That was natural. When he praised her letters I did not wonder, and when she praised his I admitted that she was eminently correct. I never witnessed better taste on the part of two young and trusting hearts.
After Christmas I thought they would both feel like buying a manual and doing their own writing, but they did not dare to do so evidently. They seemed to be afraid the change would be detected, so I piloted them into the middle of the succeeding fall, and then introduced the crisis into both their lives.
It was a success.
I felt about as well as though I were to be cut down myself, and married off in the very prime of life. Fanny wore the usual clothing adopted by young ladies who are about to be sacrificed to a great horrid man. I cannot give the exact description of her trousseau, but she looked like a hazel-eyed angel, with a freckle on the bridge of her nose. The groom looked a little scared, and moved his gloved hands as though they weighed twenty-one pounds apiece.
However, it's all over now. I was up there recently to see them. They are quite happy. Not too happy, but just happy enough. They call their oldest son Birdie. I wanted them to call him William, but they were headstrong and named him Birdie. That wounded my pride, and so I called him Earlie Birdie.
GREELEY AID RUM
WHEN I visit Greeley I am asked over and over again as to the practical workings of woman suffrage in Wyoming, and when I go back to Wyoming I am asked how prohibition works practically in Greeley, Col. By telling varied and pleasing lies about both I manage to have a good deal of fun, and also keep the two elements on the anxious seat.
There are two sides to both questions, and some day when I get time and have convalesced a little more, I am going to write a large book relating to these two matters. At present I just want to say a word about the colony which bears the name of the Tribune philosopher, and nestles so lovingly at the chilly feet of the Rocky mountains. As I write, Greeley is apparently an oasis in the desert. It looks like a fertile island dropped down from heaven in a boundless stretch of buffalo grass, sage hens and cunning little prairie dogs. And yet you could not come here as a stranger, and within the colonial barbed wire fence, procure a bite of cold rum if you were President of the United States, with a rattlesnake bite as large as an Easter egg concealed about your person. You can, however, become acquainted, if you are of a social nature and keep your eyes open.
I do not say this because I have been thirsty these few past weeks and just dropped on the game, as Aristotle would say, but just to prove that men are like boys, and when you tell them they can't have any particular thing, that is the thing they are apt to desire with a feverish yearn. That is why the thirstful man in Maine drinks from the gas fixture; why the Kansas drinkist gets his out of a rain-water barrel, and why other miracles too numerous to mention are performed.
Whisky is more bulky and annoying to carry about in the coat-tail pocket than a plug of tobacco, but there have been cases where it was successfully done. I was shown yesterday a little corner that would hold six or eight bushels. It was in the wash-room of a hotel, and was about half full. So were the men who came there, for before night the entire place was filled with empty whisky bottles of every size, shape and smell. The little fat bottle with the odor of gin and livery stable was there, and the large flat bottle that you get at Evans, four miles away, generally filled with something that tastes like tincture of capsicum, spirits of ammonia and lingering death, is also represented in this great congress of cosmopolitan bottles sucked dry and the cork gnawed half up.
When I came to Greeley, I was still following the course of treatment prescribed by my Laramie City physician, and with the rest, I was required to force down three adult doses of brandy per day. He used to taste the prescription at times to see if it had been properly compounded. Shortly after my arrival here I ran out of this remedy and asked a friend to go and get the bottle refilled. He was a man not familiar with Greeley in its moisture-producing capacity, and he was unable to procure the vile demon in the town for love or wealth. The druggist even did not keep it, and although he met crowds of men with tears in their eyes and breath like a veteran bung-starter, he had to go to Evans for the required opiate. This I use externally, now, on the vagrant dog who comes to me to be fondled and who goes away with his hair off. Central Colorado is full of partially bald dogs who have wiped their wet, cold noses on me, not wisely but too well.
ABOUT SAW MILLS
I HAVE just returned from a trip up the North Wisconsin railway, where I went to catch a string of codfish, and anything else that might be contagious. The trip was a pleasant one and productive of great good in many ways. I am hardening myself to railway traveling, like Timberline Jones' man, so that I can stand the return journey to Laramie in July.
Northern Wisconsin is the place where the "foreign lumber" comes from which we use in Laramie in the erection of our palatial residences. I visited the mill last week that furnished the lumber used in the Oasis hotel at Greeley. They yank a big wet log into that mill and turn it into cash as quick as a railroad man can draw his salary out of the pay car. The log is held on a carriage by means of iron dogs while it is being worked into lumber. These iron dogs are not like those we see on the front steps of a brown stone house occasionally. They are another breed of dogs.
The managing editor of the mill lays out the log in his mind, and works it into dimension stuff, shingle holts, slabs, edgings, two by fours, two by eights, two by sixes, etc., so as to use the goods to the best advantage, just as a woman takes a dress pattern and cuts it so she won't have to piece the front breadths, and will still have enough left to make a polonaise for the last-summer gown.
I stood there for a long time watching the various saws and listening to their monotonous growl, and wishing that I had been born a successful timber thief instead of a poor boy without a rag to my back.
At one of these mills, not long ago, a man backed up to get away from the carriage, and thoughtlessly backed against a large saw that was revolving at the rate of about 200 times a minute. The saw took a large chew of tobacco from the plug he had in his pistol pocket, and then began on him.
But there's no use going into details. Such things are not cheerful. They gathered him up out of the sawdust and put him in a nail keg and carried him away, but he did not speak again. Life was quite extinct. Whether it was the nervous shock that killed him, or the concussion of the cold saw against his liver that killed him, no one ever knew.
The mill shut down a couple of hours so that the head sawyer could file his saw, and then work was resumed once more.
We should learn from this never to lean on the buzz saw when it moveth itself aright.
EXPERIMENTS WITH OLD CHEESE
A RECENT article in a dairy paper is entitled, "Experiments with Old Cheese." We have experimented some on the venerable cheese, too. One plan is to administer chloroform first, then perform the operation while the cheese is under its influence. This renders the experiment entirely painless, and at the same time it is more apt to keep quiet. After the operation the cheese may be driven a few miles in the open air, which will do away with the effects of the chloroform.
THE RAG-CARPET
WITH the threatened eruption of the rag carpet as a kind of venerable successor to the genuine Boston-made Turkish rug, there comes a wail on the part of the male portion of humanity, and a protest on the part of all health-loving humanity.
I rise at this moment as the self-appointed representative of poor, down-trodden and long-suffering man. Already lady friends are looking with avaricious and covetous eyes on my spring suit, and, in fancy, constructing a stripe of navy blue, while some other man's spring clothes are already spotted for the "hit-or-miss" stripe of this time-honored humbug.
It does seem to me that there is enough sorrowing toil going for nothing already; enough of back ache and delirium, without tearing the shirts off a man's back to sew into a big ball, and then weave into a rag carpet made to breathe death and disease, with its prehistoric perspiration and its modern drug store dyes.
The rug now commonly known as the Turkish prayer rug, has a sad, worn look, but it does not come up to the rag carpet of the dear old home.
Around it there clusters, perhaps, a tradition of an Oriental falsehood, but the rag carpet of the dear old home, rich in association, is an heir-loom that passes down from generation to generation, like the horse blanket of forgotten years or the ragbag of the dear, dead past. Here is found the stripe of all-wool delaine that was worn by one who is now in the golden hence, or, stricken with the Dakota fever, living in the squatter's home; and there is the fragment of underclothes prematurely jerked from the back of the husband and father before the silver of a century had crept into his hair. There is no question but the dear old rag carpet, with poisonous greens and sickly yellows and brindle browns and doubtful blacks, is a big thing. It looks kind of modest and unpretending, and yet speaks of the dead past, and smells of the antique and the garret.
It represents the long months when aching fingers first sewed the garments, then the first dash of gravy on the front breadth, the maddening cry, the wild effort to efface it with benzine, the sorrowful defeat, the dusty grease-spot standing like a pork-gravy plaque upon the face of the past, the glad relinquishment of the garment, the attack of the rag-carpet fiend upon it, the hurried crash as it was torn into shreds and sewn together, then the mad plunge of the dust-powdered mass into the reeking bath of Paris green or copperas, then the weaver's gentle racket, and at last the pale, consumptive, freckled, sickly panorama of outrageous coloring, offending the eye, the nose, the thorax and the larynx, to be trodden under feet of men, and to yield up its precious dose of destroying poisons from generation even unto generation.