Baled Hay. A Drier Book than Walt Whitman's «Leaves o' Grass»

SAD DESTRUCTION

THERE came very near being a holocaust in this office on Monday. An absent-minded candidate for the legislature 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 REVOLTER

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 coat tail pocket. Those who carry revolvers generally die by the revolver, and he who agitates the six-shooter, by the six-shooter shall his blood be shed. When a man carries a gun he does so because he has said or done something for which he expects to be attacked, so it is safe to say that when a man goes about our peaceful streets, loaded, he has been doing some, little trick or other, and has in advance prepared himself for a Smith-&-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 his coat on 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 parquette is filled with people who got there by the self-cocking revolver route.

A man works twenty years to become known as a scholar, a newspaper man and a gentleman, while the illiterate murderer springs into immediate notoriety in a day, and the widow of his victim cannot even get her life insurance. These things are what make people misanthropic and tenacious of their belief in a hell.

If revolvers could not be sold for less than $500 a piece, with a guarantee on the part of the vendee, signed by good sureties, that he would support the widows and orphans, you would see more longevity lying around loose, and western cemeteries would cease to roll up such mighty majorities.

THE SECRET OF HEALTH

HEALTH journals are now asserting, that to maintain a sound constitution you should lie only on the right side. The health journals may mean well enough; but what are you going to do if you are editing a Democratic paper?

HOUSEHOLD RECIPES

TO remove oils, varnishes, resins, tar, oyster soup, currant jelly, and other selections from the bill of fare, use benzine, soap and chloroform cautiously with whitewash brush and garden hose. Then hang on wood pile to remove the pungent effluvia of the benzine.

To clean ceilings that have been smoked by kerosene lamps, or the fragrance from fried salt pork, remove the ceiling, wash thoroughly with borax, turpentine and rain water, then hang on the clothes line to dry. Afterward pulverize and spread over the pie plant bed for spring wear.

To remove starch and roughness from flatirons, 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 quicklime in a certain quantity of water. If it is not sufficient, use less water or more quicklime. Should the immediate lime continue to remain deliberate, lay the water down on a stone and pound it with a base ball club.

To give relief to a burn, apply the white of an egg. The yolk of the egg may be eaten 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 rain water 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 glycerine 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 court plaster, and put the piano out on the lawn for the children to play horse with.

Woolen 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 in another ox gall. Should this fail to do the work, put in the entire ox, reserving the tail for soup. The ox gall is comparatively useless for soup, and should not be preserved as an article of diet.

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

A SQUASH-NOSED scientist from away up the creek, asks, "What is literature!" Cast your eye over these logic-imbued columns, you sun-dried savant from the remote precincts. Drink at the never-failing Boomerang springs of forgotten lore, you dropsical wart of a false and erroneous civilization. Read our "Address to the Duke of Stinking Water," or the "Ode to the Busted Snoot of a Shattered Venus DeMilo," 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 in not haunted so much as it would like to be. Though it is a fine hotel, there is no town nearer it than Buena Vista, and no one is going to do business at Buena Yista and go up to Nathrop on a hand-car for his meals.

It is a case where a smart aleck of a man built a hotel, and asked his fellow citizens to come and form a town around him and make him rich. Mr. Nathrop was rather an impulsive man, and one day he said something that reflected on another impulsive man, and when people came and looked for Nathrop, they found that his body was tangled up in the sage brush, and his soul was marching on.

The hotel was just completed, and the ladders, and the handsome lime barrels, and hods, and old nail kegs, and fragments of laths, 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 Senegambian, with a whisk broom, waiting to brush your clothes off your back, and leave you arrayed in a birth-mark 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 chamber-maid with the 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 wart-environed and freckle-frescoed beauty.

There the new hotel will, no doubt, stand for ages, while a little way off, in his quiet grave, the proprietor, laid to rest in an old linen handkerchief, is sleeping away the years till he shall be awakened by the last grand reveille. There's no use talking, it's tough.

ANECDOTE OF SPOTTED TAIL

THE popularity of the above-named chieftain dates from a very trifling little incident, as did that of many other men who are now great.

Spotted Tail had never won much distinction up to that time, except as the owner of an appetite, in the presence of which his tribe stood in dumb and terrible awe.

During the early days of what is now the great throbbing and ambitious west, the tribe camped 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 Tail 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. Spot picked his teeth with a tent pin, and then told the defeated relic of a mighty race that if he would quit strong drink, he would be subjected to fewer insults.

Big Mouth then got irritated, and told S. Tail that his remarks showed that he was standing, in with the aggressor, and was no friend to his people.

Spotted Tail said that Mr. B. Mouth was a liar, by yon high heaven, and before there was time to think it over, he took a butcher knife, about four feet long, from its scabbard and cut Mr. Big Mouth plumb 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 Tail was at once looked upon as the Moses of his tribe. He readily rose to prominence, and by his strict attention to the duties of his office, made for himself a name as a warrior and a pie biter, at which the world turned pale.

This should teach us the importance of taking the tide at its flood, which leads on to fortune, and to lay low when there is a hen on, as Benjamin Franklin has so truly said.

THE ZEALOUS VOTER

SPEAKING of New York politics," said Judge Hildreth, of Cummings, the other day, "they have a cheerful way of doing business in Gotham, and at first it rather surprised me. I went into New York a short time before election, and a Democratic friend told me I had better go and get registered so I could '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 polls in a body, in the afternoon, but they wouldn't let me vote. I told them I was registered all right, and that I had a right and must exercise it the same as any other Democrat in this enlightened land, but they swore at me and entreated me roughly, and told me to go there myself, and that I had already voted once and couldn't do it 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 was 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 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 aizy enough to me, George. Give me something difficult. Sit down and rist yoursilf. Don't get excited and talk so loud. I know'd yez was out lasht night wid the byes and you didn't feel like gettin' up airly to go to the polls, so I got wan av the byes to go over and wote your name. That's all roight, come here 'nd have someding.'

"I saw at a glance that New York people were attending to these 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 who 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 the theatre ghosts and the spirit of Hamlet's father hasn't missed an election for a hundred years."

HOW TO PRESERVE TEETH

I FIND," said an old man to a Boomerang reporter, yesterday, "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 acids whatever, and although I am 65 years old, my teeth are as good as ever they were."

"And that is all you do to preserve your teeth, is it?"

"Yes, sir; that's all – barring, perhaps, the fact that I put them in a glass of soft water nights."

MR. BEECHER'S BRAIN

MR. BEECHER, has raked in $2,000,000 with his brain. A good, tall, bulging brow, and a brain that will give down like that, are rather to be chosen than a blind lead, and an easy running cerebellum, than a stone quarry with a silent but firm skunk in it.

OH, NO!

THE telephone line between Cheyenne and Laramie City will soon be in operation. It won't work, however. It may be a success for a time, but sooner or later Bill Nye will set his lopsided jaws at work in front of the transmitter, and pour a few quarts of untutored lies into the contribution box, which does service as a 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 Cheyennese. It is a weird and pixycal 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." —

Sun

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Oh, do not say those cruel words, kind friend. Do not throw it up to us that we are weird and pixycal. Oh, believe us, kind sir, we may have done wrong, but we never did that. We know that election is approaching, and all sorts of bygone crookedness is raked up at that time, even when a man is not a candidate for office, but we ask the public to scan our record and see if the charge made by the

Sun

 is true. It may be that years ago we escaped justice and fled to the west under an assumed name, but no man ever before charged us with being weird and pixycal. 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 any one's apartments and committing a pixycal 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 pixycal, for we are not. We are not angry over this charge. It just simply hurts and grieves us. It comes too, at a time when we are trying to lead a different life, and while others are trying to lend us every aid and encouragement. We have many friends in Cheyenne who want to see us come up and take higher ground, but how can we do so if the press lends its influence against us. That's just the way we feel about it. If the public prints try to put us down and crush us in this manner, we will probably get desperate and be just as weird and pixycal 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 vouchsafes to us the time when a doctor's life will be in less danger than that of his patient.

AN UNCLOUDED WELCOME

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

THE PILLOW-SHAM HOLDER

SOME enemy to mankind has recently invented an infernal machine known as the pillow-sham holder, which is attached to the head of the bedstead and works with a spiral spring. It is a kind of refined towel-rack on which you hang your pillow-shams at night so they wont 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 pillow-sham holder saves all this. You just yank your pillow-sham off the bed and hang it on this high-toned sham holder, where it rests all night. At least that's the intention. After a little while, however, the spring gets weak, and the holder buckles to, or caves in, or whatever you may call it, at the most unexpected moment. The slightest movement on the part of the occupant of the bed, turns loose the pillow-sham holder, and the slumberer gets it across the bridge of his or her nose, as the case may be. Sometimes the vibration caused by a midnight snore, will unhinge this weapon of the devil, and it will whack the sleeper across the features in a way that scares him almost to death. If you think it is a glad surprise to get a lick across the perceptive faculties in the middle of a sound slumber, when you are dreaming of elysium and high-priced peris and such things as that, just try the death-dealing pillow-sham holder, and then report in writing to the chairman of the executive committee. It is well calculated to fill the soul with horror and amaze. A raven-black Saratoga wave, hanging on the back of a chair, has been known to turn white in a single night as the result of the sudden kerflummix of one of these cheerful articles of furniture.

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