Chapter IV (2)

Let us institute a reform. Let us ignore the death of every plug who claims to be a James' boy, unless he identifies himself. Let us examine the matter and see if the trade mark is on every wrapper or blown in the bottle, before we fill the air with woe and bust the broad canopy of heaven wide open with our lamentations over the untimely death of the James' boys. If we succeed in standing them off while they live we can afford to control our grief and silently battle with our emotions when they are still in death, until we know we are snorting and bellowing over the correct corpse.

A RELIC.

|The Hutchinson family gave a concert last evening at the Methodist church, according to advertisement, and were greeted with a fair house. The entertainment did not awaken very loud applause, nor very much of it. The songs were not new. Many of them I had almost forgotten, but they were trotted out last evening and driven around the track in pretty fair time.

The fresh little quartette entitled, "Tommy, don't Go," was brought forward during the entertainment. I could see that this song has failed very much since I last met it. Its teeth are falling out, and it is getting very bald-headed. It will probably make two or three more grand farewell concerts and then it will be found dead in its bed some morning before breakfast.

"Silver Threads Among the Gold" was omitted from the programme.

The old melodeon that I remember was rickety and out of repair when I was a prattling infant, was on the stage last evening. It is about the size of a mouth organ, but the tone is not as clear. It is getting wheezy, and a short breath shows that it is beginning to feel the infirmities of age. The pumping arrangement makes more noise than the music, and something is the matter with the exhaust pipe. But when the old man opened the throttle and gave her sand, she would make a good deal of racket for such a little thing. After the concert was over, Mr. Hutchinson rolled up the melodeon in his pocket handkerchief and took it home.

Take the entertainment up one side and down the other, I was not much tickled with it. For those who like to drift back into the musty centuries gone by, and shake hands with the skeletons of forgotten ages, it is all right; but the time has come when a troupe cannot travel upon anything but true merit, and the public require that those who ask for money shall give some kind of an equivalent.

SOME REASONS WHY I CAN'T BE AN INDIAN AGENT.

|I see by the Western press that my name has been suggested to the Secretary of the Interior as a suitable one for the appointment of Indian Agent at the Uncompahgre Agency to succeed Berry; and, while I must express my grateful acknowledgment for the apparent faith and childlike confidence reposed in me by the people of Colorado, I must gently but firmly decline the proffered distinction.

In the first place, my other duties will not admit of it. My time is very much occupied at present in my journalistic work, and should there be a falling off in my chaste and picturesque contributions to the press, the great surging world of literature would be surprised and grieved.

Again, I could not entirely lay aside this class of work anyway, even were I to accept the position, and as I cannot write without being wrapped in the most opaque gloom and perfect calm I would be annoyed, I know, by the war-whoops of the savage when he got to playing croquet in the front yard, and whenever he got to shooting at me through the window while I was composing a poem, I am perfectly positive that I would get restless and the divine afflatus would cease to give down.

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

Further than this, I have not that gentle magnetic power over the untutored savage that some have. I am agitated all the time by a nervous dread that if I go near him I may lose my self-command and kill him. I would lose my temper some day when I felt irritable, I'm afraid, and shoot into a drove of them and mangle them horribly if they refused to dig the potatoes, or got rebellious and wouldn't do the fall plowing.

Then I would have to hunt up a suitable military post 200 or 300 miles away and stay there till the popular feeling in the tribe had cooled down a little.

Then, again, the Utes would invite me to attend the regular social hops during the winter, and I wouldn't know what to do, for it would be bad policy to refuse, and yet I don't know the first figure of the war-dance. I dance like a club-footed camel, anyway, and when I got mixed up in the scalp-dance the floor-manager would get mad at me probably, and chop some large irregular notches in me with a broad-ax.

Then their costumes are so low-necked and so exceedingly dress, and everything is so all-fired decolette, whatever that is. I would probably insist on wearing a liver-pad on a chilblain, and they wouldn't dance with me all the evening, and I would be a wall-flower, and they would call me a perfect dud, and would laugh at the way my liver-pad was cut, and I would go home and cry myself to sleep over the whole miserable affair.

So that perhaps it would be just as well to plug along as I am and not get ambitious. The life of the ostensible humorist may not be so fraught with untrammeled nature and sylvan retreats, and wild, picturesque canons, and bosky dells, and things of that kind, but it is cheering and comforting to put your hand on the top of your head and feel that it is still on deck, and, although wealth may not come pouring in upon you in such an irresistible torrent as you may desire, you know that if you can get enough to eat from day to day, and dodge the Vigilance Committee and the celluloid pie, you are comparatively safe.

Besides all this, I am afraid I am not in proper spiritual shape to go among the Indians., Suppose that on some softened, mellow, autumnal day they were all clustered about me with the bacon grease and war paint on every childlike countenance, and while I stood there in the midst of all the autumn splendor with the woods clothed in all the gorgeous apparel of the deceased year, telling them of the beauties of industry, and peace, and the glad unfettered life of the buckwheat promoter, or while I read a passage of Scripture to them and was explaining it, and they were looking up into my face with their great fawnlike eyes, all at once one of them should playfully shoot my wife--all the wife I had, too--or my hired girl! The chances are about even that I would throw down the Bible and fly into an ungovernable rage and swear, and be just as harsh, and rude, and unreasonable as I could be. Then, after I had hammered the immortal soul out of the entire tribe, and my wrath had spent itself, I would probably bitterly regret it all.

O it's of no use. I can't accept the position. I've been in the habit of swearing at the spring poet and the "constant reader" too long, and I know just as well as any one how it unfits me for every walk of life that requires meekness and gentle Christian forbearance.

THE PICNIC SNOOZER'S LAMENT.

```Gently lay aside the picnic,

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

```And the winter style of misery

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

```Lariat the lonely oyster

```Drifting on some foreign shore;

```Zion needs him in her business--

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

```Bring along the lonely oyster,

````With the winter style of gloom,

```And the supper for the pastor,

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

```Cast the pudding for the pastor,`

```With its double iron door;

```It will gather in the pastor`

```For the bright and shining shore.=

```Put away the little picnic

````Till the coming of the spring;

```Useless now the swaying hammock`

```And the idle picnic swing.=

```Put away the pickled spider`

```And the cold-pressed picnic fly,

```And the decorated trousers

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

BILLIOUS NYE AND BOOMERANG IN THE GOLD MINES.

|Whenever the cares of life weigh too heavily upon me, and the _ennui_ which comes to those who have more wealth than they know what to do with settles down upon me, and I get weary of civilization, I like to load up my narrow-gauge mule Boomerang and take a trip into the mountains. I call my mule Boomerang because I never know where he is going to strike. He is a perpetual surprise to me in this respect. A protracted acquaintance with him, however, has taught me to stand in front of him when I address him, for the recoil of Boomerang is very disastrous. Boomerang is very much below the medium height, with a sad, faraway look in his eye. He has an expression of woe and disappointment and gloom, because life has been to him a series of blasted hopes and shattered ambitions.

In his youth he yearned to be the trick-mule of a circus, and though he fitted himself for that profession, he finds himself in the decline of life with his bright anticipations nothing but a vast and robust ruin. About all the relaxation he has is to induce some trusting stranger to caress his favorite chilblain, and then he kicks the confiding stranger so high that he can count the lamp-posts on the streets of the New Jerusalem. When Boomerang and I visit a mining camp the supplies of giant powder and other combustibles are removed to some old shaft and placed under a strong guard. In one or two instances where this precaution was not taken the site of the camp is now a desolate, barren waste, occupied by the prairie-dog and the jack-rabbit. When Boomerang finds a nitro-glycerine can in the heart of a flourishing camp, and has room to throw himself, he can arrange a larger engagement for the coroner than any mule I ever saw.

There is a new camp in the valley of the Big Laramie River, near the dividing line between Wyoming and Colorado. A few weeks ago the murmur of the rapid river down the canon and the cheerful solo of the cayote alone were heard. Now several hundred anxious excited miners are prospecting for gold, and the tent-town grows apace. Up and down the sides of the river and over the side of the mountain every little way a notice greets the eye announcing that "the undersigned claim 1,500 feet in length by 300 feet in width upon" the lode known as the Pauper's Dream, or the Blue Tail Fly, or the Blind Tom, or the Captain Kidd, or the Pigeon-Toed Pete, with all the dips, spurs, angles, gold and silver bearing rock or earth therein contained.

I have a claim further on in the North Park of Colorado. I have always felt a little delicate about working it, because heretofore several gentlemen from the Ute reservation on White River have claimed it. They are the same parties who got into a little difficulty with Agent Meeker and killed him. Of course these parties are not _bona fide_ citizens of the United States, and therefore cannot hold my claim under the mining law; but I have not as yet raised the point with them. Whenever they would go over into the park for rest and recreation, I would respect their feelings and withdraw. I didn't know but they might have some private business which they did not wish me to overhear, so I came away.

Once I came away in the night. It is cooler travelling in the night, and does not attract so much attention. Last summer Antelope and his band came over into the park and told the miners that he would give them "one sleep" to get out of there. I told him that I didn't care much for sleep anyhow, and I would struggle along somehow till I got home. I told him that my constitution would stand it first-rate without rest, and I felt as though my business in town might be suffering in my absence. So I went home. The mine is there yet, but I would sell it very reasonably--very reasonably indeed. I do not apprehend any trouble from the Indians, but I have lost my interest in mines to some extent, The Indians are not all treacherous and bloodthirsty as some would suppose. Only the live ones are that way. Wooden Indians are also to be relied upon.

In digging an irrigating ditch on the Laramie Plains, last summer, the skeleton of an Indian chief was plowed up. I went to look at him. He had, no doubt, been dead many years; but in the dry alkaline divide, at an elevation of nearly 8,000 feet above sea level, his skull had been preserved pretty well. I took it in my hand and looked it over and shook the sand out of it, and convinced myself that life was extinct. An Indian is not always dead when he has that appearance. I always feel a little timid till I see his scapula, and ribs, and shin bones mixed up so that Gabriel would rather arrange a 15 puzzle than to fix up an Indian out of the wreck. Then I have the most child-like faith and confidence in him. When some avenging fate overtakes a Ute and knocks him into pi, and thus makes a Piute out of him, and flattens him out like a postage stamp, and pulverizes him, and runs him over the amalgator, and assays him so that he lies in the retort like a seidlitz powder, then I feel that I can trust him. I do not care then how much the cold world may scoff at him. Prior to that I am very reserved and very reticent.

That is why I presented my mine to the Ute nation as a slight token of my respect and esteem. Then I went away. I did not hurry much, but I had every inducement and encouragement to reach home at the earliest possible moment, and the result was very gratifying. Very much so, indeed. I left my gun and ammunition, but it did not matter. It wasn't a very good gun anyhow. I do not need it. Any one going into the park this summer can have it. It is standing behind the door of the cabin between the piano and the whatnot.

TWO GREAT MEN.

|Mr. Thompson, Secretary of the Navy, passed through here on his way to San Francisco on Wednesday evening, with his party.

In company with Delegate Downey, Judge Blair and United States Marshal Schnitger, I went into the Secretary's special car and talked with him while the train stopped here.

The other members of the party did most of the talking and I eloquently sat on the back of a chair and whistled a few bars from a little operatta that I am having cast at the rolling-mill. I am not very hilarious in the presence of great at men. I am not so much at home in their society as I am in my own quiet little boudoir, with one leg over the piano, and the other tangled up among the $2,500 lace curtains and Majolica dogs.

Bye and bye I thought that I had better show the Secretary that I knew more than the casual observer would suppose, and I said, "Mr. Thompson, how's your navy looking this summer? Have you sheared your iron-clad rams yet, and if so, what will the clip average do you think?" He laughed a merry, rippling laugh, and said if he were at home he would swear that he was in the presence of the mental giant, William G. Le Duc.

I was very much pleased with the Secretary. This will insure the brilliant success of his Western trip.

He paid the Laramie plains a high compliment; said they were greener, and the grass was far superior to that of any part of the country through which he had passed. He said he was as positive of Garfield's election as he was of reaching San Francisco, and chatted pleasantly upon the general topics of the day.

I could see that he was accustomed to the very best society, for he stood there in the blinding glare of my dazzling beauty, as self-possessed and cool as though he were at home talking with Ben Butler and Conkling and Carpenter and other rising young men.

There is a striking resemblance between the Secretary and myself. We are both tall and slender, with roguish eyes and white hair. His, however, is white from age, and is a kind of bluish white. Mine is white because it never had moral courage or strength of character enough to be any other color. It also has more of a lemon-colored tinge to it than the Secretary's has.

We resemble each other in several more respects. One is that we are both United States officials. He is a member of the Cabinet, and I am a United States Commissioner. We are both great men, but I have succeeded better in keeping it a profound secret than he has.

DIRTY MURPHY.

|On Thursday a man known by the Castillian nom de plume of Dirty Murphy, was engaged in digging out a frozen water-pipe in front of the New York House, when the glowing inspiration came upon him that the frozen earth could be blasted much easier than it could be dug, so he drilled a hole down to the pipe and put in a shot preparatory to lifting a large portion of the universe out by the roots and laying bare the foundations of the earth.

John Humpfner, the ram-rod of the New York House, feared that the explosion might break the large French plate glass windows of his palatial hotel, and so put a wash tub over the blast. What the exact notion of Mr. Humpfner was relative to the result in this case, I am unable to say, but when the roar of the universal convulsion had died away, and the result was examined by Mr. Humpfner and the Count de Dirty Murphy, they looked surprised.

Instead of blowing out a large tract of land and laying bare the entire water and gas system of the city, the blast blew out like a sick fire-cracker with a loose fuse, and, taking the washtub with it, sailed away into the realms of space. It crashed through the milky way and passed on in its mad flight into the boundless stretch of the unknown. Those who saw the affair and had no interest in the wash-tub, enjoyed it very much, but to the incorporators and bondholders who held the controlling interest in the tub, the whole thing seemed a hollow mockery and a desolate, dreary waste. Don Miguel de Dirty Murphy swooned on the spot. The hose has been playing on him ever since, but he has not returned to consciousness. The later geological formations have been washed away, and it is thought that by working a night shift, prehistoric and volcanic encrustations will be removed so that the pores may be opened and life and animation return, but it is a long, tedious job, and the superintending geologist is beginning to despair.

A ROCKY MOUNTAIN SUNSET.

|Speaking of the hours of closing day reminds me that we have recently witnessed some of the most brilliant and beautiful sunsets here that I have ever seen. In justice to Wyoming, I will say that she certainly deserves a word for the gorgeous splendor of her summer sunset skies.

The air is perfectly pure, and at that hour the sighing zephyr seems to have sighed about all it wants to and dies away to rest. The pulse of tired Nature is almost still, and the luxurious sense of rest is upon the face of the silent world. The god of day drops slowly down the crimson west, as though he reluctantly bade adieu to the grassy plains and rugged hills. Anon the golden bars of resplendent light are shot across the deep blue of heaven, the fleecy clouds are tipped and bordered with pale gold, while the heavy billows of bronze are floating in a mighty ocean of the softest azure. The blue grows deeper and the gold more dazzling. The scarlet becomes intensified and the softened east takes up the magnificent reflection. The hills and mountains are bathed in the beams of this occidental splendor, and the landscape adorns itself in honor of nature's most wonderful diurnal spectacle.

It is certainly the boss. These mountain sunsets in the pure, clear air of Wyoming and Colorado, as thrilling triumphs of natural loveliness, most unquestionably take the cake.

The Italian sunset is a good fair average sunset, but the admission is too high. It also lacks expression and _embonpoint_, whatever that may be.

May be it is not _embonpoint_ which it lacks, but it is something of that nature.

These beautiful sights awake the poet's soul within me, and on one occasion I wrote a little ode or apostrophe to the sunset, which was as sweet a little thing as I ever saw in the English language, but the taxidermist spoiled it. He left it out in the hot sun while he was stuffing a sage hen, and the poor little thing seemed to wilt and retire from the public gaze.

THE TEMPERATURE OF THE BUMBLE-BEE.

|A recent article on bees says, "If you have noticed bees very closely, you may have seen that they are not all alike in size."

I have noticed bees very closely indeed, during my life. In fact I have several times been thrown into immediate juxtaposition with them, and have had a great many opportunities to observe their ways, and I am free to say that I have not been so forcibly struck with the difference in their size as the noticeable difference in their temperature.

I remember at one time of sitting by a hive watching the habits of the bees, and thinking how industrious they were, and what a wide difference there is between the toilsome life of the little insect, and the enervating, aimless, idle and luxurious life of the newspaper man, when an impulsive little bee lit in my hair. He seemed to be feverish. Whereever he settled down he seemed to leave a hot place. I learned afterward that it was a new kind of bee called the anti-clinker base-burner bee.

O, yes, I have studied the ways of the bee very closely. He is supposed to improve each shining hour. That's the great objection I have to him. The bee has been thrown up to me a great deal during my life, and the comparison was not flattering. It has been intimated that I resembled the bee that sits on the piazza of the hive all summer and picks his teeth, while the rest are getting in honey and beeswax for the winter campaign.

DRAWBACKS OF PUBLIC LIFE.

|I always like to tell anything that has the general effect of turning the laugh on me, because then I know there will be no hard feelings. It is very difficult to select any one who will stand publicity when that publicity is more amusing to the average reader than to the chief actor. Every little while I run out of men who enjoy being written about in my chaste and cheerful vein. Then I hate to come forward and take this position myself. It is not egotism, as some might suppose. It is unselfishness and a manly feeling of self-sacrifice.

Last year I consented to read the Declaration of Independence, as my share of the programme, partially out of gallantry toward the Goddess of Liberty, and partly to get a ride with the chaplain and orator of the day, through the principal streets behind the band. It was a very proud moment for me. I felt as though I was holding up one corner of the national fabric myself, and I naturally experienced a pardonable pride about it. I sat in the carriage with the compiled laws of Wyoming under my arm, and looked like Daniel Webster wrapped in a large bale of holy calm. At the grounds I found that most everybody was on the speakers' stand, and the audience was represented by a helpless and unhappy minority.

At a Fourth of July celebration it is wonderful how many great men there are, and how they swarm on the speakers' platform. Then there are generally about thirteen venerable gentlemen who do not pretend to be great, but they cannot hear very well, so they get on the speakers' stand to hear the same blood-curdling statements that they have heard for a thousand years. While I was reading the little burst of humor known as the Declaration, the staging gave way under the accumulated weight of the Fourth Infantry band and several hundred great men who had invited themselves to sit on the platform. The Chaplain fell on top of me, and the orator of the day on top of him. A pitcher of ice water tipped over on me, and the water ran down my back. A piece of scantling and an alto horn took me across the cerebellum, and as often as I tried to get up and throw off the Chaplain and orator of the day and Fourth Infantry band, the greased pig which had been shut up under the stand temporarily, would run between my legs and throw me down again. I never knew the reading of the Declaration of Independence to have such a telling effect. I went home without witnessing the closing exercises. I did not ride home in the carriage. I told the committee that some poor, decrepit old woman might ride home in my place. I needed exercise and an opportunity to commune with myself.

As I walked home by an unfrequented way, I thought of the growth and grandeur of the republic, and how I could get rid of the lard that had been wiped on my clothes by the oleagineous pig. This year, when the committee asked me to read the Declaration, I said pleasantly but firmly that I would probably be busy on that day soaking my head, and therefore would have to decline.

THE GLAD, FREE LIFE OF THE MINER.

|In the spring the young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love. He also looks forward to some means by which he can earn the bread and oleomargarine on which he can subsist. There are several ways of doing this. Some take to agriculture and spend the long days of golden summer among the clover blossoms of the meadow, raking hay and hornets into large winrows, while they sniff the refreshing odor of the mignonette and the morning glory, and the boiling soft soap and potato bugs that have been mashed into the sweet bye-and-bye. Others, by a straightforward course become truthful newspaper men and amass untold wealth as funny men. Others proclaim the glad news of salvation at so much a proclaim.

Perhaps, however, the most exciting way to become wealthy in a speedy manner and in a surprising style is that of the miner. He buys some bacon, and tobacco, and flour, and whiskey, and a pick and some chewing tobacco, and a shovel and some whiskey, and an axe and some smoking tobacco and matches, and whiskey and blankets, and giant powder, and goes to the mountains to get wealthy.

He works all day hard, walking up hill and down, across ravines and rocky gulches, weary but happy and confident till night comes down upon him and he goes home to camp, and around the fire he enters the free-for-all lying match, and tired as he is gets away with the prize for scrub-lying. I have met miners who would with a little chance hold a pretty even race against the great stalwart army of journalists. I do not say this intending to reflect upon the noble profession of mining, for I have been taught to respect the pleasing lie which is told in a harmless way, to cheer the great surging mass of humanity who get tired of the same old truths that have been handed down from generation to generation.

One man who ran against me for justice of the peace two years ago and who, therefore, got left, is now independent, having sold out a prospect in sight of town for a good figure, while I plug along and tell the truth and have nothing under the broad blue dome of heaven but $150 per month and my virtue. Of course virtue is its own reward, but how little of glad unfettered mirthfulness it yields. Sometimes I wish I had a little looser notions about what is right and what is wrong. But it is too late now. I have become so hardened in these upright ways that when I do wrong it pretty nearly kills me.

This summer, however, I will get me a little blue jackass and put a sawbuck on his back, and pack some select oysters and gum-drops, and an upright piano, and a hammock, and some sheet music, and a camera, and some ice and frosted cake, and a Brussels carpet, and a tent on his back, and I will hie me to the mines, join the big stampede, fall down a prospect hole 200 feet deep, and my faithful jackass will pull me out, and I shall nearly freeze to death nights, and starve to death days, and I will have lots of fun.

I like the glad, free mountain life. I have tried it. Once I went out to the mountains and slept on the lap of mother earth. That is, I advertised to sleep, but I couldn't quite catch on. I lay on my back till two o'clock, A. M., looking up into the clear blue ether, while the stars above were twinkling. After they had about twinkled themselves out, I concluded I would not try to woo the drowsy god any more. I got up and made a pint of coffee, and drank it so hot that the alimentary canal was rolled together like a scroll. It felt as though I had swallowed a large slice of melted perdition, but it didn't warm me up any. Then I went up the mountain five miles to see the sun rise. In about four hours it rose. So did the coffee that I drank at two o'clock. Somehow the sunrise didn't seem to cheer me. It looked murky and muddy; all nature seemed to be shrouded in gloom. There was more gloom turned loose there than I have ever seen. I wanted to go home. I needed some one to pity me and love me a great deal. I needed rest and entire change of scene. I went away from there because the associations were not pleasant; roughing it doesn't seem to do me the required amount of good. I am too frail. I need more of the comforts of civilization, and less wealth of wild, majestic scenery. I find that my nature needs very little awe-inspiring grandeur, and a good deal of woven wire mattress and nutritious, digestible food.

SOME THOUGHTS OF CHILDHOOD.

|Childhood is the glad springtime of life. It is then that the seeds of future greatness or startling mediocrity are sown.

If a boy has marked out a glowing future as an intellectual giant, it is during these early years of his growth that he gets some pine knots to burn in the evening, whereby he can read Herbert Spencer and the Greek grammar, so that when he is in good society he can say things that nobody can understand. This gives him an air of mysterious greatness which soaks into those with whom he comes in contact, and makes them respectful and unhappy while in his presence.

Boys who intend to be railroad men should early begin to look about them for some desirable method of expunging two or three fingers and one thumb. Most boys can do this without difficulty. Trying to pick a card out of a job press when it is in operation is a good way. Most job presses feel gloomy and unhappy until they have eaten the fingers off two or three boys. Then they go on with their work cheerfully and even hilariously.

Boys who intend to lead an irreproachable life and be foremost in every good word and work, should take unusual precautions to secure perfect health and longevity. Good boys never know when they are safe. Statistics show that the ratio of good boys who die, compared to bad ones, is simply appalling.

There are only thirty-nine good boys left as we go to press, and they are not feeling very well either.

The bad ones are all alive and very active.

The boy who stole my coal shovel last spring and went out into the grave-yard and dug into a grave to find Easter eggs, is the picture of health. He ought to live a long time yet, for he is in very poor shape to be ushered in before the bar of judgment.

When I was a child I was different from other boys in many respects. I was always looking about to see what good I could do. I am that way yet.

If my little brother wanted to go in swimming contrary to orders, I was not strong enough to prevent him, but I would go in with him and save him from a watery grave. I went in the water thousands of times that way, and as a result he is alive to-day.

But he is ungrateful. He hardly ever mentions it now, but he remembers the gordian knots that I tied in his shirts. He speaks of them frequently. This shows the ingratitude and natural depravity of the human heart.

Ah, what recompense have wealth and position for the unalloyed joys of childhood, and how gladly to-day as I sit in the midst of my oriental splendor and costly magnificence, and thoughtfully run my fingers through my infrequent bangs, would I give it all, wealth, position and fame, for one balmy, breezy day gathered from the mellow haze of the long ago when I stood full knee-deep in the luke-warm pool near my suburban home in the quiet dell, and allowed the yielding and soothing mud and meek-eyed pollywogs to squirt up between my dimpled toes.

THE NEW ADJUSTABLE CAMPAIGN SONG.

|I beg leave at this time to present to the public a melodious gem of song which I am positive cannot fail to give satisfaction.

It will withstand the rigors of our mountain clime as well as the heat and moisture of a lower altitude.

It is purely unpartisan, although it may be easily changed to any shade of political opinion. It is cheap, portable and durable, and filled with little pathetic passages that will add greatly to the enthusiasm of presidential contests.

It is true that some harsh criticism has been called down upon this little chunk of crystallized melody, as I may be pardoned for calling it, and it has been suggested that it is too much fraught with a gentle, soothing sense of vacuity, and that there is nothing in it particularly one way or the other.

This I admit to be in a measure true. There is nothing in it as a poem, but it must be borne in mind that this is not a poem. It is a campaign song.

Campaign songs never have anything in them. They don't have to.

Editorials and speeches have to express human ideas and little suggestions of original horse sense, but the campaign song is generally distinguished by a wild, tumultuous torrent of attenuated space.

They are like the sons of great men--we do not expect any show of herculean intellectual acumen from them.

Directions.--Set up the song with the feed bar down and pitman reversed. Then turn the thumbscrew that holds the asterisks in place, take them out and lay them away in the upper case, and in proper compartment.

Next set up desirable candidate, unless you can get candidate to set them up himself, slug the standing galley, oil the cross-head, upset the tripod, loosen the crown sheet a little, so that the obvious duplex will work easily in the lallygag eccentric, and turn on steam.

Should the box in which the lower case candidates are stored get hot, sponge off and lubricate with castor oil, antifat and borax in equal parts.

Keep this song in a cool place.=

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

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

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

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

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

```Our brave and trusty men,

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

`````Chorus.=

```Oh, our candidate forever,

````Te doodle daddy a,

```Down with old...,

```Turn a foodie diddy a,

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

````Fal de adden adden a,

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

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

```On the fall election day,

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

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

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

```Shouting the battle cry of,=

`````Chorus.=

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

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

````As all can plainly see,

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

``And we'll whoop de dooden doo,

```With our big majority,

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

`````Chorus.=

```Oh, our candidate forever, etc.

SITTING ON ON A VENERABLE JOKE.

|Near St. Paul, on the Sioux City road, I met the ever-present man from Leadville again.

I had met him before on every division of every railroad that I had traveled over, but I nodded to him, and he began to tell me all about Leadville.

He saw that I looked sad, and he cheered me up with little prehistoric jokes that an antiquarian had given him years ago. Finally he said:

"Leadville is mighty cold; it has such an all fired altitude, The summer is very short and unreliable, and the winter long and severe.

"An old miner over in California gulch got off a pretty good joke about the climate there. A friend asked him about the seasons at Leadville, and he said that there they had nine months winter and three months late in the fall."

Then he looked around to see me fall to pieces with mirth, but I restrained myself and said:

"You will please excuse me for not laughing at that joke. I cannot do it. It is too sacred.

"Do you think I would laugh at the bones of the Pilgrim Fathers, where are they? or burst into wild hilarity over the grave of Noah and his family?

"No, sir; their age and antiquity protect them. That is the way with your Phoenician joke.

"Another reason why I cannot laugh at it is this: I am not a very easy and extemporaneous laughter, anyway. I am generally shrouded in gloom, especially when I am in hot pursuit of a wild and skittish joke for my own use. It takes a good, fair, average joke that hasn't been used much to make me laugh easy, and besides, I have used up the fund of laugh that I had laid aside for that particular joke. It has, in fact, overdrawn some now, and is behind.

"I do not wish to intrench on the fund that I have concluded to offer as a purse for young jokes that have never made it in three minutes.

"I want to encourage green jokes, too, that have never trotted in harness before, and, besides, I must insist on using my scanty fund of laugh on jokes of the nineteenth century. I have got to draw the line somewhere.

"If I were making a collection of antique jokes of the vintage of 1400 years B. C., or arranging and classifying little bon-mots of the time of Cleopatra or King Solomon, I would give you a handsome sum for this one of yours, but I am just trying to worry along and pay expenses, and trying to be polite to every one I meet, and laughing at lots of things that I don't want to laugh at, and I am going to quit it.

"That is why I have met your little witticism with cold and heartless gravity."

A HAIRBREADTH ESCAPE.

|To-day I got shaved at a barber-shop, where I begged the operator to kill me and put me out of my misery.

I have been accustomed to gentle care and thoughtfulness at home, and my barber at Laramie handles me with the utmost tenderness. I was, therefore, poorly prepared to meet the man who this morning filled my soul with woe.

I know that I have not deserved this, for while others have berated the poor barber and swore about his bad breath and never-ending clatter and his general heartlessness, I have never said anything that was not filled with child-like trust and hearty good will toward him.

I have called the attention of the public to the fact that sometimes customers had bad breath and were restless and mean while being operated on, and then when they are all fixed up nicely, they put their hats on and light a cigar and hold up their finger to the weary barber and tell him that they will see him more subsequently.

Now, however, I feel differently.

This barber no doubt had never heard of me. He no doubt thought I was an ordinary plug who didn't know anything about luxury.

I shall mark a copy of this paper and send it to him.

Then while he is reading it I will steal up behind him with a pick handle and kill him. I want him to be reading this when I kill him, because it will assist the coroner in arriving at the immediate cause of his death.

The first whiff I took of this man's breath, I knew that he was rum's maniac.

He had the Jim James in an advanced stage. Now, I don't object to being shaved by a barber who is socially drunk, but when the mad glitter of the maniac is in his eye and I can see that he is debating the question of whether he will cut my head off and let it drop over the back of the chair or choke me to death with a lather brush, it makes me nervous and fidgetty.

This man made up his mind three times that he would kill me, and some one came in just in time to save me.

His chair was near a window, and there was a hole in the blind, so that when he was shaving the off side of my face he would turn my head over in such a position that I could look up into the middle of the sun. My attention had never before been called to the appearance of the sun as it looks to the naked eye, and I was a good deal surprised.

The more I looked into the very center of the great orb of day the more I was filled with wonder at the might and power that could create it. I began to pine for death immediately, so that I could be far away among the heavenly bodies, and in a land where no barber with the delirium triangles can ever enter.

This barber held my head down so that the sun could shine into my darkened understanding, until I felt that my brain had melted and was floating around and swashing about in my skull like warm butter.

His hand was very unsteady, too. I lost faith in him on the start when he cut off a mole under my chin and threw it into the spittoon. I did not care very particularly for the mole, and did not need it particularly, but at the same time I had not decided to take it off at that time. In fact I had worn it so long that I had become attached to it. It had also become attached to me.

That is why I could not restrain my tears when the barber cut it off and then stepped back to the other end of the room to see how I looked without it.

MYSELF, DR. TALMAGE, AND OTHER DIVINES.

September 5, 1880.

|I am beginning to-day to keep a diary. It is not an agreeable task, but I feel that the wild, glad bursts of unfettered thought which surge through my ponderous mind ought to be embalmed in eligible characters, and passed down to posterity.

The thought may arise in the mind of the reader that this is taking a low and contemptible advantage of a posterity that never in word or deed ever harmed me; but I care not. Other able men have perpetrated their diaries upon me when I was not in a condition to help myself, and now that I can hand down and transmit to nations yet unborn, the same great heritage unimpaired, there is a sweet consciousness of a revenge that has been fully glutted.

To day I have been to church. I do not speak of it as remarkable at all, for wherever I am, whether at home or abroad, my first thought is, where will I find a sanctuary?

The minister was quite classical and he pumped the congregation so full of heathen mythology that he came very near forgetting that he had a word to say on behalf of Christianity as the advance agent of Zion.

I do not wish to say one word that would sound like irreverence toward the cause which this man undertook to represent; but I want to jot down a little thought or two relative to this exponent, so that I may be placed squarely upon the record.

I have often thought when I have watched this class of ministers, with one hand resting in a graceful and negligent posture on the altar rail, while the self-conscious Demosthenes reeled off a 4th of July prayer to the miserable, wretched and undone sinners before him, how God has said that He is a jealous God; and I have wondered if these prayers, arranged with great care to meet the criticism of the worshippers, and with an off-hand disregard to the feelings of the Almighty that is very cool and very refreshing indeed, whether they ever lay hold of the throne of grace or not, and whether they ever lift up mankind or make the world better.

Speaking of divines, reminds me of the very pleasant trip I had over the Union Pacific on my way east with Brother Talmage. I call him Brother Tannage because he called me brother occasionally. He no doubt thought that in different walks of life, perhaps, but working in the same direction, we were both laboring to make the world better.

Brother Talmage, General Crook, myself and two or three other eminent men together occupied the sleeper Boise City. Brother Talmage and I one day were seized with the same irresistable desire, at the same moment, to change our shirts. He was a little nearer the wash-room than I was, so he got there first, and we stood up together smiling at each other sweetly, with a clean shirt in our hands, and didn't know exactly how to express ourselves.

I was the first to speak. I told the Doctor that it was of no consequence particularly, and I would wait. He said no, I must not wait for him, and insisted so cordially on my coming in there that we went in together and tackled the mysteries of our toilet at the same time.

It was pretty tough on me, for I had been accustomed while peeling off a damp shirt to go through a few little vocal exercises and dance around on one leg and howl.

Going from the mountains of Wyoming down into the tropical heat of Nebraska made me perspire a good deal, and nothing but the firm and irresistible restraint thrown about me by an eminent divine kept me from swearing.

But the Doctor did not get mad. When he shoved his bald head into his shirt a large smile was on his face, and when it emerged at the top and he waved his arms above his head and struggled to climb up into the shirt, so that he could look out over the battlements, he was still smiling. He was not only smiling, but he was smiling a good deal. Those who have seen Dr. Talmage smile know now he throws his whole soul into it.

If I could jam my head up through a wilderness of shirt and starch and saw off my windpipe as I looked out over the billowy, buttonless mass, and still smile, as Dr. Talmage does, I would give all my broad possessions in a moment.

This offer will hold good up to the 15th.

We got quite sociable and cordial toward the close, and I got the Doctor to reach up as far as he could on my spinal column and bring down the refractory end of a suspender, then I retaliated by going down into his true inwardness after a collar button that had dropped into oblivion.

While he was smiling with that glad, free smile of his, which he takes along with him instead of baggage, he told me a pretty good thing on the editor of the _Herald_ of Salt Lake. He told it to me in confidence, he said, because he knew he could rely on a newspaper man. Then he laughed and seemed to think it was a good joke.

It seems that when Dr. Talmage was in Salt Lake, the _Tribune_ published what purported to be an interview between a reporter of that paper and the Brooklyn divine.

Shortly afterward, and while Dr. T. was in San Francisco, he received a letter from the editor of the _Herald_ and a marked copy of the paper, giving the Doctor a very flattering notice. In his letter the editor said: "I enclose a clipping from the _Tribune_ purporting to be an interview between yourself and a reporter of that paper; will you be kind enough to write me whether it is or is not genuine?"

The Doctor looked the clipping carefully over, and as it was nothing but a blood-curdling account of the merits of Day's Kidney pad, he had no hesitancy in pronouncing the alleged interview a fraud. Still he never wrote the editor of the _Herald_, and he no doubt still wonders why it is that Dr. Talmage don't come forward and state the facts, so that the Gentile _Tribune_ may be shown up.

The Doctor says that too much care cannot be used by the editor who wields the shears not to get his editorials mixed up with patent medicine advertisements.

FINE-CUT AS A MEANS OF GRACE.

|The amateur tobacco chewer many times through lack of consideration allows himself to be forced into very awkward and unpleasant positions. As a fair sample of the perils to which the young and inexperienced masticator of the weed is subjected, the following may be given:

A few Sabbaths ago a young man who was attending divine worship up on Piety Avenue, concluded, as the sermon was about one-half done and didn't seem to get very exciting, that he would take a chew of tobacco. He wasn't a handsome chewer, and while he was sliding the weed out of his pocket and getting it behind his handkerchief and working it into his mouth, he looked as though he might be robbing a blind woman of her last copper. Then when he got it into his mouth and tried to look pious and anxious about the welfare of his never dying soul, the chew in his mouth felt as big as a Magnolia ham. Being new in the business, the salivary glands were so surprised that they began to secrete at a remarkable rate. The young man got alarmed. He wanted to spit. His eyes began to hang out on his cheek, and still the salivary glands continued to give down. He thought about spitting in his handkerchief or his hat, but neither seemed to answer the purpose. He was getting wild. He thought of swallowing it, but he knew that his stomach wasn't large enough.