shoe scarf pins and quarterly meetings and gauze underwear? Methinks not.

Nature constructed the noble red man with certain little mental, moral and physical eccentricities, and these eccentricities can be better worn away and remodeled on the evergreen shore.

Poor, weak, fallible man cannot successfully grapple with the task of working over an entire nation of human beings and changing the whole trend, so to speak, of a nation's mental and moral nature.

Let us not, therefore, usurp the prerogative or attempt to perform the Herculean task which a wise Creator has laid out for Himself.

The policy of Divine administration, if I mistake not, is to improve the Indian and reform him in a future state in a large corral where the worm dieth not. This of course is only my private opinion, and I am offering it now in packages containing six each, securely boxed and sent free to any address on receipt of $1. I would sell it cheaper were it not for the excessive freight and the recent rise in white paper.

Supposing then the above to be the correct theory, what can poor erring man do to forward the good work? Evidently he can do nothing unless it be to change the state of the red man from a discouraging and annoying mortality to a bright and shining immortality.

I would suggest that this be done so far as possible by those who can spare the time and ammunition to do so. I will give to such all the encouragement and moral support I can. I would assist in the good work, but I am most too busy now planting my raspberry jam and setting out my early Swedish dried apple pie plant.

THE PREVIOUS REPORTER.

|Fluke MaGilder, an old Washington reporter, who afterward was well known among Western newspaper men, was one of the most tireless and persistent news-gatherers I ever knew. He used to tell with considerable apparent pleasure how he didn't obtain the points on a prominent military court martial which was held at Cheyenne in 1876. It happened on this wise:

When it was known for a dead certainty that the court-martial had closed, and that the result was sealed up in an envelope in the possession of General Pope, who roomed at the Inter-Ocean, Fluke got up an infernal lie to tell the General, and thus got him away from his room. He induced a little negro boy, by promising him an old pair of pants, to go up and deliver a note to General Pope, saying that General Merritt was out at Fort Russell, and that he wanted to see him immediately. After the General had gone Fluke crawled into the transom of his room, and began to ransack things. It turned out, however, that the documents were safe in the General's overcoat pocket, and MaGilder was baffled. He searched all the drawers in the room, looked under the bed, rummaged the pockets of all the extra clothes in the room, and the more he searched the madder he got, and when at last it dawned upon him that he was foiled, his wrath knew no bounds. He filled his pockets with the General's cigars, drank the General's wine, and wiped his nose on the General's best clean handkerchiefs. He spit tobacco juice in the General's slippers, wiped his feet on the pillow shams, dressed the coal-stove up in the General's night shirt, and spread a few spare hairpins which he had in his pockets, under the General's pillow. He was pretty mad. He took the spittoon and stood it on the center-table, with a tooth brush sticking in the middle, and wound up by trying on the General's underclothes and tearing the ruffles off. It is so well established that Fluke had a great deal of _embonpoint_, that it is unnecessary to say he had a good deal of trouble to get into General Pope's apparel, as the General is a slim man. However, as MaGilder stood in the position of a boy who is just on the point of going in swimming, and had the last garment drawn over his head, so that he could not see very well, General Pope slipped in with a large snow-shovel, which he applied with great vigor. When they offered Fluke a chair at a party after that he would murmur, "No, thank you, I prefer to stand up. I've been sitting down all day and wish a change." But everybody knew that he hadn't sat down for over a week.

THE PEACE COMMISSION.

EVIDENCE OF JOHNSON BEFORE THE COURT.

Los Pinos, Col., Nov. 17.

|Chief Johnson was again called on the stand this morning, and administered the following oath to himself in a solemn and awe-inspiring manner:

"By the Great Horn Spoons of the pale-face, and the Great Round Faced Moon, round as the shield of my fathers; by the Great High Muck-a-Muck of the Ute nation; by the Beard of the Prophet, and the Continental Congress, I dassent tell a lie!"

When Johnson had repeated this solemn oath--at the same time making the grand hailing sign of the secret order known as the Thousand and One--there was not a dry eye in the house.

Question by General Adams.--What is your name and occupation, and where do you reside?

Answer--My name is Johnson, just plain Johnson. The rest has been torn off. I am by occupation a farmer. I am a horny-handed son of toil, and don't you forget it. I reside in Greeley, Colorado.

Question--Did you, or did you not hear of a massacre at White River agency, during the fall, and if so, to what extent?

Objected to by defendant's counsel because it is irrelevant, immaterial, unconstitutional, imitation, and incongruous.

Most of the forenoon was spent in arguing the point before the court, when it was allowed to go in, whereupon the defendant's counsel asked to have the exception noted on the court's moments.

Answer--I did not hear of the massacre, until last evening, when I happened to pick up a copy of the Evanston _Age_ and read it. It was a very sad affair, I should think.

Question--Were you, or were you not, present at the massacres?

Objected to by defendant's counsel on the ground that the witness is not bound to answer a question which would criminate himself.

Objection sustained, and question withdrawn by the prosecution.

Question--Where were you on the night that this massacre is said to have occurred?

Answer--What massacre?

Question--The one at White River?

Answer--I was attending a series of protracted meetings at Greeley, in this State.

Question--Were Douglass, Colorow and other Ute chiefs with you at that meeting in Greeley?

Answer--They were.

Court adjourned for dinner.

General Adams remarked to a reporter that he was getting down to business now, and that he had no doubt that in a few months he would convict all these Utes of falsehood in the first degree.

After dinner, court was called, with Johnson at the bat and Douglass on deck; General Adams, short stop; Ouray, center field.

Question--You say that you were not present at the White River massacre; were you ever engaged in any massacre?

Objected to, but objection afterward withdrawn.

Answer--No.

Question--Never?

Answer--Never.

Question--What! Never?

Answer--Well, dam seldom.

(Great applause and cries of "ugh!")

Question--Did you, or did you not, know a man named N. C. Meeker?

Answer--Yes.

Question--Go on and state if you know where you met him and at what time.

Answer--I met him in Greeley, Colorado, two or three years ago. After that I heard that he got an appointment as Indian Agent somewhere out west.

Question--Did you ever hear anything of him after that?

Answer--Nothing whatever.

Question--Did the account of the White River massacre that you read in the _Age_ mention the death of Mr. Meeker?

Answer--No. Is he dead?

General Adams--Yes, he is dead.

At that the witness gave a wild whoop of pain and anguish, fell forward into the arms of General Adams, and is unconscious as we go to press.

We do not wish to censure General Adams. No doubt he is conducting this investigation to the best of his ability; but he ought to break such news as this as gently to the Indian as possible.

SOME ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS.

|Lock Malone, Beaver, Utah, writes as follows:

"I am now making some important scientific experiments with Limberger cheese as a motor, but have no data whereby to work. So new and unusual is the motor to science, that I am unable to get anything relative to its history.

"1. When was Limberger cheese first discovered, and by whom?

"2. What did he do it for anyway?

"3. To what do you attribute the bad odor in which Limberger cheese is held by scientists?

"4. Looking from what may be termed a purely utilitarian standpoint, and not allowing ourselves to be influenced by incongruous incandescence, should you say in all respects that virtually in view of the heterogeneous mobility of attended animalculate it might had or couldn't possibly was?"

ANSWER.

1. Limberger cheese was first discovered by Galileo, floating through space, during his studies relative to the heavenly bodies.

This was about 1609.

The body had, however, been floating through space for many millions of years previous to that, as Galileo remarks in his diary that he wasn't proud of it at all for it was evidently in a very poor state of preservation.

Galileo caught some of it and tamed it, but the scientific minds of that age had not yet made the attempt to utilize it as a motor.

The discovery was purely accidental. At about the time referred to, Galileo had constructed his powerful telescope which would bring the moon down so that the valleys and hills of that body were plainly visible. One day the telescope brought down a fragment of Limberger cheese that was floating through space. It magnified the cheese to such an extent that Galileo could smell it distinctly.

This was the true cause of Galileo's abandonment of the Copernican theory and eventually of astronomy.

3. The last answer really disposes of your third question.

4. Grappling with the abstruse and alarmingly previous usufruct embodied in the omnipresent, and constantly emanating and noticeably refractory diagnosis, herein set forth, and still wandering on through the ever changing yet constantly invariable and fluctuating, yet undeviating perihelion of the heavenly bodies, with unprejudiced mind and unbiased judgment.

Arriving at the conclusion that perhaps in some cases it might not, or yet again it might or might not, and still it might.

Numerous Husband, writes from Jehosephat Valley as follows:

"I am twenty-seven and am going on twenty-eight years of age. A few years ago I joined on to the Mormon Church, and with my usual enthusiasm begun to get married.

"I have been getting married with more or less recklessness ever cents. When times was dull and I was out of employment, I Would go and get married.

"The ofishal count shows that I am an easy and graceful marryer.

"I now find that I am hopelessly involved financially. I had intended this summer to build a collosle villa for my multitoodinous wife; but it will cost me more than I can now command.

"Besides that the surkass is now on the weigh, and I am called upon to secure voluptuous woven wire mattress stuffed opera reserved seats, for my household aggregation of living wonders.

"I am willing to take all I can pay for if she will sit on a hard blue seat with me, and let her feet dangle down; but I cannot abide by the excessive tariff for preserved seats.

"I love the high moral tone of the sho, and dearly love the grand display of arenick tallent, but I cannot croll under the canvuss with my domestic carryvan, without attracting attention.

"When I was a boy and had not yet entered with my wild impetuous nacher in 2 the mattrymoniall biziness, I used to carry water to the elephant, and thus see the World's Congress of Rair and Beautyful Zoologickal Wonders, but I cood not do that now.

"By the time I got the Jordan carried up to the elephant, to pay my admittance, the sho would be over and gone, and I would be more or less left.

"I thereupon ask in all kandor for your valyable advise on these points?"

ANSWER.

The case before us is one which would evoke sympathy from the stoniest heart. It is also one which requires a close scrutiny and cool, deliberate investigation.

You probably at first married a wife whom you considered a treasure, and at once set yourself about amassing wealth of this kind until you find that you are carrying over on your inventory year after year, a large stock of undesirable wives which you are unable to dispose of.

You probably thought when you first married, that there were only two or three unmarried young ladies in the broad and beautiful universe who were worthy of you.

This was a fatal error, and one very common to the bran new bridegroom.

The census will show that there are several, if not more, desirable young ladies who are still on deck.

I am sorry that you have placed yourself in the position you have, and so far as possible will assist you; but these suggestions which I might offer, could only be partially successful.

Could you earlier in the season have given your wives say a dozen able-bodied hens apiece, with instructions that they were to be stimulated to the utmost by their respective owners, the egg-crop might have assisted very materially in purchasing circus tickets with the consequent concert tickets and vermilion lemonade.

There are other suggestions that might be made but it is too late now to make them. I can only offer one more balm to your deeply wounded and disappointed heart. You might by economy and frugality, secure an available point on the route with your mass meeting of household gods and goddesses, where you could sit on the fence and see the elephant meander by.

Yours, enveloped in a large wad of dense gloom.

THE CROW INDIAN AND HIS CAWS.

|Early in the week five Crow chiefs passed through here on their way to Washington.

I went down to see them. They were as fine looking children of the forest as I ever saw. They wore buckskin pants with overskirt of same. The hair was worn Princesse, held in place with Frazer's axle grease and large mother of clamshell brooch. Down the back it was braided like a horse's tail on a muddy day, only the hair was coarser.

When an Indian wants to crimp his hair he has to run it through a rolling mill first, to make it malleable. Then the blacksmith of the tribe rolls it up over the ordinary freight car coupling pin, and on the following morning it hangs in graceful Saratoga waves down the back of the untutored savage.

I said to the interpreter who seemed to act as their trainer, "No doubt these Crows are going to Washington to try and interest Hayes in their Caws."

He gave a low, gurgling laugh.

"No," said he with a merry twinkle of the eye, as he laid his lip half way across a plug of government tobacco, "as spring approaches they have decided to go to Washington and ransack the Indian Bureau for their gauzy Schurz."

I caught hold of a car seat and rippled till the coach was filled with my merry, girlish laughter.

These Indians wear high expressive cheek-bones, and most of them have strabismus in their feet. They had their paint on. It makes them look like a chromo of Powhattan mashing the eternal soul out of John Smith with a Bologna sausage.

One of these chiefs, named Raw-Dog-with-a-Bunion-on the-Heel, I think, chief of the Wall-eyed Skunk Eaters, looked so guileless and kind that I approached him and said that no doubt the war-path in the land of the setting sun was overgrown with grass, and in his mountain home very likely the beams of peace! lit up the faces of his tribe.

He did not seem to catch my meaning.

I asked him if his delegation was going to Washington uninstructed.

In reply he made a short remark something like that which the shortstop of a match game makes when a hot ball takes him unexpectedly between the gastric and the liver pad.

Somehow live Indians do not look so picturesque as the steel engraving does. The smell is not the same, either. Steel engravings of Indians do not show the decalcomania outline of a frying-pan on the buckskin pants where the noble red man made a misstep one morning and sat down on his breakfast.

A dead Indian is a pleasing picture. The look of pain and anxiety is gone, and rest, sweet rest--more than he really needs--has come at last. His hands are folded peacefully and his mouth is open, like the end of a sawmill. His trials are o'er. His swift foot is making pigeon-toed tracks in the shifting sands of eternity.

The picture of a wild free Indian chasing the buffalo may suit some, but I like still life in art. I like the picture of a broad-shouldered, well-formed brave as he lies with his nerveless hand across a large hole in the pit of his stomach.

There is something so sweetly sad about it. There is such a nameless feeling of repose and security on the part of the spectator.

Some have such sensitive natures that they cannot look at the remains of an Indian who has been run over by two sections of freight, but I can. Somehow I do not feel that nervous distrust when I look at the red man with his osophagus wrapped around his head and tied in a double bow knot, that I do when he is full of the vigor of health.

When a train of cars has jammed his thigh-bone through his diaphragm and flattened his head out like a soup plate, I feel then that I can trust him. I feel that he may be relied upon. I consider him in the character of ghastly remains as a success. He seems at last so in earnest and as though he could be trusted.

When the Indian has been mixed up so that the closest scrutiny cannot determine where the head adjourns and the thorax begins, the scene is so suggestive of unruffled quiet and calm and gentle childlike faith that doubt and distrust and timidity and apprehension flee away.

THE NUPTIALS OP DANGEROUS DAVIS.

|On the morning on which Adam Forepaugh entered the city of Laramie, and with a grand array of hump-backed dromedaries, club-footed elephants, and an uncalled-for amount of pride, and pomp, and circumstance, captured the town, Dangerous Davis, clad in buckskin and glass beads, and ornamented with one of Smith & Wesson's brass-mounted, self-cocking, Black Hills bustles, entered his honor's office, and walking up to the counter where the Judge deals out justice to the vagabond tenderfoot, and bankrupt non resident, as well as to the law-defying Laramite, called for $5.00 worth of matrimony.

On his arm leaned the fair form of the one who had ensnared the heart of the frontiersman, and who had evidently gobbled up the manly affections of Dangerous Davis. She was resplendent in new clothes, and a pair of Indian moccasins, and when she glided up to the centre of the room, the casual observer might have been deceived into the belief that she was moving through the radiant atmosphere like an $11.00 Peri, if it had not been for the gentle patter of her moccasin as it fell upon the floor with the sylph-like footfall of the prize elephant as he moves around the ring to the dreamy strains of "Old Zip Coon." A large "filled" ring gleamed and sparkled on her brown hand, and vied in splendor with a large seed-wart on her front finger. The ends of her nails were draped in the deepest mourning, and as she leaned her head against the off shoulder of Dangerous Davis, the ranche butter from her tawny locks made a deep and lasting impression on his buckskin bosom.

At this auspicious moment His Honor entered the room, with a green covered German almanac for 1852 and a copy of Robinson Crusoe under his arm, and as he saw the young thing who was about to unite herself to the bold, bad man from Bitter Creek, he burst into tears, while Judge Blair, who had adjourned the District Court in order to witness the ceremony, sat down behind the stove and sobbed like a child. At this moment William Crout, who has been married under all kinds of circumstances and in eleven different languages, entered the room and inspired confidence in the weeping throng.

Dangerous Davis changed his quid of tobacco from one side of his amber mouth to the other, spat on his hands, and asked to see the Judge's matrimonial price list. The Judge showed him some different styles, out of which Dangerous Davis selected the kind he wanted.

By this time about one hundred and thirteen men, who had been waiting around the court room during the past week in order to be drawn as jurymen, had crowded in to witness the ceremony.

After all the preliminaries had been gone through with, the Judge commenced reading the marriage service out of a copy of the Clown's Comic Song Book. When he asked if anyone present had any objections to the proceedings, Price, from force of habit, rose and said, "I object;" but Dangerous Davis caressed his brass-mounted Grecian bend, and Price withdrew the objection. Everybody admitted Price's good judgment, under the circumstances, in withdrawing the objection.

After the usual ceremony, the Judge put the bridegroom through some little initiations, instructed him in the grand hailing signs, grips, passwords and signals, swore him to support the Constitution of the United States, pronounced the benediction on the newly-wedded pair, and the ceremony closed with an extemporaneous speech by Judge Brown and profound silence and thoughtfulness on the part of Brockway, as he reflected upon the dangers which constantly surround us.

Dangerous Davis mounted his broncho, and tying his new wife on behind him on the saddle with an old shawl strap, plunged his spurs into the panting sides of his calico colored steed, and in a few moments was flying over the green plains, while the mountain breeze caught up the oleaginous saffron-hued tresses of the bride and in wild glee mingled them with the broncho's sorrel tail, and tossed them to the four winds of heaven.

THE HOLIDAY HOG.

|Dear reader, did you ever go along past the market these cold December mornings and study the expression of the frozen holiday hog as he stands at the door with his mouth propped open by a chip, and the last hardened outlines of a diabolical smile lingering about the whole face? Did it ever occur to you that he has ways like Charles Francis Adams?

And yet he was not always thus--a cold, hard, immovable pork statue. Once he was the pride of some Nebraska home. He was petted and caressed no doubt, and had more demoralized melon rinds, and cold potatoes, and dish water than he actually needed. But think of it, gentle, kind-hearted reader; he has been torn from those he loved, and butchered to make a Caucasian holiday; snatched from the home of his youth, and frozen into a double and twisted post mortem examination. Perhaps, dear reader, you have never had to stand as a model for the picture of the man in the front of the almanac, who looks like the victim of a buzz saw, with the various members of the Zodiac family floating around him. If you have not, and we will take your word for it, you cannot fully realize the feelings of the Nebraska hog on a December day, without a stitch of clothes to his back.

SOME CENSUS CONUNDRUMS.

```It was in the prime of summer time,

```An evening calm and cool--=

|When the census enumerator came to the sanctity of my home, and opened a valise which contained a large duodecimo volume, and about nine gallons of brand new interrogation points.

He opened his note book, which was about the size of the White River Reservation, and proceeded to get acquainted. I thought at first that he had come from Chicago to interview me about the Presidential convention, and get my views. This was not the case, however.

I think he is going to write my biography and sell it at $2.00 each.

I gave him all the information I could, and telegraphed to my old Sabbath School Superintendent at home for more.

Among other little evidences of his morbid curiosity, I will give the following:

When were you born, and looking calmly back at this important epoch in your life, do you regret that you took the step?

If yes, state to what extent and under what circumstances?

Do you remember George Washington, and if so to what amount?

What is your fighting weight?

Who struck Billy Patterson?

Did you ever have membranous croup, and what did you do for it?

Do you keep hens, or do you lavish your profanity on those of your neighbors?

Have any of your ancestors ever been troubled with ingrowing nails, or blind staggers?

What is your opinion of rats?

Are you a victim to rum or other alcoholic stimulants, and if so, at what hour do you usually succumb to the potent enemy?

Would you have any scruples in asking the enumerator to join you in wrestling with man's destroyer at that hour?

Do you eat onions?

Which side do you lie on while sleeping?

Which side do you lie on during a political campaign?

What is the chief end of man?

Are you single, and if so what is your excuse? Who will care for mother now?

THE GENTLE POWER OF A WOMAN'S INFLUENCE.

|Cummins City is still a crude metropolis. Society has not yet arrived at the white vest and lawn sociable period there. There is nothing to hamper any one or throw a tiresome restraint around him. You walk up and down the streets of the camp without feeling that the vigilant eye of the policeman is upon you, and when you register at the leading hotel the proprietor don't ask how much baggage you have, or insist upon it that your valise ought to be blown up with a quill to give it a robust appearance.

Speaking of this hotel, however, brings to my mind a little incident which really belongs in here. There are two ladies at this place, the only ones in the city limits, if my memory serves me. One of these ladies owns a lot of poles or house logs which were, at the time of which I speak, on the dump, as it were, ready to be used in the construction of a new cabin.