Chapter II

So removed--illustrious--
Peace! kiss hands, and leave him thus
He hath never need of us!

Come away! Enough! Let be!
Purest praise, to such as he,
Were as basest obloquy.

Vex no more that mind of his,
We, to him, are but as phizz
Unto pop that knows it is.

Haply, even as we prate
Of him HERE--in astral state--
Or jackastral--he, elate,

Brouses 'round, with sportive hops
In far fields of sphery crops,
Nibbling stars like clover-tops.

He, occult and psychic, may
Now be solving why to-day
Is not midnight.--But away!

Cease vain queries! Let us go!
Leave him all unfathomed.--Lo,
He can hear his whiskers grow.

The Diary of Darius T. Skinner

"FIFTH AVENUE HOTEL, New York, Dec. 31, 188-.--It hardly seems possible that I am here in New York, putting up at a hotel where it costs me $5 or $6 a day just simply to exist. I came here from my far away-home entirely alone. I have no business here, but I simply desired to rub up against greatness for awhile. I need polish, and I am smart enough to know it.

"I write this entry in my diary to explain who I am and to help identify myself in case I should come home to my room intoxicated some night and blow out the gas.

"The reason I am here is that last summer while whacking bulls, which is really my business, I grub-staked Alonzo McReddy and forgot about it till I got back and the boys told me that Lon had struck a First National bank in the shape of the Sarah Waters claim. He was then very low with mountain fever and so nobody felt like jumping the claim. Saturday afternoon Alonzo passed away and left me the Sarah Waters. That's the only sad thing about the whole business now. I am raised from bull-whacking to affluence, but Alonzo is not here. How we would take in the town together if he'd lived, for the Sarah Waters was enough to make us both well fixed.

"I can imagine Lon's look of surprise and pride as he looks over the outer battlements of the New Jerusalem and watches me paint the town. Little did Lon think when I pulled out across the flat with my whiskers full of alkali dust and my cuticle full of raw agency whisky, that inside of a year I would be a nabob, wearing biled shirts every single day of my life, and clothes made specially for me.

"Life is full of sudden turns, and no one knows here in America where he'll be in two weeks from now. I may be back there associating with greasers again as of yore and skinning the same bulls that I have heretofore skun.

"Last evening I went to see 'The Mikado,' a kind of singing theater and Chinese walk-around. It is what I would call no good. It is acted out by different people who claim they are Chinamen, I reckon. They teeter around on the stage and sing in the English language, but their clothes are peculiar. A homely man, who played that he was the lord high executioner and chairman of the vigilance committee, wore a pair of wide, bandana pants, which came off during the first act. He was cool and collected, though, and so caught them before it was everlastingly too late. He held them on by one hand while he sang the rest of his piece, and when he left the stage the audience heartlessly whooped for him to come back.

"'The Mikado' is not funny or instructive as a general thing, but last night it was accidently facetious. It has too much singing and not enough vocal music about it. There is also an overplus of conversation through the thing that seems like talking at a mark for $2 a week. It may be owing to my simple ways, but 'The Mikado' is too rich for my blood.

"We live well here at the Fifth Avenue. The man that owns the place puts two silver forks and a clean tablecloth on my table every day, and the young fellows that pass the grub around are so well dressed that it seems sassy and presumptions for me to bother them by asking them to bring me stuff when I'd just as soon go and get it myself and nothing else in the world to do.

"I told the waiter at my table yesterday that when he got time I wished he would come up to my room and we could have a game of old sledge. He is a nice young man, and puts himself out a good deal to make me comfortable.

"I found something yesterday at the table that bothered me. It was a new kind of a silver dingus, with two handles to it, for getting a lump of sugar into your tea. I saw right away that it was for that, but when I took the two handles in my hand like a nut cracker and tried to scoop up a lump of sugar with it I felt embarrassed. Several people who were total strangers to me smiled.

"After dinner the waiter brought me a little pink-glass bowl of lemonade and a clean wipe to dry my mouth with, I reckon, after I drank the lemonade. I do not pine for lemonade much, anyhow, but this was specially poor. It was just plain water, with a lemon rind and no sugar into it.

"One rural rooster from Pittsburg showed his contempt for the blamed stuff by washing his hands in it. I may be rough and uncouth in my style, but I hope I will never lower myself like that in company."

O, The Man in the Moon has a crick in his back;
Whee!
Whimm!
Ain't you sorry for him?
And a mole on his nose that is purple and black;
And his eyes are so weak that they water and run
If he dares to dream even he looks at the sun,--
So he just dreams of stars, as the doctors advise--
My!
Eyes!
But isn't he wise--
To just dream of stars, as the doctors advise?

And The Man in the Moon has a boil on his ear--
Whee!
Whing!
What a singular thing!
I know; but these facts are authentic, my dear,--

There's a boil on his ear, and a corn on his chin--
He calls it a dimple,--but dimples stick in--
Yet it might be a dimple turned over, you know;
Whang!
Ho!
Why, certainly so!--
It might be a dimple turned over, you know!

And The Man in the Moon has a rheumatic knee--
Gee!
Whizz!
What a pity that is!
And his toes have worked round where his heels ought to be.--
So whenever he wants to go North he goes South,
And comes back with porridge-crumbs all round his mouth,
And he brushes them off with a Japanese fan,
Whing!
Whann!
What a marvelous man!
What a very remarkably marvelous man!

I watch him, with his Christmas sled;
He hitches on behind
A passing sleigh, with glad hooray,
And whistles down the wind;
He hears the horses champ their bits,
And bells that jingle-jingle--
You Woolly Cap! you Scarlet Mitts!
You miniature "Kriss Kringle!"

I almost catch your secret joy--
Your chucklings of delight,
The while you whizz where glory is
Eternally in sight!
With you I catch my breath, as swift
Your jaunty sled goes gliding
O'er glassy track and shallow drift,
As I behind were riding!

He winks at twinklings of the frost.
And on his airy race,
Its tingles beat to redder heat
The rapture of his face:--
The colder, keener is the air,
The less he cares a feather.
But, there! he's gone! and I gaze on
The wintriest of weather!

Ah, boy! still speeding o'er the track
Where none returns again,
To Sigh for you, or cry for you,
Or die for you were vain.--
And so, speed on! the while I pray
All nipping frosts forsake you--
Ride still ahead of grief, but may
All glad things overtake you!

Her Tired Hands

On board a western train the other day I held in my bosom for over seventy-five miles the elbow of a large man whose name I do not know. He was not a railroad hog or I would have resented it. He was built wide and he couldn't help it, so I forgave him.

He had a large, gentle, kindly eye, and when he desired to spit, he went to the car door, opened it and decorated the entire outside of the train, forgetting that our speed would help to give scope to his remarks.

Naturally as he sat there by my side, holding on tightly to his ticket and evidently afraid that the conductor would forget to come and get it, I began to figure out in my mind what might be his business. He had pounded one thumb so that the nail was black where the blood had settled under it. This might happen to a shoemaker, a carpenter, a blacksmith or most anyone else. So it didn't help me out much, though it looked to me as though it might have been done by trying to drive a fence-nail through a leather hinge with the back of an axe, and nobody but a farmer would try to do that. Following up the clue, I discovered that he had milked on his boots and then I knew I was right. The man who milks before daylight, in a dark barn, when the thermometer is down to 28 degrees below and who hits his boot and misses the pail, by reason of the cold and the uncertain light and the prudishness of the cow, is a marked man. He cannot conceal the fact that he is a farmer unless he removes that badge. So I started out on that theory and remarked that this would pass for a pretty hard winter on stock.

The thought was not original with me, for I have heard it expressed by others either in this country or Europe. He said it would.

"My cattle has gone through a whole mowful o' hay sence October and eleven ton o' brand. Hay don't seem to have the goodness to it thet it hed last year, and with their new _pro_-cess griss mills they jerk all the juice out o' brand, so's you might as well feed cows with excelsior and upholster your horses with hemlock bark as to buy brand."

"Well, why do you run so much to stock? Why don't you try diversified farming, and rotation of crops?"

"Well, probably you got that idee in the papers. A man that earns big wages writing Farm Hints for agricultural papers can make more money with a soft lead pencil and two or three season-cracked idees like that'n I can carrying of 'em out on the farm. We used to have a feller in the drugstore in our town that wrote such good pieces for the _Rural Vermonter_ and made up such a good condition powder out of his own head, that two years ago we asked him to write a nessay for the annual meeting of the Buckwheat Trust, and to use his own judgment about choice of subject. And what do you s'pose he had selected for a nessay that took the whole forenoon to read?"

"What subject, you mean?"

"Yes."

"Give it up!"

"Well, he'd wrote out that whole blamed intellectual wad on the subject of 'The Inhumanity of Dehorning Hydraulic Rams.' How's that?"

"That's pretty fair."

"Well, farmin' is like runnin' a paper in regards to some things. Every feller in the world will take and turn in and tell you how to do it, even if he don't know a blame thing about it. There ain't a man in the United States to-day that don't secretly think he could run airy one if his other business busted on him, whether he knows the difference between a new milch cow and a horse hayrake or not. We had one of these embroidered night-shirt farmers come from town better'n three years ago. Been a toilet soap man and done well, and so he came out and bought a farm that had nothing to it but a fancy house and barn, a lot of medder in the front yard and a southern aspect. The farm was no good. You couldn't raise a disturbance on it. Well, what does he do? Goes and gits a passle of slim-tailed, yeller cows from New Jersey and aims to handle cream and diversified farming. Last year the cuss sent a load of cream over and tried to sell it at the new creamatory while the funeral and hollercost was goin' on. I may be a sort of a chump myself, but I read my paper and don't get left like that."

"What are the prospects for farmers in your State?"

"Well, they are pore. Never was so pore, in fact, sence I've ben there. Folks wonder why boys leaves the farm. My boys left so as to get protected, they said, and so they went into a clothing-store, one of 'em, and one went into hardward and one is talking protection in the Legislature this winter. They said that farmin' was gittin' to be like fishin' and huntin', well enough for a man that has means and leisure, but they couldn't make a livin at it, they said. Another boy is in a drug store, and the man that hires him says he is a royal feller."

"Kind of a castor royal feller," I said, with a shriek of laughter.

He waited until I had laughed all I wanted to and then he said:

"I've always hollered for high terriff in order to hyst the public debt, but now that we've got the national debt coopered I wish they'd take a little hack at mine. I've put in fifty years farmin'. I never drank licker in any form. I've worked from ten to eighteen hours a day, been economical in cloze and never went to a show more'n a dozen times in my life, raised a family and learned upward of two hundred calves to drink out of a tin pail without blowing all their vittles up my sleeve. My wife worked alongside o' me sewin' new seats on the boys' pants, skimmin' milk and even helpin' me load hay. For forty years we toiled along to-gether and hardly got time to look into each others' faces or dared to stop and get acquainted with each other. Then her health failed. Ketched cold in the spring house, prob'ly skimmin' milk and washin' pans and scaldin' pails and spankin' butter. Any how, she took in a long breath one day while the doctor and me was watchin' her, and she says to me, 'Henry,' says she, 'I've got a chance to rest,' and she put one tired, wore-out hand on top of the other tired, wore-out hand, and I knew she'd gone where they don't work all day and do chores all night.

"I took time to kiss her then. I'd been too busy for a good while previous to that, and then I called in the boys. After the funeral it was too much for them to stay around and eat the kind of cookin' we had to put up with, and nobody spoke up around the house as we used to. The boys quit whistlin' around the barn and talked kind of low by themselves about going to town and gettin' a job.

"They're all gone now and the snow is four feet deep on mother's grave up there in the old berryin' ground."

Then both of us looked out of the car window quite a long while without saying anything.

"I don't blame the boys for going into something else long's other things paysbetter; but I say--and I say what I know--that the man who holds the prosperity of this country in his hands, the man that actually makes money for other people to spend, the man that eats three good, simple, square meals a day and goes to bed at nine o'clock, so that future generations with good blood and cool brains can go from his farm to the Senate and Congress and the While House--he is the man that gets left at last to run his farm, with nobody to help him but a hired man and a high protective terriff. The farms in our State is mortgaged for over seven hundred million dollars. Ten of our Western States--I see by the papers--has got about three billion and a half mortgages on their farms, and that don't count the chattel mortgages filed with the town clerks on farm machinery, stock, waggins, and even crops, by gosh! that ain't two inches high under the snow. That's what the prospects is for farmers now. The Government is rich, but the men that made it, the men that fought perarie fires and perarie wolves and Injuns and potato-bugs and blizzards, and has paid the war debt and pensions and everything else and hollered for the Union and the Republican party and free schools and high terriff and anything else that they was told to, is left high and dry this cold winter with a mortgage of seven billions and a half on the farms they have earned and saved a thousand times over."

"Yes; but look at the glory of sending from the farm the future President, the future Senator and the future member of Congress."

"That looks well on paper, but what does it really amount to? Soon as a farmer boy gits in a place like that he forgets the soil that produced him and holds his head as high as a holly-hock. He bellers for protection to everybody but the farmer, and while he sails round in a highty-tighty room with a fire in it night and day, his father on the farm has to kindle his own fire in the morning with elm slivvers, and he has to wear his own son's lawn-tennis suit next to him or freeze to death, and he has to milk in an old gray shawl that has held that member of Congress when he was a baby, by gorry! and the old lady has to sojourn through the winter in the flannel that was wore at the riggatter before he went to Congress.

"So I say, and I think that Congress agrees with me. Damn a farmer, anyhow!"

He then went away.

Ezra House

Come listen, good people, while a story I do tell,
Of the sad fate of one which I knew so passing well;
He enlisted at McCordsville, to battle in the south,
And protect his country's union; his name was Ezra House.

He was a young school-teacher, and educated high
In regards to Ray's arithmetic, and also Alegbra.
He give good satisfaction, but at his country's call
He dropped his position, his Alegbra and all.

"It's Oh, I'm going to leave you, kind scholars," he said--
For he wrote a composition the last day and read;
And it brought many tears in the eyes of the school,
To say nothing of his sweet-heart he was going to leave so soon.

"I have many recollections to take with me away,
Of the merry transpirations in the school-room so gay;
And of all that's past and gone I will never regret
I went to serve my country at the first of the outset!"

He was a good penman, and the lines that he wrote
On that sad occasion was too fine for me to quote,--
For I was there and heard it, and I ever will recall
It brought the happy tears to the eyes of us all.

And when he left, his sweetheart she fainted away,
And said she could never forget the sad day
When her lover so noble, and gallant and gay,
Said "Fare you well, my true love!" and went marching away.

He hadn't gone for more than two months
When the sad news come--"he was in a skirmish once,
And a cruel rebel ball had wounded him full sore
In the region of the chin, through the canteen he wore."

But his health recruited up, and his wounds they got well;
But while he was in battle at Bull Run or Malvern Hill,
The news come again, so sorrowful to hear--
"A sliver from a bombshell cut off his right ear."

But he stuck to the boys, and it's often he would write,
That "he wasn't afraid for his country to fight."
But oh, had he returned on a furlough, I believe
He would not, to-day, have such cause to grieve.

For in another battle--the name I never heard--
He was guarding the wagons when an accident occurred,--
A comrade, who was under the influence of drink,
Shot him with a musket through the right cheek, I think.

But his dear life was spared, but it hadn't been for long
Till a cruel rebel colonel came riding along,
And struck him with his sword, as many do suppose,
For his cap-rim was cut off, and also his nose.

But Providence, who watches o'er the noble and the brave,
Snatched him once more from the jaws of the grave;
And just a little while before the close of the war,
He sent his picture home to his girl away so far.

And she fell into decline, and she wrote in reply,
"She had seen his face again and was ready to die";
And she wanted him to promise, when she was in her tomb,
He would only visit that by the light of the moon.

But he never returned at the close of the war,
And the boys that got back said he hadn't the heart;
But he got a position in a powder-mill, and said
He hoped to meet the doom that his country denied.

"Oh, Wilhelmina, Come Back!"

PERSONAL--Will the young woman who edited the gravy department and
corrected proof at our pie foundry for two days and then jumped the
game on the evening that we were to have our clergyman to dine with
us, please come back, or write to 32 Park Row, saying where she
left the crackers and cheese?

Come back, Wilhelmina, and be our little sunbeam once more. Come back and cluster around our hearthstone at so much per cluster.

If you think best we will quit having company at the house, especially people who do not belong to your set.

We will also strive, oh, so hard, to make it pleasanter for you in every way. If we had known four or five years ago that children were offensive to you, it would have been different. But it is too late now. All we can do is to shut them up in a barn and feed them through a knot-hole. If they shriek loud enough to give pain to your throbbing brow, let no one know and we will overcome any false sentiment we may feel towards them and send them to the Tombs.

Since you went away we can see how wicked and selfish we were and how little we considered your comfort. We miss your glad smile, also your Tennessee marble cake and your slat pie. We have learned a valuable lesson since you went away, and it is that the blame should not have rested on one alone. It should have been divided equally, leaving me to bear half of it and my wife the other half.

Where we erred was in dividing up the blame on the basis of tenderloin steak or peach cobbler, compelling you to bear half of it yourself. That will not work, Wilhelmina. Blame and preserves do not divide on the same basis. We are now in favor of what may be called a sliding scale. We think you will like this better.

We also made a grave mistake in the matter of nights out. While young, I formed the wicked and pernicious habit of having nights out myself. I panted for the night air and would go a long distance and stay out a long time to get enough of it for a mess and then bring it home in a paper bag, but I can see now that it is time for me to remain indoors and give young people like yourself a chance, Wilhelmina.

So, if I can do anything evenings while you are out that will assist you, such as stoning raisins or neighboring windows, command me. I am no cook, of course, but I can peel apples or grind coffee or hold your head for you when you need sympathy. I could also soon learn to do the plain cooking, I think, and friends who come to see us after this have agreed to bring their dinners.

There is no reason why harmony should not be restored among us and the old sunlight come back to our roof tree.

Another thing I wish to write before I close this humiliating personal. I wish to take back any harsh and bitter words about your singing. I said that you sang like a shingle-mill, but I was mad when I said it, and I wronged you. I was maddened by hunger and you told me that mush and milk was the proper thing for a brain worker, and you refused to give me any dope on my dumpling. Goaded to madness by this I said that you sang like a shingle-mill, but it was not my better, higher nature that spoke. It was my grosser and more gastric nature that asserted itself, and I now desire to take it back. You do not sing like a shingle-mill; at least so much as to mislead a practiced ear.

Your voice has more volume, and when your upper register is closed, is mellower than any shingle-mill I ever heard.

Come back, Wilhelmina. We need you every hour.

After you went away we tried to set the bread as we had seen you do it, but it was not a success. The next day it come off the nest with a litter of small, sallow rolls which would easily resist the action of acids.

If you cannot come back will you please write and tell me how you are getting along and how you contrive to insert air-holes into home-made bread?

'Twas but a hint of Spring--for still
The atmosphere was sharp and chill--
Save where the genial sunshine smote
The shoulders of my overcoat,
And o'er the snow beneath my feet
Laid spectral fences down the street.

My shadow even seemed to be
Elate with some new buoyancy,
And bowed and bobbed in my advance
With trippingest extravagance,
And when a bird sang out somewhere,
It seemed to wheel with me, and stare.

Above I heard a rasping stir--
And on the roof the carpenter
Was perched, and prodding rusty leaves
From out the choked and dripping eaves--
And some one, hammering about,
Was taking all the windows out.

Old scraps of shingles fell before
The noisy mansion's open door;
And wrangling children raked the yard,
And labored much, and laughed as hard
And fired the burning trash I smelt
And sniffed again--so good I felt!

"Scurious-like," said the treetoad,
"I've twittered fer rain all day;
And I got up soon,
And hollered till noon--
But the sun hit blazed away,
Till I jest clumb down in a crawfish-hole
Weary at heart, and sick at soul!

"Dozed away fer an hour,
And I tackled the thing agin;
And I sung, and sung,
Till I knowed my lung
Was jest about to give in;
And then, thinks I, ef it don't rain now,
There're nothin' in singin' anyhow.

"Once in a while some farmer
Would come a driven' past
And he'd hear my cry,
And stop and sigh--
Till I jest laid back, at last,
And I hollered rain till I thought my throat
Would bust wide open at ever' note!

"But I _fetched_ her!--O I _fetched_ her!--
'Cause a little while ago,
As I kindo' set
With one eye shet,
And a-singin' soft and low,
A voice drapped down on my fevered brain
Sayin',--'Ef you'll jest hush I'll rain!'"

"Our Wife"

The story opens in 1877, when, on an April morning, the yellow-haired "devil" arrived at the office of the Jack Creek _Pizenweed_, at 7 o'clock, and found the editor in. It was so unusual to find the editor in at that hour that the boy whistled in a low contralto voice, and passed on into the "news room," leaving the gentlemanly, genial and urbane editor of the _Pizenweed_ as he had found him, sitting in his foundered chair, with his head immersed in a pile of exchanges on the table and his venerable Smith & Wesson near by, acting as a paper-weight. The gentlemanly, genial and urbane editor of the _Pizenweed_ presented the appearance of a man engaged in sleeping off a long and aggravated case of drunk. His hat was on the back of his head, and his features were entirely obscured by the loose papers in which they nestled.

Later on, Elijah P. Beckwith, the foreman, came in, and found the following copy on the hook, marked "Leaded Editorial," and divided it up into "takes" for the yellow-haired devil and himself:

"In another column of this issue will be found, among the legal notices, the first publication of a summons in an action for divorce, in which our wife is plaintiff and we are made defendant. While generally deprecating the practice of bringing private matters into public through the medium of the press, we feel justified in this instance, inasmuch as the summons sets forth, as a cause of action, that we are, and have been, for the space of ten years, a confirmed drunkard without hope of recovery, and totally unwilling to provide for and maintain our said wife.

"That we have been given to drink, we do not, at this time, undertake to deny or in any way controvert, but that we cannot quit at any time, we do most earnestly contend.

"In 1867, on the 4th day of July, we married our wife. It was a joyful day, and earth had never looked to us so fair or so desirable as a summer resort as it did that day. The flowers bloomed, the air was fresh and exhilarating, the little birds and the hens poured forth their respective lays. It was a day long to be remembered, and it seemed as though we had never seen Nature get up and hump herself to be so attractive as she did on that special morning--the morning of all mornings--the morning on which we married our wife.

"Little did we then dream that after ten years of varying fortune we would to-day give utterance to this editorial, or that the steam power-press of the _Pizenweed_ would squat this legal notice for divorce, _a vinculo et thoro_, into the virgin page of our paper. But such is the case. Our wife has abandoned us to our fate, and has seen fit to publish the notice in what we believe to be the spiciest paper published west of the Missouri River. It was not necessary that the notice should be published. We were ready at any time to admit service, provided that plaintiff would serve it while we were sober. We cannot agree to remain sober after ten o'clock a. m. in order to give people a chance to serve notices on us. But in this case plaintiff knew the value of advertising, and she selected a paper that goes to the better classes all over the Union. When our wife does anything she does it right.

"For ten years our wife and we have trudged along together. It has been a record of errors and failures on our part; a record of heroic devotion and forbearance on the part of our wife. It is over now, and with nothing to remember that is not soaked full of bitterness and wrapped up in red flannel remorse, we go forth to-day and herald our shame by publishing to the world the fact, that as husband, we are a depressing failure, while as a red-eyed and a rum-soaked ruin and all-around drunkard, we are a tropical triumph. We print this without egotism, and we point to it absolutely without vain glory.

"Ah, why were we made the custodian of this fatal gift, while others were denied? It was about the only talent we had, but we have not wrapped it up in a napkin. Sometimes we have put a cold, wet towel on it, but we have never hidden it under a bushel. We have put it out at three per cent a month, and it has grown to be a thirst that is worth coming all the way from Omaha to see. We do not gloat over it. We do not say all this to the disparagement of other bright, young drinkers, who came here at the same time, and who had equal advantages with us. We do not wish to speak lightly of those whose prospects for filling a drunkard's grave were at one time even brighter than ours. We have simply sought to hold our position here in the grandest galaxy of extemporaneous inebriates in the wild and woolly West. We do not wish to vaunt our own prowess, but we say, without fear of successful contradiction, that we have done what we could.

"On the fourth page of this number will be found, among other announcements, the advertisement of our wife, who is about to open up the old laundry at the corner of Third and Cottonwood streets, in the Briggs building. We hope that our citizens will accord her a generous patronage, not so much on her husband's account, but because she is a deserving woman, and a good laundress. We wish that we could as safely recommend every advertiser who patronizes these columns as we can our wife.

"Unkind critics will make cold and unfeeling remarks because our wife has decided to take in washing, and they will look down on her, no doubt, but she will not mind it, for it will be a pleasing relaxation to wash, after the ten years of torch-light procession and Mardi Gras frolic she has had with us. It is tiresome, of course, to chase a pillow case up and down the wash-board all day, but it is easier and pleasanter than it is to run a one-horse Inebriate Home for ten years on credit.

"Those who have read the _Pizenweed_ for the past three years will remember that it has not been regarded as an outspoken temperance organ. We have never claimed that for it. We have simply claimed that, so far as we are personally concerned, we could take liquor or we could let it alone. That has always been our theory. We still make that claim. Others have said the same thing, but were unable to do as they advertised. We have been taking it right along, between meals for ten years. We now propose, and so state in the prospectus, that we will let it alone. We leave the public to judge whether or not we can do what we claim."

After the foreman had set up the above editorial, he went in to speak to the editor, but he was still slumbering. He shook him mildly, but he did not wake. Then Elijah took him by the collar and lifted him up so that he could see the editor's face.

It was a pale, still face, firm in its new resolution to forever "let it alone." On the temple and under the heavy sweep of brown hair there was a powder-burned spot and the cruel affidavit of the "Smith & Wesson" that our wife had obtained her decree.

The editor of the _Pizenweed_ had demonstrated at he could drink or he could let it alone.

My Bachelor Chum

O a corpulent man is my bachelor chum,
With a neck apoplectic and thick,
And an abdomen on him as big as a drum,
And a fist big enough for the stick;
With a walk that for grace is clear out of the case,
And a wobble uncertain--as though
His little bow-legs had forgotten the pace
That in youth used to favor him so.

He is forty, at least; and the top of his head
Is a bald and a glittering thing;
And his nose and his two chubby cheeks are as red
As three rival roses in spring.
His mouth is a grin with the corners tucked in
And his laugh is so breezy and bright
That it ripples his features and dimples his chin
With a billowy look of delight.

He is fond of declaring he "don't care a straw"--
That "the ills of a bachelor's life
Are blisses compared with a mother-in-law,
And a boarding-school miss for a wife!"
So he smokes, and he drinks, and he jokes and he winks,
And he dines, and he wines all alone,
With a thumb ever ready to snap as he thinks
Of the comforts he never has known.

But up in his den--(Ah, my bachelor chum!)
I have sat with him there in the gloom,
When the laugh of his lips died away to become
But a phantom of mirth in the room!
And to look on him there you would love him, for all
His ridiculous ways, and be dumb
As the little girl-face that smiles down from the wall
On the tears of my bachelor chum.

The Philanthropical Jay

It had been ten long years since I last met Jay Gould until I called upon him yesterday to renew the acquaintance and discuss the happy past. Ten years of patient toil and earnest endeavor on my part, ten years of philanthropy on his, have been filed away in the grim and greedy heretofore. Both of us have changed in that time, though Jay has changed more than I have. Perhaps that is because he has been thrown more in contact with change than I have.

Still, I had changed a good deal in those years, for when I called at Irvington yesterday Mr. Gould did not remember me. Neither did the watchful but overestimated dog in the front yard. Mr. Gould lives in comfort, in a cheery home, surrounded by hired help and a barbed-wire fence.

By wearing ready-made clothes, instead of having his clothing made especially for himself, he has been enabled to amass a good many millions of dollars with which he is enabled to buy things.

Carefully concealing the fact that I had any business relations with the press, I gave my card to the person who does chores for Mr. Gould, and, apologizing for not having dropped in before, I took a seat in the spare room to wait for the great railroad magnate.

Mr. Gould entered the room with a low, stealthy tread, and looked me over in a cursory way and yet with the air of a connoisseur.

"I believe that I have never had the pleasure of meeting you before, sir," said the great railroad swallower and amateur Philanthropist with a tinge of railroad irony.

"Yes, sir, we met some ten years ago," said I, lightly running my fingers over the keys of the piano in order to show him that I was accustomed to the sight of a piano. "I was then working in the rolling mill at Laramie City, Wyo., and you came to visit the mill, which was then operated by the Union Pacific Railroad Company. You do not remember me because I have purchased a different pair of trousers since I saw you, and the cane which I wear this season changes my whole appearance also. I remember you, however, very much."

"Well, if we grant all that, Mr. Nye, will you excuse me for asking you to what I am indebted for this call?"

"Well, Mr. Gould," said I, rising to my full height and putting my soft hat on the brow of the Venus de Milo, after which I seated myself opposite him in a _degage_ Western way, "you are indebted to _me_ for this call. That's what you're indebted to. But we will let that pass. We are not here to talk about indebtedness, Jay. If you are busy you needn't return this call till next winter. But I am here just to converse in a quiet way, as between man and man; to talk over the past, to ask you how your conduct is and to inquire if I can do you any good in any way whatever. This is no time to speak pieces and ask in a grammatical way, 'To what you are indebted for this call.' My main object in coming up here was to take you by the hand and ask you how your memory is this spring? Judging from what I could hear, I was led to believe that it was a little inclined to be sluggish and atrophied days and to keep you awake nights. Is that so, Jay?"

"No, sir; that is not so."

"Very well, then I have been misled by the reports in the papers, and I am glad it is all a mistake. Now one thing more before I go. Did it ever occur to you that while you and your family are all out in your yacht together some day, a sudden squall, a quick lurch of the lee scuppers, a tremulous movement of the main brace, a shudder of the spring boom might occur and all be over?"

"Yes, sir. I have often thought of it, and of course such a thing might happen at any time; but you forget that while we are out on the broad and boundless ocean we enjoy ourselves. We are free. People with morbid curiosity cannot come and call on us. We cannot get the daily newspapers, and we do not have to meet low, vulgar people who pay their debts and perspire."

"Of course, that is one view to take of it; but that is only a selfish view. Supposing that you have made no provision for the future in case of accident, would it not be well for you to name some one outside of your own family to take up this great burden which is now weighing you down--this money which you say yourself has made a slave of you--and look out for it? Have you ever considered this matter seriously and settled upon a good man who would be willing to water your stock for you, and so conduct your affairs that nobody would get any benefit from your vast accumulations, and in every way carry out the policy which you have inaugurated?

"If you have not thoroughly considered this matter I wish that you would do so at an early date. I have in my mind's eye just such a man as you need. His shoulders are well fitted for a burden of this kind, and he would pick it up cheerfully any time you see fit to lay it down. I will give you his address."

"Thank you," said Mr. Gould, as the thermometer in the next room suddenly froze up and burst with a loud report. "And now, if you will excuse me from offsetting my time, which is worth $500 a minute, against yours, which I judge to be worth about $1 per week, I will bid you good morning."

He then held the door open for me, and shortly after that I came away. There were three reasons why I did not remain, but the principal reason was that I did not think he wanted me to do so.

And so I came away and left him. There was little else that I could say after that.

It is not the first time that a Western man has been treated with consideration in his own section, only to be frowned upon and frozen when he meets the same man in New York.

Mr. Gould is below the medium height, and is likely to remain so through life. His countenance wears a crafty expression, and yet he allowed himself to be April-fooled by a genial little party of gentlemen from Boston, who salted the Central Branch of the Union Pacific Railroad by holding back all the freight for two weeks in order to have it on the road while Jay was examining the property.

Jay Gould would attract very little attention here on the streets, but he would certainly be looked upon with suspicion in Paradise. A man who would fail to remember that he had $7,000,000 that belonged to the Erie road, but who does not forget to remember whenever he paid his own hotel bills at Washington, is the kind of man who would pull up and pawn the pavements of Paradise within thirty days after he got there.

After looking over the above statement carefully, I feel called upon, in justice to myself, to state that Dr. Burchard did not assist me in constructing the last sentence.

For those boys who wish to emulate the example of Jay Gould, the example of Jay Gould is a good example for them to emulate.

If any little boy in New York on this beautiful Sabbath morning desires to jeopardize his immortal soul in order to be beyond the reach of want, and ride gayly over the sunlit billows where the cruel fangs of the Excise law cannot reach him, let him cultivate a lop-sided memory, swap friends for funds and wise counsel for crooked consols.

If I had thought of all this as I came down the front steps at Irvington the other day, I would have said it to Mr. Gould; but I did not think of it until I got home. A man's best thoughts frequently come to him too late for publication.

But the name of Jay Gould will not go down to future generations linked with those of Howard and Wilberforce. It will not go very far anyway. In this age of millionaires, a millionaire more or less does not count very much, and only the good millionaires who baptize and beautify their wealth in the eternal sunlight of unselfishness will have any claim on immortality.

In this period of progress and high-grade civilization, when Satan takes humanity up to the top of a high mountain and shows his railroads and his kerosene oil and his distilleries and his coffers filled with pure leaf lard, and says: "All this will I give for a seat in the Senate," a common millionaire with no originality of design does not excite any more curiosity on Broadway than a young man who is led about by a little ecru dog.

I do not wish to crush capital with labor, or to further intensify the feeling which already exists between the two, for I am a land-holder and taxpayer myself, but I say that the man who never mixes up with the common people unless he is summoned to explain something and shake the moths out of his memory will some day, when the grass grows green over his own grave, find himself confronted by the same kind of a memory on the part of mankind.

I do not say all this because I was treated in an off-hand manner by Mr. Gould, but because I think it ought to be said.

As I said before, Jay Gould is considerably below the medium height, and I am not going to take it back.

He is a man who will some day sit out on the corner of a new-laid planet with his little pink railroad maps on his knees and ask, "Where am I?" and the echoes from every musty corner of miasmatic oblivion will take up the question and refer it to the judiciary committee; but it will curl up and die like the minority report against a big railroad land grant.

When snow is here, and the trees look weird,
And the knuckled twigs are gloved with frost;
When the breath congeals in the drover's beard,
And the old pathway to the barn is lost:

When the rooster's crow is sad to hear,
And the stamp of the stabled horse is vain,
And the tone of the cow-bell grieves the ear--
O then is the time for a brave refrain!

When the gears hang stiff on the harness-peg,
And the tallow gleams in frozen streaks:
And the old hen stands on a lonesome leg,
And the pump sounds hoarse and the handle squeaks;
When the woodpile lies in a shrouded heap,
And the frost is scratched from the window-pane,
And anxious eyes from the inside peep--
O then is the time for a brave refrain!

When the ax-helve warms at the chimney-jamb!
And hob-nailed boots on the hearth below,
And the house cat curls in a slumber calm,
And the eight-day clock ticks loud and slow;
When the harsh broom-handle jabs the ceil
'Neath the kitchen-loft, and the drowsy brain
Sniffs the breath of the morning meal--
O then is the time for a brave refrain!

'ENVOI.

When the skillet seethes, and a blubbering hot
Tilts the lid of the coffee-pot,
And the scent of the buckwheat cake grows plain--
O then is the time for a brave refrain!

A Blasted Snore

Sleep, under favorable circumstances, is a great boon. Sleep, if natural and undisturbed, is surely as useful as any other scientific discovery. Sleep, whether administered at home or abroad, under the soporific influences of an under-paid preacher or the unyielding wooden cellar door that is used as a blanket in the sleeping car, is a harmless dissipation and a cheerful relaxation.

Let me study a man for the first hour after he has wakened and I will judge him more correctly than I would to watch him all winter in the Legislature. We think we are pretty well acquainted with our friends, but we are not thoroughly conversant with their peculiarities until we have seen them wake up in the morning.

I have often looked at the men I meet and thought what a shock it must be to the wives of some of them to wake up and see their husbands before they have had time to prepare, and while their minds are still chaotic.

The first glimpse of a large, fat man, whose brain has drooped down behind his ears, and whose wheezy breath wanders around through the catacombs of his head and then emerges from his nostrils with a shrill snort like the yelp of the damned, must be a charming picture for the eye of a delicate and beautiful second wife: one who loves to look on green meadows and glorious landscapes; one who has always wakened with a song and a ripple of laughter that fell on her father's heart like shower of sunshine in the somber green of the valley.

It is a pet theory of mine that to be pleasantly wakened is half the battle for the day. If we could be wakened by the refrain of a joyous song, instead of having our front teeth knocked out by one of those patent pillow-sham holders that sit up on their hind feet at the head of the bed, until we dream that we are just about to enter Paradise and have just passed our competitive examination, and which then swoop down and mash us across the bridge of the nose, there would be less insanity in our land and death would be regarded more in the light of a calamity.

When you waken a child do it in a pleasant way. Do not take him by the ear and pull him out of bed. It is disagreeable for the child, and injures the general _tout ensemble_ of the ear. Where children go to sleep with tears on their cheeks and are wakened by the yowl of dyspeptic parents, they have a pretty good excuse for crime in after years. If I sat on the bench in such cases I would mitigate the sentence.

It is a genuine pleasure for me to wake up a good-natured child in a good-natured way. Surely it is better from those dimpled lids to chase the sleep with a caress than to knock out slumber with a harsh word and a bed slat.

No one should be suddenly wakened from a sound sleep. A sudden awaking reverses the magnetic currents, and makes the hair pull, to borrow an expression from Dante. The awaking should be natural, gradual, and deliberate.

A sad thing occurred last summer on an Omaha train. It was a very warm day, and in the smoking car a fat man, with a magenta fringe of whiskers over his Adam's apple, and a light, ecru lambrequin of real camel's hair around the suburbs of his head, might have been discovered.

He could have opened his mouth wider, perhaps, but not without injuring the mainspring of his neck and turning his epiglottis out of doors.

He was asleep.

He was not only slumbering, but he was putting the earnestness and passionate devotion of his whole being into it. His shiny, oilcloth grip, with the roguish tip of a discarded collar just peeping out at the side, was up in the iron wall-pocket of the car. He also had, in the seat with him, a market basket full of misfit lunch and a two-bushel bag containing extra apparel. On the floor he had a crock of butter with a copy of the Punkville _Palladium_ and _Stock Grower's Guardian_ over the top.

He slumbered on in a rambling sort of way, snoring all the time in monosyllables, except when he erroneously swallowed his tonsils, and then he would struggle awhile and get black in the face, while the passengers vainly hoped that he had strangled.

While he was thus slumbering, with all the eloquence and enthusiasm of a man in the full meridian of life, the train stopped with a lurch, and the brakeman touched his shoulder.

"Here's your town," he said. "We only stop a minute. You'll have to hustle."

The man, who had been far away, wrestling with Morpheus, had removed his hat, coat, and boots, and when he awoke his feet absolutely refused to go back into the same quarters.

At first he looked around reproachfully at the people in the car. Then he reached up and got his oilcloth grip from the bracket. The bag was tied together with a string, and as he took it down the string untied. Then we all discovered that this man had been on the road for a long time, with no object, apparently, except to evade laundries. All kinds of articles fell out in the aisle. I remember seeing a chest-protector and a linen coat, a slab of seal-brown gingerbread and a pair of stoga boots, a hairbrush and a bologna sausage, a plug of tobacco and a porous plaster.

He gathered up what he could in both arms, made two trips to the door and threw out all he could, tried again to put his number eleven feet into his number nine boots, gave it up, and socked himself out of the car as it began to move, while the brakeman bombarded him through the window for two miles with personal property, groceries, dry-goods, boots and shoes, gents' furnishing goods, hardward, notions, _bric-a-brac_, red herrings, clothing, doughnuts, vinegar bitters, and facetious remarks.

Then he picked up the retired snorer's railroad check from the seat, and I heard him say: "Why, dog on it, that wasn't his town after all."

Good-bye er Howdy-do

Say good-bye er howdy-do--
What's the odds betwixt the two?
Comin'--goin'--every day
Best friends first to go away--
Grasp of hands you druther hold
Than their weight in solid gold,
Slips their grip while greetin' you.--
Say good-bye er howdy-do?

Howdy-do, and then, good-bye--
Mixes jest like laugh and cry;
Deaths and births, and worst and best
Tangled their contrariest;
Ev'ry jinglin' weddin'-bell
Skeerin' up some funeral knell.--
Here's my song, and there's your sigh:
Howdy-do, and then, good-bye!

Say good-bye er howdy-do--
Jest the same to me and you;
'Taint worth while to make no fuss,
'Cause the job's put up on us!
Some one's runnin' this concern
That's got nothin' else to learn--
If he's willin', we'll pull through.
Say good-bye or howdy-do!

The following constitute the items of great interest occurring on the East Side among the colored people of Blue Ruin:

Montmorency Tousley of Pizen Ivy avenue cut his foot badly last week while chopping wood for a party on Willow street. He has been warned time and again not to chop wood when the sign was not right, but he would not listen to his friends. He not only cut off enough of his foot to weigh three or four pounds, but completely gutted the coffee sack in which his foot was done up at the time. It will be some time before he can radiate around among the boys on Pizen avenue again.

Plum Beasley's house caught on fire last Tuesday night. He reckons it was caused by a defective flue, for the fire caught in the north wing. This is one of Plum's bon mots, however. He tries to make light of it, but the wood he has been using all winter was white birch, and when he got a big dose of hickory at the same place last week it was so dark that he didn't notice the difference, and before he knew it he had a bigger fire than he had allowed. In the midst of a pleasant flow of conversation gas collected in the wood and caused an explosion which threw a passel of live coals on the bed. The house was soon a solid mass of flame. Mr. Beasley is still short two children.

Mr. Granulation Hicks, of Boston, Mass., who has won deserved distinction in advancing the interests of Sir George Pullman, of Chicago, is here visiting his parents, who reside on Upper Hominy. We are glad to see Mr. Hicks and hope he may live long to visit Blue Ruin and propitiate up and down our streets.

Miss Roseola Cardiman has just been the recipient of a beautiful pair of chaste ear-bobs from her brother, who is a night watchman in a jewelry store run by a man named Tiffany in New York. Roseola claims that Tiffany makes a right smart of her brother, and sets a heap by him.

Whooping cough and horse distemper are again making fearful havoc among the better classes at the foot of Pizen Ivy avenue.

We are pained to learn that the free reading room, established over Amalgamation Brown's store, has been closed up by the police. Blue Ruin has clamored for a free temperance reading room and brain retort for ten years, and now a ruction between two of our best known citizens, over the relative merits of a natural pair and a doctored flush, has called down the vengeance of the authorities, and shut up what was a credit to the place and a quiet resort, where young men could come night after night and kind of complicate themselves at. There are two or three men in this place that will bully or bust everything they can get into, and they have perforated more outrages on Blue Ruin than we are entitled to put up with.

There was a successful doings at the creek last Sabbath, during which baptism was administered to four grown people and a dude from Sandy Mush. The pastor thinks it will take first-rate, though it is still too soon to tell.

Surrender Adams got a letter last Friday from his son Gladstone, who filed on a homestead near Porcupine, Dak., two years ago. He says they have had another of those unprecedented winters there for which Dakota is so justly celebrated. He thinks this one has been even more so that any of the others. He wishes he was back here at Blue Ruin, where a man can go out doors for half an hour without getting ostracized by the elements. He says they brag a good deal on their ozone there, but he allows that it can be overdone. He states that when the ozone in Dakota is feeling pretty well and humping itself and curling up sheet-iron roofs and blowing trains of the track, a man has to tie a clothes-line to himself, with the other end fastened to the door knob, before it is safe to visit his own hen-house. He says that his nearest neighbor is seventeen miles away, and a man might as well buy his own chickens as to fool his money away on seventeen miles of clothes-line.

It is a first-rate letter, and the old man wonders who Gladstone got to write it for him.

The valuable ecru dog of our distinguished townsman, Mr. Piedmont Babbit, was seriously impaired last Saturday morning by an east-bound freight.

He will not wrinkle up his nose at another freight train.

George Wellington, of Hickory, was in town the front end of the week. He has accepted a position in the livery, feed and sale stable at Sandy Mush. Call again, George.

Gabriel Brant met with a sad mishap a few days since while crossing the French Broad river, by which he lost his leg.

Any one who may find an extra leg below where the accident occurred will confer a favor on Mr. Brant by returning same to No. 06-1/2 Pneumonia street. It may be readily identified by any one, as it is made of an old pickhandle and weighs four pounds.

J. Quincy Burns has written a war article for the Century Magazine, regarding a battle where he was at. In this article he aims to describe the sensations of a man who is ignorant of physical fear and yet yearns to have the matter submitted to arbitration. He gives a thorough expose of his efforts in trying to find a suitable board of arbitration as soon as he saw that the enemy felt hostile and eager for the fray.

The forthcoming number of the Century will be eagerly snapped up by Mr. Burns' friends who are familiar with his pleasing and graphic style of writing. He describes with wonderful power the sense of utter exhaustion which came over him and the feeling of bitter disappointment when he realized that he was too far away to participate in the battle and too fatigued to make a further search for suitable arbitrators.

While Cigarettes to Ashes Turn