Classic Audiobook Collection - Baled Hay - A Drier Book than Walt Whitmans Leaves o Grass by Bill Nye ~ Full Audiobook [comedy]

Episode Date: June 28, 2025

Baled Hay - A Drier Book than Walt Whitmans Leaves o Grass by Bill Nye audiobook. Genre: comedy In Baled Hay: A Drier Book than Walt Whitman's Leaves o' Grass, 19th-century American humorist Bill Nye (Edgar Wilson Nye) sets out to do the unthinkable: publish a book of lofty, poetic sayings while insisting he has carefully removed anything that might accidentally resemble real poetry. The result is a brisk, mischievous collection of comic sketches, mock-serious reflections, and satirical observations that lampoon literary pretension, public figures, and everyday American life. Moving from frontier-flavored anecdotes to sly social commentary, Nye adopts the voice of a straight-faced lecturer who cannot resist puncturing his own authority with self-deprecating asides and playful word twists. Characters drift in and out like the cast of a tall tale: artists and journalists, would-be intellectuals, hard-luck workers, and assorted busybodies who take themselves far too seriously. Whether he is parodying high culture or turning ordinary experiences into absurd set pieces, Nye keeps the pace lively and the tone irreverent. Beneath the jokes lies a sharp eye for how people perform respectability, chase status, and mistake pomposity for wisdom. For ad-free listening try our premium subscription Chapters (Approximate) (00:00:00) Chapter 01 (00:13:59) Chapter 02 (00:26:49) Chapter 03 (00:41:06) Chapter 04 (00:56:40) Chapter 05 (01:08:19) Chapter 06 (01:22:25) Chapter 07 (01:34:38) Chapter 08 (01:47:59) Chapter 09 (01:58:42) Chapter 10 (02:13:09) Chapter 11 (02:26:40) Chapter 12 (02:40:37) Chapter 13 (02:53:03) Chapter 14 (03:07:01) Chapter 15 (03:19:08) Chapter 16 (03:29:32) Chapter 17 (03:46:20) Chapter 18 (04:04:59) Chapter 19 (04:15:33) Chapter 20 (04:25:23) Chapter 21 (04:37:32) Chapter 22 (04:48:57) Chapter 23 (05:03:34) Chapter 24 (05:16:32) Chapter 25 (05:33:21) Chapter 26 (05:44:36) Chapter 27 (05:59:02) Chapter 28 (06:11:33) Chapter 29 (06:23:20) Chapter 30 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bailed Hay, a drier book than Walt Whitman's Leaves O'Grass by Bill Nye. Dedication To my wife, who has courteously and heroically laughed at my feeble and emaciated jokes, even when she did not feel like it, who was again and again started up and agitated successfully the flagging and reluctant applause, who has courageously held my coat through this trying ordeal, and who, even now, as I write this, is in the front yard warning people to keep off the premises,

until I have another lucid interval. This volume is affectionately inscribed by the author. Piazza to the third volume. There can really be no excuse for this last book of trite and beautiful sayings. I do not attempt in any way to palliate this great wrong. I would not do so even if I had an idea what palliate meant. It will, however, add one more to the series of, of books for which I am to blame, and the pleasure of travel will be very much enhanced,

for me at least. There is one friend I always meet on the trains when I travel. He is the news agent. He comes to me with my own books in his arms and tells me over and over again of their merits. He means it too. What object could he have in coming to me not knowing who I am, and telling me of their great worth? Why would he talk that way to me if he did not really feel it? That is one reason I travel so much. When I get gloomy and heart-sick, I like to get on a train and be assured once more by a total stranger that my books have never been successfully imitated.

Some authors like to have a tall man with a glazed grip-sack and whose breath is stronger than his intellect selling their works. But I do not prefer that way. I like the candor and ingeniousness of the train boy. He does not come to the front door while you were at prayers and ring the bell till the hat rack falls down, and then try to sell you a book containing 2,000 receipts for the blind staggers. He leans gently over you as you look out the car window, and he puts some piquan mates in your hand, and thus wins your trusting heart.

Then he sells you a book, and takes an interest in you. This book will go to swell the newsboy's armful, and if there be any excuse under the sun for its publication, aside from the royalty, that is it. I have taken great care to thoroughly eradicate anything that would have the appearance of poetry in this work, and there is not a thought or suggestion contained in it that would soil the most delicate fabric. Do not read it all at once, however, in order to see whether he married the girl or not, take a little at a time, and it will cure gloom on the similia similibus currantor principle. If you read it all at once and it gives you the heaves,

I'm glad of it, and you deserve it. I will not bind myself to write the obituary of such people. Hudson, Wisconsin, September 5, 1883. Bailed Hay, a novel, novelette. I never wrote a novel, because I always thought it required more of a mashed raspberry imagination than I could muster, but I was the business manager once, for a year and a half, of a little two-bit novelette that has never been published. I now proposed to publish it, because I cannot keep it to myself any longer.

Allow me, therefore, to reminisce. Harry Bevins was an old schoolmate of mine in the days of, and although Bevins was not his sure-enough name, it will answer for the purposes herein set forth. At the time of which I now speak, he was more bashful than a book agent and was trying to promote a cream-colored mustache and buff donagals on the side. Suffice it to say that he was mildly in love with Fanny Buttonhook, and too bashful to say so by telephone. Her name wasn't Button Hook, but I will admit it for the sake of argument. Harry lived over at Kalamazoo, we will say, and Fanny at Oshkosh.

These were not the exact names of the towns, but I desire to bewilder the public a little in order to avoid any harassing disclosures in the future. It is always well enough, I find, to deal gently with those who are alive and moderately muscular. Young Bevins was not especially afraid of old man Buttonhook or his wife. He didn't dread the enraged parent worth assent. He wasn't afraid of anybody under the Cerulean dome, in fact, except. Miss Buttonhook. But when she sailed down the main street, Harry lowered his colors and dodged into the first place he found open,

whether it was a millinery store or a livery stable. Once in an unguarded moment, he passed so near her that the gentle south wind caught up the cherry ribbon that Miss Buttonhook wore her throat and slapped Mr. Bevins across the cheek with it before he knew what ailed him. There was a little vision of straw hat, brown hair, and pink and white cuticle, as it were, a delicate odor of violets, the swish of summer silk,

and my friend, Mr. Bevins, put his hand to his head, like a man who has a sunstroke, and fell into a drug store and a state of wild mash, ruin, and helpless chaos. His bashfulness was not seated nor chronic. It was the varioloid, and didn't hurt him only when Miss Buttonhook was present or in sight. He was polite and chatty with other girls and even dared to be blithe and gay sometimes, too. But when Francis loomed up in the distance, he would climb a rail fence nine feet high to evader. He told me once that he wished I would erect the framework of a letter to Fanny

and which he desired to ask that he might open up a correspondence with her. He would copy and mail it, he said, and he was sure that. that I, being a disinterested party, would be perfectly calm. I wrote a letter for him, of which I was moderately proud. It would melt the point on a lightning rod, it seemed to me, for it was just as full of gentleness and poetic soothe as it could be, and Tupper, Webster's dictionary, and my scrapbook had to give down first rate. Still, it was manly and square-toed. It was another man's confession, and I made it bulge out. with frankness and candor.

As luck would have it, I went over to Oshkosh about the time Harry's prize epistle reached that metropolis, and having been a confidant of Miss Bees from early childhood, I had the pleasure of reading Bev's letter and advising the young lady about the correspondence. Finally, a bright thought struck her. She went over to an easy chair and sat down on her foot,

coolly proposing that I should outline a letter replying to Harry's, in a reserved and rather frigid manner, yet bidding him dare to hope that if his orthography and punctuation continued correct, he might write occasionally, though it must be considered entirely subrosa and abnormally entre nous on account of pa. By the way, pa was a druggist, and one of the salts of the earth, Epsom salts, of course.

I agreed to write the letter, swore never to reveal the secret workings of the order, the grips, explanations, passwords, and signals, and then wrote her a nice, demure, startled, fond letter, as brief as the collar to a party dress, and as solemn as the Declaration of Independence. Then I said goodbye, and returned to my own home, which was neither in Kalamazoo nor Oshkosh. There I received a flat letter from William Henry Bevins, enclosing one from Fanny and asking, for suggestions as to a reply. Her letter was in Miss Buttonhook's best vein.

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

Thus the short sweet summer scooted past. The weeks were filled with gladness, and their memory even now comes back to me, like a wood-violet-scented vision. A wood-violet-scented vision comes high, but it is necessary in this place. Toward winter the correspondence grew a little tedious, owing to the fact that I had a large and tropical boil on the back of my neck, which refused to declare its intentions or come to a focus for three weeks. And looking over the letters of both lovers yesterday,

I could tell by the tone of each just where this boil began to grow up, as it were, between two fond hearts. This feeling grew till the middle of December when there was a red-hot quarrel. It was exciting and spirited, and after I had alternately flattered myself first from Kalamazoo and then from Oshkosh,

It was a genuine luxury to have a row with myself through the medium of the United States males. Then I made up and got reconciled. I thought it would be best to secure harmony before the holidays so that Harry could go over to Oshkosh and spend Christmas. I therefore wrote a letter for Harry in which he said he had, no doubt, been hasty, and he was sorry. It should not occur again.

The days had been like weary ages since the day. their quarrel, he said, vicariously, of course, and the light had been shut out of his erstwhile joyous life. Death would be a luxury unless she forgave him, and Hades would be one long, sweet picnic and lawn festival unless she blessed him with her smile. You can judge how an old newspaper reporter, with a scarlet imagination, would naturally dash the color into another man's picture of humility and woe. She replied, by proxy, that he was not to blame. It was her waspish temper and cruel thoughtlessness.

She wished he would come over and take dinner with them on Christmas Day, and she would tell him how sorry she was. When the man admits that he's a brute and the woman says she's sorry, it behooves the eagle eye of the casual spectator to look up into the blue sky for a quarter of an hour, till the reconciliation has had a chance and the brute has been given time to wipe a damp sob from his coat-collar. I was invited to the Christmas dinner. As a successful, reversible Emanuensis, I thought I deserved it. I was proud and happy. I had passed through a lover's quarrel and sailed in with white-winged peace on time,

and now I reckon that the second joint, with an irregular fragment of cranberry jelly, and some of the dressing, and little of the white meat please, was nothing more than right. Mr. Bevins forgot to be bashful twice during the day, and even smiled once also. He began to get acquainted with Fanny after dinner and praised her beautiful letters. She blushed, clear up under her wave, and returned the compliment. That was natural. When he praised her letters, I did not wonder, and when she praised his, I admitted that she was eminently correct. I never witness better taste on the part of two young and trusting hearts.

After Christmas, I thought they would both feel like buying a manual and doing their own writing, but they did not dare to do so, evidently. They seemed to be afraid that change would be detected, so I piled them into the middle of the succeeding fall, and then introduced the crisis into both their lives. It was a success. I felt about as well as though I were to be cut down my heart. and married off in the very prime of life. Fanny wore the usual clothing adopted by young ladies

who were about to be sacrificed on a great horrid man. I cannot give the exact description of her trousseau, but she looked like a hazel-eyed angel with a freckle on the bridge of her nose. The groom looked a little scared and moved his gloved hands as though they weighed 21 pounds apiece. However, it's all over now. I was up there recently to see them. They are quite happy. Not too happy, but just happy enough. They call their oldest son Bertie.

I wanted them to call him William, but they were headstrong and named him Bertie. That wounded my pride, and so I called him early Bertie. End of Section 1. Section 2 of Bailed Hay by Bill 9. This Libravox recording is in the public domain. Greeley Aid Rum

When I visit Greeley, I'm asked over and over again as to the practical workings of women's suffrage in Wyoming. And when I go back to Wyoming, I'm asked how Prohibition works practically in Greeley, Colorado. By telling varied and pleasing lies about both, I managed to have a good deal of fun and also keep the two elements on the anxious seat. There are two sides to both questions, and someday when I get time and have convalesced a little more,

I'm going to write a large book relating to these two matters. At present, I just want to say a word about the colony which bears the name of the Tribune philosopher and nestle so lovingly at the chilly feet of the Rocky Mountains. As I write, Greeley is apparently an oasis in the desert. It looks like a fertile island dropped down from heaven In a boundless stretch of buffalo grass, Sagehens, and cutting little prairie dogs.

And yet you could not come here as a stranger And within the colonial barbed wire fence Secure a bite of cold rum if you were president of United States With a rattlesnake bite as large as an Easter egg concealed about your person. You can, however, become acquainted if you are of a social nature and keep your eyes open. I do not say this because I have been thirsty these past few weeks and just dropped on the game, as Aristotle would say,

but just to prove that men are like boys, and when you tell them they can't have any particular thing, that is the thing they are apt to desire with a feverish yearn. That is why the thirstful man in Maine drinks from the gas fixture, why the Kansas drinkist gets his out of a rainwater barrel and why other miracles to numerous dimension are performed. Whiskey is more bulky and annoying to carry about in the co-tail pocket than a plug of tobacco, but there have been cases where it was successfully done.

I was showing yesterday a little corner that would hold six or eight bushels. It was in the washroom of a hotel and was about half full. So were the men who came there, for before night the entire place was filled with empty whiskey bottles of every size, shape, and smell. The little fat bottle with the odor of gin and livery stable was there, and large flat bottle that you get at Evans, four miles away, generally filled with something that tastes like tincture of capsicum, spirits of ammonia and lingering death, is also represented in this great Congress of Cosmopolitan bottles sucked dry.

and the cork gnawed half up. When I came to Greeley, I was still following the course of treatment prescribed by my Laramie City physician, and with the rest, I was acquired to force down three adult doses of brandy per day. He used to taste the prescription at times

to see if it had been properly compounded. Shortly after my arrival here, I ran out of this remedy and asked a friend to go and get the bottle refilled. He was a man not phoned, familiar with Greeley in its moisture-producing capacity, and he was unable to procure the vile demon in the town for love or wealth. The druggist even did not keep it, and although he met crowds of men with tears in their eyes and breathed like a veteran bung-starter, he had to go to Evans for

the required opiate. This I use externally now on the vagrant dog who comes to me to be fondled and who goes away with his hair off. Central Colorado is full of partially bald dogs who have wiped their wet, cold noses on me, not wisely, but too well. About sawmills, River Falls, Wisconsin, May 80. I have just returned from a trip up the North Wisconsin Railway where I went to catch a string of codfish

and anything else that might be contagious. The trip was a pleasant, one and productive of great good in many ways. I'm hardening myself to railway traveling like Timberline Jones's man so that I can stand the return journey to Laramie in July. Northern Wisconsin is the place where the foreign lumber comes from, which we use in Laramie in the erection of our palatial residences. I visited the mill last week that furnished the lumber used in the Oasis Hotel at Greeley. They yank a big wet law. into the mill and turn it into cash as quick as a railroad man can draw his salary out of the pay car.

The log is held on a carriage by means of iron dogs while it is being worked into lumber. These iron dogs are not like those we see on the front steps of a brownstone house occasionally. They are another breed of dogs. The managing editor of the mill lays out the log in his mind and works it into dimension stuff, shingleholts, slavs, slavs, abbs, edgelings, two-by-fours, two-by-eights, two-by-sixes, etc. So as to use the goods to the best advantage, just as a woman takes a dress pattern and cuts it so she won't have to piece the front breaths,

and will still have enough left to make a polonaise for the last summer gown. I stood there for a long time watching the various saws and listening to their monotonous growl, and wishing that I had been born a successful timber thief instead of a poor boy without a rag to my back. At one of these mills, not long ago, a man backed up to get away from the carriage and thoughtlessly backed against a large saw that was revolving at the rate of about 200 times a minute.

The saw took a large chew of tobacco from the plug he had in his pistol pocket and then began on him. But there is no use going into details. Such things are not cheerful. They gathered him up out of the sawdust and put him in a nail-keg and carried him away. But he did not speak again.

Life was quite extinct. Whether it was the nervous shock that killed him or the concussion of the cold saw against his liver that killed him, no one ever knew. The mill shut down a couple of hours so that the head sawyer could file his saw, and then work was resumed once more.

We should learn from this, never to lean on the buzz saw, when it moveth itself aright. Experiments with Old Cheese A recent article in a dairy paper is entitled Experiments with Old Cheese. We have experimented some on the venerable cheese too. One plan is to administer chloroform first

and perform the operation while the cheese is under its influence. This renders the experiment entirely painless, and at the same time it is more apt to keep quiet. After the operation, the cheese may be driven a few miles in the open air, which will do away with the effects of the chloroform. The rag carpet With the threatened eruption of the rag carpet as a kind of venerable successor to the genuine Boston-made Turkish rug,

there comes a wail on the part of the male portion of humanity and a protest on the part of all health-loving humanity. I rise at this moment as the self-appointed representative, of poor downtrodden and long-suffering man. Already lady friends are looking with avaricious and covetous eyes on my spring suit and in fancy constructing a stripe of navy blue, while some other man's spring clothes are already spotted for the hit or miss stripe of this time-honored humbug.

It does seem to me that there is enough sorrowing toil going for nothing already, enough of backache and delirium, without tearing the shirts off a man's back to sew into a big ball and then weave into a rag carpet made to breathe death and disease with its prehistoric perspiration and its modern drugstore dies. The rug now commonly known as the Turkish prayer rug has a sad worn look, but it does not come up to the rag carpet of the dear old home.

Around it there are clusters, perhaps a tradition of the Oriental falsehood, But the rag carpet of the dear old home, rich in association, is an heirloom that passes down from generation to generation, like the horse blanket of forgotten years or the rag bag of the deer dead past. Here is found the stripe of all wool delane that was worn by one who is now in the golden hens, or stricken with the Dakota fever, living in the squatters' home. And there is the fragment of underclothes prematurely jerked from the back. of the husband and the father before the silver of a century had crept into his hair. There is no question but the dear old rag carpet with poisonous greens and sickly yellows

and brindle browns and doubtful blacks is a big thing. It looks kind of modest and unpretending and yet speaks of the dead past and smells of the antique and the garret. It represents the long months when aching fingers first. sewed the garments, then the first dash of gravy on the front breadth, the maddening cry, the wild effort to efface it with benzene, the sorrowful defeat, the dusty grease spot standing like a pork gravy plaque upon the face of the past. The glad relinquishment of the garment, the attack of the rag carpet fiend upon it, the hurried crash as it was torn into shreds

sewn together with the mad plunge of the dust-powdered mass into the reeking bath of Paris green or coperas. Then the weaver's gentle racket, and at last the pale, consumptive, freckled, sickly panorama of outrageous coloring, offending the eye, the nose, the thorax, and the larynx, to be trodden under feet of men, and to yield up its precious dose of destroying poisons from generation even, unto generation. It is not a thing of beauty, for it looks like the colored engraving of a mortified lung. It is not economical, for the same time devoted to knocking out the brains of frogs and collecting their hams for the metropolitan market would yield infinitely more, and it is not worth much as an heirloom, for within the same time a mortgage may be placed upon the old homestead which

will pass down from father to son, even to nations yet unborn, and attract more attention in the courts than all the rag carpets that it would require to span the broad, spangled dome of heaven. I often wonder that Oscar Wilde, the pale patron of the good, the true, and the beautiful, did not rise in his might and knock the essential warp of filling out of the rag carpet. Oscar did not do right, or he would have stood up in his funny clothes and fought for reform at so much per fight. While he made fun of the Chicago Waterworks, a grateful public would have buried him and cut flowers if, instead, he had warped it to the rag carpet and the approaching dude. A trying situation

There are a great many things in life which go to atone for the disappointments and sorrows which one means. But when a young man's rival takes the fair Matilda to see the baseball game and sits under an umbrella beside her and is at the height of enjoyment and gets the benefit of a hot ball in the pit of his stomach, there is a nameless joy settles down in the heart of the lonesome young man, such as the world can neither give nor take away. End of Section 2 Section 3 of Bailed Hay by Bill Nye. This Libravox recording is in the public domain.

One kind of a boy. I am always sorry to see a youth get irritated and pack up his clothes in the heat of debate and leave the home nest. His future is a little doubtful, and it is hard to prognosticate whether he will fracture limestone for the streets of a great city or become president of the United States. But there is a beautiful and luminous life ahead of him, in comparison with that of the boy who obstinately refuses to leave the home nest. The boy who cannot summon the moral courage some day to uncoil the tendrils of his heart from the clustering idols of the household, to grapple with outrageous fortune, ought to be taken by the ear and led away out into the great untried realm of space.

While the great world throbs on, he sighs and refuses to throb. While other young men put on their seal-brown overalls and wrench the laurel wreath and other vegetables from cruel fate, the youth who dangles near the old nest and eats the hard-earned groceries of his father, shivers on the brink of life's great current and sheds the scalding tear. He is the young man afraid of the saw-buck, the human being. with the unlaundried spinal column. The only vital question that may be said to agitate his pseudo-brain is, whether he shall marry and bring his wife to the home nest,

or marry and tear loose from his parents to live with his father-in-law. Finally, he settles it and compromises by living alternately with each. How the old folks yearned to see him, how their aged eyes light up when he comes with his growing family to devour everything in sight and yawn through the space between meals. This is the heyday of his life, the high noon of the boy who never ventured to ride the yearling colt, or to be yanked through the shimmering sunlight at the tail of a two-year-old. He never dared to have any fun because he might bump his nose and make it bleed on his clean

clothes. He never surreptitiously cut the copper wire off a lightning rod to snare suckers with, and he never went in swimming because the great rude boys might duck him or paint him with mud. He shunned the green apple of boyhood and did not slide downhill because he would have to pull his sled back to the top again. Now he borrows other people's newspapers, eats the provisions of others, and sits on the counter of the grocery till the proprietor calls him a counter-irritant. There can be nothing more un-American than this flabby polyp, this one-horse tadpole that never becomes a frog. The average American would rather burst up in business six times in four years

and settle for nine cents on the dollar than to lead such a life. He would rather be an active bankrupt than a weak in billy's barnacle on the clam-shell of home. The true American would rather work himself into luxury or the lunatic asylum than to hang like a great wart upon the face of nature. This young man is not in accordance with the Yankee's schedule, and yet I do not want to say that he belongs to any other nation. Foreign powers may have been wrong, transatlantic nations may have erred, and the system of European government may have been erroneous, but I would not come out and charge them with this horrible responsibility. They never harmed me, and I will not tarnish their fair fame with this grave indictment.

He will breathe a certain amount of atmosphere and absorb a given amount of feed for a few years, and then the full-grown biped will leave the home nest at last. The undertaker will come and get him and take what there is left of him out to the cemetery. That will be all. There can be no deep abiding sorrow for him here. Public buildings will not be draped in mourning, and you can get your mail at the usual hour when he dies. The band will not play a sadder strain because the fag end of human failure has tapered down to death, and the soft and shapeless features are still. You will have no trouble getting a draft cashed on that day, and the giddy throng will join the picnic, as they had made arrangements to do.

The Champion Mean Man Laramie has the Champion Mean Man. He has a Sunday handkerchief made to order with scarlet spots on it, which he sticks up to his nose just before the plate starts round, and leaves the church like a house on fire. So after he has squeezed out the usual amount of gospel, He slips around the corner and goes home 10 cents ahead And has his self-adjusting nosebleed handkerchief

For another trip Fraternal Sparring I have just returned from a little two-handed tournament With the gloves I have filled my nose with cotton waist So that I shall not soak this sketch in gore as I write I needed a little healthful exercise And was looking for something that would be

Full of vigorous enthusiasm and at the same time promote the healthful flow of blood to the muscles. This was rather difficult. I tried most everything, but failed. Being a sociable being, joke, I wanted other people to help me exercise or go along with me when I exercised. Some men can go away to a desert aisle and have fun with dumbbells in a horizontal bar, but to me it would seem dull and commonplace after a while,

and I would yearn for more humanity. Two of us finally concluded to play billiards. But we were only amateurs, and the owner intimated that he would want the table for Fourth of July, so we broke off in the middle of the first game, and I paid for it. Then a younger brother said he had a set of boxing gloves in his room, and although I was the taller and had longer arms, he would hold up as long as he could,

and I might hammer him until I gained stone. strength and finally got well. I accepted this offer because I had often regretted that I had not made myself familiar with this art, and also because I knew it would create a thrill of interest and fire me with ambition, and that's what a hollow-eyed invalid needs to put him on the road to recovery. The boxing glove is a large fat mitten, with an abnormal thumb and a string at the wrist by which you tie it on, so that when you feed it to your adversary he can not swallow it and choke himself. I had never seen any boxing gloves before, but my brother said

they were soft and wouldn't hurt anybody. So we took off some of our raiment and put them on. Then we shook hands. I can remember distinctly yet that we shook hands. That was to show that we were friendly and would not slay each other. My brother is a great deal younger than I am, and so I warned him not to get excited and come for me with anything that would look like wild and ungovernable fury, because I might, in the heat of debate, pile his jaw up on his forehead and fill his ear full of sore thumb. He said that was all right and he would try to be cool and collected. Then we put our right toes together, and I told him to be on his guard.

At that moment I dealt him a terrific blow aimed at his nose. but through a clerical error of mine, went over his shoulder and spent itself in the wall of the room, shattering a small Hollywood bracket for which I paid him 375 afterward. I did not wish to buy the bracket, because I had two at home, but he was arbitrary about it, and I bought it.

When we took athletic posture, and in two seconds the air was full of pultist thumb and buckskin, mitten, I soon detected a chance to put one in where my brother could smell of it, but I never knew just where it struck, for at that moment I ran up against something with the pit of my stomach that made me throw up the sponge along with other groceries, the names of which I cannot now recall. My brother then proposed that we take off the gloves, but I thought I had not sufficiently punished him, and that another round would complete the conquest. which was then almost within my grasp.

I took a bismuth powder and squared myself, but in warding off a left-hander, I forgot about my adversary's right and ran my nose into the middle of his boxing glove. Fearing that I had injured him, I retreated rapidly on my elbows and shoulder blades to the corner of the room, thus giving him ample time to recover.

By this means my younger brother's features were saved, and are today as symmetrical as my own. I can still cough up pieces of boxing gloves, and when I close my eyes I can see calcium lights and blue phosphorescent gleams across the horizon. But I am thoroughly convinced that there is no physical exercise which yields the same amount of health and elastic vigor to the puncher that the manly art does.

To the punchee also it affords a large wad of glass, surprises and nosebleed, which cannot be hurtful to those who hanker for the pleasing nervous shock, the spinal jar, and the pyrotechnic concussion. That is why I shall continue the exercises after I have practiced with a mule or a cowcatcher two or three weeks, and feel a little more confidence in myself. Chapitas addressed to the Utes. People of my tribe, the sorrowing widow of the dead Ure, speaks to you, She comes to you, not as the squaw of the dead chieftain, to rouse you to war and victory,

but to weep with you over the loss of her people and the greed of the pale face. The fair Colorado, whose rocky mountains we have roamed and hunted in the olden time, is now overrun by the silver-plated senator and the soft-eyed dude. We are driven to a small corner of the earth to die, while the oppressor digs gopher holes in the green grass and sells them to the speculated, of the great cities toward the rising sun. Through the long cold winter my people have passed, in want and cold, while the conqueror of the peaceful Ute has worn $250 night shirts and filled his pale skin with pie.

Chepida addresses you as the weeping squaw of a great man whose bones will one day nourish the cucumber vine. Urey now sleeps beneath the brown grass of the canyon, where the soft spring winds may stir the dead, leaves, and the young coyote may come and monkey over his grave. Ure is ignorant of the ways of the pale face. He could not go to Congress, for he was not a citizen of the United States. He had not taken out his second papers. He was a simple child of the forest, but he stuck to Chepeda. He loved Chepeda like a hired man.

That is why the widowed squaw weeps over him. A few more years and I shall join Yeruner. my chief, Ure, the big engine from way up the gulch. His heart is still open to me. Chepeda could trust him, even among the smiling maidens of her tribe. Ure was true. There was no funny business in his nature. He loved not the garb of the pale face,

but won my heart while he wore a saddle blanket and look of woe. Chepida looks to the north and the south, and all about are the graves of her people. The refinement of the oppressor has come, with its divorce and schools and gin cocktails and flower bread and fall elections, and we linger here like a boil on the neck of a fat man. Even while I talk to you, the damp winds of April are sighing through my vertebras, and I've got more pains in my back than a conservatory. Weep with the widowed chepida, bow your head and howl,

for our harps are hung on the willows and our wild goose is cooked. Who will be left to mourn at Chepeda's grave? None but the starving papooses of my nation. We stand in the gray mist of spring, like dead verdocks in the field of the honest farmer, and the chilly winds of departing winter make us hump and gather like a burnt boot. All we can do is to wail.

We are the red-skinned whalers from wailers from waltzoned whaler, Whale Town. Colorado is no more the home of the Ute. It is the dwelling place of the Bonanza Senator, who doesn't know the difference between the plan of salvation in the previous question. Chepeda cannot vote. Chepeda cannot pay taxes to a great nation,

but you will be apt to hear her gentle voice, and her mellow racket will fill the air till her tongue is cold, and they tuck the buffalo robe about her and plant her by the side of her. her dead chieftain, where the South Wind and the sage hen are singing. End of Section 3 Section 4 of Bailed Hay by Bill Nye. This Librevox recording is in the public domain.

Bill Nye's Cat, by permission. I am not fond of cats as a general rule. I never yearned to have one around the house. My idea was that I could have trouble enough in a legitimate way without adding a cat to my woes. With a belligerent cook and a communistic lawn dress, it seemed to me most anybody ought to be unhappy enough, without a cat. I never owned one until a tramp cat came to our house one day during the present autumn, and tearfully asked to be loved. He didn't have anything in his makeup that was calculated to win anybody's love,

but he seemed contented with a little affection. One ear was gone, and he was gone, and he was and his tail was bald for six inches at the end, and he was otherwise well calculated to win confidence and sympathy. Though we could not be madly in love with him, we decided to be friends, and give him a chance to win the general respect. Everything would have turned out all right if the Bobtail Waf had not been a little given to investigation.

He wanted to know more about the great world in which he lived, so he began by inspecting my house. He got into the storeroom closet and found a place where the carpenter had not completed his job. This is a feature of the Laramie artisan style. He leaves little places in unobserved corners, generally, so that he can come back someday and finish it at an additional cost of $50. This cad observed that he could enter at this point and go all over the imposing structure between the flooring and the ceiling.

He proceeded to do so. We will now suppose that a period of two days has passed. The wide halls and spacious facades of the Nye Mansion are still. The lights in the banquet hall are extinguished, and the ice cream freezer is hushed to rest in the woodshed. A soft and tearful yowl deepened into a regular ring-tail peeler splits the solemn night in twain. Nobody seemed to know where it came from.

I rose softly and went to where the sound had seemed to swell up from. It was not there. I stood on a piece of cracker in the dining room a moment, waiting for it to come again. This time it came from the boudoir of our French artist in soup-bone symphonies and pie, Mademoiselle Brigitte O'Dooley. I went there and opened the door softly, so as to let the cat out without disturbing the giant mind that had worn itself out during the day in the kitchen, bestowing a dry shampoo to the china. Then I changed my mind and came out. Several articles of Vertu, besides Bridget, followed me with some degree of vigor. The next time the tramp cat yelled, he seemed to be in the recess of the bathroom. I went downstairs and investigated. In doing so, I drove my

superior toe into my foot, out of sight, with a door that I encountered. My wife joined me in the search. She could not do much, but she aided me a thousand times by her counsel. If it had not been for her mature advice, I might have lost much of the invigorating exercise of that memorable night. Toward morning, we discovered that the cat was between the floor of the children's playroom and the ceiling of the dining room. We tried till daylight to persuade the cat to come out and get acquainted, but he would not. At last, we decided that the quickest way to get the poor, little thing out, was to let him die in there. And then we could tear up that portion of the house and get him out. While he lived, we couldn't keep him still long enough to tear a hole in the house

and get at him. It was a little unpleasant for a day or two, waiting for death to come to his relief, for he seemed to die hard, but at last the unearthly midnight yowl was still. The plaintive little voice ceased to vibrate on the still and pulseless air. Later we found, however, that he was not dead. In a lucid interval, he had discovered the hole in the storeroom where he entered, and as we found afterward a gallon of coal oil spilled in a barrel of cutloaf sugar, we concluded that he had escaped by that route. That was the only time that I ever kept a cat, and I didn't do it then because I was suffering from something to fondle. I've got a good deal of surplus affection, I know,

but I don't have to spread it out over a stump-tail orphan cat. Autumn Thoughts In the Rocky Mountains now the eternal whiteness is stealing down toward the foothills and the brown mantle of October hangs softly on the swelling divide. While along the winding streams, cottonwood and willow are turned to gold, and the deep green of the solemn pines lies farther back against the soft blue of the autumn sky. The sigh of the approaching storm is heard at even tide, and the hostile Indian comes into the reservation to get some arnica for his chillblane

and to heal up the old feeling of intolerance on the part of the pale face. He leaves the glorious picture of mountain in Glen, the wide sweep of magnificent nature, where a thousand gorgeous dyes are spread over the remains of the dead dead summer, and folding his tepee he steals into the home of the white man that he may be once more at peace with the world. The hectic of the dying year saddens and depresses him, for is it not an emblem to him of the death of his race? Is it not to him an assurance that in the golden ultimately the red man will be sought for on the face of the earth, and he will not be able to represent?

He will not be there either in person or by proxy. Here in the red man, he will be there either in person or by proxy. Here and there may be found the little silent mounds with some glass beads and teeth in them, but the silent warrior with the Roman nose will not be there. The Indian agent will have a large conservative cemetery on his hands, and the brave warrior will be marching single file through the corridors of the hents. At this moment he does not look romantic. Clothed in a coffee sack and a little brief authority, he would not make a good Vignette on a five-dollar bill.

His wife too looks careworn And the old glad light is not in her eye Peer Gunny Sack Dolman is not what it once was And her beautifully arched foot has spread out Over the reservation more than it used to Her step has lost its old elasticity And so have her suspenders Autumn brings to her nothing but regret for the past

And hopelessness for the future The cold and cruel winter Will bring her nothing but bitter memories in condemned government grub. The solemn hush of nature and the gorgeous coloring of the forest do not awake a thrill in her wild heart. She cares not for the dead summer

or the mellow mist of the grand old mountains. She doesn't care too sense. She knows that no seal-skin sack will come to her on the Christmas trees and the glad welcome of the placid and select oyster is not for her. Is it surprising then that to this decaying bell of an old family, the sparkle of hope is unknown.

Can we wonder, as we contemplate her history, that to her, the soldier pantaloons of last year and the bullwackers' straw hat of 79 are obnoxious? She is like her sex, and her joy is fractured by the knowledge that her moccasins are down at the heel, and her stockings exist in the realms of fancy. We should not look with scorn upon Mrs. Rise Up William Riley, for Hope is dead in her breast, and the wigwam is desolate in the sagebrush. Daughter of a great nation, we are not mad at you. You are not to be blamed because the Republican Party has busted your crust. We do not hate you because you eat your steak rare and wear

your own hair. It is your own right to do so if you wish. Brace up, therefore, and take a tumble, as it were, and try to be cheerful. We will not massacre you if you will not massacre us. All we want is peace, and you can wear what you like. Only wear something, if you please, when you come into our society. We do not ask you to conform strictly to our false and peculiar costumes, but wear something to protect you from the chilling blasts of winter, and you will win our respect.

You needn't mingle in our society much if you do not choose to, but wrap yourself up in most any kind of clothing that will silence the tongue of slander and try to quit drinking. You will get a long first-rate if you would only let liquor alone. Do not try to drown your sorrows in the flowing bowl. It's expensive and unsatisfactory. Take our advice and swear off. We have tried it and we know what we are talking about.

You have a glorious future before you. If you will cease to drink the vintage of the pale face and monkey with petty larceny, look at Pocahontas and Mrs. Tecumza. They didn't drink. They were women of no more ability than you have, but they were high-toned, and they got there, Eli. Now they are known to history along with Cornwallis and pain. You can do the same if you choose to.

Do not be content to lead a yellow-dellow-dose-dose-y-lawful. dog around by a string and get inebriated, but rise up out of the alkali dust and resolve that you will shun the demon of drink. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. The man who interrupts. I do not, as a rule, thirst for the blood of my fellow man. I am willing that the law should, in all ordinary cases, take its course. But when we begin to discuss the man who breaks into a conversation and ruins it with his own irrelevant ideas, regardless of the feelings of humanity, I am not a law and order man. The spirit of the red vigilanter is roused in my breast, and I hunger for the blood of that man. Interruptors are of two classes. First, the common plug,

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

Did you ever strike some beautiful thought and begin to reel it off to your friends, only to be shut off in the middle of a sentence by this choice and banner idiot of conversation. If so, come and sit by me, and you may pour your woes into my ear, and I in turn will pour a few gallons into your listening ear. I do not care to talk more than my share of the time, but I would be glad to arrive at a conclusion just to see how it would seem. I would be so pleased and so joyous to follow up an antidote till I had reached the nub, as it were, to chase an argument meant home to conviction and to clinch assertion with authority and evidence. The second class of interruptors is even worse. It consists of the man, and I am pain to state,

his wife also, who see the general drift of your remarks and finish out your story, your gem of thought, or your argument. It is very seldom that they do this as you would do it yourself, but they are kind and thoughtful and their services are always at hand. No matter how busy they may be, they will leave their own work and fly to your aid. With the light of sympathy in their eyes, they rush into the conversation, and, partaking of your own zeal, they take the words from your mouth and cheerfully suck the juice out of your joke, handing back the rind and hoping for reward. That is where they get left, so far as I am concerned, I am almost always ready to repay rudeness with rudeness

and cold-preserved gall with such acrid sarcasm as I may be able to secure at the moment. No one will ever know how I yearn for the blood of the interrupter. At night I camp on his trail, and all the day I thirst for his warm life's current. In my dreams I am cutting his scalp loose with a case-knife while my fingers are twined in his clustering hair. I walk over him and promenade across his abdomen as I slumber. I hear his ribs crack, and I see his tongue hang over his shoulder as he smiles death's mirthful smile.

I do not interrupt a man no more than I would tell him he lied. I give him a chance to win applause or decomposed eggs from the audience, according to what he has to say, and according to the profundity of his profound. All I want is a similar chance and room according to my strength. Common decency ought to govern conversation without its being necessary to hire an umpire armed with a four-foot club to announce who is at the bat and who is on deck. It is only once in a week or two that the angel troubles the waters and stirs up the depths of my conversational powers, and then the chances are that some leprous old nasty toad who has been

hanging on the brink of decent society for two weeks, slides in with a low kerplunk, and my fair blossom of thought that has been trying for weeks to bloom, withers and goes to seed. While the man with chilled steel and copper-riveted brow and a lot of self-esteem on his intellectual balcony as big as an inkstand, walk slowly away to think of some other dazzling gem, and thus be ready to bust my beautiful phantom and tear out my high-priced bulbs of fancy the next time I open my mouth. End of Section 4 Section 5 of Bailed Hay by Bill Nye.

This Librevox recording is in the public domain. The Rocky Mountain Cow The attention of the Rocky Mountain Detective Association is respectfully called to a large bay cow, who is hanging around this place under an association. name. She has no visible means of support and has been seen trying to catch the combination to the safes of several of our businessmen here. She has also stolen into our lot several times and eaten two or three lengths of stovepipe that we neglected to lock up. Preserving Eggs

The Scientific American gives this as an excellent mode of preserving eggs. Take fresh ones, put a dozen or more in a small willow basket, and immerse this for five. five seconds in boiling water, containing about five pounds of common brown sugar per gallon, then pack, when cool, small ends down, in an intimate mixture of one part of finely powdered charcoal and two of dry bran. In this way, they will last six months or more. The scalding water causes the formation of a thin skin of hard albumin near the inner surface of the shell, and the sugar of syrup closes all the pores. The scientific American neglects, however, to add that when you open them six months after they were picked and preserved,

the safest way is to open them out in the alley with a revolver at 16 paces. When you have succeeded in opening one, you can jump on a fleet horse and get out of the country before the nut-brown flavor catches up with you. Human Nature on the Half-Show I am up here in River Falls, Wisconsin, and patiently, waiting for the snow banks to wilt away and gentle spring to come again. Gentle spring, as I go to press, hath not yet loomed up. Nothing, in fact, hath loomed up as yet, save the Great Dakota boom.

Everybody from the servant girl with the symphony in smut on her face, and the boundless waste of freckles athwart her nose, up to the normal school graduate, with enough knowledge to start a gristmill for the gods, has a claim in the promised land, the great wild goose orchard and tadpole aquarium of the new northwest. The honest farmer deserts his farm, around which clusters a thousand memories of the past, and buckling on his web feet,

he flees to the frog ponds of the great northern watershed to make a tree claim and be happy. Such is life. We battle on bravely for years, cutting out white oak grubs and squashing army worms on a shingle, in order that we may dwell beneath our own vine and plum tree, and then we sell and take wings toward a wild, unknown country, where land is dirt cheap, where the wicked cease from troubling,

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

Then the family went home to Toledo. They went in a day coach and said a Pullman car was full of malaria and death. Their relatives made sport of them and lifted up their yop and yopped at them in so much as the yopness thereof was as the town caucus for might. Then the tourists on the following spring packed up two pillows, and a pink comforter, and a change of raiment, and got them onto the emigrant train, and journeyed into the land, which is called Arizona, where the tarantula climbeth up on the inner side of the pantaloon, and tickleth the limb of the pilgrim as he journeyeth.

And behold, he getteth in his work, and the leg of that man is greater than it was aforetime, even like unto the leg of a piano. A frigid route There's no doubt but that the Fort Collins route to the North Park is a good practicable route, but the only man who has started out over it this spring fetched up in the New Jerusalem. The trouble with that line of travel is that the temperature is too short. The summer on the Fort Collins route is noted mainly for its brevity. It lasts about as long as an ordinary eclipse of the sun.

The man who undertook to go over the road this spring on snow shoes, with a load consisting of ten cents worth of fine-cut tobacco, has not been heard from yet at either end of the line, and he is supposed to have perished, or else he is still in search of an open polar sea. It is hoped that dog days will bring him to the surface, but if the winter comes on as early this fall as there are grave reasons to fear. A man couldn't get over the divide in the short space of time which will intervene between decoration day and Christmas. We hate to discourage people who have an idea of going over the Fort Collins Road to North Park, but would suggest that preparations be made in advance for about 500 St. Bernard dogs and a large supply of Arctic whiskey to be placed

on file where it can be got at without a moment's delay. Too contiguous. There is a firm on Coyote Creek in New Jersey that would like to advertise in the boomerang, and the members of the firm are evidently good square men, although they are not large. They lack about four feet in stature of being large enough to come within the range of our vision. They have got more pure gall to the superficial foot than anybody we ever heard of. It seems that the house has a lot of vermifuge to feed plants and a bedbug tonic that it wants to bring before the public, and it wants us to vote our quarter of a column every day to the merits of these bug and worm discouragers, and then take our pay out of tickets in the drawings of a brindle dog next spring.

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

In closing, we will add that New Jersey people will not be charged much more for advertising space than Wyoming people. We have made special rates so that we can give the patrons of the East almost as good terms as our home advertisers. The Amend Honorable It is rather interesting to watch the manner by which old customs have been slightly changed and handed down from age to age. peculiarities of old traditions still linger among us and are forked over to posterity like a woppy-jawed teapot or a long-time mortgage. No one can explain it, but the fact still remains patent

that some of the oddities of our ancestors continue to appear from time to time clothed in the changing costumes of the prevailing fashion. Along with these choice antiquities in carrying the nut-brown flavor of the dead and relentless years comes the amend honorable. From the original amend in which the offender appeared in public, clothed only in a cotton flannel shirt, and with a rope around his neck as an evidence of a formal recantation,

down to this day when, sometimes, the pale editor, in a stickful of type, admits that his informant was in error. The amend Honorable has marched along with the easy tread of time. The blue-eyed molder of public opinion, with one suspender hanging down at his side and writing on a sheet of newscopy paper, has a more extensive costume, perhaps, than the old-time offender, who bowed in the dust in the midst of the great populace, and with a halter under his ear admitted his offense, but he does not feel any more cheerful over it. I have been called upon several times to make the amend honorable, and I admit that it is not an occasion

of mirth and merriment. People who come into the editorial office to invest in a retraction are generally very healthy and have a stiff-reserved manner that no cheerfulness of hospitality can soften. I remember of an accident of this kind which occurred last summer in my office while I was writing something scathing. A large man with an air of profound perspiration about him and a plaid flannel shirt stepped into the middle of the room and breathed in the air, that I was not using. He said he would give me four minutes in which to retract, and pulled out a watch by which to ascertain the exact time. I asked him if he would not allow me a moment or two to go over to the telegraph office and to wire my parents of my awful death. He said,

I could walk out of that door when I walked over his dead body. Then I waited a long time, until he told me my time was up and asked what I was waiting for. I told him I was waiting for him to die so that I could walk over his dead body. How could I walk over a corpse until life was extinct? He stood and looked at me first in astonishment, afterward in pity. Finally tears welled up in his eyes and plowed their way down his brown and grimy face. Then he said that I need not fear him. You are safe, said he, a youth who is so patient and so cheerful as you are, who would wait for a

healthy man to die so that you could meander over his pulseless remnants, ought not to die a violent death. A soft-eyed seraph like you, who is no more conversant with the ways of this world than that, ought to be put in a glass vial of alcohol and preserved. I came up here to kill you and throw you into the rainwater barrel. But now that I know what a patient disposition you have, I shuddered a think of the crime I was about to commit. End of Section 5. Section 6 of Bailed Hay by Bill Nye.

This Librevox recording is in the public domain. Joaquin and Huniata Joaquin Miller has just published a new book called The Shadows of Shasta. It is based on the Hiawatha, Blue Huniata Romance, which the average poet seems competent to yank loose from the history of the sore-eyed savage at all times. Whenever a deadbeat poet strikes bedrock and don't have shekels enough to buy a bowl of soup, he writes an inspired ode to the unfettered horse thief of

the West. It is all right so far as we know. If the poet will wear out the smoke-tanned child of the forest writing poetry about him, and then if the child of the forest will rise up in his death struggle and mash the never-dying soul out of the white-livered poet, everything will be okay, and we will pay the funeral expenses. If it could be so arranged that the poet and the bright Alpharita bug-eater and the bilious wild-eyed bard of the backwoods could be shut up in a corral for six weeks together, with nothing to eat but each other, it would be a big thing for humanity. We said once that we wouldn't dictate to this administration, but let it flicker along alone.

We just throw out the above as a suggestion, however, hoping that it will not be ignored. Some vague thoughts. Spring, gentle, touchful, tuneful, breezeful, soothing, smoothful spring is here. It has not been here more than twenty minutes, and my Arctic stand where I can reach them in case it should change its mind. The bobbolink sits on the basswood vines, and the thrush in the gooseberry tree is as melodious as a hired man. The robin is building his nest,

or rather her nest, I should say, perhaps, in the boughs of the old willow that was last year busted by thunder. I beg your pardon, by lightning, I should say. The speckled calf dines teet-a-teat with his mother, and strawberries are like the bald-headed man brow. They come high, but we can't get along without them. I never was more tickled to me gentle spring than I am now. It stirs up my drug-soaked remains and warms the genial current of life considerably. I froliced around in the grass this afternoon and filled my pockets full of

one thousand-legged worms and the little mementoes of the season. The little hairfoot boy now comes forth and walks with a cautious tread at first, like a blind horse. But toward the golden autumn, the back of his feet will look like a warty toad, and there will be big cracks in them, and one toe will be wrapped up in part of a bed quilt, and he will show it with pride to crowded houses. Last night I lay awake for several hours thinking about Mr. Sherrod, and how long we had been separated, and I was wondering how many weary days would have to elapse before we could again look into each other's eyes and hold each other by the hand, when the loud and violent concussion of a revolver shot near West Main Street and Cascade Avenue rent the sable robe of night. I rose and lit the

gas to see if I had been hit. Then I examined my pockets to see if I had been robbed of my lead pencil and seasoned pass. I found that I had not. This morning I learned that a young doctor who had been watching his own house from a distance during the evening had discovered that, taking advantage of the husband's absence, a blonde dry-goods clerk had called to see the crooked but lonely wife. The doctor waited until the young man had been in the house long enough to get pretty well acquainted, and then he went in himself to see that the youth was making himself perfectly comfortable. There was a wild dash toward the window, made by a blonde man with his pantaloons in his hand,

the spatter of a bullet in the wall over the young man's head, and then all was still for a moment, save the low sob of a woman with her head covered up by the bedclothes. Then the two men clinched, and the doctor injected the barrel of a 32 self-cocker up the bridge of the young man's nose, knocked him under the washstand, yanked him out by the hem of his garment,

and jarred him into the coal-bubes. bucket, kicked him up on a corner bracket, and then swept the quivering ruins into the street with a stub broom. He then lit the chandelier and told his sobbing wife that she wasn't just the temperament for him, and he was afraid that their paths might diverge. He didn't care much for company and society while she seemed to yearn for such things constantly. He came right out and admitted that he was of a nervous temperament and quick-tempered. He loved her. He loved her. He seemed to yearn for. He her, but he had such an irritable, fiery disposition that he guessed he would have to excuse her. So he escorted her out of the gate and told her where the best hotel was.

Came in, drove out the cat, blew out the light, and retired. Some men seem almost like brutes in their treatment of their wives. They come home at some eccentric hour of the night, and because they have to sleep on the lounge, They get mad and try to shoot holes in the lumberkins and look at their wives in a harsh, rude tone of voice. I tell you, it's tough. The humorist. You are a humorist, are you not? queried a long-billed pelican addressing a thoughtful mental athlete on the Milwaukee and St. Paul Road the other day.

Yes, sir, said the sorrowful man, brushing away a tear. I am a numeralist. I am not very much so, but still I can see that I am drifting that way, and yet I was once joyous and happy as you are. Only a few years ago before I was exposed to this malady, I was as blithe as a speckled yearling and wrecked not of aught, or anything else either. Now my whole life is blasted. I do not dare to eat pie or preserves, and no one tells funny stories when I am near. They regard me as a professional, and when I get in sight, the scrub nine close up and wait for me to entertain the crowd and waddle around the ring. What do you mean by that? murmured the purple-nosed interrogation point. Mean. Why, I mean that whether I am drawing a salary or not, I'm expected to be the life of the party.

I don't want to be the life of the party. I want to let someone else. the life of the party. I want to get up the reputation of being as cross as a bear with a sore head. I want people to watch their children for fear all swallow them. I want to take my low-cut evening dress smile and put it in the bureau drawer and tell the world I've got a cancer in my stomach, and the heaves and hypochondria, and a malignant case of leprosy. Do you mean to say that you do not feel facetious all the time, and that you get weary of being a numerist. Yes, hungry interlocutor, yes, lowbrow student, yes. I am not always tickled. Did you ever have a large, angry, and abnormally protuberant boil somewhere on your person,

where it seemed to be in the way? Did you ever have such a boil as a traveling companion, and then get introduced to people as an humorist? You have not? Well, then, you do not know, you do not know, all there is of suffering in this sorrow-streaked world, when wealthy people die, why don't they endow a cast-iron castle with a drawbridge to it and call it the humorist's retreat? Why don't they do something good with their money instead of fooling it away on those who are comparatively happy? But how did you come to get to be a numrist? Well, I don't know. I blame my parents some. They might have prevented it if they'd taken it in time, but they didn't. They let it run on until it got established, and now it is no use to go to the hot springs or to the

mountains, or have an operation performed. You let a man get the name of being a numorous, and he doesn't dare to register at the hotels, and he has to travel anonymously and mark his clothes with his wife's name, or the public will lynch him if he doesn't say something humorous. "'Where is your boy to-night?' continued the gloomy humorist. "'Do you know where he is? "'Is he at home under your watchful eye, "'or is he away somewhere, nailing the handles on his first little joke? "'Parent, beware, teach your boy to beware,

"'watch him night and day, or all at once when he is beyond your jurisdiction, "'he will grow pale. "'He will have a far-away look in his eye, and the bright rosy lad will have become the flat-chested, joyless humorist. It's hard to speak unkindly of our parents, but mingled with my own remorse I shall always murmur to myself and ask over and over, why did not my parents rescue me while they could? Why did they allow my chubby little feet to waddle down to the dangerous ground on which the sad-eyed humorous must forever stand? Partner, do not forget what I have said today.

Whether your child be a son or daughter, it matters not. Discourage the first sign of approaching humor. It is easier to bust the backbone of the first little tender joclet that sticks its head through the virgin soil than it is to allow the slimy folds of your son's humorous lecture to be wrapped about you and to bring your gray hairs with sorrow to the grave. My cabinet. I've made a small collection of wild western things during the past seven years, and I've put them together, hoping someday, when I get feeble,

to travel with the aggregation and erect a large monument of COPEX for my executors, administrators, and assigns forever. Beginning with the skull of old high-low jack-in-the-game, a Sue Brave, the collection takes in my wonderful bird known as the Walk Up the Creek, and another rara avis, with carnivorous bill and web feet, which has astonished everyone except the taxidermist and myself. An old grizzly bear hunter, who has plowed corn all his life and don't know a coyote from a maverick steer,

looked at it last fall and pronounced it a kingfisher, said he had killed one like it a year ago. Then I knew he was a pilgrim and a stranger, and that he had bought his buckskin coat and bead-trimmed moccasins at Niagara Falls, for the bird is constructed of an eagle's head, a canvas back, ducks bust and feet, with the balance, sage-hen, and baled hay. Last fall, I desired to add to my rare collection a large hornet's nest. I had an embalmed tarantula and her porcelain-line nest,

and I desired to add to these a gray and airy, home of the hornet. I procured one of the large size after cold weather and hung it in my cabinet by a string. I forgot about it until this spring. When warm weather came, something reminded me of it. I think it was a hornet. He jogged my memory in some way and called my attention to it. Memory is not located where I thought it was. It seemed as though whenever he touched me, he awakened a memory, a warm memory with a red place all around it. Then some more Hornets came and began to rake up old personalities. I remember that one of them lit on my upper lip.

He thought it was a rosebud. When he went away, it looked like a gladiola bulb. I wrapped a wet sheet around it to take out the warmth and reduce the swelling so that I could go through the folding doors and tell my wife about it. Hornets lit all over me and walked around on my person. I did not dare to scrape them off because they are so sensitive. You have to be very guarded in your conduct toward a hornet. I remember once while I was watching the busy little hornet gathering honey and June bugs

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

Much has been said of the Hornet, but he has an odd, quaint way after all. That is forever new. End of Section 6. Section 7 of Bailed Hay by Bill Nye. This Liebervox recording is in the public domain. Health food While trying to reconstruct a telescope spine and put some new copper rivets in the lumbar vertebrae this spring, I have had occasion to thoroughly investigate.

the subject of so-called health food, such as grules, beef-tee inundations, toasts, oatmeal mush, bran mash, soups, conditioned powders, gram-gem, ground feed, pepsin, laudable mush, another hen feed usually poked into the invalid who is too weak to defend himself. Of course, it stands to reason that the reluctant and fluttering spirit may not be one back to earth, and joy once more beam in the leaden eye, unless do care be taken relative to the food by means of which nature may be made to assert herself. I do not care to say to the world through the columns of the free press

that we may woo from eternity the trembling life with pie. Welsh Rabbit and other wild game will not do it first. But I think I am speaking the sentiments of a large and emaciated constituency when I say that there is getting to be a strong feeling against oatmeal submerged in milk and in favor of strawberry shortcake. I almost ate myself into an early grave in April by flying into the face of providence and demoralizing old gastric with oatmeal. I ate oatmeal two weeks, and at the end of that time my friends were telegraphed for. But before it was too late, I threw off the shackles

that bound me. With a desperation born of a terrible apprehension, I rose and shook off the fatal oatmeal habit and began to eat beefsteak. At first, life hung trembling in the balance and there was no change in the quotations of beef. But later on, there was a slight, delicate bloom on the wan cheek, and the range cattle that had barely escaped a long severe winter on the plains began to apprehend a new danger and to seek the secluded canyons of the inaccessible mountains. I often thought while I was eating health food and waiting for death, how the doctor another invited guests at the post-mortem would stare back in amazement to find the remnants of an eminent man filled with bran. Through all the painful hours of the long, long night and the adventless day,

while the mad throng rushed onward like a great river towards eternity's ocean, this thought was uppermost in my mind. I tried to get the physician to promise that he would not expose me and show the way, world what a hollow mockery I had been and how I had deceived my best friends. I told him the whole truth and asked him to spare my family the humiliation of knowing that, though I might have led a blameless life, my sunny exterior was only a thin covering for bran and shorts and midlings, cracked wheat and pearl barley. I dreamed last night of being in a large city where the streets were paved with dry toast and buildings were roofed with toast, and buildings were roofed with toast,

and the soil was bran and oatmeal, and the water was beef tea and gruel. All at once it came over me that I had solved the great mystery of death and had been consigned to a place of eternal punishment. The thought was horrible. A million eternities in a city built of dry toast and oatmeal. A home for never-ending cycles of ages where the principal hotel and the post-office building and the opera house were all built of toast.

and the fire department squirted gruel at the devouring element forever. It was only a dream, but it has made me more thoughtful, and people notice that I am not so giddy as I was. A new poet. A new and dazzling literary star has risen above the horizon and is just about to shoot athwart the starry vault of poesy. How wisely are all things ordered, and how promptly does the new star begin to beam upon the decline of the old.

Hardly had the sweet singer of Michigan commenced to wane and to flicker when, rising above the western hills, the glad light of the rising star is seen. And down the canyons and gulches of the rocky mountains comes the melodious cadences of the poet of the Greeley Eye. Couched in the rough terms of the west, robed in the untutored language of the Michelangelo's slang of the miner and the cowboy. The poet at first twitters a little on a bow far up the canyon, gradually waking the echoes, until the song is taken up and handed back by every rock and crag along the rugged ramparts of the mighty mountain barrier. Listen to the opening stanza of The Dying Cowboy and the Preacher. So old gospel shark, they tell me I must die, that the wheels of the wheels of a little bit of a little bit of a little biter.

They tell me I must die, that the wheels of Life's Wagon have rolled into their last rut. Well, I will pass in my checks without a whimper or a cry, and die as I have lived. A hard nut. This is no time-worn simile, no hackneyed illustration or bald-headed, decrepit comparison, but a new fresh illustration that appeals to the Western character and lifts the very soul out of the kinks, as it were. Wheels of Life's wagon have rolled into their last rut. Ah, how true to nature, and yet how grand, how broad and sweeping,

how melodious, and yet how real! None but the true poet would have thought to compare the clothes of life to the sudden and unfortunate chuck of the off-hind wheel of a lumber wagon into a rut. In fancy we can see it all. We hear the low, sad kerplunk of the wheel, the loud burst of earnest logical profanity, and then all is still. Now and then the swish of a mule's tail through the air,

or the sigh of the rawhide as it shimmers and hurdles through this silent air, and then a calm falls upon the scene. Anon, the driver bangs the mule that is ostensibly pulling his daylights out, but who is, in fact, humping up like an angle worm without pulling a pound. Then the poet comes to the close of the cowboy's career in this style. Do I repent? No, of nothing present or past. So skip, old preach, on gospel pap I won't be fed.

My breath comes hard. I am going, but I am game to the last. And reckless of the future, as the present, the cowboy was dead. If we could write poetry like that, do you think we would plot along the dreary pathway of the journalist? Do you suppose that if we had the heaven-born gift of song to such a degree that we could take hold of the hearts of millions and warble two or three, little ditties like that, or write an effigy before breakfast, or construct an ionic, anapestic twitter like the foregoing, that we would carry in our own coal and trim our own lamps and wear a shirt two weeks at a time. No, sir, we would high us away to Europe or Salt Lake, and let our hair grow long,

and we would ride some obituary truck that would make people disgusted with life, and they would sigh for death that they might leave their insurance and their obituaries to their survivors. A word in self-defense. It might be well in closing to say a word in self-defense of myself. The varied and uniformly erroneous notions expressed recently as to my plans for the future naturally call for some kind of an expression on this point over my own signature. In the first place, it devolves upon me to regain my health in full if it takes 14 years, I shall not, therefore, publish a book.

Prepare a humorous lecture. Visit Florida. Probate the estate of Lydia E. Pinkham deceased. Nor make any other grand break till I have once more the old vigor and elasticity and gurgling laughed of other days. In the meantime, let it be remembered that my home is in Laramie City, and that unless the common council pass an ordinance against it, I shall return in July, if I can make the trip between snowstorms and evade the peculiarities of a tardy and reluctant spring.

Bill Nye Pines for his old home Tom Fagan of this city has a wild horse that don't seem to take to the rush and hurry and turmoil of a metropolis. He has been so accustomed to the glad free air of the plains and mountains that the hampered and false life of a throbbing city with its myriad industries makes him nervous and unhappy. He sighs for the boundless prairie and the pure breath of the life-giving mountain atmosphere. So taciturn is he, in fact, and so cursed by homesickness and weariness of an artificial and unnatural horse society here in Laramie, that he refuses to eat anything and is gradually pining away.

Sometimes he takes a light lunch out of Mr. Fagin's arm, but for days and days he utterly loathes food. He also loathes those who try to go into the stable and fondle him. He isn't apparently very much on the fondle. He don't yearn for human society, but seems to want to be by himself and think it over. The wild horse and stories soon learns to love his master and stay by him and carry him through flood, or fire, and generally knows more than the Cyclopedia Britannica. But this horse is not the historical horse that they put into wild Arabian falsehoods. He is just a plain, unassuming wild horse of Wyoming descent,

whose pedigree is slightly clouded and who is sensitive on the question of his ancestry. All he wants is just to be let alone, and most everybody has decided that he is right. They came to that conclusion after they had soaked their persons in Arnica and glued themselves together with poultices. Perhaps after a while he will conclude to eat hay and grow up with the country, but now he sighs for his native bunch grass and the buffalo wallow wherein he has here to four made his lair. We don't wonder much, though,

that a horse who has lived in the country should be a little rattled here when he finds the electric light and bicycles and lawnmowers and Uncle Tom's cabin troops and bailed hay at $20 per ton. It makes him as wild and skittish as it does an 18-year-old girl the first time she comes into town, and for the first time is met by the blare of trumpets and the oriental wealth of the circus with the deformed camels and uniformed tramps

driving its miles of cages with no animals in them. The great natural world and the giddy maelstrom of seething perspiring humanity peculiar to the city world are two separate and distinct existences. End of Section 7 Section 8 of Bailed Hay by Bill Nye. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. One touch of nature Up in Polk County, Wisconsin, not long ago, a man who had lost eight children

by Ditherea, while the ninth hovered between life and death with the same disease, went to the health officer of the town and asked aid to prevent the spread of the terrible scourge. The health officer was cool and collected. He did not get excited over the anguish of the father whose last child was at the moment hovering upon the outskirts of immortality. He calmly investigated the manner, and never for a moment lost sight of the fact that he was a town officer and a professed. Christian.

You ask aid, I understand, said he, to prevent the spread of the disease, and also that the town shall assist you in procuring new and necessary clothing to replace that which you have been compelled to burn in order to stop the further inroads of diphtheria. Am I right? The poor man answered affirmatively. May I ask if your boys who died were Christian boys, and whether they improved their gospel opportunities and attended the Sabbath school, or whether they were profane and given over to Sabbath breaking.

The bereft father said that his boys had never made a profession of Christianity, that they were hardly old enough to do so, and that they might have missed some gospel opportunities owing to the fact that they were poor and hadn't clothes fit to wear to Sabbath school. Possibly, too, they had met with wicked companions and had been taught to swear. He could not say, but name might have sworn, although he thought they would have turned out to be good boys had they lived. I'm sorry that the case is so bad, said the health officer. I am led to believe that God has seen fit to visit you with affliction in order to express his divine disapproval of profanity, and I cannot help you. It ill becomes us poor, weak worms of the dust to meddle with the just judgments of God,

whether as an individual or as a quasi-corporation, it is well to allow the Almighty work out his great plan of salvation, and to avoid all carnal interference with the works of God. The old man went back to his desolated home and to the bedside of his only living child. I met him yesterday, and he told me all about it. I'm not a professor of religion, said he, But I tell you, Mr. Nye, I can't believe that this board of health has used me right.

Somehow I ain't worried about my little fellers that is gone. They was little fellers anyway, and they wasn't posted on the plan of salvation. But they was always kind, and they always minded me in their mother. If God is using diphtheria again profanity this season, they didn't know it. They was too young to know about it, and I was too poor, to take the papers, so I didn't know it another. I just thought that Christ was partial to kids like mine, just the same as he used to be two thousand years ago when the country was new.

I admit that my little shavers never went to Sabbath school much, and I wasn't scholar enough to throw much light on to God's system of retribution, but I told them to behave themselves, and they did. And we had a good deal of fun together, me and the boys. And they was so bright and square and cute that I didn't see how they could fall under divine wrath. I don't believe they did. I could tell you lots of smart little things that they used to do, Mr. Nye, but they weren't mean and cussed.

It was just frolicy and gay sometimes because they felt good. I don't believe God had it in for them because they was like other boys, do you? For if I thought so, it would kind of harden me and the old lady and make a sour in all creation. Mind you, I don't kick because I'm left alone here in the woods, and the sun don't seem to shine, and the birds seem a little backward about singing this spring, and the house is so quiet, and she is still all the time and cries in the night when she thinks I'm asleep. All that is tough, Mr. Nye, tough as old. Harry too. But it's so, and I ain't murmuring. But when the board of health says to me that the ruler of the

universe is making a tower of northern Wisconsin, mowing down little boys with sore throat because they say, gosh, I can't believe it. I know that people who ain't familiar with the facts will shake their heads and say that I'm a child of wrath, but I can't help it. All I can do is go up there under the trees where them little graves is, and think how ill-fired pleasant to me them little short lives was, and how every one of them little fellers was welcome when he come, poor as I was, and how I rassled with poor crops and pine stumps to buy clothes for them, and didn't care a cent for style as long as they was well. That's a kind of heretic I am, and if God is like a father that settles it, he wouldn't wipe my family just to establish discipline, I don't believe.

The plan of creation must be on a bigger scale than that, it seems to me, or else it's more or less of a fizzle. That board of health is better read than I am. It takes the papers and can add up figures and do lots of things that I can't do. But when them fellers tell me that they represent the town of Balsam Lake and the kingdom of heaven, my morbid curiosity is a row. I want to see the stificates of election. How to put up a stove pipe.

Putting up a stove pipe is easy enough, if you only go at it right. In the morning, breakfast on some light nutritious diet and drink two cups of hot coffee, after which put on a suit of old clothes, or new ones, if you can get them on time, put on an old pair of buckskin gloves, and, when everything is ripe for the fatal blow,

go and get a good hardware man who understands his business. If this rule be strictly adhered to, the gorgeous 18-carat stem-winding profanity of the present day may be very largely diminished, and the world made better. Fun of being a publisher. Being a publisher is not all sunshine, joy, and Johnny jump-ups, although the gentle and tractable reader may at times think so.

A letter was received two years ago, by the publishers of this book, on the outside of which was a request to the P. Master of Chicago to give to the most reliable man in Chicago and oblige. The P. Master thereupon gave the letter to Monsieur Belford Clark and Company, who have sent it to me as a literary curiosity. I wanted to go down to posterity, so I put it in this great work. I simply change the names, and where words are too obscure, doctor them up a little. Butler Bates County, Missouri, January 2, 1881. I have a novel, fresh, and pure from Pren, which I would like to be examined by you.

I wish to bring it before the public the ensuing summer. I've wrote a good deal for the press, and always with great success. I wrote once an article on the growth of pie plant, which was copied fur and wide. You may have heard of me through my poem on The Cold, Damp, Sea, or the murmuring wave and its sad kerplunk. I dashed it off one summer day for the Scab Town Herald. In it I enter the fair field of fancy and with exquisite word painting, I lead the reader on and on till he forgets that breakfast is ready,

and follows the thrilling career of Algonquin and his own fair-haired sciatica through page after page of delirious joy and poetic rhythm. In this novel I have wove a woof of possibilities criss-crossed with pictures of my own wild, unfettered fancy, which makes it a work at once truthful and yet sufficiently unnatural to make it eagerly sought by the great reading world. The plot of this novel is this. Algonquin is a poor artist who paints lovely sunsents and things nights and cuts cordwood during the day, struggling to win a competence so that he can sue for the hand of sciatica,

the wealthy daughter of a plumber. She does not love him much and treats him coldly, but he perseveres till one of his exquisite pictures is eagerly snapped up by a wealthy man at two dollars. The man afterwards turns out to be Syatica's paw. He says unkind things of Algonquin and intimates that he is a better artist in four-foot wood. than he is as a sunset man. He says that Algonquin is more of a Michelangelo in Basswood than anywhere else, and put a wet blanket on Syatica's love for Algonquin. Then Syatica grows colder than ever to Algonquin

and engages herself to a wealthy journalist. Just as the wedding is about to take place, Algonquin finds that he is by birth an Ohio man. Syatica repents and marries her first love. He secures the appointment of Governor of Wyoming, and they remove to Cheyenne. Then there are many little bursts of picturesqueness and other things that I would like to see in print. I send also a picture of myself which I would like to have in the book. Tell the artist to tone down the freckles so that the features may be seen by the observer,

and put on a diamond pin so that it will have the appearance of wealth, which the author of a book generally wears. It is not wrote very good, but that won't make any difference when it is in print. When the reading public begins to devour it and the scads come rolling in, you can deduct enough for to pay your expenses of printing and pressing, and send me the balance by a post-office money order. Please get it on the market as soon as possible, as I need a Swiss muslin and some other togs suitable for my position in literary circles.

Yours truly, Luella Blinker. Laundere. A lady's underwear is politely spoken of as lingerie. But the great horrid man crawls into his decrepit last year's undershirt every Monday morning and swears because his new underclothes are so lingerie about making their appearance. Fruit. A class of croakers that one meets with everywhere have steadily maintained that fruit cannot be raised in this territory. In conversation with a small boy yesterday, we learned that this is not true. It is very simple and easy to do, even in this rigorous climate.

He showed us how it is done. He has a small and delicately constructed harpoon with a tail to it, the apparatus attached to a long string. He goes into the nearest market, and while the clerk is cutting out some choice stakes for the man with the store teeth, the boy throws his harpoon and hauls in on the string. In this way, he raises all kinds of fruit, not only for his own use, but he has some to sell. He showed us some that he raised. It was as good as any of the fruit that we buy here,

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

Two self-accused humorists of Ohio have had a fight over the authorship of the facetious phenomenon and laugh-jurking success, whoever saw a tree box. The bone of contention between these two gigantic minds, evidently, is not their funny bone. End of Section 8. Section 9 of Bailed Hay by Bill Nye. This Librevox recording is in the public domain.

Congratulatory. I cannot close this letter without writing my congratulations to Mr. Raymond of Tribune upon the position of notary public, which he has secured. True merit cannot long go unrewarded. I too am a notary public. So is Patterson of the Georgetown Minor. And yet we were all once poor boys, unknown and unrecognized.

Patterson was the son of a wealthy editor in Michigan who wished Snick Tao to be a minister of the everlasting gospel. But Snick knew that he was destined to enter upon a wider and more important field. He devoted himself to the study of profanity in all its various branches, until now he can swear more men, and do a bigger, so-help-me-God business, than any other go-as-you-please affidavit man in Colorado. I have held my office through a part of the administration of Grant, and all of Hayes administration so far,

and all through the countless political changes of the territorial administration. I state this with a pardonable pride, It shows it was not the result of political influence or party, but was the natural outgrowth of official rectitude and just dealing toward awe. When a man comes before me to make affidavit or to acknowledge a deed, I recognize no party, no friend. They are all served alike and charged alike. I was appointed to this high official position under the administration of Governor Thayer.

At that time, COD French was secretary. I had to lubricate the wheels of government before I could catch on, as it were. COD French wanted five dollars. I sent it to him. I wrote him that, when the people seemed determined to foist upon me the high official honor of notary public, the paltry sum of five dollars should not stand in the way. I have held the position ever since. Political enemies have endeavored to tear to pieces my record, both officials

and socially. But through evil and good report, I have still held it. The nation today looks to her notary's public for her crowning glory and successful future. In their hands rest the might and the grander of the glory which, like a halo, in the years to come, will encircle the brow of Columbia. I feel the responsibility that rests upon me, and I tremble with the mighty weight of wheel or woe for a great nation which hangs upon my every official act. I presume Mr. Raymond feels the same way. He ought, certainly, for the eyes of a great republic, watch us with feverish anxiety. It is an awful position to be placed in. Let those who tread the lower walks of life envy not the brain and nerve-destroying position of the notary public, whose every movement is portentous

and great with its burden of good or ill for nations unborn. That is what is making an old man of me before my time and sprinkling my strawberry blonde hair with gray. The agony is over. It has occurred to us that the destruction of timber near the continental divide in Colorado, which is also called the backbone of the continent, will naturally be a severe blow

to the lumber region of Colorado. We began studying this joke last summer and have wrestled prayerfully with it ever since with the above result. Do not think, oh, gay, light-hearted reader, that these jokes are spontaneous and that mirth is pumped out of the recesses of the editor's brain as a grocer pumps coal out of a tin tank.

They come with fasting and sadness and vexation of spirit and groanings that cannot be uttered and weeping and gnashing of teeth. Now that we are over this joke safely, no doubt that we shall begin to flesh up again. Ostrich cavalry. The question of mounting the United States cavalry upon ostriches, as a matter of economy, is being agitated on the strength of their easy propagation in Arizona and New Mexico. There being now 117 of these birds in that region, the result of the increase from nine of them imported several years ago. However successful ostrich farming may be in and of itself, we cannot speak too highly of the feasibility of using the bird for cavalry purposes.

It is an established fact that the ostrich is very swift and will live for days without food and be very irrevisable all the time. A detachment of ostrich cavalry could light out across the enemy's country like the wind, an easily distance and equal force mounted upon horses, and after several days march, instead of a weary, worn and jaded out lot of horses, there would be a flock of ostriches, hungry but in good spirits, and the quartermasters could issue some empty bottles, and some sardine boxes and some government socks, and an old blue overcoat or two,

and the irons from an old ambulance to each bird. And at evening, while the white tents were glimmering in the twilight, the birds could lie in a little knot chewing their cud constantly, and snoring in a subdued way that would shake the earth for miles around. One great difficulty would be to keep a sufficient guard around the arms and ammunition to prevent the cavalry from eating them up. Think of a half-dozen ostriches breaking into an enclosure while the guard was asleep or off-duty

and devouring 15 or 20 rounds of ammunition in one night, or stealing into the place where the artillery was encamped and filling themselves up with shells and round-shot and Greek fire and gatling guns, an electric belt. A Cheyenne man was once mildly saw, struck by lightning, calls it an electric belt, the annual whale. As usual, the regular fall whale of the eastern press on the Indian question, charging that the Indians never committed any depredations unless grossly abused, has arrived. We are unpacking it this morning and

marking the price on it. Some of it is manifold and the remainder an ordinary telegraph paper. It will be closed out very cheap. Parties wishing to supply boarding schools with essays and compositions cannot do better than to apply at once. We are selling Boston lots with large brass-mounted words at two and three cents per pound. Every package draws a prize of a two-pound can of baked beans. If large orders are received from any one person, we will set up the whale and start it to running free of cost. It may be attached to any newspaper. in a few minutes, and the merest child can readily understand it. It is very simple.

But it is not as simple as the tallowy poultice on the average eastern paper who grinds them out at $4 per week and found. We also have some old whales, two or three years old, and older, that have never been used, which we will sell very low. Old Sioux whales, Modoc whales, etc., etc. They do not seem to meet with a ready sale in the West, and we rather suspect it's because we are too near this scene of the Indian troubles. Parties who have been shot at, scalped, or had their wives and children massacred by the Indians do not buy Eastern Wales. Eastern Wales are meant for the Eastern market, and if we can get this old stock off our hands, we will hereafter treat the Indian question in our plain, matter-of-fact way.

The Nambi-Pambi style of Indian editorial and molasses candy gush that New Englanders are now taking in makes us tired. Life is too short. It is but a span. Only as a tale that has been told. Just like the coming of a guest who gets his meal ticket punched, grabs a toothpick, and skins out. Then why do we fool away the golden years that the creator has given us for mental improvements, and spiritual elevation in trying to fill up the enlightened masses with an inferior article of taffy. Every man who knows enough to feed himself out of a maple trough knows, or ought to know,

that the Indian is treacherous, dishonest, diabolical, and devilish in the extreme, and that he is only waiting the opportunity to spread out a little juvenile hell over the fair face of nature if you give him one-sixteenth of a chance. He will wear pants and comb his hair and pray and be a class leader at the agency for 59 years if he knows that in the summer of the 60th year, he can murder a few Colorado settlers and beat out the brains of the industrious farmers. Industry is the foe of the red man. He is a warrior.

He has royal blood in his veins and the vermin of the Montezuma's dance, the German over his filthy carcass. That's the kind of hairpin he is. He never works. Nobody but Chinamen and plebeians ever work. He was not a burglar. The young man who was seen climbing in a window on Center Street yesterday was not a burglar, as some might suppose. But on the contrary, he was a man whose wife had left the keys to the house lying on the mantle and locked them in by means of a spring lock on the front door. He did not climb in the window because he preferred that way, but because the door unlocked better from the

inside. End of Section 9. Section 10 of Bailed Hay by Bill Nye. This Librovox recording is in the public domain. Best on Blessed Memory One of the attractions of life at the Cheyenne Indian Agency is a reserved seat ticket to the regular slaughterhouse matinee. The agency butchers kill at the rate of of ten bullocks per hour while at work, and so great was the rush to the slaughterpens for the internal economy of the slaughtered animals, that major love found it necessary to erect a box office and gate, where none but those holding tickets could enter and provide themselves with these delicacies. This is not a sensation. It is the plain truth, and we desire to call

the attention of those who love and admire the Indian at a distance of two thousand miles, and to the aesthetic love for the beauty which prompts the crooked fanged and dusky bride of old fly up the creek to rob the soap grease man in the glue factory, that she may make a Cheyenne holiday. As a matter of fact, common decency will not permit us to enter into a discussion of this matter. Firstly, it would not be fit for the high order of readers who are now paying their money for the boomerang, and secondly, the Indian maiden at the present moment stands on a lofty crag, of the rocky mountains, beautiful in her wild simplicity, wearing the fringed garments of her tribe. To the sentimentalist, she appears outlined against the glorious sky of the New West,

wearing a coronet of eagle's feathers, and a health corset trimmed with fantastic beadwork and wonderful and impossible designs and savage art. Shall we then rush in and with ruthless hand shatter this beautiful picture? Shall we portray her as she appears on her return from the great slaughterhouse benefit and moral aggregation of digestive mementos? Shall we draw a picture of her clothed in a horse blanket with a necklace of the false teeth of the pale face, and her coarse unkempt hair hanging over her smoky features and clinging to her warty bony neck? No, no, far be it from us to destroy the lovely vision of copper-colored grace and smoke-tempel. beauty, which the freckled student of the Afeet East has erected in the rose-hued chambers of fancy.

Let her dwell there as a plump-limbed princess of a brave people. Let her adorn her hat-rack of his imagination. Proud, beautiful, grand, gloomy, and peculiar. While, as a matter of fact, she is at that moment leaving the vestibule of the slaughterhouse, conveying in the soiled laprobe, which is her slender. sole adornment, the mangled lungs of a Texas steer. No man shall say that we have busted the beautiful cigar-sign vision that he has erected in his memory. Let the graceful Indian queen that has lived on in his heart ever since he studied history

and saw the graphic picture of the landing of Columbus, in which Columbus is just unsheathing his bread-knife, and the stage Indians are fleeing to the tall brush. Let her, we say, still live on. The ruthless hand that writes nothing but everlasting truth And the stub pencil that yanks the cloak of the false and artificial from cold And perhaps unpalatable fact Null spare this little imaginary Indian maiden with a back comb and gold garters Let her withstand the onward march of centuries While the true Indian maiden eats the fricazeed locust of the plains

And wears the cavalry pants of progress We may be rough and thoughtless many times, but we cannot come forward and ruthlessly shatter the red goddess at whose shrine the far-away student of Blackhawk and other fourth-reader warriors worship. As we said, we declined to pull the cloak from the true Indian maiden of today and show her as she is. That cloak may be all she has on,

and no gentleman will be rude even to the daughter of old bobtail flush, The Cheyenne Brave A Judicial Warbler Jacob Beeson Blair, who has been recently nominated as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of Wyoming and Judge of the Second Judicial District, with his headquarters at this place, is one of the most able and consistent officials that Wyoming has ever had.

I might go further and say that he stands at the head of them all. A year ago, as an evidence of his popularity, I will say that he was unanimously nominated to represent the territory in Congress, which nomination he gracefully declined. He has put his spare capital into mines, and shown that he is a resident of Wyoming, and not of the classic halls of Washington, or the sea-beat shores of Maryland, my Maryland.

Two years ago, I had the pleasure of making a trip to the mines on Douglas Creek, or, as it was then called, Last Chance, in company with Judge Blair and Delicate Downey, owners of the Keystone Gold Mine in that district. The party also included Governor Hoyt, Asayer Murphy, Postmaster Hayford, and several other prominent men. Judge Brown and Sheriff Boswell were also in the party at the mine.

Judge Blair is, by natural choice, a Methodist, and renewed our spiritual strength throughout the trip in a way that was indeed pleasant and profitable. The judge sings in a soft, subdued kind of way that makes the walls of the firmament crack, and the heavens roll together like a scroll. When he sings, how tedious and tasteless the hours, when Jesus no longer I see! The coyotes and jackrabbits within a radius of 75 miles hunt their respective holes, and remain there till the danger has passed.

Looking at the judge as he sits on the bench, singing the road agent for ten years in solitary confinement, one would not think he could warble so when he gets into the mountains. But he can. He's a regular prima donna, so to speak. When he starts to sing, the sound is like an aeolian harp, sighing through the pine forest and dying away upon the silent air. Gradually it swells into the wild melody of the Hotel Gong. A fire at a ball.

Down at Gunnison last week, a large select ball was given in a hall, and of which was partitioned off for sleeping rooms. A young man who slept in one of these rooms, and who had grieved because he had not been invited, and had to roll around and suffer while the glad throng tripped the light bombastic toe, at last discovered a knot hole in the partition through which he could watch the giddy multitude. While peeping through the knot hole, he discovered that one of the dancers, who had an aperture in

the heel of his shoe and another in his sock to correspond, was standing by the wall with the ventilated foot near the knot hole. It was but the work of a moment to hold the candle against his exposed heel, until the thick epidermis had been heated red-hot. Then there was a whale that rent the battlements above and drowned the blasts of the music. There was a whale. There was a wild scared cry of fire! A frightened throng rushing hither and thither, and then, where mirth and music and rum, had gladdened the eye and reddened the cheek a moment ago.

All was still, save the low convulsive twitter of a scandly-clad man as he lay on the floor of his dungeon tower and dug his nails in the floor. A little puff. Some time ago the Cheyenne's son noted that Judge Crosby, known to Colorado and Wyoming people quite well, was making strenuous efforts, with some show of success, to obtain the appointment of Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of Wyoming. Since that, I have noticed with great sorrow that the president, in his youthful thoughtlessness and juvenile independence, has appointed another man for the position.

I speak of this because so many Colorado and Wyoming people knew Mr. Crosby and had an interest in him, as I might say. Some of us only knew him 50 cents worth, while others knew him for various amounts, up to $5 and $10. He was an earnest, unflagging, and industrious borrower. When times were dull, he used to borrow of me. Then I would throw up my hands and let him go through me. It was not a hazardous act at all on my part. The judge knew everybody, and everybody knew him, and seemed nervous when they saw him,

for fear that the regular assessment was about to be made. Every few days he wanted to buy a pair of socks, but he never bought them. Forty or fifty of us got together and compared notes the other day. We ascertained that not less than $100 had been contributed to the Crosby's socks. stock fund during his stay here, and yet the old man wore the same socks to Washington that he had worn in the San Juan County. A like amount was also contributed to the wash bill fund, and still he never

had any washing done. We often wondered why so much money was squandered on laundry expenses, and yet that he should have the general perspective and spicy fragrance of a Mormon immigrant train. He used to come into my office and be sociable with me because he was just a journalist. It surprised me at first to meet a journalist who never changed his shirt. I thought that journalists, as a rule, wore diamond studs and had to be looked at through smoked glass. He liked me. He told me so one day when we were alone, and after I had promised to tell no one. Then he asked me for a quarter. I told him I had nothing less than a 50-cent piece. He said he would go and get it changed. I said it would be a shame for an old man, and lame at that, to go out and get it changed. So I said I would go. I went out and played

thirteen of my eternal revolving games of billiards, and about dusk went back to the office, whistling a merry roundelay, knowing that he had starved out and gone away. I found him at my desk, where he had written to every senator and representative in Congress, and every man who had ever been a senator or representative in Congress. Likewise, every man, woman, and child who ever expected to be a senator or representative in Congress, also to every superintendent and passenger agent of every known line of railway, for a pass to every known point of the civilized world. And this correspondence he had used my letterheads and,

envelopes and stamps, and he wasn't done either. He was just getting animated and warming up to his work, and perspiring so that I had to open the hall door and burn some old gum-over shoes and other disinfectants before I could breathe. A large society is being formed here and in Cheyenne, called the Crosby Suffer Aid Association. It is for the purpose of furnishing speedy relief to the sufferers from the Crosby outbreak. We desire the cooperation and assistance of Colorado philanthropists and will, so far as plausible, furnish relief to Colorado sufferers from the great scourge. Later, Henry Rothschild Crosby, Esquire, passed through here a few evening since on his way to Evanston, Wyoming, where he takes charge of his office as receiver of public monies for the

Western Land Office. Henry seems to feel as though I had not stood by him through his political struggle at Washington. At least I learned from other parties that he does not seem to hunger and thirst after my genial society and thinks that what little influence I may have had has not been used in his interest. That is where Henry hit the nail on the head, with that far-sided statesmanship and clear, unerring logic for which he is so remarkable. I do not blame those who were instrumental in securing his appointment, remember. Not at all.

No doubt I would have done the same thing if I had been in Washington all winter, and Henry had hovered around me for breakfast and for lunch, and for dinner, and for supper, and for in-between meals, and for picnics, and had borrowed my money and my overcoat and my meal ticket, and my bath ticket and my pool checks and my socks and my robe de nois and my toothbrush and my gas and writing materials and stationary. But it should be born in mind that I am a resident of Wyoming. I have property here, and it behooves me to do and say what I can for the interests of our people. I may have to borrow some things myself someday, and I don't want to find then that they have all been

borrowed. Let Hank stand back a little while and give other boys a chance. Note. In order to give the gentle reader an idea of Mr. Crosby's personal appearance, I had consented to draw a picture of him myself. It isn't very pretty, but it is horribly accurate. It is so lifelike that it seems as though I could almost detect his maroon-colored breath. B. N. End of Section 10. Section 11 of Bailed Hay by Bill Nye. This Libravox recording is in the public domain. Genius and Whiskey

I see in a recent issue of this sun a short article clipped from a Sydney paper relative to William Henry Harrison, which brings to my mind fresh recollections of the long ago. I knew William too. I knew him for a small amount which I wish I had now, to give to suffering Ireland. He came upon me in the prime of summertime and said he was a newspaper man. That always gets me. When a man says to me that he is a newspaper man and proves it by showing the usual

discouraging state of resources and liabilities, I always come forward with the collateral. William wanted to go into the mountains and recover his exhausted nerve force and build up his brain power with our dry, bracing air. He knew Mr. Foley, who was then working a claim in last chance. So he went out there to tone up his exhausted energies. He went out there, and after a few weeks a note came in from the man with the historical cognomen, asking me to send him a gallon of best old crow. I went to my guidebook and encyclopedia and ascertained that this was a kind of drink.

I then purchased the amount and sent it on. Mr. Foley said that William stayed by the jug till it was dry, and then he came into town. I met him on the street and asked him how his intellect seemed after his picnic in the mountains. He said she was all right now, and he felt just as though he could do the entire staff work on the New York Herald for two weeks and not sweat a hair. But he didn't pay for the old crow. It slipped his mind. When time hung heavy on my hands, I used to write William a note and cheerfully done him for the amount. I would also ask him how his intellect seemed by this time, and also make other little jocular remarks. But he has never forwarded me the amount. If the bill had been for pantaloons or grub or other luxuries, I might have excused him.

But when I loan a man money for a staple like whiskey, I don't think it's asking too much to hope that In the flight of time, it would be paid back. However, I can't help it now. It's about time that another bogus journalist should put in an appearance. I have a few dollars ahead, and I am yearning to lay out the sum on struggling genius. The Two-Headed Girl Has Visited The West. It is very rare that a town the size of Laramie experiences the rare treat of witnessing any,

so enjoyable. In addition to the mental feast, which such a thing affords, one goes away feeling better, feeling that life has more in it to live for, and is not, after all, such a veil of tears as he had at times believed it. Through the trials and disappointments of this earthly pilgrimage, the soul is at times cast down and discouraged. Man struggles against ill fortune and unlooked-for woes, year after year, until he becomes misanthropical and soured. But when a two-headed girl comes along and he sees her, it cheers him up. She speaks to his better nature in two different languages at one in the same time, and at one price. When I went to the show, I felt gloomy and apprehensive.

The 18th ballot had been taken, and the bulletins seemed to have a tiresome sameness. The future of the Republic was not encouraging. I felt as though, if I could get first cost for the blasted thing, I would sell it. I had also been breaking in a pair of new boots that day, and spectators had been betting wildly on the boots while I had no backers at three o'clock in the afternoon, and had nearly decided to withdraw on the last ballot. I went to the entertainment feeling as though I should criticize it severely. The two-headed girl is not beautiful.

Neither one of her, in fact, is handsome. There is quite a similarity between the two, probably because they have been in each other's society a great deal and have adopted the same ways. She is an Ethiopian by descent and natural choice, being about the same complexion as Frank Miller's oil blacking, priced ten cents. She was at one time a poor slave,

but by her winning ways in genuine integrity and genius, she has won her way to the hearts of the American people. She has thoroughly demonstrated the fact that two heads are better than one. A good-sized audience welcomed this popular favorite. When she came forward to the footlights and made her two-ply bow, she was greeted by round after round of applause from the elite of the city. I felt pleased and gratified. The fact that a recent course of scientific lectures here was attended by from 15 to 30 people, and the present brilliant success of the two-headed girl proved to me, beyond a doubt,

that we live in an age of thought and philosophical progress. Science may be all right in its place, but does it make the world better? Does it make a permanent improvement on the minds and thoughts of the listener? Do we go away from such a lecture feeling that we have made a grand stride toward a glad emancipation from the mental thralldom of ignorance and superstition? Do people want to be assailed year after year with a nebular theory and the Professor Huxley theory of natural selection and things of that nature? No.

One thousand times no. They need to be led on quietly by a netherly. appeal to their better natures. They need to witness a first-class bureau of monstrosities, such as men with heads as big as a bandwagon, women with two heads, Cardiff giants, men with limbs bristling out all over them like the velvety bloom on a prickly pair. When I get a little leisure and can attend to it, I'm going to organize a grand constellation of living wonders of this kind and make thirteen or fourteen hundred farewell tours with it, not so much to make much to make money.

money, but to meet a long-felt want of the American people for something which will give a higher mental tone to the tastes of those who never lag in their tireless march toward perfection. The Cultivation of Gum An idea has occurred to us that, situated as we are at a considerable elevation, and being comparatively out of the line of tropical growth, we should try to propagate plants that will withstand the severe winter and the sudden and sometimes fatal surprise of spring. Plants in this locality worry along very well through the winter in a kind of semi-unconscious state, but when spring drops down on them, about the 4th of July, they're not prepared for it,

and they yield to the severe nervous shock and pass with a gentle gliding motion up the flume. This has suggested to our mind the practicability of cultivating the chewing-gum plant. We advance this thought with some timidity, knowing that our enemies will use all these novel and untried ideas against us in a presidential campaign. But the good of the country is what we are after, and we do not want to be misunderstood. Chewing gum is rapidly advancing in price, and the demand is far beyond the supply. Why? The call for gum is co-extensive with the onward move of education. They may be said to go hand in hand. Wherever institutions of learning are found, there you will see the tall, graceful form of the chewing gum tree rising toward heaven, with its branches extending toward all humanity.

Here in Wyoming, we could easily propagate this plant. It is hearty and don't seem to care whether winter lingers in the lap of spring or not. We have the figures also to substantiate this article. We will figure on the basis of 20 boxes of gum to the plant. And this is a very low estimate indeed. Then the plants may easily be three feet apart. This would be 3,097,600 plants to the acre, or 61,952,000 boxes containing one of

chews in each box, or $6,195,000,200,000 chews to the acre. We have a million acres that could be used in this way, which would yield in a good year, 6 quadrillion, 195 trillion, 200 billion, 200 billion chews at one cent each. The reader will see at a glance that this is no wild romantic notion on our part, but a terrible reality. Wyoming could easily supply the present demand and wag the jaws of nations yet unborn. It makes us tired to think of it. Of course, anything like this will meet with strong opposition on the part of those who have no faith in enterprises,

but let a joint stock company be formed with sufficient capital to purchase the tools and gum seed, and we will be responsible for the result. Very likely, the ordinary spruce gum, made of lard and resin, would be a good of the tools of gum, would be best as an experiment, after which the prize-package gum plant could be tried. These experiments could be followed up with a trial of the gum drop, gum-over-shoe, gum-aub, gum-arabic, and other varieties of gum. Dr. Hayford would be a good man to take hold of this. Colonel Donnellan says, however, he don't think it is practical.

No use of enlarging on this subject. It will never be tried. Probably the town is full of people who are willing to chew the gum, but wouldn't raise a hand towards starting a gum orchard. We are sick and tired of pointing out different avenues to wealth, only to be laughed at and ridiculed. We have reasoned it out. A home magazine comes to us this week in which we find the following,

connected with a society article. After alluding to the young men of the 19th century and their peculiarities, it continues, in fact, many of the more fashionable strains are all black, except the distinctive white feet and snout, so noticeable at this epoch in our history. This, it would seem, will make a radical change in the prevailing young man. With white feet and white snout, the masher must also be black aside from those features. This will add the charm of extreme novelty to our social gatherings, and furnish sufficient excuse for a man like us, with blonde brine and strawberry blonde feet,

staying at home with the ban of society in the loose smoking jacket on him. Farther on, this peculiar essay says, He is noted for his wonderfully fine blood, the bone is fine, the hair thin, the carcass long but broad, straight and deep-sided, with smooth skin, susceptible to no mange or other skin diseases. We almost busted our capacity trying to figure out this startler in the fashion line, and wore ourselves down to a mere geometrical line in our endeavor to fathom this thing when, yesterday, in reading an article on the same paper entitled The Berkshire Hog,

we discovered that the sentences above referred to had evidently been omitted by the foreman, and put in the Society article. It is unnecessary to state that a blessed calm has settled down in the heart of this end of the boomerang. Time at last makes all things size up in proper shape. Blessed be the time which matures the human mind and the promissory note. Carving schools. They are agitating the matter of instituting carving schools in the east so that the rising generation will be able to pass down through the corridors of time,

without its lap full of dressing and its bosom laden with gravy and remorse. The students at this school will wear barbed wire masks while practicing. These masks will be similar to those worn by German students, who slice each other up while obtaining an education. End of Section 11. Section 12 of Bailed Hay by Bill Nye. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. Dignity

Colonel Ingersoll said at Omaha the other day that he hated a dignified man and that he never knew one who had a particle of sense that such men never learned and were constantly forgetting something. Josh Billings says that gravity is no more the sign of mental strength than a paper collar is the evidence of a shirt. This leads us to say that the man who ranks as a dignified snoozer and banks on winning wealth and a deathless name through this one sort of, of strength is in the most unenviable position of anyone we know. Dignity does not draw. It answers in place of intellectual tone for 20 minutes, but after a while it fails to get there. Dignity works all right in a wooden Indian or a drum major, but the man who desires to draw a salary through life and to be sure of a visible means of support will do well to make some other provision than a haughty look

and an air of patronage. Colonel Ingersoll may be wrong in the matter of future punishment, but his head is pretty level on the dignity question. Dignity works all right with a man who is worth a million dollars and has some doubts about his suspenders, but the man who is to get a large sum of money before he dies and get married and accomplish some good must place himself before his fellow men

in the attitude of one who has ideas that are not too lonely and isolated. Let us therefore aim higher than simply to appear cold and austere. Let us study to aid in the advancement of humanity and the increase of bailed information. Let us struggle to advance and improve the world, even though in doing so we may get into ungraceful positions and at times look otherwise than pretty. Thus shall we get over the ground, and though we may do it in the eccentric style of the camel, We will get there, as we said before, and we will have camped and eaten our supper while the graceful and dignified pedestrian lingers along the trail. Works, not good clothes and dignity, are the grand hailing sign, and he who halts and refuses to jump over an obstacle because he may not do it so as to appear as graceful as a gazelle, will not arrive until the festivities are over.

A snort of agony. Our attention has been called to a remark made by the New York Tribune, which would intimate that the journal referred to didn't like acting postmaster F. Hatton, and characterizing the editor of the boomerang as a journalistic pal of General Hatton's. We certainly regret that circumstances have made it necessary for us to rebuke the Tribune and speak harshly to it. Frank Hatton may be a journalistic pal of ours. Perhaps so. We would be glad to class him as a journalistic pal of ours, even though he may not have married rich. We think just as much of General Hatton as though he had married wealthy. We can't all marry rich and travel over the country and edit our papers vicariously. That is something that can only happen to the blessed few. It would be nice for us to go to Europe and have a our pro tem editor at home working for $20 per week, and telegraphing us every few minutes to know whether he should support Cornell or Folger.

The pleasure of being an editor is greatly enhanced by such privileges, and we often feel that if we could get away from the hot, close office of the boomerang and roam around over Scandahuvia and the Bosphorus and mold the policy of the boomerang by telegraph, and wear a cork helmet and tight pants, we would be far happier. Still, it may be that Whitelaw Reed is no happier with his high-priced wife and his own record of crime than we are in our simplicity here in the wild and rugged West,

as we write little epics for our one-horse paper and borrow tobacco of the foreman. It is not all of life to live, nor all of death to die. We should live for a purpose, Mr. Reed, not aimlessly like a blind Indian, 200 miles from the reservation at Christmas tide. Now, Mr. Reed, if you will just tell Mr. Nicholson when you get back home, that in referring to us as a journalistic pal of Frank Hatton, he has exceeded his authority. We will feel grateful to you, and so will Mr. Hatton.

Don't do it. We shall be called upon to stop the Tribune, and subscribe for Harper's Weekly. This we should dislike to do very much, because we have taken the Tribune for years. We used to take it when the editor stayed at home and wrote for it. Our father used to take the Tribune, too. He is the editor of the Omaha Republican and needs a good New York paper,

but he has quit taking the Tribune. He said he must withdraw his patronage from a paper that is edited by a tourist. All the Nyes will now stop taking the Tribune, and all subscribe for some other dreary paper. We don't know just whether it will be Harper's Weekly or the Shroud. Later. Mr. Reed went through here on Tuesday and told us that he might have been wrong in referring to us as a journalistic pal of Frank Hatton, and in fact did not know that the Tribune had said so.

He simply told Nicholson to kind of generally go for the administration and turn over a great man every morning with his scathing pen, and probably Nicholson had kind of wrong. run out of great men and tackled the North American Indian fighter of the boomerang. Mr. Reed also said, as he rubbed some camphor ice on his nose and borrowed a dollar from his wife to buy his supper here, that when he got back to New York, he was going to write some pieces for the Tribune himself. He was afraid he couldn't trust Nicholson, and the paper had now got where it needed an editor right by it all the time. He said also that he couldn't afford to be wakened up 40 times a night to write telegrams to New York, telling the Tribune who to endorse for governor.

It was a nuisance, he said, to stand at the center of a way station telegraph office in his sunflower night shirt and write telegrams to Nicholson, telling him who to sass the next morning. Once, he said, he telegraphed him to dismember a journalistic pal of Frank Hatton's, and the operator made a mistake. So the next morning the Tribune had a regular old ring-tail peeler of an editorial which planted one of Mr. Reed's special friends in an early grave. So we may know from this that molding the course of a great paper by means of red messages is fraught with some unpleasant features. Always room at the top. Young man do not stand lounging on the threshold of the glorious future, while the coming years are big with possibilities.

But take off your coat and spit on your hands and win the wealth which the world will yield you. You may not be able to write a beautiful poem and die of starvation, but you can go to work humbly as a porter and buy a whisk broom and wear people's clothes out with it. And in five years you can go to Europe in your own special car. As the strawberry said to the box, there is always room at the top, inaccurate. Once more has Laramie been slandered and introduced.

Once more our free and peculiar style has been spoken lightly of and our pride trailed in the dust. Last week, the Police Gazette, an illustrated family journal of Great Merit, appeared with a half-page steel engraving, executed by one of the old masters, representing two Laramie girls on horseback yanking a fly drummer along the street at a gallop, because he tried to make a mash on them and they did not yearn for his love. There are two or three little airs in the illustration,

to which we desire to call the attention of the Eastern Reader of Michelangelo masterpieces that appear in the Police Gazette. First, the saloon, or hurdy-gurdy shown in the left foreground, is not the exact representation of any building in Laramie, and the doby pig pens and eight-tents of which the town seems to be composed are not true to nature. Again, the streets do not look like the streets of Laramie. They look more like the public thoroughfares of Thai City or Jerusalem.

Then the girls do not look like Laramie girls, and we are acquainted with all the girls in town, and consider ourselves a judge of those matters. The girls in this illustration look too much as though they had mingled a great deal with the people of the world. They do not have that shy, frightened, and pure look that they ought to have. They appear to be the kind of girls that one finds in the crowded metropolis under the gaslight, yearning to get acquainted with someone. There are several features of the illustration which we detect as erroneous,

and among the rest we might mention casually that the incident illustration, never occurred here at all. Aside from these little irregularities above-named, the picture is no doubt a correct one. We realize fully that times get dull even in New York sometimes, and it is necessary occasionally to draw on the imagination. But the Gazette artists ought to pick up some hard town like Cheyenne and let us alone a while. The Western Chap. Few know how voraciously we go for anything in the fashion line. Many of our exchanges are fashion magazines, and nothing is read with such avidity as these highly pictorial aggregations of literature. If there are going to be any changes in the male wardrobe this winter, it behooves us to know what they are. We intend to do so.

It is our high prerogative and glorious privilege to live in a land of information. If we do not provide ourselves with a few, it is our own fault. Man has spanned the ocean with an electric cable and runs his streetcars with another cable that puts people out of their misery as quick as a giant powder caramel in a man's chest protector under certain circumstances. Science has done almost everything for us except to pay our debts without leaning toward repudiation. We are making rapid strides in the line of progression, that is, the scientists are. Every little while you can hear a scientist burst a basting thread off his overalls while making a stride. It is equally true that we are marching rapidly along in the line of fashion.

Change unceasing change is our war cry, and he who undertakes to go through the winter with the stage costumes of the previous winter will find, as Voltaire once said, that it is a cold day. We look with great concern upon the rapid changes which a few weeks have made. The full voluptuous swell and broad cinch of the Chaparajo have given place to the tight pantalets with feathers on them, conveying the idea that they cannot be removed until death, or an earthquake shall occur. Chaps, as they are vulgarly called, deserve more than a passing notice. They are made of leather with fronts of dogskin,

with the hair on. The inside breaths are of calf or sheepskin, made plain but trimmed down the side seam with buckskin bugles and oil-tanned bric-a-brac of the time Michelangelo Kelly. On the front are plain pockets used for holding the ball program and the pop. The pop is a little design in nickel and steel,

which is often used as an inhaler. It clears out the head and leaves the nasal passages and phrenological chart out on the sidewalk, where pure air is abundant. Chaps are rather attractive while the wear is on horseback or walking toward you, but when he chassees and all waltz to places, you discern that the seat of the garment has been postponed siney-di-e. This at first induces a pang in the breast of the beholder. Later, however, you become accustomed to the baron and perhaps even stern demeanor of the wear.

You gradually gain control of yourself and master your raging desire to rush up and pin the garment together. The dance goes on. The elite take an adult's dose of ice cream and other refreshments. The leader of the mad waltz glides down the hall with his medieval chaps, swishing along as he sails. The violin gives a last shriek. The superior fiddle rips the robe of night wide open with a parting, the mad frolic is over and five dollars have gone into the dim and unfrequent in freight depot of the frog-pond and byroned past end of section twelve section thirteen of bailed hay by bill nigh this Libravox recording is in the public domain an incident of the campaign colonel thomas junius

Dayton entered the democratic headquarters on second street a few nights ago having been large largely engaged previously in talking over the political situation, with sugar in it. The first person he saw in entering was an individual in the back part of the room, writing. Colonel Dayton ordered him out. The man would not go, maintaining that he had a right to meet together in Democratic headquarters as often as he desired. The colonel still insisted that he was an outsider and could have nothing in common with the patriotic band of Bourbons, whose stamping ground he had thus entered. Finally, the excitement became so great that a man was called in to umpire the game and sponge off the hostiles.

But before blood was shed, a peacemaker asked Colonel Dayton what the matter was with him. Well, this man is a Democrat. I've known him for years. What's the reason you don't want him in here? That's all right, said the colonel with his eyes, starting from their sockets with indignation. You people can be easily fooled. I cannot. I know him to be a spy in our camp. I have smelled his breath and find he is not up in the Ohio degree. I have also discovered him to be able to read and write. He cannot answer a single democratic test. He is a bogus bourbon, and my sentiments are that he should be gently but firmly fired. If the band will play something in D that he is a bogus bourbon, is kind of tremulous, I will take off my coat and throw the gentleman over into a vacant lot.

I think I know a Democrat when I see him. Perhaps you do not. He cannot respond to a single grand hailing sign. He hasn't the cancelled internal revenue stamp on his nose, and his breath lacks that spicy election odor which we know so well. Away with him! Fling his palpitating remains over the drawbridge and walk on him. Spread them out on the ramparts and jam them into the culverin.

Those are my sentiments. We want no electroplate Democrats here. This is the stronghold of the highly aesthetic and excessively bon ton, Andrew Jackson Peeler, and if justice can't be done to this usurper by the party, I shall have to go out and get an infirm whole handle and administer about $9 worth of rebuke myself. He went out after the hoe handle, and while absent, the stranger said he didn't want to be the cause of any ill feeling, or to stand in the way of the prosperity of his party.

So he would not remain. He put on his hat and stole out into the night, a quiet martyr to the blind rage of Colonel Dayton, and has not since been seen. Why do they do it? Ben Hill died after suffering intolerable anguish from a tobacco cancer caused by excessive smoking. The consumers of the Western-made cigar are now and then getting a nice little dose of leprosy from the Chinese constructed cigars of San Francisco, and yet people go right on and biting the most horrible diseases known to science by smoking and smoking to excess. Why do they do it?

It is one of those deep, dark mysteries that nothing but death can unravel. We cannot fathom it. That's certain. Give us a light, please. Two styles. One of the peculiarities of correspondence is witnessed at this office every day, to which we desire to call the attention of our growing girls and boys, who ought to know that there is a long way and a short way of saying things on paper.

A right way and a wrong way to express thoughts on a postal card, just as there is in conversation. We all admire the businessman who is terse and to the point, and we dislike the man who hangs on to the doorknob as though life was a never-ending summer dream and refuses to say goodbye. It's so with correspondence. In touching upon the letters received at this office, we refer to a carload received at this office during the past year, relating to sample copies. Still, they are a good specimen of the different styles of doing the same thing. For instance, here is a line which tells a story in brief,

without wearing out your eyes and daze by ponderous phrases and useless verbiage. Useless verbiage and frothy surplusage is a cinnamon which we discovered in 75, while excavating for the purpose of laying the foundations of our imposing residence. up the gulch. Persons using the same will please fork over 10% of the gross receipts. Bangor Main 1110.82. Find 10 cents for which send sample copy boomerang to above address. Yours, etc. Thomas Billings. Some would have said, please find and close 10 cents. That is not absolutely necessary. If you put ten cents in the letter, that covers all seeming lack of politeness, and it's all right. If, however, you are out of a job and have nothing else to do but

to write for sample copies of papers, and wait for the department at Washington to allow you a pension, you might say, please find enclosed, etc. Otherwise, the ten cents will make it all right. Here's another style which evinces a peculiarity we do not admire. It bespeaks the man who thinks that life and its associations are given us in order to wear out the time, waiting patiently, meanwhile, for Gabriel to render his little overture. It occurs to us that life is real, life is earnest, and so forth. We cannot sit here in the gathering gloom and read four pages of a letter, which only expresses what ought to have been expressed in four lines.

We feel that we are here to do the greatest good to the greatest number, and we dislike the correspondent who hangs on to the literary doorknob, so to speak, and absorbs our time, which is worth $5.35 per hour. Here we go. New Centerville, Wisconsin, November 3, 1882. Mr. William Nye, Esquire, Laramie City, Wyoming. Dear sir, I have often saw in our home papers little pieces cut out of your paper the larmie boomerang, yet I have never saw the paper itself.

I hardly pick up a paper from the fireside friend to the Christian at work, but I do not see something or another from your facetious pan and credited to the boomerang. I have asked the bookstore for a copy of the paper, and he said, go to grass. There wasn't no such periodical in existence. He is a liar, but I did not tell him so, because I am recovering from a case of that kind now, which swelled both eyes shut and placed me under the doctor's care. It was a result of a campaign lie, and at this moment I do not remember whether it was the other man or me which told it. Things got confused, and I'm not clear on the matter now. I send ten cents in postage stamps, hoping you will favor me with a specimen copy of the boomerang,

and I may subscribe. I sent postage stamps because they are more convenient to me, and I suppose that you can use them all right, as you must have a good deal of writing to do. I intend to read the paper thorough and give my folks the benefit also. I love to read humorous pieces to my children and my wife, and hear their gurgly laugh well up like a bubble lynx. I now take a nestern paper, which is gloomy in its tendencies, and I call it the morgue.

It looks at the dark side of life and costs $3 a year in postage. So send the specimen, if you please, and I will probably subscribe for the boomerang, as I have saw a good many in tracks from it in our papers here, and I have not as yet saw your paper. So goodbye. Yours truly, James Letson. Gosh all hemlock salve. The bullwacking, mule-skinned proprietor of a life-giving salve wants us to advertise for him, and to state that,

with his gosh-all hemlocked salve, he can cure all chronicle diseases whatever. We would do it if we could, sweet being, but owing to the fullness of the paper and the foreman, we must turn you cruelly away. The Stage Bald Head Most everyone who is not born blind knows that the stage bald head is a delusion and a snare. The only all-wool yard-wide bald head we remember in the American stage is that of Dunstan Kirk as worn by the veteran Koldock.

Effie Elsler wears her own hair and so does Koldok, but Koldok wears his the most. It is the most worn, anyhow. What we started out to say is that the stage bald head and the average stage whiskers made us weary with life. The stage bald head is generally made of the internal economy of a cow, dried so that it shines and cut to fit the head as tightly as a potato sack would naturally fit a billiard cue. It is generally about four shades wider than a red face of the wear, or vice versa. We do not know which is the worst violation of eternal fitness,

the red-faced man who wears a deathly white bald head, or the pale young actor who wears a florid roof on his intellect. Sometimes, in starring through the country and playing 10 or 1,500 engagements, a bald head gets soiled. We notice that when a show gets to Laramie, the chances are that the bald head of the bleeding old man is so soiled that he really needs a sheep-dipped shampoo. Another feature of this accessory of the stage

is its singular failure to fit. It is either a little too short at both ends or it hangs over the skull in large festoons and wands and warts in such a way as to make the audience believe that the wearer has dropsy of the brain. You can never get a stage baldhead near enough like nature to fool the average housefly. A fly knows in two moments whether it is the genuine or only a base imitation,

and the bald head of the theater fills him with nausea and disgust. Nature at all times hard to imitate, preserves her bald head as she does her sunny skies and deep blue seas, far beyond the reach of the weak, fallible human imitator. Baldness is like fame. It cannot be purchased. It must be acquired. Some men may be born bald. Some may acquire baldness, and others may have baldness thrust upon them,

but they generally acquire it. The stage beard is also rather dizzy as a rule. It looks as much like a beard that grew there as a cow's tail would if tied to the bronze dog on the front porch. When you tie a heavy black beard on a young actor whose whole soul would be churned up if he smoked a full-fledged cigar. He looks about as savage as a bowl of mushen milk

struck with a club. End of Section 13. Section 14 of Bailed Hay by Bill Nye. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. Fatherly Words NWP writes, I'm a young man of 25 years old, I'm in love with a young lady of 17.

For mine being very different from mine, I have not told her of my love, nor asked to call on her. I thought her so giddy that she did not want any steady company. She is a great lover of amusement. She is a perfect lady in her department, although she is more like a child of fourteen than a young lady of seventeen. I think she is very pretty, but she seems to enjoy flirting to the greatest extent. One evening at a party I asked her to promenade with me, and she would not do it. I then asked her to allow me to bring her refreshments, which she would not do. I then asked her to let me take her home when she was ready to go,

and the answer was, No, I will not do any such thing. And turning around, she left me. I have met her several times since. She always bows to me. Everywhere she meets me, she recognizes me pleasantly. Now, did I do wrong in asking her those privileges at the party? I having no introduction to her, I am still in love with her.

After she had refused a promenade with you and had declined to permit you to bring her refreshments, it was pressing matters rather too far for you to ask her to allow you to accompany her home whenever she was ready to go. Still, as she treats you kindly whenever you meet, it is evident that you did not offend her very deeply. Perhaps she sees that you love her and does not wish to discourage you. You were no doubt a little previous and trying to get acquainted with the young lady. She may be giddy, but she has just about sized you up in shape, and no doubt if you keep on trying to love her without her knowledge or consent,

she will hit you with something and put a Swiss sunset over your eye. Do not yearn to win her affections all at once. Give her twenty or thirty years in which she will be. to see your merits. You will have more to entitle you to her respect by that time, no doubt. During that time, you may rise to be president and win a deathless name. The main thing you have to look out for now, however, is to restrain yourself from marrying people who do not want to marry you.

That style of freshness will, in 30 or 40 years, wear away. If it does not, probably the vigorous big brother of some young lady, of 17 will consign you to the silent tomb. Do not try to promenade with a young lady unless she gives her consent. Do not marry anyone against her wishes. Give the girl a chance. She will appreciate it, and even though she may not marry you, she will permit you to sit on the fence and watch her when she goes to marry someone else.

Do not be despondent. Be courageous, and someday, perhaps, You will get there. At present, the horizon is a little bit foggy. As you say, she may be so giddy that she doesn't want steady company. There is a glimmer of hope in that. She may be waiting until she gets over the agony and annoyance of teething before she looks seriously into the matters of matrimony.

If that should turn out to be the case, we're not surprised. Give her a chance to grow up, and in the meantime, go and learn the organ grinders profession and fix yourself so that you can provide for a family. Sometimes a girl only 17 years old is able to discern that a young intellectual giant like you is not going to make a dazzling success of life as a husband. Brace up and try to forget your sorrow in WP, and you may be happy yet. The Good Time Coming Angora Cloth is a Parisian novelty. Shaggy woolen goods are all

the rage, and this Angora cloth is a perfect type of shaggy materials. It is a soft downy article like the fur of an Angora cat. Very showy toilets are of Angora cloth trimmed with velvet applique work to form passimentary. Angora cloth may be fashionable, but the odor of the Angora goat is losing favor. A herd of these goats crossed the Sierra Nevada's during the autumn, and as soon as they got over the range, we knew it at Laramie just as well as we knew of the earthquake shock on the seventh instant. The Angora goat is very quiet in other respects, but as a fragrant shrub, he certainly demands attention. A little band of Angora goats has been quartered in Laramie City lately, and though they have been well behaved, they have made themselves known from time to time, whenever we have opened the casement to let in the glorious air of,

heaven. In letting in the glorious air of heaven, we have, in several instances, let in a good deal of the mohair industry and some seductive fragrance. There is a glowing prospect that, within the next year, a bone fertilizer mill, a soap emporium, and a glue factory will have been started here. And now, with the Angora goat looming up in the distance with his molasses candy horns, his erect but tremulous and undecided tail piercing the atmosphere and the seductive odor peculiar to this foul, we feel that life in Wyoming will not, after all, be a hollow mockery. Herefore, we have been compelled to worry along with polygamy and the odor of the alkali flat, but times are changing now, and we will one day have all the wonderful and complicated

smells of Chicago at our door. Then will the desert indeed blossom as the rose, and the mountain lion and Billy the Kid will lie down together. Mania for marking clothes. The most quiet, unobtrusive man I ever knew, said Buck Bramble to a boomerang man, was a young fellow who went into North Park in an early day from the Salmon River. He was also reserved and taciturn among the miners,

and never made any suggestions if he could avoid it. He was also the most thoughtful man about other people's comfort I ever knew. I went into the cabin one day where he was lying on the bed and told him I had decided to go into Laramie for a couple of weeks to do some trading. I put my valise down on the floor and was going out when he asked me if my clothes were marked. I told him that I never marked my clothes. If the washerwoman wanted to mix up my wardrobe but that of a female seminary, I would have to stand it, I supposed.

He thought I ought to mark my clothes before I went away and said he would attend to it for me. So he took down his revolver and put three shots through the valise. After that, a coolness sprang up between us, and the warm friendship that had existed so long was more or less busted. After that he marked a man's clothes over in Leadville in the same way. only the man had them on at the time. He seemed to have a mania on that subject,

and as they had no insanity experts at Leadville in those days, they thought the most economical way to examine his brain would be to hang him, and then send the brain to New York in a baking powder can. So they hung him one night to the bow of a sighing mountain pine. The autopsy was, of course, crude, but they saw it open his head and scooped out the brain with a long-handled spoon and sent it on to New York. By some mistake or other, he got mixed up with some sample specimens of ore from the Brindle Tom Cat discovery

and was sent to the Assayer in New York instead of the insanity smelter and refiner as was intended. The result was that the assayer wrote a very touching and grieved letter to the boys, saying that he was an old man anyway and he was. wish they would consider his gray hairs and not try to palm off their old groceries on him. He might have made errors in his essays, perhaps. All men were more or less liable to mistakes, but he flattered himself that he could still distinguish between a piece of blossom rock and a can of discomposed lobster salad, even if it was in a baking powder can. He hoped they would not try to be facetious at his expense anymore, but use him and, you know,

as they would like to be treated themselves when they got old and began to totter down toward the silent tomb. This is why we never knew to a dead moral certainty whether he was okay in the upper story or not. Regarding the nose. The annals of surgery contain many cases where the nose has been cut or torn off, and being replaced has grown fast again, recovering its jeopardized functions. One of the earliest, 1680, is related by the surgeon Fioraventhi, who happened to be nearby when a man's nose, having been cut off, had fallen in the sand.

He remarks that he took it up, washed it, replaced it, and that it grew together. Still, this is a little bit hazardous, and in warm weather the nose might refuse to catch on. It would be mortifying in the extreme to have the nose drop off in a dish of ice cream at a large banquet. Not only would it be disagreeable to the owner of the nose, but those who sat near him. He adds the address of the owner of the repaired nose and requests any doubter to go and examine for himself. Reginald in the Gazette Saluter, 1714, tells of a patient whose nose was bitten off by a smuggler. The owner of the nose wrapped it in a bit of cloth and sought Reginald, who, although the part was cold, reset it, and it became attached.

This is another instance where, by being sufficiently previous, the nose was secured and handed down to future generations. Yet as we said before, it is a little bit risky, and a nose of that character cannot be relied upon at all times. After a nose has once seceded, it cannot be expected to still adhere to the old constitution with such loyalty is prior to that change. Although these cases call for more credulity than most of us have to spare,

yet later cases published in trustworthy journals would seem to corroborate this. In the Clinical Annals and Medical Gazette of Heidelberg, 1830, there are 16 similar cases cited by the surgeon Dr. Hoffekker, who was appointed by the Senate to attend the duels of the students. It seems that during these duels it is not uncommon for a student to slice off the nose of his adversary and lay it on the table until the duel is over. After that the surgeon puts it on with mucilage and it never misses a meal, but keeps right on growing. The wax nose is attractive, but in a warm room it is apt to get excited and wander down into the mustache,

or it may stray away under the collar. And when the proprietor goes to wipe the feature, he does not wipe anything but space. A gold nose that opens on one side is engraved, with hunter case and key wind, is attractive, especially on a bright day. The coin's silver nose is very well in its way, but rather commonplace unless designed to match the tea service and knives and forks. In that case, good taste is repaid by admiration and place. pleasure on the part of the guest. The paper mache nose is durable and less liable to become cold and disagreeable.

It is also lighter and not liable to season crack. False noses are made of paper mache, leather, gold, silver, and wax. These last are fitted to spectacles or springs and are difficult to distinguish from a true nose. Tycho Brahe lost his nose in a duel and wore a golden one, which he attached to his face with cement, which he always carried about. This was a good scheme, as it found him always prepared for accidents. He could at any moment repair to a dressing room

or even slide into an alley where he could avoid the prying gaze of the vulgar world and glue his nose on. Of course he ran the risk of getting it on crooked, and a little out of line with his other features. But this would naturally only attract attention and fix the minds of those with whom he might be called upon to converse. A man with his nose glued on wrong side up could hold the attention of an audience for hours,

when any other man would seem tedious and uninteresting. End of Section 14. Section 15 of Bailed Hay by Bill Nye. This Liebervok's recording is in the pull. public domain. Something too much of this. The Pawnee Republican of the 13th, innocently and impertinently remarks, Fred Nye, father of Bill Nye, the humorist, is the editor of the Omaha Republican.

Vice Dadeus Brooks, gone to Europe. Omaha Herald. Will the press of the country please provide us with a few more parents? Old Jim Nye and several other valuable fathers of ours have already cloned the golden elevator. We now feel like a comparative orphan. The time was when we could hold a reunion of our parents and have a pretty big time. But it's a mighty lonely thing to stand on the shores of time and see your parents whittled down to three or four young men no bigger than Fred Nye of the Republican. Colorblindness. The Paper World says there's no use talking. The newspaper men of the press are

today becoming more and more colorblind. In other words, they have lost that subtle flavor of description for which the public yearns. They have missed that wonderful spice and aroma of narration, which is the life of all newspaper work. We do not take this to ourself at all, but we desire before we say one word to make a few remarks. The boomerang has been charged with airing on the other side and coloring things a little too high. Sir Garnet Wolles. in a private letter to us during the late Egyptian assault and battery, stated that if we aired at all, it was on the highly colored side. There is an excuse for lack of spice and all that sort of thing in the newspaper world. The men who write for our dailies, as a rule, have to

write about two miles per day, and they ought not to be kicked if it is not as interesting as Uncle Tom's cabin or leaves a grass. We have done some 900 miles of writing ourselves during our short, sharp and decisive career, and we know what we are talking about. Those things we wrote at a time when we were spreading our graceful characters over ten acres of paper per day were not thrilling. They did not catch the public eye,

but were just naturally consigned to oblivion's bottomless maw. Read that last sentence twice. it will do you no harm. The public, it seems, to us, has created a false standard of merit for the newspaper. People take a big daily and pay ten dollars per year for it because it is the biggest paper in the world, and then don't read a quarter of it. They are doing a smart thing, no doubt, but it is killing the feverish young men with throbbing brains who are doing the work.

Would you consider that a large pair of shoes or a large wife Should be sought for just because you can get more material for the same price? Not much, Marianne Excellence is what we seek, not bulk. Write better things and less of them, and you will do better, and the public will be pleased to see the change. Should anyone who reads these words be suffering from an insatiable hunger for a paper, that aims at elegance of diction, high-toned logic, and pink cambric sentiment, at a moderate price,

he will do well to call at this office and look over our goods, samples sent free on application to any part of the United States or Europe. We refer to Herbert Spencer, the Laramie National Bank, and the postmaster of this city, as to our reputation for truth and veracity. A little previous Speaking of elections and returns brings back to our memory the time when it was pretty close in a certain congressional district in Wisconsin where W.T. Price is now putting up a job on the Democrats.

In those days, returns didn't come in by telegraph, but on horseback and on foot, and it was annoying to wait for figures by which to determine the result. At Hudson, the politicians had made made a pretty close estimate, but we're waiting one evening after election at a saloon on Buckeye Street for something definite from O'Clair County. The session was very dull, and to cheer up the little Spartan hand, someone suggested that old Judge Weatherby ought to set him up. Judge Weatherby was a staunch old Democrat and had rigidly treated himself for 20 years,

and just as rigidly refused to treat anybody else. The result was a staunch old Democrat, and had rigidly treated himself for 20 years. The result was that he had secured a vigorous bloom on his own nose, but had never put the glass to his neighbor's lips. He intimated on this occasion, however, that if he could get encouraging news from O'Clair for the Democrats, he would turn loose. The party waited till midnight and had just decided to go home when a travel-worn horseman rode up to the door.

He was very reticent, and he was a stranger. No one seemed to want to open up a conversation with him, till at last Judge Weatherby, who couldn't keep the great question of politics out of his mind, asked him what part of the country he had come from. Just got in from O'Clair County, was the reply. How did O'Clair County go, was the judge's next question. Oh, I don't pay attention to no politics,

but they told me it went 453 majority for the Democrats. Thereupon, the judge threw his hat in the air for the first and last time in his life, treated the entire crowd of Republicans and Democrats alike. It was very late when he went home, also very late when he got downtown the next day. When he did come down, he was surprised to find a Republican brass band out, and the news all over the city that the Republican candidate had been elected by several hundred majority. In the afternoon, he learned that Hodd Taylor, now clergyman of Marseilles, had hired a tramp to ride into the Buckeye Saloon the previous evening and report as stated

in order to bring about a good state of feeling on the judge's part. Judge Weatherby, since that time, is regarded as the most skeptical Democrat in that congressional district, and even if he were to be assured over and over again that his party was victorious, would still doubt. It is such things as these that go a long way toward encouraging a feeling of distrust between the parties, and causes politicians to be looked upon with great mistrust. Although Mr. Taylor is now in France attending to the affairs of his government and trying to become familiar with the French language, he often pauses in his work as the memory of this little incident comes over his mind, and a hot tear falls on the report. He is a hot tear. He's

making out to send on to the Secretary of State at Washington. Can it be that his hard heart is at last touched with remorse? Is dueling murder? Somebody wants to know whether dueling is murder, and we reply in clarion tones that it depends largely in how fatal it is. Dueling with monogram note paper at a distance of 1,200 yards is not murder. Heap gone Another landmark of Laramie has gone

Another wreck has been strewn upon the sands of time Another gay bark has gone to pieces upon the cruel rocks And above the broken spars and jib boom And foretop gallant royal main brace And spanker boom euker deck Old damp tide is moaning We refer to L.W. Schroeder who recently left this place incognito, also in debt,

largely to various people of this gay and festive metropolis. Laramie has been the home at various times of some of the most classical deadbeats of modern times, but Schroeder was the noblest, the most grand and colossal of deadbeats that has ever visited our shores. Born with unusual abilities in this direction, he early learned how to, enlarge and improve upon the talents thus bestowed upon him. And here in Laramie, he soon won a place

at the front as a man who purchased everything and paid for nothing. He had a way of approaching the grocer and the merchant that was well calculated to deceive, and he did, in several instances, make representations, which we now learn, were false. He was, by profession, a carpenter and joiner, having learned the art while cutting cordwood on the Missouri bottoms near Omaha for the Collins brothers. Here he rapidly won his way to the front rank by erecting some of the most commanding architectural ruins of which modern wood assassination can boast. He would take a hatchet in a buck saw and carve out his fortune anywhere in the world, and it wouldn't cost him a cent. He filled this whole Trans-Missouri country with his fame and his promissory notes, and then skinned out and left us here to mourn.

Goodbye, Schroeder. Wherever you go, we will remember you and hope that you may succeed in piling up a monument of indebtedness as you did here. You were industrious and untiring in your efforts to become a great financial wreck, and success has crowned your efforts. We will not grudge you the glory that coagulates about your massive brow. The editorial lamp There is something unique about an editor's lamp that enables almost anyone to select it from a large number of other lamps. It is sui generis and extremely original. The large metropolitan papers use gas in the editorial rooms

and make up for the loss of the kerosene lamp by furnishing their offices with some other article of furniture that is equally attractive. The Boomerang lamp, especially during the election, has had its intensity wonderfully softened and toned down through various causes. You can take most any other lamp and trim the wick so that it will burn squarely and not smoke, but the editorial lamp is peculiar in this respect. The wick gets so it will burn straight when you find that it does not burn the oil. Then you get it filled and put in a new wick.

Experimenting with this, you get your fingers perfumed with coal oil and spill some in your lap. Then you turn it up so you can see, and as you get a flow of thought, you look up to find that you have smutted up your chimney, and you murmur something that you are glad no one is near to hear. When our life record is made up and handed down to posterity, if a generous people will kind of overlook the remarks we have made over our lamp, and also the little extemporaneous statements made at picnics, we will do as much for the public and make this thing as near even as possible. End of Section 15. Section 16 of Bailed Hay by Bill Nye. This Liebervox recording is in the public domain. Difficult to identify

A dead fisherman was taken to the San Francisco morgue the other day, with nothing by which to identify him, but his fish line. There may be features of difference between fish lines, but as a rule there is a long, tame sweep of monotony about them, which confuses the authorities in tracing a man's antecedents. The Maroon Sausage The Maroon Sausage will be in favor this winter, as was the case last season in our best circles. It will be caught up at the end, and tied in a plain knot. with strings of the same.

Testimonials of regard Friday was a large day in the office of this paper, a delegation consisting of Ed Walsh and J.J. Clark, trained dispatchers of this division of the Union Pacific Road, waited on the editor hereof with two tokens of their esteem. One, consisting of a bird that had been taxidermied at Wyoming Station by the agent, Mr. Gullier, the great corn canner of the West, aided by another man who has up to this date evaded the authorities.

As soon as he is captured, his name will be given to the public. The bird is mainly constructed on the duck plan, with web feed and spike tail. The material gave out, however, and the artist was obliged to complete the bird by putting an eagle's head on him. This gives the winged king of birds a low, squatty, and plebeian cast of countenance, and bothers the naturalist in determining its class and in diagnosing the case. With the piercing keen eye of the eagle and the huge Roman nose peculiar to that bird, coupled with the pose of the duck, we have a magnificent combination in the way of an ornithological

specimen. Science would be tickled to death to wrestle with this feathered anomaly. The eagle looks as though he would like to soar first-rate if it were not for circling. circumstances over which he has no control, while the other portions of his person would suggest that he would be glad to paddle around an hour or two in the yielding mud. We have placed this singular circumstance where he can look down upon us in a reproachful way, while we write abstruse articles upon the contiguity of the hents. The same committee also presented a bottle of what purported to be ginger ale. It was wrapped up in a newspaper, and the cork was held in place by a piece of copper wire.

As we do not drink anything whatever now, we presented it to the composing room and told the boys to sail in and have a grand debauch. Generosity is always rewarded, sooner or later. The office boy took it into the composing room and partially opened it. Then it opened itself, with a loud report that shook the dome of the boomerang office, and pied a long article on yellow fever in Texas. Almost immediately after it opened itself, it escaped into space. At least it filled the space box of one of the cases full. There was only about a spoonful left in the bottle,

and no one felt as though he wanted to rob the rest, so it stands there yet. If Mr. Gullier could put up his goods in such shape as to avoid this high degree of effervescence, he would succeed. But in canning corn and bottling beer, he has so far put too much vigor into the goods, and when you open them, they escape almost immediately. While we are grateful for the kind and thoughtful spirit shown,

we regret that we are unable to test the merits of the beverage without collecting it from the sky, where it now is. It looks to us as though someday Mr. Gullier, while engaged in canning and bottling of some of his gaseous goods would be lifted over into the middle of the holidays and we warn him against being too reckless, or he will certainly meander through the atmosphere sometime, and the place that knew him once will know him no more forever.

About two o'clock the following special was received. Special to the Boomerang, D.H. Account Charity, Wyoming, October 27. Dear Bill Nye, we made the run from Laramie to Wyoming in one hour. Gullier says, do not open that bottle. It might go off. He sent you the wrong bottle by mistake. It is a preparation for annihilating tramps and produces instant dissolution.

We, after careful inquiry and rigid investigation, find that the bird is filled with dynamite, nitroglycerin, etc. In fact, it is an infernal. machine and is set to go off at 3.30 this p.m. Clark, Potter, and Walsh. The Chinese compositor cannot sit at his case as our printers do, but must walk from one case to another constantly, as the characters needed cover such a large number that they cannot be put into anything like the space used in the English newspaper office. In setting up an ordinary piece of manuscript, the Chinese printer will waltz up and down the room for a few moments and then go downstairs for a line of lowercase. Then he takes the elevator and goes up into the third story after some caps,

and then goes out into the woodshed for a handful of astonishers. The successful Chinese compositor doesn't need to be so very intelligent, but he must be a good pedestrian. He may work and walk around over the building all day to set up a stick full. and then half the people in this county couldn't read it after all. Snowed under. We have met the enemy, and we are hisn. We have made our remarks, and we are now ready to listen to the gentleman from New York. We could have dug out, perhaps, and explained about New York.

But when almost every state in the Union rose up and made certain statements yesterday, we found that the job of explaining this matter thoroughly would be wearisome, and require a great deal of time. We do not blame the democracy for this. We are a little surprised, however, and grieved. It will interfere with our wardrobe this winter. With an overcoat on Wyoming, a plug hat on Iowa, a pair of pantaloons on Pennsylvania,

and boots in the general result, it looks now as though we would probably go through the winter wrapped in a bed quilt and profound meditation. We intended to publish an extra this morning, but the news was of such a character that we thought we would get along without it. What was the use of publishing an extra with a Republican majority only in Red Butte? The cause of this great Democratic freshet in New York yesterday, but why go into details, we all have an idea why it was so. The number of votes would seem to indicate that there was a tendency toward democracy throughout democracy, throughout the state. Now, in Pennsylvania, if you will look over the returns carefully,

but why should we take up your valuable time in offering an explanation of a political matter of the past? Under the circumstances, some would go and yield to the soothing influences of the maddening bowl, but we do not advise that. It would only furnish temporary relief, and the recoil would be unpleasant. We resume our arduous duties with a feeling of extreme ennui, and with that sense of surprise and astonishment that a man does who has had a large brick block fallen him when he was not expecting it. Although we feel a little lonely today, having met but a few Republicans on the street, who were obliged to come out and do their marketing, we still hope for the future. The grand old Republican Party, but that's what we said last week.

It sounds hollow now and meaningless somehow, because our voice is a little hoarse, and we are snowed under so deep that it is difficult for us to enunciate. But about those bets, if the parties to whom we owe bets, and we owe most everybody, will just agree to take the stakes and not go into details, not stop to ask us about the state of our mind and talk about how it was done. We don't care. We don't wish to have this thing explained at all. We are not of an inquiring turn of mind.

Just plain facts are good enough for us, without any harrowing details. In the meantime, we are going to work to earn some more money to bet on the next election. Judge Folger and others, come over and see us when you have time, and we will talk this matter over. Mr. B. Butler wishes we had your longevity. With a robust constitution, we find that most any man can wear out cruel fate and get there at last. We do not feel so angry as we do grieved and surprised. We are pained to see the American people thus betray our confidence and throw a large wardrobe into the hands of the relentless foe.

Rough on Oscar Somebody shook a log cabin bedquilt at Oscar Wise, when he was in this country, and it knocked him so crazy for two days, that a man had to lead him around town by a bedcord to prevent him from budding his head against a lump of oatmeal mush and scattering his brains all over the Union. End of Section 16. Section 17 of Bailed Hay by Bill Nye. This Lieberwax recording is in the public domain. The Postal Card

No one denies that the postal card is a great thing, and yet it makes most people mad to get one. This is because we naturally feel sensitive about having our correspondence open to the eye of the postmaster and postal clerk. Yet they do not read them. Postal employees hate a postal card as cordially as anyone else. If they were banished and had nothing to read but a package of postal cards or a foreign book of statistics, they would read the statistics. This wild hunger for postal cards on the part of Postmasters is all a myth. When the writer don't care who sees his message, that knocks the curiosity out of those who handle those messages. A man who would read a postal card without being compelled to by some stringent statute

must be a little deranged. When you receive one, you say, Here's a message of so little importance that the writer didn't care who saw it. I don't care much for it myself. Then you look it over and lay it away and forget it. Do you think that the postmaster is going to wear out his young life in devouring literature that the sendee don't feel proud of when he receives it? Nay, nay.

During our official experience, we have been placed where we could have read postal cards time and again, and no one but the all-seeing eye would have detected it. But we have controlled ourselves and closed our eyes to the written message, refusing to take advantage of the confidence reposed in us by our government, and those who thus trusted us with their secrets. All over our great land, every moment of the day or night, these little cards are being silently scattered, breathing loving words inscribed with a hard-led pencil,

and shedding information upon sundered hearts, and they are as safe as though they had never been breathed. They are safer in most instances, because they cannot be read by anybody in the whole world. That is why it irritates us to have someone open up a conversation by saying, You remember what that fellow wrote me from Cheyenne on that postal card of the 25th and how he rounded me up for not sending him those goods? Now, we can't keep all those things in our head.

It requires too much of a strain to do it on the salary we receive. A man with a very large salary and a tenacious, his memory might keep run of the postal correspondence in a small office, but we cannot do it. We are not accustomed to it. It tells and excites us. A card. I have just received a letter from my friend Bill Nye of the Laramie City Boomerang, wherein he informs me that he is engaged to the beautiful and accomplished Lydia E. Pinkham

of Vegetable Compound fame, and that the wedding will tell you. take place on next Christmas. To be sure, I'm expected at the wedding, and I'll be on hand if I can secure a clean shirt by that time, and the roads ain't too bad. But I'm somewhat at a loss what to get is a suitable present, as Bill informs me in a postscript to his letter, that gifts of Bibles, albums, nickel-plated pickle dishes, chromos with frames and the like, will not be in order, as it is utterly impossible to pawn articles of this kind in Laramie City. The Bohemian We are sorry that the above letter which we dashed off in a careless moment

has been placed before the public, as later developments have entirely changed the aspect of the matter. The engagement between oneself and Lydia having been rudely broken by the young lady herself. She has returned the solitaire-filled ring, and henceforth we can be nothing more to each other than friends. The promise which bade fair to yield so much joy in the future has been ruthlessly yanked asunder, and two young hearts must bleed through the coming years.

Far be it from us to say aught that would reflect upon the record of Miss Pinkham, it would only imperil her chances in the future and deny her the sweet satisfaction of gathering in another guileless sucker like us. The truth, however, cannot be evaded That Lydia is no longer young. She is now in the searing yellow leaf. The gurgle of girlhood and the romping careless grace of her childhood Are matters of ancient history alone.

We might go on and tell how one thing brought on another Till the quarrel occurred, In hot words and an assault and battery led to this estrangement. But we will not do it. It would be wrong for a great strong man. to take advantage of his strength and the public press, to speak disparagingly of a young thing like Lid. No matter how unreasonably she may have treated us, we are dumb and silent on this point. Journalists who have been invited and have purchased costly wedding presents may ship the presents

by express prepaid, and we will accept them and struggle along with our first great heart trouble, while Lydia goes on her mad career. Why We Are Not Gay. It was the policy of this paper from its inception, whatever that is, to frown upon and discourage fraud wherever the latter has shown its hideous front. In doing so, we have simply done our duty, and our reward has been great, partially in the shape of money, and partially in the shape of conscious rectitude and new subscribers. We shall continue this course until we are able to take a trip to Europe,

or until some large man comes into the office with a masked battery and blows us out through the window into the mellow haze of an eternal summertime. We have been waiting until the present time for about 100,000 shade trees in this town to grow, and as they seem to be a little reluctant about doing so, and the season being now far advanced, we feel safe in saying that they are dead. They were purchased a year ago of a nursery that purported to be, be okay, and up to that time no one had ever breathed the word against it. Now, however, unless

those trees are replaced, we shall be compelled to publish the name of that nursery and large, glaring type to the world. The trees looked a little under the weather when they arrived, but we thought we could bring them out by nursing them. They stood up in the spring breeze, like a seedwort, however, and refused to leave. are still obstinate. The agent concluded to leave, but the trees did not. We feel hurt about it, because people come here from a distance and laugh at our Ho-Handle forest. They speak jeeringly of our wilderness of deceased elms and sneer at our defunct magnolias. We hate to cast a reflection on the house, but we also dislike to be played for Chinamen when we are no such thing. We prefer to sit in the

shade of the luxuriant telegraph pole, and stroll at set of sun amid the ebrageous shadows of the barbed wire fence, through which the sunlight glints and glitters to and fro. Nothing saddens us like death in any form, and 100,000 dead trees scattered through the city, sticking their limbs up into the atmosphere like a variety actress, bears down upon us with the leaden weight of an ever-present gloom. The Boomerang Reporter, sent out to find the North Pole 18 months ago, has just been heard from. An exploring party recently found portions of his remains in latitude 41144, longitude, Sal West by Sal from the pole, and near the remains the following fragment of a diary.

July 1, 1881, have just been out searching for a sunstroke and signs of a thorn, Saw, saw nothing but ice flow and snow so far as the eye could reach. Think we will have snow this evening, unless the wind changes. July 2nd. Spent the forenoon exploring to the northwest for right-of-way for a new equatorial and North Pole Railroad that I think would be of immense value to commerce. The grade is easy, and the expense would be slight. "'Ate my last dog today, had intended him for the fourth, but got too hungry, and ate him raw with vinegar.

"'I wish I was at home eating boomerang paste. "'July 3rd. We had quite a frost last night, and it looks this morning as though the corn and small fruits must have suffered. "'It is now two weeks since the last of the crew died and left me alone. "'Ate the leather ends of my suspenders today for dinner. dinner. I did not need the suspenders anyway, for by tightening up my pants I find they will stay on all right, and I don't look for any ladies to call, so that even if my pants came off by some oversight or other, nobody would be shocked. July 4th. Saved up some tar roofing and a bottle of mucilage for my 4th of July dinner, engorged myself today. The exercises were very poorly attended,

and the celebration rather a failure. It is clouding up in the West, and I'm afraid we're going to have snow. Seems to me we're having an all-fired late spring here this year. July 5th. Didn't drink a drop yesterday. It was the quietest fourth I ever put in. I never felt so little remorse over the way I celebrated as I do today. I didn't do a thing yesterday that I was ashamed of,

except to eat the remainder of a box of shoe blacking for supper. Today, I ate my last boot heel, stewed. Looks as though we might have a hard winner. July 6th. Feel a little apprehension about something to eat. My credit is all right here, but there is no competition, and prices are therefore very high. Ice, however, is still firm.

This will be a good ice cream country if there were any demand. But the country is so sparsely settled That a man feels as lonesome here As a greenbacker at a presidential election Eight a pound of cotton waste Soaked in machine oil today There is nothing left for tomorrow But ice water and an old pocketbook for dinner

Looks as though we might have snow July 7th This is a good cool place to spend the summer If provisions were more plenty I am wearing a seal-skin undershirt with three woolen overshirts and two bear-skin vests today, and when the dew begins to fall, I have to put on my buffalo ulster to keep off the night air. I wish I was home. It seems pretty lonesome here since the other boys died.

I do not know what I will get for dinner tomorrow, unless the neighbors bring in something. A big bear is coming down the hatchway as I write. I wish I could eat him. It would be the first square meal for two months. It is, however, a little mixed, whether I will eat him or he eat me. It will be a cold day for me if he... Here the diary breaks off abruptly, and from the chewed-up appearance of the book, we are led to entertain a horrible fear as to his safety.

The Revelation Racket in Utah Our esteemed and extremely connubial contemporary, the Desert News, says in a recent editorial, The Latter-day Saints will rejoice to learn that the vacancies which have existed in the quorums of the Twelve Apostles and the first seven presidents of the Seventies are now filled. During the conference recently held, Elder Abram H. Cannon was unanimously chosen to be one of the first seven presidents of 70s, and he was ordained to that office. on Monday, October 9th. Subsequently, the Lord, by revelation through his servant,

pressed John Taylor, designated by name, brothers George Teesdale and Herbert J. Grant, to be ordained to the apostleship, and brothers Seymour B. Young to fill the remaining vacancy in the presidency of the 70s. These brethren were ordained Monday, October 16th, the two apostles under the hands of the first presidency in 12, and the other under the hands of the 12 and the presidency of the 70s.

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

has it pretty much his own way. We would not care who made the laws of Utah if we could do its revelating at so much per revelet. Think of the power it gives a man in a community of blind believers. Imagine, if you please, the glorious possibilities in store for the man who can successfully reveal the word of the Lord in an easy, extemporaneous manner on five minutes' notice. This prerogative does not confine itself to politics alone. The impromptu revelator of the Jordan has revelations when he wants to evade the payment of a bill. He gets a divine order also if he desires to marry a beautiful maid or seal the new schoolman to himself.

He has leverage which he can bring to bear upon the people of his diocese at all times, even more potent than the press, and it does not possess the drawbacks that a newspaper does. You can run an aggressive paper if you want to in this country, and up to the time of the funeral you have a pretty active and enjoyable time. But after the grave has been filled up with the clods of the valley and your widow has drawn her insurance, you naturally ask, What is the advantage to be gained by this fearless style of journalism? Still, even the inspired racket has its drawbacks. Last year, a little incident occurred in a Mormon family down in southern Utah, which weighed about nine pounds.

and when the ex officio husband, who had been absent two years, returned, he acted kind of wild and surprised somehow. And as he went through the daily round of his work, he could be seen counting his fingers back and forth and looking at the almanac and adding up little mounts on the side of the barn with a piece of red chalk. Finally, one of the inspired mob of that part of the vineyard thought it was about time to get a revelation

and go down there, so he did so. He sailed up to the de facto husband and quasi-parent, and solemnly straightened up some little irregularities as to dates, but the revelation was received with disdain, and the revelator was sent home in an old oarsack, and buried in a peach basket. Sometimes there is evening in Utah, a manifestation of such irreverence and open hostility to the church,

church, then it makes us shudder. End of Section 17. Section 18 of Bailed Hay by Bill Nye. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. Sagebrush Tonic We have a scheme on hand which we believe will be even more remunerative than a newspaper business, if successfully carried out. It is to construct a national remedy and joy to the world tonic, composed of

the carefully expressed juice of our Rocky Mountain tropical herb, known as the sagebrush. Sagebrush is known to possess wonderful medicinal properties. It is bitter enough to act as a tonic and to convey the idea of great strength. Our idea would be to have our portrait on each bottle to attract attention and aid in affecting a cure. We have noticed that the homeliest men succeed best as patent medicine inventors, and this would be right in our hand. The tonic could be erected at a cost of three cents per bottle, delivered on the cars here,

and after we got fairly to going, we might probably reduce even that price. At $1 per bottle, we could realize a living profit and still do mankind to favor and turn loose a boon to suffering humanity. It will make the hair grow, as everyone knows, and it will stir up a torpid liver equally well. It just loves to get after anything that is dormant. It might even help the Democratic Party if it had a chance.

Our plan would be to advertise liberally, for we know the advantages of judicious advertising. Only last week a man on South Sea Street had three cows to sell, which fact he set forth in this paper at the usual rates. Before he went to bed that evening, the cows were sold, and people were filing in the front gate like a row of men at the general delivery of the post office. The next morning a large mob of people was found camped out in front of the house, and the railroad was giving excursion rates to those who wanted to come in from the country to buy these cows that had been sold the day before. We just quote this to show how advertising stirs the mighty deep and wakes people up. We would make propositions to our brethren of the press

by which they could make some money out of the ad, too, instead of telling them to put it in the middle of the telegraph page surrounded by pure reading matter, daily and weekly till forbid and pay when we get ready. Publishers will find that we are not that kind of people. We shall aim to do the square thing, and will throw in an electotype, showing us just discovering the sagebrush

and exclaiming, Eureka, while we prance around like a Zulu on the warpath. Underneath this, we will write, Yours for Health, or words to that effect, and everything will be pleasant and nice. The sagebrush tonic will be made of two grades. One will be for prohibition states, and the other for states where prohibition is not in general use. The prohibition tonic will contain, in addition to the sagebrush,

a small amount of Tancy and Jamaica ginger to give it a bead and prevent it from fermenting. A trial bottle will be sent to subscribers of this paper, also a fitting little poem to be read at the funeral. We will also publish death notice of those using the tonic at one-half rates. Lame from his birth. A sad-eyed man the other night

fell out of his bed into the aisle of a Pullman car and skinned his knee. He now claims that he was lame from his birth. When he passes carbon, he will be hung by request. The public printer Very few of the great mass of humanity know who makes the beautiful public document with its plain black binding and wealth of statistics. Few stop to think that, hidden away from the great workaday world,

with eyelids heavy and red, and with fingernails black with antimony, toiling on at his case hour after hour, the public printer, during the sessions of Congress, is setting up the thrilling chapters of the congressional record, and between times yanking the Washington Press backward and forward with his suspenders hanging down as he prints this beautiful seaside library of song. We are too prone to read that which gives us pleasure without thought of the labor necessary to its creation. We glide gayly. through the congressional record, pleased with its more attractive features, viz, its eyes and nose. Little wrecking that Sterling P. rounds, the public printer, stands in the subdued gaslight with his

stick half full, trying to decipher the manuscript of some reticent representative whose speech was yesterday delivered to the janitor as he polished the porcelain cuspidor of Congress. This is a day and age of the world when men take that which, comes to them, and do not stop to investigate the pain and toil it costs. They never inquire into the mystery of manufacture, or try to learn the details of its construction. Most of our libraries are replete with books which we have received at the hands of a generous government, and yet we treat those volumes with scorn and contumily. We jeer at the foot-store bugologist who has chased the large green worm from tree to tree in order that we may be wise.

We speak sneeringly of the man who stuffs the woodstick and paints the gaudy wings of the squish-bug that we may know how often she orates. Year after year, the entomologist treats the same weary road with his bait box tied to his waist, wooing to his laboratory the army worm and the sheep-scad larvae, in order that we, poor particles on the surface of the great earth, may know how these minute creatures rise, flourish, and decay. Then the public printer throws in his case, rubs his finger and thumb over the lump of an alum,

takes a chew of tobacco, and puts in type these words of wisdom from the lips of gray-bearded savants, that knowledge may be scattered over the broad republic. patiently he goes on with the click of type, anon in an absorbed way, while we, gay, thoughtless mortals, wear out the long summer day at a basket picnic, with deft fingers selecting the large red ant from our cold ham. Thus these books are made which come to us wrapped in Manila

and franked by a man we voted for last fall. Beautiful lithographs, illustrating the different things stages of hog cholera decked their pages. Rich oil paintings of gaudy tobacco worms chase each other from preface to errata. Magnificent chromos of the foot and mouth disease appeal to us from page after page, and statistics boil out between them, showing what percent of invalid or convalescent animals was sent abroad, and what percent was worked into oleomargarine and pressed corned beef. And what becomes of this wealth of information, this mammoth aggregation of costly knowledge? Cast ruthlessly away by a trifling shallow, frivolous, and freckle-minded race.

It is no more than right that Sterling-Pee rounds should know this. How it will gall his proud heart to know how his beautiful books and his chatty and spicy congressional record are treated by a jeering, heartless throng. Do you suppose that I would perspire over doubtful copy night after night, and then tread a job printing press all the next day by printing books at which the bloodless, soulless public sneered, and the broad-browed talent of a cruel generation spit upon? Not exactly. I have a moderate amount of patience and self-control, but I am free to say right here before the world, that if I had been in Mr. Rounds's place, and had at great cost erected a scientific work upon the rise and fall of bots in America, and a flippant nation of scoffers had

utilized that volume to press autumn leaves and scraggly ferns in, I would rise in my proud might and mash the forms with a mallet. I would jerk the lever of the Washington press into the middle of the effulgent hents. I would kick over my case, wipe the roller on the frescoed walls, and feed my statistics to the hungry flames. No publisher has ever been treated more shabbily. No compositor has, in the history of literature, been more rudely disregarded and derided. Think of this, dear reader, when you look carelessly over the brief but wonderful career of the hoplouse, or with a parent-on-wee, dawdle through the treatise on colic among silkworms and facial neuralgia among fowls. This will not only please Mr. Rounds the young struggling compositor,

but it will gratify and encourage all the friends of American progress and the lovers of learning throughout our whole land. A Reproductive Comet An exchange remarks, The present common in the eastern sky which can be distinctly seen by everyone at early morning is certainly the most remarkable one of the modern commons. Professor Lewis Swift, director of the Warner Observatory, Rochester, New York,

states that the comet grazed the sun so closely as to cause great disturbance, so much so that it has divided into no less than eight separate parts, all of which can be distinctly seen by a good telescope. There is only one other instance on record where a comet has divided, that one being Bela's comment of 1846, which separated into two parts. Applications have been made to Mr. H. H. Warner, by parties who have noticed these commentary offshoot,

claiming the $200 prize for each one of them. Whether the Great Comet will continue to produce a brood of smaller comments remains to be seen. It is certainly to be hope that it will not. If the comet is going to multiply and replenish the earth, the average inhabitant had better proceed in the direction of the tall timber. It excites and rattles us a good deal now to look out for what comets we have on hand. But that is mild compared with what we will experience if the heavens are to be filled every spring with new laid comets

and comets that haven't got their eyes open yet. Our astronomers are able to figure on the old parent comets, and they know when to look for them too. But if twins are to burst upon our vision occasionally, and little bobtail orphan comments are to float around through space, we will have to kind of get up and seek out another solar system, where we will be safe from this comet-foundling asylum. Instead of the calm sky of night,

flooded with the glorious effulgence of the silvery moon, surrounded by the twinkling stars. The coming sky will be one grand Fourth of July exhibit of fireworks, with a thousand little disobedient comments coming from the four corners of heaven in search of the Milky Way. Possibly science may be wrong. We have known science to make bad little breaks of that kind, and when it advertised a particular show to come off, It was delayed by a wreck on the main track, or something of that kind, so that people were disappointed. Let us hope that this is the case now, and that the comets now loafing around through space with their coattails on fire will not become parents.

It would be scandalous. A little vague. A tall, pleasant-looking gentleman, with quick restless eyes and an air of a man who had been in a newspaper office, before, dropped into the boomerang science department yesterday, and asked the pale scholarly blossom, who sat writing an epic on the alarming prevalence of Pip and its future as a national evil, if he could be permitted to read the Desiree news. The scientist said certainly, and after a long and weary tussle got the Mormon plaque out of the ruins. I used to be a foreman on the Desiree News, said the gentleman with the penetrating eye. I worked on the news two years

and had a case on the Tribune. I've been foreman of 37 papers during my life, but my most unfortunate experience was on the Desiree News. I wanted the paper just now to see if they were still running a nad that I had some trouble with when I was there. It was a contract we had with Dr. Bolshazzar to advertise his blue-eyed forget-me-not perfume, Dr. Balchazzer's Red Tar Worm Buster, and Dr. Bolshazzer's bail brain food and tollerokin dry and cod liver oil. The blue-eyed forget-me-not perfume was to go solid in long primer, following pure reading matter EOD and Daily and E-O-W-T-F weekly. The Red-T-W-Buster was to go in non-parile lead,

192.I.T. T.H. F-T-H-T-H-9-A-W-W-3-M-O. And repeat. And the bailed brain food and Tullarocken dry cod liver oil was a six-inch electrotype to go in on third page following pure original humorous matter. With six full headlines, D and W-E-O-D, O-C-T-F, set in reading types similar to copy. These to be inserted between pure religious news, with no other advertising within four miles of the electro, or the reading notices. At the same time, we were running old monkey wrenches kidney scraper on the same kind of a contract. The business manager did not remember

this when we took the contract, so that as soon as we began to run the two, there was a collision between the Tullerock and dry and cod liver oil and the kidney scraper right off. I spoke to the business manager about it, and he was puzzled. He didn't exactly know what it was best to do under the circumstances, and he hated to lose old Balshazer's whole trade, for he wouldn't run any of his ads unless he would take them all according to his contract. We tried to get him to let us run the blue-eyed forget-me-not-perfume, L-A-P-R-9-D and W-L-Y, D-E-O-D-W-L-Y, 10-2-T-E-O-W-T-F.

The Bed-T-R-W-Buster, D-O-L-3-T-F, A-R-O-O-A-2-T-F, and the brain food, and the Tull-Rock-N-R-R-E-R-E-R-E-H-L-8-L-Y, J-U-N-4-D-T-F and D-A-N-G-L-8 at G-F-T-E-R-S-Y-L-D-D-S-Y-L-D-D-D-D-D-L-S-V-E-O-D-D-L-S-V-E-O-D-D-D-L-SIN. I displayed his ad, top-of- column-o-o-d-d-d-o-L-L-L-LIN-RORSher-E-LIN-ROR-SOR-E-SOR-E-E-R-E-R-E-R-E-R-E-R-S-E-E-R-E-R-E-R-R-M-E-R-R-R-R-M-E-R-R-S-M-M-M-M-E-M all omissions or errors to be subject to fine an imprisonment. They were to go PDQ, dollar sign E-O-I-S-T-P-A-P-A-P-A-S-S-S-Sar, and they were to be double-ledded and headed with the talcaps. Still, I said it had been some time since I saw the contract, and I had been suffering with brain fever six months in jail, and possibly my memory might be defective.

I would go over it again and see if I was right. The electrophones were to be blown in the bottle And the readers were to be set at lowercase slugs With guarantee of good faith And rough on rats would not die in the house Use Pinkham's sozodont for itching freckles Bunions and croup It saved my life

But good woman, why are you bilious With them quads and solid minion? Eureka jumbo baking powder Will not crack or fade in any climate sent on three months trial in leaded brevier quines, and all wool column rules warranted to cure rheumatism and army worms or money refunded. To be adjoining selected miscellany or fancy brass dashes

marked EODSY L D, AMPRSAW, SOR, Xlamation,R, Question Mark, dash. At this moment, a dark-browed man came in and told us that the young man was his charge and on his way to Mount Pleasant Asylum for the insane and that we would have to excuse the intrusion. After subscribing for the paper and asking us if we had heard from Ohio, he went. The scientist said afterward that he found it difficult to follow the young man

in some of his statements, and that he was just going to ask him to go over that again and say it slower when the Mount Pleasant Man came in and interrupted the flow of comfort. conversation. End of Section 18. Section 19 of Bailed Hay by Bill Nye. This Librevox recording is in the public domain.

Sad destruction. There came very near being a Holocaust in this office on Monday. An absent-minded candidate for the legislator lit his cigar and gently threw the match in the waste basket. Shortly after that, we felt a grateful warmth stealing up our back, and melting the rubber in our suspenders. The fire was promptly put under control by our editorial fire department, but the basket is no longer fit to hold a large word.

The immediate revolver. Wyoming has recently been a great sufferer, mainly through the carrying of revolvers in the caboose of the overalls. There is no more need of carrying a revolver in Wyoming than there is of carrying an upright piano in the car. coat-tail pocket. Those who carry revolvers generally die by the revolver, and he who agitates the six-shooter, by the six-shooter, shall his blood be shed. When a man carries a gun, he does so because he has said or done something for which he expects to be attacked. So it is safe to say that when a man

goes about our peaceful streets, loaded, he has been doing some little trick or other, and has in advance prepared himself for a Smith and Wesson matinee. The other class of men who suffer from the revolver comprises the white-livered and effeminate parties who ought to be arrested for wearing men's clothes and who never shoot anybody except by accident. Fortunately, they sometimes shoot themselves, and then the fool-killer puts on his coat and rests half an hour.

We have been writing these things and obituaries all for several years, and yet there is no falling off in the mortality. For every man who is righteously slain, there are about a million law-abiding men, women and children murdered. Eternities Parquet is filled with people who got there by the self-cocking revolver route. A man works twenty years to become known as a scholar, a newspaper man, and a gentleman, while the illiterate murderer springs into immediate notice. notoriety in a day, and the widow of his victim cannot even get her life insurance.

These things are what make people misanthropic and tenacious of their belief in a hell. If revolvers could not be sold for less than $500 a piece, with a guarantee on the part of the vendee signed by good sureties that he would support the widows and orphans, you would see more longevity lying around loose, and Western cemeteries would cease to roll. up such mighty majorities. The Secret of Health Health Journals are now asserting that to maintain a sound constitution,

you should lie only on the right side. The health journals may mean well enough, but what are you going to do if you're editing a Democratic paper? Household recipes. To remove oils, varnishes, resins, tar, oyster soup, current jelly, and other selections from the, Bill of Fair, use benzene soap and chloroform cautiously with whitewash brush and garden hose,

then hang on woodpile to remove the pungent effluvia of the benzene. To clean ceilings that have been smoked by kerosene lamps or the fragrance from fried salt pork, remove the ceiling, washed thoroughly with borax, turpentine, and rainwater, then hang on the clothesline to dry. afterward pulverize and spread over the pie plant bed for spring wear. To remove starch and roughness from flat irons, hold the iron on a large grindstone for 20 minutes or so, then wipe off carefully with a rag.

To make this effective, the grindstone should be in motion while the iron is applied. Should the iron still stick to the goods when in use, spit on it. To soften water for household purposes, put in an ounce of quick lime in a certain quantity of water. If it is not sufficient, use less water, or more quick lime. Should the immediate lime continue to remain deliberate, lay the water down on a stone and pound it with a baseball club. To give relief to a burn, apply the white of an egg. The yoke of the egg may be beaten or placed on the shirt bosom, according to the tex. taste of the person. If the burn should occur on a lady, she may omit the last instruction.

To wash black silk stockings, prepare a tub of lather composed of tepid rainwater and white soap with a little ammonia, then stand in the tub till dinner is ready, rolling a cloth to dry. Do not ring, but press the water out. This will necessitate the removal of the stockings. If your hands are badly chapped, wet them in warm water, rub them all over with Indian meal, then put on a coat of glycerin and keep them in your pockets for ten days. If you have no pockets convenient, insert them in the pocket of a friend. An excellent liniment for toothache or neuralgia is made of sassafras, oil of organum, and a half ounce of tincture of capsicum with half a pint of alcohol.

Soak nine yards of red flannel in this mixture, wrap it around the head and then insert the head in a haystack till death comes to your relief. To remove scars or scratches from the limbs of a piano, bade the limb in a solution of tepid wather and tincture of sweet oil. Then apply a strip of court plaster and put the piano out on the lawn for the children to play horse with. Wolling goods may be nicely washed,

if you put half an ox gall into two gallons of tepid water. It might be well to put the goods in the water also. If the mixture is not strong enough, put it another ox-gall. Should this fail to do the work, put in the entire ox, reserving the tail for soup. The ox-gall is comparatively useless for soup and should not be preserved as an article of diet. What is literature?

A squash-nosed scientist from a way up the creek asks, What is literature? Cast your eyes over these logic-embued columns, you sun-dried savant from the remote precincts. Drink at the never-failing boomerang springs of forgotten lore, you dropsical ward of a false and erroneous civilization. Read our address to the Duke of Stinking Water, or the ode to the busted snoot of a shattered venous

de Milo, if you want to fill up your thirsty soul with high-priced literature. Don't go around hungering for literary pie while your eyes are closed, and your capacious ears are filled with bales of hay. The previous hotel. Down at Nathrop, Colorado, there is a large, new, and fine hotel where no guest ever ate or slept. It stands there near the South Park track, like the ghost of some nice, clean, country inn. The reader will naturally ask if the house is haunted, that no one stops at the very

attractive hotel in a country where good hotels are rare. No, it is not that. It is not haunted so much as it would like to be. Though it is a fine hotel, there is no town nearer it than Buena Vista, and no one is going to do business at Buena Vista and go up to Nathrop on a handcar for his meals. It is a case where a smart aleck of a man built a hotel and asked his fellow citizens to come and form a town around him and make him rich. Mr. Nathrop was rather an impulsive man, and one day he said something that reflected on another impulsive man, and when people came and looked for Nathrop,

they found that his body was tangled up in the sagebrush, and his soul was marching on. The hotel was just completed, and the ladders and the handsome lines barrel and hods and old nail-kegs and fragments of lathes and pieces of bricks and scaffolds and all those things that go to make life desirable are still there adorning the hotel and the front yard. But there is no handsome man with a waxed mustache inside at the desk, shaking his head sadly when he is asked for a room, and looking at you with that high-born pity and contempt for your pleading that the hotel clerk, air apparent to the universe,

always keeps for those who go to him with humility. There is no Senegambian with a whisk broom waiting to brush your clothes off your back and leave you a raid in a birthmark and the earache at 25 cents per brush. There is no young fair masher strutting up and down the piazza, trying to look brainy and capable of a thought. It is only a hollow mockery,

For the chambermaid, with a large slop-pail, does not come at daylight to pound on your door, and try to get in and fix up your room and wake you up, and frighten you to death with her shocking chaos of warden-vironed and freckle-frescoed beauty. There, the new hotel will, no doubt, stand for ages. While a little way off in his quiet grave, the proprietor, laid to rest in an old linen handkerchief, is sleeping away the years till he shall be awakened by the last grand revely. There's no use talking. It's tough. End of Section 19. Section 20 of Bailed Hay by Bill Nye.

This Liebervox recording is in the public domain. Anadote of Spotted Tale The popularity of the above-named chieftain dates from a very trifling little incident, as did that of many other men who were now great. Spotted Tail had never won much distinction up to that time, except as the owner of an appetite, in the presence of which his tribes stood in dumb and terrible awe. During the early days of what is now the great throbbing and ambitious west,

the tribe camp near Fort Sedgwick, and Bigmouth, a chief of some importance, used to go over to the post regularly for the purpose of filling his brindle hide full of Fort Sedgwick bloom of youth. As a consequence of Big Mouth's fatal yearning for liquid damnation, he generally got impudent and openly announced on the parade ground that he could lick the entire regular army. This used to offend some of the blood-scarred heroes who had just arrived from West Point, and in the heat of debate, they would warm the venerable warrior about two feet below the back

of his neck with the fiat of their sabers. This was a gross insult to Bigmouth, and he went back to the camp where he found Spotted Tail eating a mule that had died of inflammatory rheumatism. Bigmouth tearfully told the wild epicure of the way he had been treated and asked for a council of war. Spot picked his teeth with a tent pin and then told the defeated relic of a mighty race that if he would quit strong drink, he would be subjected to fewer insults. Bigmouth then got irritated and told S. T. T. that his remarks showed that he was standing in with the aggressor and was no friend to his people. Spotted Tail said that Mr. B. Mouth was a liar by yon high heaven,

and before there was time to think it over, he took a butcher knife about four feet long from its scabbard and cut Mr. Bigmouth plumb in two just between the umbilicus and the watch pocket. As the reader who is familiar with anatomy has already surmised, Bigmouth died from the effects of this wound, and Spotted Tail was at once looked upon as the Moses of his tribe. He readily rose to prominence, and by his strict attention to the duties of his office, made for himself a name as a warrior and a pie-biter,

at which the world turned pale. This should teach us the importance of taking the tide at its flood, which leads on to fortune, and to lay low when there is a hen on, as Benjamin Franklin has so truly said. The zealous voter. Speaking of New York politics, said Judge Hildreth of Cummings the other day, they have a cheerful way of doing business in Gotham, and at first it rather surprised me. I went into New York a short time before election, and a Democratic friend told me I had

better go and get registered so I could wot. I did so, for I hate to lose the deal. divine right of suffrage, even when I'm a good way from home. One election day came around, I went over to the polls and a body in the afternoon, but they wouldn't let me vote. I told them I was registered all right, and that I had a right and must exercise it the same as any other Democrat in this enlightened land. But they swore at me and entreated me roughly, and told me to go there myself, and that I had already voted once and couldn't do it anymore. I had always thought that New York was prone to vigilance,

and industry in the suffrage business, and early and often was what I supposed to be the grand hailing sign. It made me mad, therefore, to have the city get so virtuous all at once that it couldn't even let me vote once. I was irritated and extremely ill-natured when I went back to Mr. McGuinness and told him of the great trouble I had with the judges of election, and I denounced New York politics with a great deal of fervor. Mr. McGinnis said, it was all right. That's easy enough to me, George. Give me something difficult. Sit down and risk yourself. Don't get excited and talk so loud. I know deyze was out last night with the buys and he didn't feel like getting up, Ailey, to go to the pose. So I got one of the

buys to go over and wot your name. That's all right. Come here and have something. I saw at a glance the New York people were attending to the things thoroughly and carefully, and since that when I hear that a full vote hasn't been polled in New York City for some unknown cause, I do not think it is true. I look upon the statement with great reserve, for I believe they vote people there who have been dead for centuries, and people have not yet arrived in this country, nor even expressed a desire to come over. I am almost positive that they are still voting the bones of old A.T. Stewart up in the doubtful wards, and as soon as Charlie Ross is entitled to vote, he will most assuredly be permitted to represent. Why, there's one ward there where they vote,

that theater ghosts and the spirit of Hamlet's father hasn't missed an election for a hundred years. How to preserve teeth. I find, said an old man to a boomerang reporter yesterday, but there is absolutely no limit to the durability of the teeth. If they are properly taken care of, I never drink hot drinks. Always brush my teeth morning and evening. Avoid all acids, whatever, and although I'm 65 years old, my teeth are as good as ever they were.

And that is all you do to preserve your teeth, is it? Yes, sir. That's all, barring perhaps the fact that I put them in a glass of soft water at nights. Mr. Beecher's brain. Mr. Beecher has raked in two million dollars with his brain, A good tall bulging brow and a brain that will give down like that, or rather to be chosen than a blind lead, and an easy-running cerebellum,

than a stone quarry with a silent but firm skunk in it. Oh no! The telephone line between Cheyenne and Laramie City will soon be in operation. It won't work, however. It may be a success for a time, but sooner or later Bill Nye will set his lopsided jaws at work in front of the transmitter, and pour a few quarts of untutored lies into the contribution box, which does service as part of the telephone machine. Then the wires will be yanked off the poles, a hissing torrent of prevarication will

blow the battery jars clean over into Utah, and the listener at the Cheyenne end will be gathered up in a basket. Weeping friends will hold a funeral over a pair of old boots and a fragment of shoulder blade. The remains of the departed Shiremen. It is a weird and pixical thing to be a natural-born liar, but there are times when a robust lie will successfully defy the unanimous inventive genius of the age. Son. Oh, do not say those cruel words, kind friend. Do not throw it up to us that we are weird and pixical.

Oh, believe us, kind sir, we may have done wrong, but we never did that. We know that election is approaching and all sorts of bygone crookedness is raked up at that time, even when a man is not a candidate for office. But we ask the public to scan our record and see if the charge made by the sun is true. It may be that years ago we escaped justice and fled to the West under an assumed name, but no man ever before charged us with being weird and pixical. We have been in all kinds of society, perhaps, and mingled with people, who were our inferiors, having been pulled by the police once while visiting a Democratic caucus,

but that was our misfortune, not our fault. We were not a member of the caucus and were therefore discharged. But even little things like that ought to be forgotten. As for entering anyone's apartments and committing a pixical crime, we state now without fear of successful contradiction that it is not so. It is no sign because of the same. It is no sign because, a man in an unguarded moment entered the Rock Creek eating house and gave way to his emotions, that he is a person to be shunned. It was hunger and not love for the questionable that made us go there. It is not because we are by nature weird or pixical, for we are not. We are not angry over this charge. It just simply hurts and grieves us. It comes too at a time when we are trying to

lead a different life, and while others are trying to lend us every aid and encouragement. We have many friends in Cheyenne who want to see us come up and take higher ground, but how can we do so if the press lends its influence against us? That's just the way we feel about it. If the public prints try to put us down and crush us in this manner, we will probably get desperate and be just as weird and pixical as we can be. End of Section 20 Section 21 of Bailed Hay by Bill Nye.

This Librevox recording is in the public domain. The March of Civilization Spokane Ike, the Indian who killed a doctor last summer for failing to cure his child, has been hanged. This shows the onward march of civilization and vouchsafes to us the time when a doctor's life will be in less danger, than that of his patient.

An unclouded welcome. N. P. Willis once said, the sweetest thing in life is the unclouded welcome of a wife. This is true indeed, but when her welcome is clouded with an atmosphere of angry words and coal scuttles, there is something about it that makes a man want to go out in the woodshed and sleep on the ice chest. The Pillow-Sham Holder

Some enemy of mankind has recently invented an infernal machine known as the Pillow-Sham holder, which is attached to the head of the bedstead and works with a spiral spring. It is a kind of refined towel rack on which you hang your pillow-shams at night, so they won't get busted by the man in the house. The man in the house generally gets the pillow-shams down under his feet when he undresses, and polishes off his cunning little toes on the left. lace pultus on which his wife prides herself. This pillow-sham holder saves all this.

You just yank your pillow-sham off the bed and hang it on this high-toned sham holder, where it rests all night. At least that's the intention. After a little while, however, the spring gets weak, and the holder buckles to or caves in, or whatever you may call it, at the most unexpected moment. The slightest movement on the part of the occupant of the bed turns loose the pillow-sham holder, and the slumberer gets it across the bridge of his or her nose, as the case may be.

Sometimes the vibration caused by a midnight snore will unhinge this weapon of the devil, and it will whack the sleeper across the features in a way that scares him almost to death. If you think it is a glad surprise to get a lick across the prospective faculties in the middle of a sound slumber when you were dreaming of elysium and high-priced parries and such things as that, just try the death-dealing pillow-sham holder and then report in writing to the chairman of the executive committee. It is well calculated to fill the soul with horror and amaze. A raven-black Saratoga wave hanging on the back of a chair. chair has been known to turn white in a single night as a result of the sudden kerflemics of one of these

cheerful articles of furniture. Something fresh. Our Saturday dispatches announced that an infernal machine had just been received at the office of Chief Justice Field, and later on, Justice Field, who was in Wyoming Saturday, said to a reporter that the machine was one that was sent to him in 1866, and that last week he sent it down to a gun factory to have the powder taken out, as he wished to stuff it and preserve it among the archives. With the aid of the telegraph and the faculties of the Associated Press, it does seem as though we were living in an age of almost miraculous possibilities. Here is an instance where an infernal machine is sent to a prominent man,

and in less than 16 years the news is seen. flashed to the four quarters of the globe like lightning. How long will it be before the whole bloody history of the war of the rebellion will be sent to every hamlet in the land? How long before the safe arrival of the ark and the losses occasioned by the deluge will be given to us in dollars and cents? People don't fully realize the advantages we possess in this glorious 19th century. They take all these things as a matter of,

course, and forget how the palpitating brain palps for them, and how the quivering nerve quives on and on through the silent night in order that humanity may keep informed in relation to ancient history. A barefooted goddess. There's one little national matter that has been neglected about long enough, it seems to us. If the goddess of liberty is allowed to go barefoot for another century, her delicate toes will spread out over this nation, like the shadow of a great woe, yanked to eternity. Once when a section crew came down the mountain of the South Park Road, from Alpine Tunnel to Buena Vista, a very singular thing occurred, which has never been given to the public. Everyone who knows anything at all knows that riding down that mountain on a push car,

descending at the rate of over 200 feet to the mile, means utter destruction unless the brake is on. This break is nothing more nor less than a piece of scantling, which is applied between one of the wheels and the car bed in such a way as to produce great friction. The section crew referred to, got on at Hancock with their bronzed and glowing hides as full of arsenic and rainwater as they could possibly hold.

Being recklessly drunk, they enjoyed the accumulated velocity of the car wonderfully, until the section boss lost the brake off the car, and then there was a slight feeling of anxiety. The car at last acquired a velocity like that of a young and frolicsome bob-tailed comet turned loose in space. The boys began to get nervous at last and asked each other what should be done. There seemed to be absolutely nothing to do but to show.

shoot onward into the golden presently. All at once, the section boss thought of something. He was drunk, but the deadly peril of the moment suggested an idea. There was a rope on the car, which would do to tie to something heavy and cast off for an anchor. The idea was only partially successful, however, for there was nothing to tie to but a spike hammer. This was tried, but it wouldn't work. Then it was decided to tie it to someone of the crew and cast him loose in order to save the

lies of those who remained. It was a glorious opportunity. It was a heroic thing to do. It was like Arnold Winkleredd's great sacrifice by which victory was gained by filling his own system full of lances and making a toothpick holder of himself in order that his comrades might break through the ranks of their foes. George O'Malley, the section boss, said that he was willing that Patsy McBride should snatch the laurels from outrageous fortune and bind them on his brow. But Mr. McBride said he didn't care much for the anconiums of the world.

He hadn't lost any anconiums and didn't want to trade his liver for two dollars' worth of damaged laurels. Everyone declined. All seemed willing to go down into history without any. ten-line pay local and wanted someone else to get the effulgence. Finally, it was decided that a man by the name of Christian Christensen was the man to tie to. He had the asthma anyhow, and life wasn't much of an object to him, so they said that although he declined, he must take the nomination as he was in the hands of his friends. So they tied the rope around Christian and cast anchor. The car slowed up and at last stopped still.

The plan had succeeded. Five happy wives greeted their husbands that night as they returned from the jaws of destruction. Christian Christensen did not return. The days may come and the days may go, but Christian's wife will look up toward the summit of the Snowcrown Mountains in vain. He will never entirely return. He has done so partially, of course, but there are still missing fragments of him, and it looks as though he must have lost his life. Why, we shed the scalding.

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

It was the presence of death that broke our heart and opened the fountains of our great deep, so to speak. When we poured the glucose syrup on our pancakes, the stiff and cold remains of a large beetle and two cunning little twin cockroaches fell out into our plate and lay there hushed in an eternal repose. Death to us is all powerful. The king of terrors is to us the mighty sovereign before whom we must all bow, from the mighty emperor down to the meanest slave, from the railroad superintendent riding in his special car, down to the humblest humorist.

All alike must someday curl up and die. This saddens us at all times, but more peculiarly so when death, with his relentless lawnmower, has gathered in the young and innocent. This was the case where the two little twin cockroaches, whose lives had been unspotted and whose years had been unclouded by wrong and selfishness were called upon to meet death together. In the stillness of the night, when others slept, these affectionate little twins crept into the glucose syrup and died.

We hope no one will misrepresent this matter. We did weep, and we are not ashamed to own it. We sat there and sobbed until the tablecloth was wet for our feet, and the venerable ham was floating around in tears. It was not for ourself, however, that we wept. No unkindness on the part of an eating-house ever provoked such a tornado of woe. We just weep when we see death and are brought in close contact with it, and we are not the only one that shed tears.

Dickinson and Warren wept, strong men as they were. Even the butter wept, strong as it was, it could not control its emotions. We don't very often answer a newspaper attack, but when we are accused of weeping till people have to take off their boots and wring out their socks, we want the public to know what it is for. End of Section 21. Section 22 of Bailed Hay by Bill Nye. recording is in the public domain. Another suggestion. We were surprised and grieved to see, on Monday evening,

a man in the dress circle at the performance of Hazel Kirk at Blackburn's Grand Opera House, who had communed with the maddening bull till he was considerably elated. When Pidicus made a good hit or Hazel struck a moist lead, and everybody wept softly on the carpet, this man furnished a war-whoop that not only annoyed the audience, but seemed also to break up the actors a little. Later, he got more quiet,

and at last went to sleep and slid out of his chair on the floor. It is such little episodes as these that make strangers dissatisfied with the glorious West. When you go to see something touchful on the stage, you do not care to have your finer feelings ruffled by the yells of a man who has got a corner on delirium tremens. It is also humiliating to our citizens to be pulled up off the floor by the coat collar and steered out the door by a policeman. We hope that as progress is more plainly visible in Wyoming

and as we get more and more refined, such things will be of less and less frequent occurrence till a man can go to see a theatrical performance with just as much comfort as he would in New York and other eastern towns. Another point, while we are discussing the performance of Hazel Kirk, there were some present on Monday night, sitting back in the third balcony, who need a theatrical guide to aid them in discovering which are the places to weep and which to gurgle.

It was a little embarrassing to Miss Esler to make a grand dramatic hit that was supposed to yank loose a freshet of woe, to be greeted with a snort of demoniac, laughter from the rear of the grand opera house. It seemed to unnerve her and surprise her, but she kept her balance and her head. When death and ruin and shame and dishonor were pictured in their tragic horror, the wild, unfettered humorist of a crude civilization fairly yelled with delight. He thought that the tomb and such things were intended to be synonymous with the minstrel show

and the circus. He thought that old Dunstan Kirk was there with his sightless eyes to give Laramie the grandest, rip-roaringest tempest of mirth that she had ever experienced. That is why we say we will never have a successful performance in the theatrical line, till some of this class are provided with laugh and cry guide books. Piscatorial and editorial A correspondent of the New York Post says that codfish frequency the table lands of the sea. The codfish, no doubt, does this to secure as nearly as possible a dry, bracing atmosphere. This pure air of the submarine table lands gives to the codfish

that breadth of chest and depth of lungs which we have always noticed. The glad-free smile the codfish is largely attributed to the exhilaration of this oceanic altitudulum. The correspondent further says that the cod subsists largely on the sea cherry. Those who have not had the pleasure of seeing the codfish climb the sea cherry tree in search of food or clubbing the fruit from the heavily laden branches with chunks of coral have missed a very fine sight. The codfish, when at home, rambling through the submarine forests,

does not wear his vest unbuttoned, as he does while loafing around the grocery stores of the United States. Another feathered songster. A Fort Steele taxidermist has presented this office with a stuffed bird of prey about nine feet high, which we have put up in the boomerang office, and hereby return thanks for. It is a kind of a cross between a dodo and a meander up the creek. Its neck is long, like the right-of-way to a railway,

and its legs need some sawdust to make them look healthy. Those who subscribe for the paper can look at this great work of art free. As bird is noted for its brief and horizontal elementary canal, it has no devious digestive arrangements, but contends itself with an economical and unostentatious trunk line of digestion, so simple that any child can understand it. He, or she as the case may be, in his or her, stocking feet can easily look over into the next fall, and when standing in our office peers down at us from over the stovepipe in a reproachful way that fills us with remorse.

We have labeled it the Democrat wading up Salt Creek and filed it away near the skull of an Indian that we killed years ago when we got mad and wiped out a whole tribe. The geological name of this bird we do not at this moment recall, but it is one of those sorrowful-looking fowls that stick their legs out behind when they fly and are not good for food. Parties wishing to see the bird and subscribe for the Home Journal can obtain an audience by kicking three times on the last hall door on the left and throwing two dollars through the transom.

About the ostrich There is some prospect of ostrich farming developing into quite an industry in the southwest and it will sometime be a cold day when the simple-minded rustic of that region will not have ostrich on toast if he wants it. Ostrich farming, however, will always have its drawbacks. The hen ostrich is not a good layer as a rule,

only laying two eggs per annum, which, being about the size of a porcelain, and washbowl make her so proud that she takes the balance of the year for the purpose of convalescing. The ostrich is chiefly valuable for the plumage which he wears, and which, when introduced into the world of commerce, makes the husband almost wish that he were dead. Probably the ostrich will not come into general use as an article of food, few people caring for it, as the meat is coarse and the gizzard full of old hardware, and relics of wrecked trains and old irons left where there has been a fire. Carving the ostrich is not so difficult as

carving the quail, because the joints are larger, and one can find them with less trouble. Still, the bird takes up a great deal of room at the table, and the best circles are not using them. The ostrich does not set. she don't have time. She does not squat down over something and insist on hatching it out if it takes all summer, but she just lays a couple of porcelain cupsidores in the hot sand when she feels like it, and then goes away to the seaside to quiet her shattered nerves. Too much god and no flour.

Old Chief Pocatello, now at the Fort Hall Agency, an answer to an inquiry relative to the true Christian character of a former Indian agent at that place, gave in very terse language the most accurate description of a hypocrite that was ever given to the public. Ugh! Too much God and no flower! We are getting cynical. It begins to look now as though Major F.G. Wilson, who stopped here a short time

last week and week before, might be a gentleman in disguise. He has done several things since he left here that looked to a man up a man up a tree like something irregular and peculiar. The major has not only prevaricated, but he has done so in such a way as to beat his friends and to make them yearn for his person in order that they may kick him over into the inky night of space. He has represented himself as confidential advisor and literary tourist of several prominent New York, Chicago, Omaha, and Thai-siding dailies. And as such good documents, to show and proof of his identity in that capacity,

that he has received many courtesies, which, as an ordinary American deadbeat, he might have experienced great difficulty in securing. We simply state this in order to put our esteemed contemporaries on their guard, so that they will not let him spit in their overshoes and enjoy himself as he did here. He wears a white hat on his head and a crooked tooth in the piazza of his mouth. This pearly fang he uses to masticade and reduce little delicate irregular fragments of plugged tobacco,

which he borrows of people who have time to listen to the silvery tinkle of his bazoo. When last seen, he was headed west and will probably strike Eureka, Nevada in a week or two. His mission seems to be mainly to make people feel a goneness in their exchequer and to distribute tobacco dadoes over the office stoves of our great land. He is a man who writes long letters to the New York Herald that are never printed. His freshly blown nose is read, but his newspaper articles are not. He claims to represent the Mutual Reserve Fund Life Association lately, too. The company represents the insurance, and he attends to the Mutual Reserve Fund.

He has mutually reserved all the funds he could get hold of since he struck the West, besides mutually reserving enough strong drink to eat a hole through the Ames monument. Such men as Major Wilson make us suspicious of humanity, and very likely the next man who comes along here and represents that he is a great man and wants five dollars on his well-rounded figure and fair fame will have to be identified. But we have helped 40 or 50 such men to make a bridal tour of Wyoming, and now we are going to saw off and quit. When a great journalist comes into this office again with an internal revenue tax on his breath and $19 back on his baggage, we will probably pick up a 50-pound chunk of North Park

courts and spread his intellectual faculties around this building till it looks like the Custer Massacre. End of Section 22. Section 23 of Bailed Hay. by Bill Nye. This Libravox recording is in the public domain. Ask us something difficult. What becomes of our bodies? asks a soft-eyed scientist, and we answer in stentorian tones that they get inside of a red flannel undershirt as the maple turns to crimson and the sassafras to gold. Ask us something difficult, ethereal being, if you want to see us get up and claw for our library of public documents.

A mining experiment. A mild-eyed youth wearing a desert spoon hat in polka dot socks went into Middle Park the other day and claimed to be a mining expert. The boys inveigled him into driving a stick of giant powder into a drill hole at the bottom of a shaft with an old axe. And now they are trying to get him out of the ground with a ammonia and a toothbrush. A New Industry. The want column of the Chicago News for October 10th has the following.

Twelve frightful examples wanted to travel with Scott Marble's new drama and appear in the realistic barroom scene of the drunkard's daughter, Arthur G. Cambridge, dramatic agent, 75 South Clark Street. This throws open a field of usefulness to a class of men's who hitherto have seen no prospect whatever for the future. It brings within the reach of such men a business which, requiring no capital, still gives the actor much time to do as he chooses. Beauty often wins for itself a place in the great theatrical world, but it is rare that the tomato knows and the watery eye secure a salary for their proprietors. Business must be picking up

when the wiggly legs and danger signal knows will bring so much per week in railroad fare. Perhaps prohibition has got the frightful example business down to where it commands the notice of the world because of its seldom condition. The Mimic Stage At the performance of the Phoenix here the other night, there was a very affecting place where the play is transferred very quickly from a street scene to the elegant apartments of Mr. Blackburn, the heavy villain. The street scene had to be raised out of the way,

and the effect of the transition was somewhat marred by the reluctance of the scenery and rolling up out of the way. It got about halfway up and stopped there in an undecided manner, which annoyed the heavy villain a good deal. He started to make some blood-curdling remarks about Mr. Bloodsoe, and it got pretty well warmed up when the scenery came, down with a bang on the stage. The artist who pulls up the curtain and fills the hall lamps then pulled the scene up so as to show the villain's feet for 15 or 20 minutes, but he couldn't

get it any farther. It seemed that the clothes line by which the elaborate scenery is operated got tangled up some way, and this caused the delay. After that another effort was made, and this time the street scene rolled up to about the third story. of a brick hotel shown in the foreground and stopped there, while the clarionette and first violin continued a kind of sad tremulo. Then a dark hand with a ward on one finger and an oriental dollar store ring on another came out from behind the wings and began to wind the clothesline

carefully around the pole at the foot of the scene. The villain then proceeded with his soliloquy, while the street scene hung by one corner in such a way as to make a large warehouse on the corner of the streets stand out at an angle of about 45 degrees. Laramie will never feel perfectly happy until these little hitches are dispensed with, supposing that at some place in the play where the heroine is speaking soft and low to her lover and the proper moment has arrived for her to pillow her sunny head up on his bosom, that street scene should fetch loose and come down with such a momentum as to knock

the lovers over into the arms of the base vial player. Or suppose that in some deathbed act, the same scene, loaded with a telegraph pole at the bottom, should settle down all at once in such a way as to leave the deathbed out on the corner of Monroe and Clark Streets in front of a candy store. Modern stage mechanism has now reached such a degree of perfection that the stage carpenter does not go up on a step ladder in the middle of a play and nail the corner of a scene to a stick of two-by-four scantling,

while a duel is going on near the stepladder. In all the larger theaters and opera houses now, they are not doing that way. Of course, little incidents occur, however, even on the best stages and where the whole thing works all right. For instance, the other day a young actor who was kneeling to a beautiful heiress down east got a little too far front

and some scenery which was to come together in the middle of the stage to pianissimo music shut him outside and divided the tableau in two, leaving the young actor apparently kneeling at the foot of a street lamp as though he might be hunting for a half dollar he had just dropped on the sidewalk. There was a play in New York not long ago in which there was a kind of military parade introduced and the leader of a file of soldiers had his instructions to march three times around the stage to martial music, and then file off at the left, the whole column, of course, following him.

After marching once around, the stage manager was surprised to see the leader deliberately wheel and walk off the stage at the left, with the whole battalion following at his heels. The manager went to him and abused him shamefully for his haste, and put him, told him he had a mind to discharge him. But the talented hack driver, who thus acted as the military leader, and who had overplayed himself by marching off the stage ahead of time, said, Well, confound it, you can discharge me if you want to, but what was a man to do? Would you have me march around three times when my military pants were coming off, and I knew it? Military pride, pomp, parade, and circumstance are all right. But it can be over.

overdone. A military squadron, detachment, or whatever it is, can make more of a parade under certain circumstances than is advertised. I didn't want to give people more show than they paid for, and I ask you to put yourself in my place. When a man has paid three dollars a week to play a Roman soldier, would you have him play the Greek slave? No, sir. I guess I know what I'm hired to play, and I'm going to play it. When you want me to play Adam at the Garden of Eden, just give me my fig leaf and salary enough to make it interesting, and I will try and properly interpret the character for you,

or refund the money at the door. Decline of American Humor Dear mellow-voiced, starry-eyed reader, did you ever see something about the decline of American humor? Well, we got a gob of American humor. Well, we got a gob of American humor yesterday written by a Yahoo with pale pink hair, which was entitled Marriage in Mormondom on the Taunting Plan. Well, we declined it.

Decline of American humor. Sabby. Chicago Custom House The Chicago Custom House and Post Office, built from designs by Oscar Wilde and other Delirium Tremens artists, is getting wiggly and bids fair to someday fall down and scrunch about 500 United States employees into the great billowy sea of the Eternal Hents. It is a sick-looking structure with little Gothic warts on top and red window sashes and little half-grown smokehouses sprouting out of it in different places.

It is grand, gloomy, and peculiar, and looks as though it might be cursed with an inward pain. Foreign Opinion We are indebted to Fred J. Prouding, correspondent of the Foreign and British Newspaper Press, for a copy of the London Daily News of the Ninth Instant A. Ments, containing the following editorial notice. If ever celebrity were attained unexpectedly, most assuredly it was that thrust upon Bill Nye by truthful James. It is just possible, however, that the innumerable readers of Mr. Breweral,

at heart's heathen Chinese may have imagined Bill Nye and Arsin to be purely mythical personages. So far as the former is concerned, any such conclusion now appears to have been erroneous. Bill Nye is no more a phantom than any other journalist, although the name of the organ, which he runs, savours more of a fiction than a fact. But there is no doubt about the word. the matter for the Washington correspondent of the New York Tribune telegraphed on the 29th instant that Bill Nye had accepted a post under the government. He has lately been domiciled in Laramie City, Wyoming Territory, and his editor of the Daily Boomerang. In reference to acting

Postmaster General Hatton's appointment of him as postmaster at Laramie City, the opponent of our sin writes an extremely humorous letter, extending his thanks, and advising his chief of his opinion that his appointment is a triumph of eternal truth over error and wrong. Nye continues, it is one of the epochs, I may say, in that nation's onward march toward political purity and perfection. I don't know when I have noticed any stride in the affairs of state, which has so thoroughly impressed me with its wisdom. In this quiet strain of banter, Bill Nye continues to the end of his letter, which suggests the opinion that whatever the official qualifications of the new postmaster may be,

the inhabitants of Laramie City must have a very readable newspaper in the Daily Boomerang. While thanking our London contemporary for its gentle and harmless remarks, we desire to correct an erroneous impression that the news seems to have as to our general style. The British press has in some way arrived at the conclusion that the editor of this fashion guide and mental lighthouse on the rocky shores of time, terms cash, is a party with wild tangled hair and an eye like a tongue of flame. That is not the case, and therefore our English co-worker in the great field of journalism is, no doubt, laboring under a popular misapprehension. Could the editor of the news look in upon us as we pull down tome after tome of forgotten lore in our study?

Or, with a glad smile, glance hurriedly over the postal card in transit through our post office, He would see, not as he supposes, a wild and cruel slayer of his fellow men, but a thoughtful scholarly and choice fragment of modern architecture, with lines of care about the firmly chiseled mouth, and with the subdued and chastened air of a man who has run for the legislature and failed to get there, Eli. The London News is an older paper than ours, and we therefore recognize the value of its kind notice.

The boomerang is a young paper, and has therefore only begun fairly to do much damage as a national misfortune. But the time is not far distant when, from Greenland's icy mountains to Indian's coral strand, we propose to search out suffering humanity and make death easier and more desirable by introducing this choice malady. Regarding the post office, we wish to state that we shall aim to make it a great financial success, and furnish mail at all times to all who desire it, whether they have any or not. We shall be pretty busy, of course, attending to the office during the day, and writing scathing editorials during the night, but we will try to snatch a moment now and then to write a few letters

for those who have been inquiring sadly and hopelessly for letters during the past ten years. It is indeed a dark and dreary world to the man who has looked in at the same general deliver window nine times a day for ten years, and yet never received a letter, nor even a confidential postal card from a commercial man, stating that on the fifth of the following month he would strike the town with a new and attractive line of samples. We should early learn to find out such suffering as that, and if we are in the post office department, we may be the means of such good by putting new envelopes on our own dunning letters and mailing them to the suffering and distressed. Let us in our abundance remember those who have not been done for many a weary year.

It will do them good, and we will not feel the loss. End of Section 23. Section 24 of Bailed Hay by Bill Nye. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. They have curbed their woe. They say that Brigham Young's grave is looking as bare and desolate as a boulevard now. At first, while her grief was fresh, his widow used to march out there five abreast and just naturally deluge the grave with scalding tears. And at that time the green grass grew luxuriantly, and the pigweed waved in the soft summer air.

But as she learned to control her emotions, The humidity of the atmosphere disappeared, and grief's grand irrigation failed to give down. We should learn from this that the man who flatters himself, that in marrying a whole precinct during life he is piling up for the future a large invoice of ungovernable woe is liable to get left. The prophet's tomb looks today like a deserted buffalo wallow, while his widow has dried her tears and is trying to make a mash on the Utah Commission. Such is life in the far west, and such the fitting resting place of a red-headed old galvanized prophet,

who marries a squint-eyed fly up the creek, and afterward gets a special revelation requiring him to marry a female mass meeting. Let us be thankful for what we have, instead of yearning for a great wealth of wife. Then the life insurance will not have to be able to be a great wealth of wife. Then the life insurance will not have to be scattered so, and our friends will be spared the humiliating spectacle of a bereft and sorrowing herd of widow, turned loose by the cold hand of death to monkey over our tomb.

Hung by request. This county has had two hemp carnivals during the past few weeks, and it begins to look like old times again. In each case, the murder was unprovoked, and the victim a quiet gentleman. That is why there was a popular feeling against the murderer and a spontaneous rope-stretching benefit as a result. While we deplore the existence of a state of affairs

that would warrant these little expressions of feeling, we cannot come right out and condemn the exercises which followed. The more we read the political record of the candidate for office as set forth in opposing journals, the more we feel that there are already few enough good men in this country, so that we do not care to spare any of them. If, therefore, the mischievous bad man is permitted to thin them out this way, the day is not distant when we won't have good men enough to run the newspapers, to say nothing of other avocations. We know that Eastern people will speak of us as a ferocious tribe on the Wyoming Reservation, but we desire to call the attention of our more

law-abiding brethren to the fact that there has been in the past year a lynching in almost every state in the Union, to say nothing of several hundred cases where there should have been. Do you suppose Wyoming young ladies would consent to play the waltz, known as Under the Elms, composed by Walter Malley, if Walter had been as front of, prolux some here as he was down on the Atlantic coast? Scarcely. We may be the creatures of impulse here, but not that kind of impulse. Minneapolis hung a man during the past year, and so did Bloomington and other high-tone towns, and shall we because we are poor and lonely, be denied this poor boon? We hope not. Because we have left the east and moved out here to make some money and build up a new

country, shall we be refused the privileges we would have enjoyed if we had remained in the States? We tro not. A telegraph pole with the remains hanging on it is not a cheerful sight, but it has a tendency to annoy and mentally disturb those who contemplate the violent death of some good man. It unnerves the brave assassin and makes him rustless and apprehensive. Death is always depressing. But it is doubly so when it has that purple and suffocated appearance which is noticeable in the features of the early fall fruit of the telegraph pole. Lately, we will state, however, the telegraph pole has fallen into disfavor and is not much used, owing to a rumor which gained circulation some time ago, to the effect that Jay Gould intended to charge the vigilance committee,

rent, a colored Greek slave. A nude-colored woman, as wild as a gorilla, is startling the people of the Marvel section of Missouri. She has been seen several times, and the last time, through a young lady who was horseback riding into hysteria, and with a grunt, not unlike that of a wild hog, jumped up and ran into the forest. At the time of her discovery, she was burrowing into the side of the road, catching and eating crawfish, which she ate, claws, hide, and all. She is very black and foams at the mouth when angry, like a wild animal at bay. She is probably a colored Greek slave in search of an umbrella, and the remainder of her wardrobe. Still, she may be a brunette society bell, who went in swimming where a mud turtle caught her by the pink toe,

and the nervous shock has unsettled her mind. The Melvilles An exchange says that Mrs. Melville has become deranged through excess of joy over the unexpected return of her husband. Another one says that it is thought that Lieutenant Melville is off his basement as a result of exposure to the vigorous and bracing air of the North Pole. Still another says that Mr. Melville was always mean and hateful toward his wife, and that when he was at home, she had to do her own washing and wind the clock herself.

From the different stories now floating about relative to the Melville family, we are led to believe that he is a kind and considerate husband, pleasant and good nature toward his wife, while asleep, and that she is a kind, beautiful, and accomplished wife, when she is sober. How many of our best wives are falling victims to the alcoholic habit recently? How sad to think that, as husbands, we will soon be left to wait and watch and vigil through the long, weary night, for that one to return who promised us on the nuptial day that she would protect and love us.

Ah, what a silent but seductive foe to the husband is rum! How it creeps into the home circle And snatches the wife In the full blush and bloom of womanhood While the pale, sad-eyed husband sits at the sewing machine And barely makes enough to keep the little ones from want No one can fully realize

But he who has been there, so to speak, The terrible shock that Mr. Melville received On the first evening that his wife came staggering home No one can tell how the pain froze his stuff throbbing gizzard, or how he shuddered in the darkness and filled the pillow-sham full of sobs when he first knew that she had got it up her nose. Ah, what a picture of woe we see before us. There in the solemn night, robed in long, plainly constructed garment of pure white, buttoned at the throat in a negligent manner, stands Mr. Melville with his bare, tall brow,

glistening in the flickering rays of a kerosene lamp, which he holds in his hand, while on the front porch stands the wife, who, a few years ago, promised to defend and protect him. She is a little unsteady on her feet, and her hat is out of plumb. She tries to be facetious, and asks him if that is where Mr. Melville lives. He looks at her coldly and says it is, but unfortunately it is. is not an inebriates home and refuge for the budge demolisher. Then he bursts into tears, and his sobs shake the entire ranch. But we draw a curtain over the scene.

A year later, he may be discovered about two miles southwest of the North Pole. Cool, but happy. He is trying to forget his woe. He smells like sperm oil and looks like a bald-headed sausage. but the woe of drink is forgotten. How sad that he has returned and suffered again! What a mistake that he did not remain where, instead of his wife's coolness, he would have had only that of natures to contend against.

Mending Broken Necks They have successfully set a boy's broken neck in Connecticut, and now it looks as though the only way to kill a man is to take him about 200 miles from any physician, and run him through a whole perfecting press. If this thing continues, they will someday put some electricity into Pharaoh's daughter and engage her as a ballet dancer,

along with other tender pullets of her own age. Are you a Mormon? We are indebted to Elder Wilkins of Logan, Utah, first assistant General Tully Mukahai, Z-C-M-I, and Z-W of T-U-O-M and B Company. and president of the cash stake of Zion, constituting last in the quorum of 70s, for the late edition of the Mormon guide and handbook of the endowment house.

It is a very pleasant work to read, that makes the whole endowment scheme as clear to the average mind as though he had been through it personally. Pictures of the endowment Cameloon and ZCMI Bibb are given to show the novice exactly how they appear to the unclothed and unregenerate vision. The convert, it seems, first goes to the desk on entering and registers. Then she leaves her everyday clothes in the baggage room and gets a check for them. The next thing on the program is a bath, called the farewell bath,

because it is the last one taken by the endowment victim. The convert is then anointed with machine oil from a cow's horn, after which she is named something, supposed to be the celestial cognomen. Then comes the endowment robe, which is a combination arrangement that don't look pretty. After that, the apprentice to polygamy goes into an impromptu garden of Eden, where the apple business has gone through with. A thick-necked pathmaster from Logan takes the character of Adam, and a pale-haired livery stablekeeper from Salt Lake acts as the ruler of the universe. This is not making light of a sacred subject.

It is just the simple, plain, horrible truth. The creation of the world is thus gone through by these blatant priests of Latter-day Bogus sanctity, and the exercises are continued after this fashion through all their disgusting details. We have no time or inclination to enlarge upon them. Truth is sometimes nauseating, especially while discussing the Mormon problem.

If Brigham Young had lived, he would have helped out his church by a revelation that would have knocked the daylights out of polygamy. But as it is now, John Taylor, with his characteristic stubbornness, will not attend to it, his revelation machine being somewhat out of whack, as Oscar Wilde would say, so that the anointing with the so-called sanctified lubricant will continue till the United States sits down on the whole grand farce. End of Section 24. Section 25 of Bailed Hay by Bill Nye. This Libravox recording is in the public domain.

Caution A man is going about the streets of Laramie, claiming to be John the Baptist. He has light hair and chin whiskers, is stout built, and looks like a farmer. We desire to warn those of our friends. readers who may be inclined to trust him that he is not what he purports to be. We have taken great pains to look the matter up and find, as a result of our research, that John the Baptist

is dead. A blow to the government. At the October term of the district court, we shall resign the office of United States Commissioner for this judicial district, an office which we have held so long, and with such great credit to ourself. Faring that in the hurry and rush of other business, our contemporaries might overlook the matter, we have consented to mention, briefly, the fact that at the opening of court, Judge Blair will be called upon to accept the resignation

of one of our most tried and true officials, who has for so long held up this corner of the great national fabric. It has been our solemn duty to examine the greaser who sold liquor to our red brother, and filled him up with the deadly juice of the sour-mash tree. It has devolved upon us to singe the soft-eyed lad who stole baled hay from the reservation, and it also has been our glorious privilege to examine, in a preliminary manner, the absent-minded party who gathered unto himself the U.S. mule.

We have attempted to resign before but failed. One reason was that it was a novel proceeding in Wyoming, and no one seemed to know how to go to work at it. No one had ever resigned before, and the matter had to be hunted up, and the law thoroughly understood. The office is one of great profit, as we have said before. It brings wealth into the coffers of the U.S. Commissioner in a way that is well calculated to turn the head of most people. We have, however, succeeded in controlling ourselves, and have so far suppressed that beastly pride which wealth engenders. With a salary of $7.25 per annum and lead pencils, we have steadily refused to go to Europe, preferring rather to plot along here in the Wild West, although we may never see the beauties of a foreign shore. Official duty was at all times weighing upon our mind like a leaden load.

Often this stilly night we have been wakened by the oppressing thought that, perhaps at that moment on some distant reservation, some pale-faced villain might be selling valley tan to the gentle, untutored Indian brave, and it has tortured us and robbed us of slumber and joy. Now it is a relief to know that very soon we shall be free from this great responsibility. If an Indian gets drunk on the reservation or a time-honored government mule is stolen, we shall not be expected to get up in the night and administer swift and terrible justice to the offender. Old man with a torpid liver can get as drunk as he pleases on the reservation.

It does not come under our jurisdiction anymore. We can sleep now nights, while some other man peels his coat and acts as the United States' nemesis for this diocese. Sometime during the ensuing week, we will turn over the lead pencil and the blotting paper of the office to our successor. We leave the Indian temperance movement in his hands. The United States mule, kleptomaniac, also we leave with him. With a clear conscience and an unliquidated claim against the government for $9. $0.55, the earnings of the past two years, we turn over the office, knowing that although we have sacrificed our health, we have never evaded our duty, no matter how dangerous or disagreeable.

Yet we do not ask for any gold-headed cane as a mark of esteem on the part of the government. We have a watch that does very well for us, so that a testimonial consisting of a gold watch, costing $250 would be unnecessary. Any little trinket of that kind would, of course, show how ready the Department of Justice is to appreciate the work of an efficient officer, but we do not look for it, nor ask it. A thoroughly fumigated and disinfected conscience is all we want.

That is enough for us. Do not call out the band. Just let us retire from the office quietly and unostentatiously. As regards to the United States commission ship, we retire to private life. In the bosom of our family, we will forget the turbulent voyage of official life

through which we have passed, and as we monkey with the children around our hearthstone, we will shut our eyes to the official suffering that is going on all around us. Poisons and their antidotes. An amateur scientist sends us a long article written with a purple pencil on both sides of 12 sheets of legal cap and entitled Poisons and Their Antidotes

Will the soft-eyed mullethead please call and get it Also a lick over the eye with a hot stove leg and greatly oblige the weary throbbing brain that molds the scientific course of this paper Correspondence Cheyenne September 6, 1882 The party, consisting of Governor Hale and wife, Secretary Morgan and wife, President Slack of the Wyoming Press Association, and wife, Mr. Baird and myself, start out of Laramie about 8.30 last evening, and excursed along over the hill with some hesitation, arriving here this morning at four o'clock. The engine at first slipped an eccentric on Dale Creek Bridge, and we remain there some time, delayed but had. Then, as the night wore away and the gray dawn came down over the broad and mellow sweep of plane to the eastward, an engine ahead of us on a freight train blew off her monkey wrench,

and we were delayed in the neighborhood of Hazard several more hours. Hazard is a thriving town on the eastern slope in the mountains, with glorious possibilities for a town site. With gas and waterworks and a city dead of $200,000, Hazard will someday attract notice from the civilized world. If her vast deposits of sand and alkali could be brought to the notice of capital, Hazard would someday take rank with such cities as Wilcox and Thai City. Still, we had a good deal of fun. We heard that Whitelaw Reed, one of the New York Tribune, was on board,

and we sent the porter into the other car after him. Mr. Reed did not behave as we thought he would at first. first, we had presumed that he was cold and distant in his manners, but he is not. As soon as the first embarrassment of meeting us was over, he sailed right in and did all the talking himself, just as any cultivated gentleman would. He told us all about New York politics and how he was fighting the machine. At the same time, however, casually dropping a remark or two that led us to conclude that it was only one machine that didn't want another one to win. He is a tall, rather fine-looking man with a Grecian nose and long dark hair, which he does up

in tinfoil at night. I told him that I was grieved to know that his hired man had, inadvertently no doubt, referred to me in a manner that gave the American people an idea that I was a good deal bigger man than I really was. I asked him whether he wanted to apologize then and there, or be thrown over Dale Creek Bridge into the rip-snorting torrent below. He said he didn't believe that such a remark had been made, but if it had, he would go home and kill the man who wrote it, if that would paltice up my wounded heart. I said it would.

If he would just mail me the remains of the man who made the remark, not necessarily for publication, but as a guarantee of good faith, it would be all right. We talked all night and incurred the everlasting displeasure of a fat man from San Francisco. who told the porter he wanted his money back because he hadn't slept any all night. He seemed mad because we were having a little harmless conversation among ourselves, and when the clock and the steeple struck four, he rolled over in his birth, gave a large groan, and then got up and dressed.

Some people are so morbidly nervous that they cannot sleep on a train, and they naturally get cross and say ungentlemanly things. This man said some things while he was dressing and buttoning his suspenders that made my blood run cold. A man who has no better control of his temper than that ought not to travel at all. He just simply makes a North American side show of himself. Cheyenne is very greatly improved since I was here last. The building up of the corner opposite the Inner Ocean Hotel has greatly added to the attractiveness of the magic city. and other work is being done which enhances the beauty of the city very much.

Effie Warren is one of those most enterprising and thoroughly vigorous Western businessmen I ever knew. He is an anomaly, I might say. When I say he is an anomaly, I do not mean to reflect upon him in any way, though I do not know the meaning of the word. I simply mean that he is the chief grand rustle of a very rustling city. the Democratic Party needs. The candidate for county commissioner on the Democratic ticket of Sweetwater County keeps a drugstore, and when a little girl burned her arm against the cook stove and her father went after a package of

Russia salve, the genial bourbon gave her a box of rough-on rats. What the Democratic Party needs is not so much a new platform, but a carload of assorted brains that some female seminary had left over. A letter from Leadville. Leadville, Colorado, September 10th. This morning we rose at 4.30 and rode from Buena Vista to Leadville, arriving at the Clarendon for breakfast. Our party has been reduced in one way and another

until there are only eight here today. Secretary Morgan and family remained at Buena Vista on account of the illness of Missa Lily Morgan, who suffers severely from seasickness on the mountain railroads. One thing I have not mentioned, and an incident certainly worthy of note, was the sudden decision of our president E.A. Slack, on Friday, to remain at a little station on the South Parle Road, above Como, while the party continued on to Boisna Vista.

Mr. Slack is a man of iron will and sudden impulses, as all who know him are aware. He got in a car at the station referred to, and under the impression that it belonged to our train, remained in it until he got impatient about something and asked a man who came in with a broom why we were making such a stop at that station. The man said that this car had been sidetracked,

and the train had gone some time ago. Then Mr. Slack made the rash remark that he would remain there until the next train. He acts readily in an emergency, and he saw at a glance that the best thing thing that he could do would be to just stay there and examine the country until he could get the next train. He telegraphed us that the fare was so high on our train that he would see if he couldn't get better rates on the following day. In the meantime, he struck Superintendent Egbert's

special car and rode around over the country till morning, while our party took in Buena Vista. The city is but two years old, but very thriving, and has 2,500 to 3,000. population. At the depot, we were met by Agent Smith of the South Park Road, who had secured rooms for us at the Grand Park Hotel. He had also arranged for carriages to take us to Cottonwood Hot Springs, about six miles up Cottonwood Creek, where we took supper. We found a first-class 64-room hotel there, with hot baths and everything comfortable and neat. The proprietors are Monsieur Safford and Hartinstein, the latter having been a medical student under Dr. Agnew. After a good supper, we returned to Buena Vista, where the home military company under Captain

Johnson, led by the Buena Vista band, serenaded us. I responded in a brief but telling speech, which I would give here if I had not forgotten what it was. Some of the other members of the party wanted to make the speech, but I said no. It would not be right. I was representing the president, Mr. Slack, and wearing his overcoat, and therefore it would devolve on me to make the grand opening remarks. It was the greatest effort of my life,

and town lots and Buena Vista depreciated 50%. We found Ady Butler, formerly of Cheyenne, now at Buena Vista, also Tom Campbell, well known to Laramie people, doing well at the new city, and a prospective member of the Colorado legislature. George Marion, formerly of Laramie, is also at Buena Vista, engaged in the retail bridge trade. We also met Monsieur Leonard of the Times and Kennedy of the Herald, who treated us the whitest kind. Mr. Leonard and wife went with us yesterday over to Gunnison City.

Billy Butler, formerly of Laramie, is now at Buena Vista, successfully engaged in mining. Yesterday we put in the most happy day of the entire trip. Under the very kind and thoughtful guidance of Superintendent E. Wilbur of the Gunnison Division of the South Park Road, we went over the mountain to Gunnison and through the wonderful alpine tunnel, the highest railroad point in the United States, and with its approaches, 2,600 feet long. When you pass through the tunnel, the brakeman makes you close your window and take in your head. He does this for two reasons. First, you can't see anything if you look out.

And secondly, the company don't like to hire an extra man to go through the tunnel twice a day and wipe the remains of tourists off the walls. The newsboy told me that a tourist from Philadelphia once tried to wipe his nose on the alpine tunnel while the train was in motion. And when they got through into daylight and his companions told him to take in his head,

he couldn't do it. because it was half a mile behind examining the formation of the tunnel. Later it was found that the man was dead. The passengers said that they noticed a kind of crunching noise while going through the tunnel that sounded like a smashing of false teeth, but they paid no attention to it. Mr. Wilbur afterward told me that there had never been a passenger killed on the road, so I may have been misled by this newsboy.

Still, he didn't look like a boy who would trifle with a man's feelings in that way. However, I will leave the remainder of the Gunnison trip for another letter, as this is already too long. End of Section 25. Section 26 of Bailed Hay by Bill Nye. This Libravox recording is in the public domain. Table Manners of Children Young Children who have to wait till older people have eaten all their is. in the house, should not open the dining room door during the meal and ask the host if he is going

to eat all day. It makes the company feel ill at ease and lays up wrath in the parents' heart. Children should not appear displeased with the regular courses at dinner and then fill up on pie. Eat the less expensive food first and then organize a picnic in the preserves afterward. Do not close out the last of your soup by taking the plate in your mouth and pouring the liquid down your childish neck. You might spill it on your bosom, and it enlarges and distorts the mouth unnecessarily. When asked what part of the foul you prefer, do not say that you will take the part that goes over the fence last. This remark is very humorous, but the rising generation ought to originate some new table jokes that will be worthy of the age in which we live.

Children should early learn to use the fork and how to handle it. This knowledge can be acquired by allowing them to pry up the carpet tacks with this instrument and other little exercises, such as the parent mind may suggest. The child should be taught at once not to wave his bread around over the table while in conversation or to fill his mouth full of potatoes and then converse in a rich tone of voice with someone out in the yard. He might get his dinner down his trachea and cause his parents great anxiety. In picking up a plate or saucer filled with soup or with moist food, the child should be taught not to parboil his thumb in the contents of the dish

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

during the festivities and jump into the gravy. If a fly wades into your jelly up to his gambrels, do not mash him with your spoon before all the guests. His death is at all times depressing to those who are at dinner and retards digestion. Take the fly out carefully with what naturally adheres to his person and wipe him on the tablecloth. It will demonstrate your perfect command of yourself and afford much amusement for the company.

Do not stand up in your chair and try to spear a roll with your fork. It is not good manners to do so, and you might slip and bust your crust by so doing. Say thank you, and much obliged, and beg pardon, whenever you can work in these remarks, as it throws people off their guard and gives you an opportunity to getting your work on the pastry and other bric-a-brac near you at the time. What it meant. When Billy Root was a little boy, he was of a philosophical and investigating turn of mind and wanted to know almost everything. He also desired to know it immediately. He could not wait for time to develop his intellect, but he crowded things and wore out the patience of his father, a learned savant, who was president of a livery stable in Chicago.

One day, Billy ran across the grand hailing sign, which is generally represented as a tapeworm in the beak of the American eagle, on which is inscribed E. Pluribus Unum. Billy, of course, asked his father what Eploribus Unum meant. He wanted to gather in all the knowledge he could, so that when he came out west he could associate with some of our best men. I admire your strong appetite for knowledge, Billy, said Mr. Root. You have a morbid craving for cold hunks of ancient history and cyclopedia that does my soul good, and I am glad, too, that you come to your father to get accurate data for your collection.

That is right. Your father will always lay aside his work at any time and gorge your young mind with knowledge that will be as useful to you as a pharaoh cow. E. Pluribus Unum is an old Greek inscription that has been handed down from generating to generation, preserved in brine, and signifies that the tail goes with the hide. Voters in Utah This is the form of the oath required of voters in Utah under the new law. Territory of Utah, County of Salt Lake.

I, blank, being first duly sworn or affirmed, depose and say that I am over 21 years of age and have resided in the territory of Utah for six months, and in the precinct of blank one month immediately preceding the date thereof, and if a male, am a native-born or naturalized, as case may be, citizen of the United States and a taxpayer in this territory, or if a female, I am native-born or naturalized, or the widow or daughter, as the case may be, of a native-born or naturalized citizen of the United States.

And I do further solemnly swear or affirm that I am not a bigamist or polygamous, that I am not a violator of the laws of the United States prohibiting bigamy or polygamy, that I do not live or cohabit with more than one woman in the marriage relation, nor does any relation exist between me and any woman which has been entered into or continued in violation of said laws of the United States, prohibiting bigamy or polygamy, and if a woman, that I am not the wife of a polygamist, nor have I entered into any relation with any man in violation of the laws of the United States concerning polygamy or bigamy. Subscribed and sworn to before me this blank day of blank 1882. Registration Officer Blank Precinct

It will be seen that at the next election some of the brethren and sisters in Zion will be disenfranchised unless they do some pretty tall swearing. This is a terrible state of affairs, and the whole civilized world will feel badly to know that some of our people are going to be left out in the cold, cold world with no voice and no vote, just because they have been too zealous in the wedlock business. Matrimony is a glorious thing, but it can be overdone. A man can become a victim to the nuptial habit just the same as he can the opium habit. It then assumes entire control over him, and he has to be chained up. or paralyzed with a club, or he would marry all creation. This law, therefore, is salutary in its

operations. It is intended as a gentle check on those who have allowed themselves to become matrimonies maniacs. If we marry one of the daughters of a family and are happy over it, is that any reason why we should marry the other daughters and the old lady and the colored cook? We think not. It is natural for man to acquire railroads and promissory notes and houses and lands, but he should not undertake to acquire a corner of the wife trade. Hence we say the law is just and must be permitted to take its course, even though it may disenfranchise many of the most prominent pelicans of the Mormon church. Matrimony in Utah has been allowed to run riot, as it were. The cruel and relentless hand of this hydra-headed monster has been laid upon the youngest and the fairest of the Mormon people.

Matrimony has broken out there in a large family in some instances and has not even spared the widowed and toothless mother. It generally seeks its prey among the youngest and fairest, but in Utah it has not spared even the old in the infirm. Like a cruel epidemic, It has at first raked in the blooming maidens of Mormondom and at last spotted the lantern-jawed dregs of foreign female emigration. In one community, this great scourge entered and took all the women under 45 and then got into a block where there were 19 old women who didn't average a tooth apiece and swept them away like a cyclone.

People who do not know anything of this great evil can have no knowledge of it. Those who have not investigated this question have certainly failed to look into it. We cannot find out about this question without ascertaining something of it. Incongruity Our attention has been called recently to an illustration by Hopkins in a work called Forty Liars, in which a miner is represented as sliding down a mountain in a gold pan with a handle on it. Mr. Hopkins, no doubt, labors under a wrong impression of some kind, relative to the gold pan.

He seems to consider the gold pan and the frying pan is synonymous. In this he is wrong. The gold pan is a large low pan without a handle and made a very different metal from a skillet or frying pan. The artist should study as far as possible to imitate nature and not make a fool of himself. Some artists consider it funny to represent a farmer milking a cow on the wrong side.

They also show the same farmer later on, plowing with a plow that turns the furrow over to the left, another eccentricity of genius. There are many little things like this that the artist should look into more closely, so as not to bust up the eternal fitness of things. We presume that Mr. Hopkins would represent a gang of miners working a placer with giant powder and washing out smelting ore in a tin dipper. It's pretty hard, though, for an artist who never saw a mining camp to sit and watch a New York beer tournament and draw pictures of life in a mining camp, and people ought not to expect too much. End of Section 26. Section 27 of Bailed Hay by Bill Nye.

This LibreVox recording is in the public domain. Riding Down a Mountain Gunnison City is one of the peculiarities of a mining, boom. It spreads out and slops over the plain like a huge camp meeting, but without shape or beauty. The plains there are red and sandy. The trees are not nearer than the foothills, and the city, which claims 5,000 inhabitants, though 3,000 would, no doubt, be more accurate, is composed of a wide area of ground, with scattering houses that look lonely in the midst of the desolation. Mining in Colorado this season has not advanced with the wonderful,

impetus which characterized it in previous years. Wherever you go, you hear first one reason and then another why good mines are not being worked. There is trouble among the stockholders, a game of freeze-out, lack of capital to put in proper machinery, or excessive railroad freights, to pay which virtually paralyzes the reduction of ore owned by men too poor to erect the expensive works necessary to the realization of profit from the mines. Returning from Gunnison City now, you rise at a rate of over 200 feet to the mile, zigzagging up the almost perpendicular mountain, near the summit of which is the alpine tunnel. As you near the tunnel, there is a perpendicular and sometimes even a jutting wall above you,

hundreds of feet at your right, while far below you on your left is a yellow, streak, which at first you take to be an old mountain trail, but which you soon discover is the circuitous track over which you have just come. Near here, while the road was being built, a fine span of horses balked on the grade, and like all balky horses, proceeded to back off the road. The owner got out of the wagon and told them they could keep that thing up if they wanted to, but he could not endorse their policy. They kept backing off until the wagon went over the brink, and then there was a little scratching of loose stones,

the kaleidoscope of legs and hoofs, a little rush and rumble, and the world was wealthier by one less bulky team. The owner never went down to see where they went to, or how they lit. He was afraid they would not survive their injuries, so he did not go down there. Later, the carrion crows and turkey buzzes,

and turkey buzzards indicated where the refractory team had landed. And deep in the mountain gorge the white bones lie amid the wreck of a lumber wagon as monuments of equine folly. On Saturday evening we had the pleasure of riding down the dizzy grade from Hancock, a distance of 18 miles, at which time we descended a mile perpendicularly in a push-car, with Superintendent Wilbur as conductor and engineer. A push car is a plain, flat car, about as big as a dining table, with four wheels and nothing to propel it but gravity, and nothing to stop it but a sharpened piece of two-by-four scantling. Hancock is near the Alpine Tunnel, at the summit of the mountains, about 11,000 feet high. Secretary Morgan, Mrs. Morgan with their little daughter, Gertrude,

E.A. Slack of the son, Frank Clark of the leader, Superintendent Wilbur and ourself, constituted the party. At first, everybody was a little nervous with the accumulating velocity of the car, and the yawning abyss below us. But later, we got more accustomed to it, and the solemn grandeur of the green pine-covered canyons, the lofty snow-covered peaks, apparently so near us. and the rushing foaming torrent far below us were all we saw.

Like lightning, we rounded the sharp curves where the roads seemed to hang over instant destruction, and we held our breath as we thought that, like Dutch Charlie and other great men, only a piece of two-by-four scantling stood between us and death. Again and again, the abrupt curve loomed up ahead, and below us, while we flew along the narrow gauge, such a pace that we were almost sure the car would leave the track before it would round such a point, and each time the two-by-four went down on the drive-wheel with a pressure that sent up volumes of blue smoke. It was a wild, grand ride, so wild and grand, in fact, that even yet we wake up a night with a start

from a dream in which the same party is riding down that canyon and lightning speed, and Mr. Wilbur in a thoughtless moment has dropped his pine break overboard. Shades of Sam Patch, but wouldn't it scatter the average excurter over Southern Colorado if such a thing should happen someday? Why the woods would be full of them, and for years to come, the prospector along Chalk Creek Canyon would find pyrites of editorial poverty

and indications of collar buttons and fragments of Archimedian levers and other mementos of the great editorial Hegira of 1882. Corraldom. Last May, Sheriff Boswell received a postal card from a man up near Fort McKinney, describing a pair of horses that had just been stolen and asking that Mr. Boswell would keep his eye peeled for the thief and arrest him on site. Last week, the sheriff discovered the identical team with color, brands, and everything to correspond. He told the driver that he was,

have to turn over that team and come along to the Bastille. The man Stalely protested his innocence and claimed that he owned the team. But Boswell laughed him to scorn and said that he often got such games of talk as that when he arrested horse thieves. Just as they were going down into the damp corridors, Judge Blair met the criminal, recognized him at once, and called him by name. It seems that he was the man who had originally written Boswell, and having found his horses, had neglected to inform him. Thus, when he came to town

four months afterward, he got snatched. You not only have to call the officer's attention to a larceny in this country, but it is absolutely necessary that you call off the sleuth-hound of eternal justice when you have found the property, or you will be gathered in unless you can identify yourself. Boswell's initials are NK, and now the boys call him Nemesis K Boswell. Let bald-headed men rejoice. The London Lancet upsets the popular theory that abundant hair is a sign of bodily or mental strength. The fact is, it says, that notwithstanding the Samson precedent, the Chinese who are the most enduring of all races, are mostly bald.

Men as to the supposition that long and thick hair is a sign of intellectuality, all antiquity, all madhouses, and all common observation are against it. The easily wheedled Esau was hairy, the mighty Caesar was bald. Long-haired men are generally weak and fanatical, and men with scant hair are the philosophers and soldiers and statesmen of the world. Oscar Wilde, Theodore Tilton, and others of the long-haired fraternity should read these statements with soulful and heart-earning delight. Will the editor of the Lancet please step over to the saloon opposite the royal palace

and take something at our expense? Pard, we shake with you. Count us in also. Reckon us, along with Caesar and Elijah and Aristotle, please. Though young, we can show more polished intellect. to the superficial foot than many who have lived longer than we have. Will the editor of the Lancet please put our name on his list of subscribers and send the bill to us? What we want is a good live paper that knows something and isn't afraid to say it. Firmness.

We were pained to see a large mule brought into town yesterday with his side worn away until it looked very thin. It looked as though the pensive mule had lain down to think over. over his past life, and being in the company of seven other able-bodied mules, all of whom were attached to a government freight wagon going down a mountain, this particular animal, while wrapped in a brown study, had been pooled several miles with so much unction, as it were, that when the train stopped, it was found that this large and highly accomplished mule had worn his side off so thin that you could see his inmost thoughts. we saw him, he looked as though if he had his life to live over again, he would select a different

time to ponder over his previous history. Sometimes a mule's firmness causes his teetotal and everlasting overthrow. Firmness is a good thing in its place, but we should early learn that to be firm, we need not stand up against a cyclone till our eternal economy is blown into the tops of the neighboring trees. Moral courage is a good thing. but it is useless unless you have a liver to go along with it. Sometimes a man is required to lay down his life or his principles, but the cases where he is expected to lay down his digester on the altar of his belief are comparatively seldom.

We may often learn a valuable lesson from the stubborn mule and guard against the too protuberant use of our own ideas in opposition to other powers against which it is useless to contend. It may be wrong for giant powder to blow the top of a man's head off without cause, but repeated contests have proved that even when giant powder is in the wrong, it is eventually victorious. Let us, therefore, while reasonably fixed in our purpose, avoid the display of a degree of firmness which will scatter us around over two school districts,

and confuse the corner in his inquest. Put in a sump The president of the North Park and Vendalia Mining Company not long ago got a letter from the superintendent which closed by saying that everything was working splendidly. The ore body was increasing and the quality and richness of the rock improving with every foot. He also added that he had constructed a sump in the mine. The president, having spent most of his life in military and political affairs, had never found it necessary to use the sump,

and so he didn't know, to a dead moral certainty, what it was that the superintendent had put in. He hoped, however, that the expense would not cripple the company, and that by handling it carefully, they might escape damage from an explosion of the sump at an unlooked-for time. He proceeded, however, to examine the unabridged, and found that it meant a cistern, which is constructed at the bottom of a mott.

for the purpose of collecting the water, and from which it is pumped. The president, having posted himself, concluded to go and have a little conversation with one of the directors, who was a druggist in the city, and see if he knew the nature of a sump. The president, in answer to the questions of the director relative to the latest news from the mine, said that it was looking better all the time, and that the superintendent had constructed a sump. The director never blinked his eye. He acted like a man who has lived on sumps all his life. Do you know what a sump is? asked the president. Why, of course, anybody knows what a sump is. It's a place where they collect water from a mine and pump it from

to free the mine from water. A man who don't know what a sump is, don't know his business. That's all I got to say. The president looked hurt about something. He hadn't looked for the to assume just exactly the shape that it had. Finally, he said, Well, you needn't point your withering sarcasm in me. I know what a sump is. I just wanted to see whether a man who had been in the pill business all his life knew what a sump was.

I knew you claimed to know almost everything, but I didn't believe you was up on that word. Now, if it's a proper question, I'd like to know just how long you have been so all fired fluent about mining terms. Then the director said that there was no use in putting on airs and swelling up with pride over a little thing like that. He, for one, didn't propose to crow over other men who had not had the advantages that he had, and he would be frank with the president, and admit that an hour ago he didn't know the difference between a sump and a surrecher air-eye.

It seems that a passenger who had come in on the same coach that brought in the superintendent's letter had casually dropped the remark to the director that Smith had put a sump in the endomile, and the director had lit out for a dictionary without loss of time, so that when the two great miners got together, they were both proud and confident. Each was proud because he knew what a sump was, and confident that the other one didn't know. End of Section 27. Section 28 of Bailed Hay by Bill 9. This Libravox recording is in the public domain. Mining as a science

The study of mining as a science is one which brings with it a quiet joy, which the novice knows nothing of. In Morrison's mining rights, we find the following. If all classes of load deposits are to be regarded as legally identical, it follows that where a vein is pinched for a considerable distance, it is lost to the owner. If its apex is found in the slide, it cannot be located as a load.

The distinction which would relieve these points would be to allow the dip to such loads only as have a perpendicular base and are not on the nature of stratographical deposits. All of the inconsistencies apparent with the previous paragraph are the sequence to any other ruling. If it be alleged that such holdings are not applicable to Fisher Vaines, at once a distinction is made between the two classes of veins

in their consideration under the act. And if a single distinction in their legal status be admitted, no reason can be alleged against further distinctions with reference to their essential points at difference. Now, few who have not toiled over the long and wearisome works upon mining as a legal branch of human knowledge would care a cold dead clam whether such loads as have perpendicular bases or which have had stratigraphical deposits,

are to be allowed under the law in relation to pinched out or intersecting baines. But to the student, whose whole life is wrapped up in the investigation of this beautiful mystery, these logical sequences break upon his mind with a beautiful effulgence that fills him with unstratified and purely igneous or nomicatious joy. Reading farther in the thrilling work, above referred to, we find this little garland of fragrant literary woodviolet. Another point to be guarded against in the conveyance of a segregated portion of a claim on a fisher vein is that a line drawn at right angles to the sidelines at the surface,

and which is intended as the dividing line between the part retained and the parts sold, may, when carried vertically downward, cut off the vein on its dip in such a way as to divide it, for instance, at the surface. It begins at the west end of discovery shaft. It may leave the bottom of such shaft entirely in the west fraction of the load within a comparatively few feet of sinking. Such result, or a similar result, will invariably occur where the vein has a dip, unless the end lines are at exact right angle to the strike of the vein. Now, however, supposing that for the sake of argument the above is true,

but in addition thereto a segregation of non-metallic vertically heterogeneous quartz, site in nonconformity to presuppose notions of horizontal deposits of mineral in place should be agotized and truncated with diverging lines meeting at the point of intersection and disappearing with the pinched veins or departing from known proximity in company with the dividends. We have then to consider whether a wind's coming in at this juncture and pinching out the assessments would thereby invalidate tertiary flux and thereby in the light of close legal examination of the slide, bar out the placer or riparian rights of contesting parties, or, if so, why in thunder should it not? Or at least, what can be done about it in case of same or totally different set of

surrounding circumstances should or should not take place. Drawbacks of royalty It seems from our late dispatches that the prevailing assassin has made his appearance in England and has fired at her royal tallness, the queen. The dispatch does not say why the man fired at Victoria, but the chances are that she at some time in a careless moment refused him the appointment of bookkeeper to the queen's livery stable extraordinary, or neglected to confirm his nomination to the position as usher plenipotentiary to the royal bathroom and knight of the queen's cuspidor.

Royalty gets it in the nose every day or two, and yet after the family has hung on to the salary for several centuries, it does not occur to the average king that he could strike a job as humorist on some London paper and about the same salary and with none of the annoyances. The most of those people who have worn a great heavy cast-iron crown with diamonds on it as big as a peanut have become so attached to it that they can't swear off in a moment. We do not see where the orchestra comes in on a thing like that. The average American would rather sell mining stock and get wealthy without a tail on his name

and his hair all worn off with a crown two sizes too large for him than to be king of the cannibal islands with a missionary baby on toast twice a day. English humor The London Spectator says that The Humor of the United States, if closely examine, will be found to depend in a great measure on the ascendancy which the principle of utility has gained over the imagination of a rather imaginative people. The humor of England, if closely examined, will be found just about ready to drop over the picket fence into the arena, but never quite making connections. If we scan the English literary horizon, we will find the humorist up a tall tree, depending,

from a sharp knot thereof by the slack of his overalls. He is just about out of sight at the time you look in that direction. He always has a man working in his place, however. The man who works in his place is just paring down the half-soul and newly pegging a joke that has recently been sent in by the foreman for repairs. About the autopsy. We have been carefully reading and investigating the report of Dr. Lamb, relative to the anatomical condition of the latent remnants of Charles J. Guto, and also a partial

or minority report furnished by the other two doctors, who got it on their ear at the time of the autopsy. We are permitted to print the fragment of a private letter addressed personally to the editor from one of these gentlemen whose name we are not permitted to use. He says, We found the late lamented, and after looking him over thoroughly, and removing what works he had inside of him, agreed almost at once that he was dead. This was the only point upon which we agreed. Shortly after we began to remove the internal economy of the deceased, some little discussion arose between Doc Lamb and myself about the extravasation of blood in the right pectoralis and the peculiar position of the dew flicker on the dome of the diaphragm. I made a suggestion about the causes that had led to this, stating in my opinion the paracarditis had crossed the median line and congested the doodad. He said it was no such thing in that I didn't know the difference between a Malpigian capsule and an abdominal viscera.

That insulted me, but I held my temper going on with my work removing the gallbladder and other things, as though nothing had been said. By and by, Lamb said I'd better quit fooling with the pancreas and come and help him. Then he advanced a tom-full theory about an adhesion of the duramatter and the jib-boom or some medical rot or other, and I told him that I thought he was wrong, and I didn't believe deceased had any duramatter. Lamb flared up then and struck in me with a bloody towel. I then grabbed a fragment of liver and pasted him in the nose. I don't allow any sawbone upstart to impose on me if I know it. He then called me a very opprobrious epithet,

indeed, and struck me in the eye with a kidney. Then the fight became disgraceful, and by the time we got through, the late lamented was considerably scattered. Pier lay a second-hand lobe of liver, while over there was the apex of a lung hanging on a gas fixture. It was a pretty lively scrimmage and made quite a feeling between us.

I still think, however, that I was right in standing up for my theory, and when an old pelican like Lamb thinks he can scare me into St. Bidus dance, he bulls himself. The fact is, he don't know a gallbladder from the gout, and he couldn't tell a lobulated tumor from the side of a house. I told him so, too, while I was putting some court plaster on my nose after he pasted me with an old prison bedstead. Lamb would get along better with me if he would curb his violent temper. I guess he thought so, too, when I broke his false teeth and jammed them so far back in his esophagus that he got blue in the face. I never allow a second-hand horse doctor to impose on me if I know it, and it is time Doc Lamb took a grand aberrassent tumble to himself.

A few calm words. A London paper tells how when a certain dean of Chester was all ready to perform a marriage between persons of high standing, the bride was very late. When she reached the altar, to the question, wilt thou take this man? She replied in most distinct tones, I will not. On retiring with the dean to the vestry, she explained that her late arrival was not her fault,

and that the bridegroom had accosted her on her arrival at the church with, God damn you, if this is the way you begin, you'll find it to your cost, when you're my wife. That was no way to open up a honeymoon. They are not doing that way recently, and in the Bon Ton and Disabilselect and Et cetera society of the more metropolitan cities,

such a remark would at once be considered as Utre and Corpus Christi. The groom should stop and consider that sometimes the most annoying accidents occur to a young lady in dressing. Suppose, for instance, that in stooping over to button her shoe, she breaks a spoke in her corset and asks to send it to the blacksmith's shop. Do you think that the groom is justified in kicking over the altar and dragging his a fiancé up the aisle by the hair of the head? We would rather suggest that he would not.

There are other distressing accidents which may happen at such a time to the prospective bride, but we forbear to enter into the harrowing details. No man with the finer feelings of a gentleman will ever knock his new one. wife down in the church and tramp on her, until he knows to a reasonable degree of a certainty that he is right. It may be annoying, of course, to the groom to stand and look out of the window for half an hour, while the bride is allaying the hemorrhage of a pimple on her nose with a powder puff. But then, great hemlock, if a man can't endure that and smile, how will he behave when the clothes line falls down and the baby gets a kernel of corn up its nose?

These are questions which naturally occur to the candid and thinking mind and command our attention. The groom, who would swear at his wife for being a few minutes late at the altar, would kill her and throw her stiffened remains over into the sheep corral if she allowed the twins to eat crackers in his bed and scatter the crumbs over his couch. Let us look these matters calmly in the face and not allow ourselves to drift the way into space. End of Section 28. Section 29 of Bailed Hay by Bill Nye. This Liebervox recording is in the public domain.

Don't like our style. Oscar Wilde closes his remarks about America thus. But it is in the decay of manners that the thoughtful and well-bred American has cause for regret. I have repeatedly said this, but I am told in reply, We are still a young country, and you must not be too severe upon us. Yes, I answer, but when your country was still younger, its manners were better. They have never been equal sense to what they were in Washington's time, a man whose manners were irreproachable. I believe a most serious problem for the American people to consider is the cultivation of better manners among its people.

It is the most noticeable, the most painful defect in American civilization. Yes, Oscar, you are in a measure correct. Our manners are a little decayed. So also were the eggs with which you were greeted in some of our cities. That may have given you a wrong impression as to our manners and their state of health. We just want to straighten out any little error of judgment on your part. as to American customs, and to oppress upon your mind the fact that the decayed article which, in most cases, you considered our miasma impregnated etiquette, was what is known among savants

as decayed cabbage. Mr. T. Wilson The gentleman above referred to has accomplished one of the most remarkable feats known to modern science. Though uneducated and perhaps inexperienced, he is attracted toward himself the notice of the world. Though he was once a poor boy, unnoticed and unknown, he has risen to the proud eminence from which, with pride, and covered with glory and sore places, he may survey the civilized world. He entered upon an argument with Mr. Sullivan, knowing the mental strength and powers of his adversary, and yet he never flinched. He stood up before his powerful antagonist and acquired a national reputation and a large octagonal breadth of black and blue intellect, which are the envy and

admiration of 50 million people. This should be a convincing argument to our growing youth of the possibilities in store for the earnest, untiring and enthusiastic thumper. It is an example of the wonderful triumph of mind over matter. It shows how certain intellectual developments may be acquired almost instantaneously. It demonstrate at once that phrenological protuberances may be grown more rapidly and more spontaneously than the scientist has ever been willing to admit. A few weeks ago, Tug Wilson was as obscure as the Greenback Party. Now he is known from ocean to ocean, and his fame is as universal as is that of Dr. Tanner, the starvation prima donna of the world.

Few men have the intellectual stamina to withstand the strain of such an argument as he did, but he left the arena with a collection of knobs in Arnica clustering around his brow, which he justly merited, and the world will not grudge him his meager acquisition. It was due to his own exertions and his own prowess, and there is no American so mean as to rest it from him. Thousands of our own boys, who today are spearing frogs or bathing in the rivers of their native land

and parading on the shingly beach with no clothes on to speak of, are left to choose between such a career of usefulness and greatness of brow and the humdrum life of a bilious student and pale, sad congressman. Will you rise to the proud pinnacle of fame as a pugilist boys, or will you plug along as a sorrowing, overworked statesman? Now, in the springtime of your lives, choose between the two and abide the consequences. Etiquette of the napkin It has been stated, and very truly too, that the law of the napkin is but vaguely understood. It may be said, however, on the start, that custom and good breeding have uttered the decree

that it is in poor taste to put the napkin in the pocket and carry it away. The rule of etiquette is becoming more and more thoroughly established that the napkin should be left at the house of the host or hostess after dinner. There has been a good deal of discussion also upon the matter of folding the napkin after dinner, and whether it should be so disposed of or negligently tossed into the gravy boat. If, however, it can be folded easily, and without attracting too much attention and prolonging the session for several hours, it should be so arranged and placed beside the plate, where it may be easily found by the hostess, and returned to her neighbor from whom she borrowed it for the occasion.

If, however, the lady of the house is not doing her own work, a napkin may be carefully jammed into a globular wad and fired under the table to convey the idea of utter recklessness and pampered abandon. The use of the finger bowl is also a subject of much importance to the bontone guest who gorges himself at the expense of his friends. The custom of drinking out of the finger bowl, though not entirely obsolete, has been limited to the extent that good breeding does not now permit the guest to quaff the water from his finger bowl, unless he does so prior to using it as a finger bowl.

Thus it will be seen that social customs are slowly but surely cutting down and circumscribing the rights and privileges of the masses. At the Court of Eugenie, the customs of the table were very rigid, and the most prominent guest of H.R.H. was liable to, to get the G.B. if he spread his napkin on his lap and cut his egg in two with a carving knife. The custom was that the napkin should be hung on one knee, and the egg busted at the big end and scooped out with a spoon. A prominent American at her table one day, in an unguarded moment, shattered the shell of a soft-boiled egg with his knife, and while prying it apart,

both thumbs were erroneously jammed into the true inwardness of the fruit with so much momentum that the juice took him in the eye, thus blinding him and maddening him to such a degree that he got up and threw the remnants into the bosom of the hired man Plenipotentiary, who stood near the table, scratching his ear with a tray. As may readily be supposed, there was a painful interim during which it was hard to tell for five or six minutes, whether the prominent American or the hired man would come out on top. But at last the American, with the egg in his eye, got the ear of the high-priced hired man in among his back teeth,

and the honor of our beloved flag was vindicated. An infernal machine. A singular thing occurred in England the other day, and in view of its truth, and also in order that the American side of the affair may be shown in the correct light, We give the facts as they occurred, having obtained our information directly from the parties who were implicated in the affair. We hesitate to take hold of the subject, but our duty to the American people demands some action, and we do not falter. During the past winter, there arrived in London a suspicious-looking metallic box with a peculiar thumb-screw or button on top.

It was sent by mail and was addressed to a prominent landowner. This gentleman had been on the watch for some explosive machine for some time, and when it was brought to him, he had once turned it over to the authorities for investigation. The police force, detective force, and chemists were called in, and requested to ascertain the nature of the infernal machine, and, if possible, where it came from. Experts examined the box, and, with the aid of a court attached to the suspicious button on top,

pulled open the metallic box without explosion. The substance contained therein was of a dark color with a strong smell of ammonia. All kinds of tests were made by the experts in order to ascertain of what kind of combustible it was composed. The odor was carefully noted, as well as the taste, and then there was a careful chemical analysis made, which was barren of result. In the midst of the General alarm, the London papers with large scareheads and astonishers gave full and elaborate reports of the attempt upon the life of a prominent man, through the agency of a new and very peculiar machine, loaded with an explosive of which scientists could gain no knowledge or information whatever. It looked as though the assassin was far in advance of science, or at least

of professional chemists, and the matter was about to be given up in despair, when the following letter arrived from San Antonio, Texas, United States of America. My dear sir, I sent you by a recent mail, prepaid, a small metallic box of bat guano from the caves of Texas for analysis and experiment, pleasing knowledge receipt of same. Morton Freewin Then the experts went home They felt as though science had done all it could in this case And they needed rest and perfect calm and change of scene

They hadn't seen their families for some time And they wanted to go home and get acquainted with their wives They didn't ask for any pay for their services They just said it was in the interest of science And they couldn't have the heart to charge anything for it One chemist started off without his umbrella and never went back after it. When he got home, he was troubled with nausea, and they had to feed him on crack or toast for several weeks. We tell this incident simply to vindicate America.

The London papers did not give all the proceedings, and we feel it our duty to place the United States upon a square footing with England in this matter. Of course, it is a little tough on the experts, but when we know it, we know it is a lot of the United States, but when we know it, our duty to our magnificent country and the land that gave us birth, there is no earthly power we fear, no terrestrial snoozer who can deter us from its performance. End of Section 29. Section 30 of Bailed Hay by Bill Nye. This Libravox recording is in the public domain. The codfish

This tropical bird barely seldom wings its way so far west as Wyoming. loves the sea breezes and humid atmosphere of the Atlantic Ocean, and when isolated in this mountain climb, pines for his native home. The codfish cannot sing, but is prized for his beautiful plumage and seductive odor. The codfish of commerce is devoid of digestive apparatus, and is more or less permeated with salt. Codfish on toast is not as expensive as quail on toast. The codfish ball is made of the shadowyed. remains of the adult codfish mixed with the tropical Irish potato of commerce. The codfish has a great wealth of glad, unfettered smile. When he laughs at anything,

he has that same wide waist of mirth and back teeth that Mr. Talmadge has. The Wyoming codfish is generally dead. Death in most cases is a result of exposure and loss of appetite. No one can look at the codfish of commerce and not shed a tear. Far from home, with his system filled with salt, while his eternal economy is gone. There is an air of sadness and homesickness and briny hopelessness about him that no one can see unmoved. It is in our home life, however, that the codfish makes himself felt and remembered. When he enters our household, We feel his all-pervading presence, like the perfume of wood violets or the seductive odor of a dead mouse in the piano. Friends may visit us and go away to be forgotten with the advent of a new face,

but the cold, calm, silent corpse of the codfish cannot be forgotten. Its chastened influence permeates the entire ranch. It steals into the parlor like an unbidden guest and flavors the car. costly curtains and the high-priced lamberkins. It enters the dark closet and dallys lovingly with your swallow-tail coat. It goes into your sleeping apartment and makes its home in your glove box and your handkerchief case.

That is why we say that it is a solemn thing to take the life of a codfish. We would not do it. We would pass him by a thousand times, no matter how ferocious he might be, rather than take his life and have our once-happy home haunted forever by his unholy presence. His aged mother. An exchange says that the James Boys had a morose and ugly disposition.

This may be regarded as authentic. The James Boys were not only morose, but they were at times irritable and even boorish. Some of their acts would seem to savor of the most coarse and rome. root of impulses. Jesse James at different times killed over 50 men. This would show that his disposition must have been soured by some great sorrow. A person who fills the New Jerusalem with people, or kills a majority of the Republican voters of a precinct, or the entire board of directors of a national bank, or who remorselessly kills all the first-class passengers on a through train, just because he feels crotchety and disagreeable must be morose and sullen in his disposition.

No man, who is healthy and full of animal spirits, could massacre the able-bodied voters of a whole village, unless he fell cross and taciturn naturally. There should have been a post-mortem examination of Mr. James to determine what was the matter with him. We were in favor of a post-mortem examination of Mr. James. James 12 years ago, but there seemed to be a feeling of reluctance on the part of the authorities about holding it. No one seemed to doubt the propriety of such a movement, but there was a kind of vague hesitation by the proper officials on account of his mother. There has been a vast amount of thoughtfulness manifested by the Missouri people on behalf of Jesse's mother. For nearly 20 years,

they have put off the post-mortem examination of Mr. James because they knew. that his mother would feel wretched and gloomy when she saw her son with his vitals in one market basket and his vertebrae in another. The American people hate like sin to step in between a mother and her child and create unpleasant sensations. Mr. Pinkerton was the most considerate. At first he said he would hold an autopsy on Mr. James right away, but it consumed so much time holding autopsies on his detectives that he postponed Jesse's postmortem for a long time. He also hoped that after the lapse of years, maybe,

Mr. James would become enfeebled so that he could steal up behind him some night and stun him with a Chicago pie. But Jesse seemed vigorous up to a late date, and out of respect for his aged mother, the Chicago sleuth-hounds of justice have spared him. Detectives are sometimes considered hard-hearted and unloving in their natures, but this is not the case. Very few of them can bear to witness the shedding of blood,

especially their own blood. Sometimes they find it necessary to kill a man in order to restore peace to the country, but they very rarely kill a man like James. This is partly due to the fact that they hate the country, cut a man like that right down before he has a chance to repent. They are prone to give him probation and yet another chance to turn. Still, there are lots of mean, harsh unthinking people who do not give the detectives credit for this. Business letters.

All business letters, as a rule, demand some kind of an answer, especially those containing money. To neglect the reply to a letter is an insult, unless the letter feels. failed to contain a stamp. In your reply, first acknowledge the receipt of the letter, then the receipt of the money, whatever it is. Letters asking for money or the payment of a bill may be postponed from time to time, if necessary. No man should reply to such a letter while angry.

If the amount is small and you are moderately hot, wait two days. If the sum is quite large and you are tempted to write it, an insulting letter, wait two weeks, or until you have thoroughly cooled down. Business letters should be written on plain, neat paper, with your name and business neatly printed at the top by the boomerang job printer. Letters from railroad companies, referring to important improvements, etc., etc., should contain pass, not for publication, but as a guarantee of good faith. Need and beautiful penmanship is very desired. You. Need and beautiful penmanship is very desirable in business correspondence, but it is most important that you should not spell

God with a little G or codfish with a K. Ornamental penmanship is good, but it will not take the cuss off if you don't know how to spell. Read your letter over carefully after you have written it, if you can. If not, send it with an apology about the rush of business. In ordering goods, State whether you will remit soon or whether the account should be placed in the refrigerator. Danger of Gardening A Colorado Book Agent writes us about as follows. For some time past, it has been my desire to ensure my life for the benefit of my family, but I knew the public sentiment so well that I feared it could not be done.

I knew that there was a deep and bitter enmity against book agents, which I found had pervaded the insurance world to such an extent that I would be unable to obtain insurance at a reasonable premium. The popular belief is that book agents are shot on site and their mangled bodies thrown into the tall grass or fed to the coyotes. I found, however, that I could get my life insured for $2,000 by paying a premium of $12 per year as a book agent. This was far better than anything I had ever.

looked for. The question arose as to whether I worked in my garden or not, and I was forced to admit that I did. It ought to reduce the premium for a man works in his garden, and thus, by short periods of vigorous exercise, prolongs his life. But it don't seem to be that way. They charged me an additional three dollars on the premium, because I toiled a little among my pet rudabagas. I don't know what the theory is about this matter. Perhaps the company labors under the impression that a thousand-legged worm might crawl into my ear and kill me, or a purple-top turnip might explode and knock my brains out. Of course, in the midst of life, we are in death,

but I always used to think I was safer mashing my squash bugs and hoeing my blue-eyed beans than when I was on the road dodging bulldogs and selling books. Perhaps some amateur gardener in a careless moment, at some time or other, has been stabbed in the diaphragm by a murderous radish, or a watermelon may have stolen up to some man in years gone by, and brained him with part of a picket fence. There must be statistics somewhere by which the insurance companies have arrived at this high rate on gardeners.

If you know anything of this matter, I wish you would write me. For if hoeing sweet corn and cultivating string beans Is going to sock me into an early grave I want to know it End of Section 30 Recording by Scotty Smith End of Bailed Hay A Dryer Book than Walt Whitman's Leaves a Grass

By Bill Nye