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

TOO CONTIGUOUS

THERE is a firm on Coyote creek, in New Jersey, that would like to advertise in The Boomerang, and the members of the firm are evidently good square men, although they are not large. They lack about four feet in stature of being large enough to come within the range of our vision.

They have got more pure gall to the superficial foot than anybody we ever heard of. It seems that the house has a lot of vermifuge to feed plants, and a bedbug tonic that it wants to bring before the public, and it wants us to devote a quarter of a column every day to the merits of these bug and worm discouragers, and then take our pay out of tickets in the drawing of a brindle dog next spring.

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

In closing, we will add, that New Jersey people will not be charged much more for advertising space than Wyoming people. We have made special rates so that we can give the patrons of the East almost as good terms as our home advertisers.

THE AMENDE HONORABLE

IT is rather interesting to watch the manner by which old customs have been slightly changed and handed down from age to age. Peculiarities of old traditions still linger among us, and are forked over to posterity like a wappy-jawed teapot or a long-time mortgage.. No one can explain it, but the fact still remains patent that some of the oddities of our ancestors continue to appear from time to time, clothed in the changing costumes of the prevailing fashion.

Along with these choice antiquities, and carrying the nut-brown flavor of the dead and relentless years, comes the amende honorable. From the original amende in which the offender appeared in public clothed only in a cotton-flannel shirt, and with a rope about his neck as an evidence a formal recantation, down to this day when (sometimes) the pale editor, in a stickful of type, admits that "his informant was in error," the amende honorable has marched along with the easy tread of time. The blue-eyed moulder of public opinion, with one suspender hanging down at his side, and writing on a sheet of news-copy paper, has a more extensive costume, perhaps, than the old-time offender who bowed in the dust in the midst of the great populace, and with a halter under his ear admitted his offense, but he does not feel any more cheerful over it.

I have been called upon several times to make the amende honorable, and I admit that it is not an occasion of mirth and merriment. People who come into the editorial office to invest in a retraction are generally very healthy, and have a stiff, reserved manner that no cheerfulness of hospitality can soften..

I remember of an accident of this kind which occurred last summer in my office, while I was writing something scathing. A large map with an air of profound perspiration about him, and a plaid flannel shirt, stepped into the middle of the room, and breathed in the air that I was not using. He said he would give me four minutes in which to retract, and pulled out a watch by which to ascertain the exact time.

I asked him if he would not allow me a moment or two to go over to the telegraph office and to wire my parents of my awful death. He said I could walk out of that door when I walked over his dead body. Then I waited a long time, until he told me my time was up, and asked what I was waiting for. I told him I was waiting for him to die, so that I could walk over his dead body. How could I walk over a corpse until life was extinct?

He stood and looked at me first in astonishment, afterward in pity. Finally tears welled up in his eyes, and plowed their way down his brown and grimy face. Then he said that I need not fear him. "You are safe," said he. "A youth who is so patient and so cheerful as you are – who would wait for a healthy man to die so that you could meander over his pulseless remnants, ought not to die a violent death. A soft-eyed seraph like you, who is no more conversant with the ways of this world than that, ought to be put in a glass vial of alcohol and preserved. I came up here to kill you and throw you into the rain-water barrel, but now that I know what a patient disposition you have, I shudder to think of the crime I was about to commit."

JOAQUIN AND JUNIATA

JOAQUIN MILLER has just published a new book called "The Shadows of Shasta." It is based on the Hiawatha, Blue Juniata romance, which the average poet seems competent to yank loose from the history of the sore-eyed savage at all times.

Whenever a dead-beat poet strikes bedrock and don't have shekels enough to buy a bowl of soup, he writes an inspired ode to the unfettered horse-thief of the west.

It is all right so far as we know. If the poet will wear out the smoke-tanned child of the forest writing poetry about him, and then if the child of the forest will rise up in his death struggle and mash the never-dying soul out of the white-livered poet, everything will be O.K., and we will pay the funeral expenses.

If it could be so arranged that the poet and the bright Alfarita bug-eater and the bilious wild-eyed bard of the backwoods could be shut up in a corral for six weeks together, with nothing to eat but each other, it would be a big thing for humanity. We said once that we wouldn't dictate to this administration, but let it flicker along alone. We just throw out the above as a suggestion, however, hoping that it will not be ignored.

SOME VAGUE THOUGHTS

SPRING, gentle, touchful, tuneful, breezeful, soothful spring is here. It has not been here more than twenty minutes, and my arctics stand where I can reach them in case it should change its mind.

The bobolink sits on the basswood vines, and the thrush in the gooseberry tree is as melodious as a hired man. The robin is building his nest – or rather her nest, I should say, perhaps – in the boughs of the old willow that was last year busted by thunder – I beg your pardon – by lightning, I should say. The speckled calf dines teat-a-teat with his mother, and strawberries are like a baldheaded man's brow – they come high, but we can't get along without them.

I never was more tickled to meet gentle spring than I am now. It stirs up my drug-soaked remains, and warms the genial current of life considerably. I frolicked around in the grass this afternoon and filled my pockets full of 1000-legged worms, and other little mementoes of the season. The little hare-foot boy now comes forth and walks with a cautious tread at first, like a blind horse; but toward the golden autumn the backs of his feet will look like a warty toad, and there will be big cracks in them, and one toe will be wrapped up in part of a bed quilt, and he will show it with pride to crowded houses.

Last night I lay awake for several hours thinking about Mr. Sherrod and how long we had been separated, and I was wondering how many weary days would have to elapse before we would again look into each other's eyes and hold each other by the hand, when the loud and violent concussion of a revolver shot near West Main street and Cascade avenue rent the sable robe of night. I rose and lit the gas to see if I had been hit. Then I examined my pockets to see if I had been robbed of my led pencil and season pass. I found that I had not.

This morning I learned that a young doctor, who had been watching his own house from a distance during the evening, had discovered that, taking advantage of the husband's absence, a blonde dry goods clerk had called to see the crooked but lonely wife. The doctor waited until the young man had been in the house long enough to get pretty well acquainted, and then he went in himself to see that the youth was making himself perfectly comfortable.

There was a wild dash toward the window, made by a blonde man with his pantaloons in his hand, the spatter of a bullet in the wall over the young man's head and then all was still for a moment save the low sob of a woman with her head covered up by the bed clothes. Then the two men clinched and the doctor injected the barrel of a thirty-two self-cocker up the bridge of the young man's nose, knocked him under the wash stand, yanked him out by the hem of his garment and jarred him into the coal bucket, kicked him up on a corner bracket and then swept the quivering ruins into the street with a stub-broom. He then lit the chandelier and told his sobbing wife that she wasn't just the temperament for him and he was afraid that their paths might diverge. He didn't care much for company and society while she seemed to yearn for such things constantly. He came right out and admitted that he was of a nervous temperament and quick tempered. He loved her, but he had such an irritable, fiery disposition that he guessed he would have to excuse her; so he escorted her out to the gate and told her where the best hotel was, came in, drove out the cat, blew out the light and retired.

Some men seem almost like brutes in their treatment of their wives. They come home at some eccentric hour of the night, and because they have to sleep on the lounge, they get mad and try to shoot holes in the lambrequins, and look at their wives in a harsh, rude tone of voice. I tell you it's tough.

THE YOUMORIST

You are an youmorist, are you not?" queried a long-billed pelican addressing a thoughtful, mental athlete, on the Milwaukee & St. Paul road the other day.

"Yes, sir," said the sorrowful man, brushing away a tear. "I am an youmorist. I am not very much so, but still I can see that I am drifting that way. And yet I was once joyous and happy as you are. Only a few years ago, before I was exposed to this malady, I was as blithe as a speckled yearling, and recked not of aught – nor anything else, either. Now my whole life is blasted. I do not dare to eat pie or preserves, and no one tells funny stories when I am near. They regard me as a professional, and when I get in sight the 'scrub nine' close up and wait for me to entertain the crowd and waddle around the ring."

"What do you mean by that?" murmured the purple-nosed interrogation point.

"Mean? Why, I mean that whether I'm drawing a salary or not, I'm expected to be the 'life of the party.' I don't want to be the life of the party. I want to let some one else be the life of the party. I want to get up the reputation of being as cross as a bear with a sore head. I want people to watch their children for fear I'll swallow them. I want to take my low-cut-evening-dress smile and put it in the bureau drawer, and tell the world I've got a cancer in my stomach, and the heaves and hypochondria, and a malignant case of leprosy."

"Do you mean to say that you do not feel facetious all the time, and that you get weary of being an youmorist?"

"Yes, hungry interlocutor. Yes, low-browed student, yes. I am not always tickled. Did you ever have a large, angry, and abnormally protuberent boil somewhere on your person where it seemed to be in the way? Did you ever have such a boil as a traveling companion, and then get introduced to people as an youmorist? You have not? Well, then, you do not know all there is of suffering in this sorrow-streaked world. When wealthy people die why don't they endow a cast-iron castle with a draw-bridge to it and call it the youmorists' retreat? Why don't they do some good with their money instead of fooling it away on those who are comparatively happy?"

"But how did you come to git to be an youmorist?"

"Well, I don't know. I blame my parents some. They might have prevented it if they'd taken it in time, but they didn't. They let it run on till it got established, and now its no use to go to the Hot Springs or to the mountains, or have an operation performed. You let a man get the name of being an youmorist and he doesn't dare to register at the hotels, and he has to travel anonymously, and mark his clothes with his wife's name, or the public will lynch him if he doesn't say something youmorous.

"Where is your boy to-night?" continued the gloomy humorist. "Do you know where he is? Is he at home under your watchful eye, or is he away somewhere nailing the handles on his first little joke? Parent, beware. Teach your boy to beware. Watch him night and day, or all at once, when he is beyond your jurisdiction, he will grow pale. He will have a far-away look in his eye, and the bright, rosy lad will have become the flatchested, joyless youmorist.

"It's hard to speak unkindly of our parents, but mingled with my own remorse I shall always murmur to myself, and ask over and over, why did not my parents rescue me while they could? Why did they allow my chubby little feet to waddle down to the dangerous ground on which the sad-eyed youmorist must forever stand?

"Partner, do not forget what I have said to-day. 'Whether your child be a son or daughter, it matters not. Discourage the first sign of approaching humor. It is easier to bust the backbone of the first little, tender jokelet that sticks its head through the virgin soil, than it is to allow the slimy folds of your son's youmorous lecture to be wrapped about you, and to bring your gray hairs with sorrow to the grave."

MY CABINET

I HAVE made a small collection of wild, western things during the past seven years, and have put them together, hoping some day, when I get feeble, to travel with the aggregation and erect a large monument of kopecks for my executors, administrators and assigns forever.

Beginning with the skull of old Hi-lo-Jack-and-the-game, a Sioux brave, the collection takes in my wonderful bird, known as the Walk-up-the-creek, and another vara avis, with carnivorous bill and web feet, which has astonished everyone except the taxidermist and myself. An old grizzly bear hunter – who has plowed corn all his life and don't know a coyote from a Maverick steer – looked at it last fall and pronounced it a "kingfisher," said he had killed one like it a year ago. Then I knew that he was a pilgrim and a stranger, and that he had bought his buckskin coat and bead-trimmed moccasins at Niagara Falls, for the bird is constructed of an eagle's head, a canvas back duck's bust and feet, with the balance sage hen and baled hay.

Last fall I desired to add to my rare collection a large hornet's nest. I had an embalmed tarantula and her porcelain-lined nest, and I desired to add to these the gray and airy home of the hornet. I procured one of the large size after cold weather and hung it in my cabinet by a string. I forgot about it until this spring. When warm weather came, something reminded me of it. I think it was a hornet. He jogged my memory in some way and called my attention to it. Memory is not located where I thought it was. It seemed as though whenever he touched me he awakened a memory – a warm memory with a red place all around it.

Then some more hornets came and began to rake up old personalities. I remember that one of them lit on my upper lip. He thought it was a rosebud. When he went away it looked like a gladiola bulb. I wrapped a wet sheet around it to take out the warmth and reduce the swelling so that I could go through the folding doors and tell my wife about it.

Hornets lit ah over me and walked around on my person. I did not dare to scrape them off because they are so sensitive. You have to be very guarded in your conduct toward a hornet.

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

Much has been said of the hornet, but he has an odd, quaint way after all, that is forever new.

HEALTH FOOD

WHILE trying to reconstruct a telescoped spine and put some new copper rivets in the lumbar vertebrae, this spring, I have had occasion to thoroughly investigate the subject of so-called health food, such as gruels, beef tea inundations, toasts, oat meal mush, bran mash, soups, condition powders, graham gem, ground feed, pepsin, laudable mush, and other hen feed usually poked into the invalid who is too weak to defend himself.

Of course it stands to reason that the reluctant and fluttering spirit may not be won back to earth, and joy once more beam in the leaden eye unless due care be taken relative to the food by means of which nature may be made to assert herself.

I do not care to say to the world through the columns of the Free Press, that we may woo from eternity the trembling life with pie. Welsh rabbit and other wild game will not do at first. But I think I am speaking the sentiments of a large and emaciated constituency when I say, that there is getting to be a strong feeling against oat meal submerged in milk and in favor of strawberry short cake.

I almost ate myself into an early grave in April by flying into the face of Providence and demoralizing old Gastric with oat meal. I ate oat meal two weeks, and at the end of that time my friends were telegraphed for, but before it was too late, I threw off the shackles that bound me. With a desperation born of a terrible apprehension, I rose and shook off the fatal oat meal habit and began to eat beefsteak. At first life hung trembling in the balance and there was no change in the quotations of beef, but later on there was a slight, delicate bloom on the wan cheek, and range cattle that had barely escaped a long, severe winter on the plains, began to apprehend a new danger and to seek the secluded canyons of the inaccessible mountains.

I often thought while I was eating health food and waiting for death, how the doctor and other invited guests at the post mortem would start back in amazement to find the remnants of an eminent man filled with bran!

Through all the painful hours of the long, long night and the eventless day, while the mad throng rushed onward like a great river toward eternity's ocean, this thought was uppermost in my mind. I tried to get the physician to promise that he would not expose me, and show the world what a hollow mockery I had been, and how I had deceived my best friends. I told him the whole truth, and asked him to spare my family the humiliation of knowing that though I might have led a blameless life, my sunny exterior was only a thin covering for bran and shorts and middlings, cracked wheat and pearl barley.

I dreamed last night of being in a large city where the streets were paved with dry toast, and the buildings were roofed with toast, and the soil was bran and oat meal, and the water was beef tea and gruel. All at once it came over me that I had solved the great mystery of death, and had been consigned to a place of eternal punishment. The thought was horrible! A million eternities in a city built of dry toast and oat meal! A home for never-ending cycles of ages, where the principal hotel and the post-office building and the opera house were all built of toast, and the fire department squirted gruel at the devouring element forever!

It was only a dream, but it has made me more thoughtful, and people notice that I am not so giddy as I was.

A NEW and dazzling literary star has risen above the horizon, and is just about to shoot athwart the starry vault of poesy. How wisely are all things ordered, and how promptly does the new star begin to beam, upon the decline of the old.

Hardly had the sweet singer of Michigan commenced to wane and to flicker, when, rising above the western hills, the glad light of the rising star is seen, and adown the canyons and gulches of the Rocky mountains comes the melodious cadences of the poet of the Greeley Eye.

Couched in the rough terms of the west; robed in the untutored language of the Michael Angelo slang of the miner and the cowboy, the poet at first twitters a little on a bough far up the canyon, gradually waking the echoes, until the song is taken up and handed back by every rock and crag along the rugged ramparts of the mighty mountain barrier.

Listen to the opening stanza of "The Dying Cowboy and the Preacher:"

``So, old gospel shark, they tell me I must die;

``That the wheels of life's wagon have rolled into their last rut,

``Well, I will "pass in my checks" without a whimper or a cry,

``And die as I have lived – "a hard nut."=

This is no time-worn simile, no hackneyed illustration or bald-headed decrepit comparison, but a new, fresh illustration that appeals to the western character, and lifts the very soul out of the kinks, as it were.

"Wheels of life's wagon have rolled into their last rut."