 18. 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 one dollar per bottle we could realize a living profit and still do mankind a 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 C 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 electrotype 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 tansy 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 pooling 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 in 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 gaily through the congressional record, pleased with its more attractive features—these, its eyes and nose—little wrecking that sterling pea 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 cuspidore 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 contimately. We jeer at the footstore 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-scab 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, a non 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 stages of hog cholera decked their pages. Rich oil paintings of gaudy tobacco worms chase each other from preface to errata. Magnificent cromos 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 oleo margarine 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 pea 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 hense. 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 shadowy. 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 apparent ennui 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 comets. Professor Louis 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 Comet of 1846, which separated into two parts. Applications have been made to Mr. H. H. Warner by parties who have noticed these cometary offshoots claiming the $200 prize for each one of them, whether the great comet will continue to produce a brood of smaller comets remains to be seen. It is certainly to be hoped 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 comets 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 comets 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 deseret 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 deseret 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 deseret 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. Ball Shazer to advertise his blue-eyed, forget-me-not perfume, Dr. Ball Shazer's red tar worm buster, and Dr. Ball Shazer's bailed brain food and taller rockin' 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 EOWTF weekly. The red tar worm buster was to go in non-parile leaded, 192i.t.thfth98weow3mo, and repeat. And the bailed brain food and taller rockin' 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 9 T F, set in reading type 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. 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 taller rockin' 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 ball-shazer'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 I'd forget me not perfume LAPR 9 D and W L Y D E O D and W L Y 10 colon 2 T E O W T F the bed tar worm buster D O L 3 4 T D A 2 2 T F APR L O dash L Y D O L 3 T F and the brain food and the taller rockin' dry cod liver oil M C H L 8 star L Y J U N 4 D T F and D A N G L 8 at G F T arrow star ampersand S Y L D dash S 3 0 T F ampersand R S V P E O D dollar sign but he wouldn't do it. I displayed his ad top of column adjoining humorous column with three-line readers and astonishers without advertising marks or signs according to copy and instructions to foreman all omissions or errors to be subject to fine and imprisonment. They were to go PDQ dollar sign E O Y star O C T P ampersand S star and they were to be double-edded and headed with italic caps. 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 lower case slugs with guarantee of good faith and rough-on rats would not die in the house. Use Pinkham's sozadont for itching freckles, bunions and croup. It saved my life. But good woman, why are you billious with emquads and solid minion? Eureka jumbo baking powder will not crack or fade in any climate sent on three months' trial in leaded brevier quans 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 E O D S Y L D ampersand W star exclamation star 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 conversation. End of Section 18. Section 19 of Bailed Hay by Bill Nye. This LibriVox 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 coattail pocket. Those who carry revolvers generally die by the revolver, and he who agitates the sick shooter by the sick 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 alternately 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. Eternity's parquet is filled with people who got there by the self-caulking 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 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 five hundred dollars apiece, 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 oil's varnishes, resins, tar, oyster soup, current jelly, and other selections from the bill of fare, use benzene, soap, and chloroform cautiously with white-wash 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 twenty 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 yolk of the egg may be beaten or placed on the shirt bosom according to the 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. Roll in a cloth to dry. Do not wring, 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, bathe the limb in a solution of tepid water and tincture of sweet oil. Then apply a strip of quart plaster and put the piano out on the lawn for the children to play horse with. Wooling 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-nose scientist from away up the creek asks, What is Literature? Cast your eyes over these logic-embued columns you sundried 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 Snute of a Shattered Venus 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 near it than Buena Vista, and no one is going to do business at Buena Vista and go up to Nathrop on a hand-car for his meals. It is a case where a smart alec 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 lime barrels and hodds 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, heir apparent to the universe, always keeps for those who go to him with humility. There is no Senagambian with a whisk broom waiting to brush your clothes off your back and leave you a raid and a birthmark and the earache at twenty-five 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 freckled 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 revelry. There's no use talking. It's tough. A very trifling little incident, as did that of many other men who are now great. Spotted tale had never won much distinction up to that time, except as the owner of an appetite, in the presence of which his tribe 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 Big Mouth, 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 Big Mouth, and he went back to the camp where he found Spotted Tale eating a mule that had died of inflammatory rheumatism. Big Mouth tearfully told the wild epicure of the way he had been treated, and asked for a council of war. Spott 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. Big Mouth then got irritated and told Spotted Tale that his remarks showed that he was standing in with the aggressor, and was no friend to his people. Spotted Tale 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. Big Mouth plum in two just between the umbilicus and the watch-pocket. As the reader who is familiar with anatomy has already surmised, Big Mouth died from the effects of this wound, and Spotted Tale 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 WOTE. I did so, for I hate to lose the divine right of suffrage, even when I'm a good way from home. When Election Day came around, I went over to the poles 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 treated me roughly, and told me to go there myself, and that I had already voted once and couldn't do it any more. 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. McGinnis 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 rest yourself. Don't get excited and talk so loud. I know Diaz was out last night with the buys, and he didn't feel like getting up early to go to the polls, so I got one of the buys to go over and vote your name. That's all right. Come here and have something. I saw at a glance that 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 Hammond'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, that 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 aphids, whatever, and although I'm sixty-five 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 night. 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, a rather to be chosen than a blind lead, and an easy-running cerebellum, then a stone quarry with a silent but firm skunk in it. Oh, no! The telephone line between Cheyenne and Laramy 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 Cheyenneese. 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 son 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 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 prince 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. 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 vouch safes to us the time when a doctor's life will be in less danger than that of his patient. An Unclouded Welcome NP 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 cold scuttles, there is something about it that makes a man want to go out in the woodshed and sleep on the ice chest. The Pillowsham Holder Some enemy of mankind has recently invented an infernal machine known as the Pillowsham 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 of the house. The man of the house generally gets the pillow shams down under his feet when he undresses and polishes off his cunning little toes on the lace poultice on which his wife prides herself. This Pillowsham 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 too 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 Pillowsham 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 perspective faculties in the middle of a sound slumber when you are dreaming of Elysium and high-priced parries and such things as that, just try the death-dealing Pillowsham 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 has been known to turn white in a single night as a result of the sudden kerflummox 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 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 quivers 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 brake 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 bobtailed 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 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 some one of the crew and cast him loose in order to save the lives of those who remained. It was a glorious opportunity. It was a heroic thing to do. It was like Arnold Winklered'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 Enconiums of the world. He hadn't lost any Enconiums 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 snow-crowned mountains in Bain. 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 In justice to ourself, we desired a 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 Peanutter and otherwise ill-treated at the railroad eating corral and omelet 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 humourist. All alike must some day 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 our self, 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 until 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. This LibriVox 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 Pidekis made a good hit or Hazel struck a moist lead and everybody wept softly on the carpet, this man furnished a war-woop 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 tremors. It is also humiliating to our citizens to be pulled up off the floor by the coke-caller 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 Essler to make a grand dramatic hit that was supposed to yank loose a freshet of woe, to be greeted with a snort of demonic 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 humorous of accrued 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 Dunston 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 guidebooks. Piscatorial and editorial. A correspondent of the New York Post says that codfish frequents 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 outed tutelum. 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 Steel 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. This bird is noted for its brief and horizontal elementary canal. It has no devious digestive arrangements but contents itself with an economical and un ostentatious trunk line of digestion so simple that any child can understand it. He or she as the case may be in his or her stalking feet can easily look over into the next fall and when standing in our office peers down at us from over the stove pipe in a reproachful way that bills 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 wash bowl make her so proud that she takes the balance of the year for the purpose of convalescing. The ostrich is cheaply 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 cupidores 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 flower. Old Chief Pocatello, now at the Fort Hall agency, in 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. Ugg, 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 look to 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 Tysiding dailies. And as such good documents to show in 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 masticate 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 agonist in their ex-checker and to distribute tobacco dados 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 red, 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 whole 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. We have helped forty or fifty 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 nineteen dollars back on his baggage, we will probably pick up a fifty-pound chunk of North Park Quartz and spread his intellectual faculties around this building till it looks like the Custer Massacre. End of section twenty-two, section twenty-three of Bailed Hay by Bill Nye. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Ask Us Something Difficult What Becomes of Our Bodies asks a soft-eyed scientist and we answer instantorian 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 and polka dot socks went into Middle Park the other day and claimed to be a mining expert. The boys invagaled him into driving a stick of giant powder into a drill-hole at the bottom of a shaft with an old ax. And now they are trying to get him out of the ground with 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 bar room scene of the drunkard's daughter, Arthur G. Cambridge, geratic agent 75 South Clark Street. This throws open a field of usefulness to a class of men 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 nose and the watery eye secure a salary for their proprietors. Business must be picking up when the wiggly legs and danger signal nose 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 fifteen or twenty minutes, but he couldn't get it any farther. It seemed that the clothesline 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 tremolo. Then a dark hand with a wart 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 street stand out at an angle of about forty-five 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 vile 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 step ladder. 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 marshal 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 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 pop parade and circumstance are all right but it can be 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 yesterday written by a yahoo with pale pink hair which was entitled marriage in Mormon doom on the taunting plan well we declined it decline of American humor sabi chicago custom house the chicago custom house and post office built from designs by oscar wild 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 hence it is a sick looking structure with little gothic warts on top and red window sashes and little half grown smoke houses 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 jay prouding correspondent of the foreign and british newspaper press for a copy of the london daily news of the ninth instant they meant 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 brett hart's heathen chinae may have imagined bill nye and our sin 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 savers more of a fiction than a fact but there is no doubt about 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 larry me city wyoming territory and his editor of the daily boomerang in reference to acting postmaster general hatton's appointment of him as postmaster at larry me 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 larry me 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 bashing 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 coworker 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 elie 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 delivery 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 is 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 Bale Day by Bill Nye this LibriVox 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 their five abreast and just naturally deluge the grave with scalding tears and at that time the green grass grew luxuriously 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 redheaded 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 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-biting 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 why yoming young ladies would consent to play the waltz known as under the elms composed by walter malley if walter had been as frolicsome 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-toned 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 melvils 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 blushing 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 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 plum 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 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 muckahy zcmi and zw 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 chemilune and zcmi bib 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 cog nomen 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 path master 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 nigh this libra vox recording is in the public domain caution a man is going about the streets of larry claiming to be john the baptist he has light hair and chin whiskers his stout built and looks like a farmer we desire to warn those of our 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 our south fearing 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 bailed 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 us 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 our self and have so far suppressed that beastly pride which wealth engenders with a salary of seven dollars twenty five cents 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 valetan 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 torped 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 conscious and an unliquidated claim against the government for nine dollars fifty five cents 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 two hundred and fifty dollars 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 unassentatiously 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 mull ahead 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 shy and september 6 1882 the party consisting of governor hail and wife secretary morgan and wife president slack of the wyoming press association and wife mr. baird and myself start out of larmy about 8 30 last evening and excurted 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 happy then as the night wore away and the gray dawn came down over the broad and mellow sweep of plain 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 two hundred thousand dollars 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 white law 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 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 be 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 grieve 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 poult us 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 in the steeple struck four he rolled over and 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 un-gentlemanly 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 shyan 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 f e 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 russell of a very rustling city what 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 sav 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 ledville ledville colorado september 10th this morning we rose at 4 30 and rode from boinevista to ledville 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 boinevista on account of the illness of misa lily morgan who suffers severely from sea sickness on the mountain railroads one thing i have not mentioned and an incident certainly worthy of note was the sudden decision of our president ea slack on friday to remain at a little station on the south parle road above komo while the party continued on to boinevista 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 that he could do would be to just stay there and examine the country until he could get the next train he'd 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 eggberts special car and rode around over the country till morning while our party took in boinevista 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 we 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 mr's safford and hartenstein the latter having been a medical student under dr agnew after a good supper we returned to boinevista where the home military company under captain johnson led by the boinevista 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 boinevista depreciated 50 percent we found adi butler formerly of shyan now at boinevista also tom campbell well known to larry me people doing well at the new city and a prospective member of the colorado legislator george maryon formerly of larry me is also at boinevista engaged in the retail bridge trade we also met mr's lennard of the times and kennedy of the herald who treated us the who treated us the whitest kind mr lennard and wife went with us yesterday over to gunison city billy butler formerly of larry me is now at boinevista 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 gunison division of the south park road we went over the mountain to gunison and through the wonderful alpine tunnel the highest railroad point in the united states and with its approaches 2600 feet long when you pass through the tunnel the breakman 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 news boy 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 news boy still he didn't look like a boy who would trifle with the 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 libra vox recording is in the public domain table manners of children young children who have to wait to older people have eaten all there 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 parent's 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 plating 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 tax 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 causes parents great anxiety in picking up a plate or saucer filled with soup or with moist food the child should be taught not to par boil 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 a 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 e pluribus 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 farrow cow e pluribus unum is an old greek inscription that has been handed down from generation 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 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 i'm a native born or naturalized as the 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 polygamist 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 matrimony's 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 Mormon them and at last spotted the lantern-jawed dregs of foreign female immigration 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 of peace 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 a 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