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

We found A. D. Butler, formerly of Cheyenne, now at Buena Vista, also Tom Campbell, well known to Laramie people, doing well at the new city, and a prospective member of the Colorado legislature. George Marion, formerly of Laramie, is also at Buena Vista, engaged in the retail bridge trade. We also met Messrs. Leonard, of the and Kennedy, of the Herald, who treated us the whitest kind. Mr. Leonard and wife went with us yesterday over to Gunnison City. Billy Butler, formerly of Laramie, is now at Buena Vista, successfully engaged in mining.

Yesterday we put in the most happy day of the entire trip. Under the very kind and thoughtful guidance of Superintendent E. Wilbur, of the Gunnison division of the South Park road, we went over the mountain to Gunnison and through the wonderful Alpine tunnel, the highest railroad point in the United States, and with its approaches 2,600 feet long. When you pass through the tunnel the brakeman makes you close your window and take in your head. He does this for two reasons: first, you can't see anything if you look out, and secondly, the company don't like to hire an extra man to go through the tunnel twice a day and wipe the remains of tourists off the walls.

The newsboy told me that a tourist from Philadelphia once tried to wipe his nose on the Alpine tunnel, while the train was in motion, and when they got through into daylight, and his companions told him to take in his head, he couldn't do it – because it was half a mile behind examining the formation of the tunnel. Later, it was found that the man was dead. The passengers said that they noticed a kind of crunching noise while going through the tunnel that sounded like the smashing of false teeth, but they paid no attention to it.

Mr. Wilbur afterward told me that there had never been a passenger killed on the road, so I may have been misled by this newsboy. Still, he didn't look like a boy who would trifle with a man's feelings in that way.

However, I will leave the remainder of the Gunnison trip for another letter, as this is already too long.

TABLE MANNERS OF CHILDREN

YOUNG children who have to wait till older people have eaten all there is in the house, should not open the dining-room door during the meal and ask the host if he is going to eat all day. It makes the company feel ill at ease, and lays up wrath in the parents' heart.

Children should not appear displeased with the regular courses at dinner, and then fill up on pie. Eat the less expensive food first, and then organize a picnic in the preserves afterward.

Do not close out the last of your soup by taking the plate in your mouth and pouring the liquid down your childish neck. You might spill it on your bosom, and it enlarges and distorts the mouth unnecessarily.

When asked what part of the fowl you prefer, do not say you will take the part that goes over the fence last. This remark is very humorous, but the rising generation ought to originate some new table jokes that will be worthy of the age in which we live.

Children should early learn the use of the fork, and how to handle it. This knowledge can be acquired by allowing them to pry up the carpet tacks with this instrument, and other little exercises, such as the parent mind may suggest.

The child should be taught at once not to wave his bread around over the table, while in conversation, or to fill his mouth full of potatoes, and then converse in a rich tone of voice with some one out in the yard. He might get his dinner down his trochea and cause his parents great anxiety.

In picking up a plate or saucer filled with soup or with moist food, the child should be taught not to parboil his thumb in the contents of the dish, and to avoid swallowing soup bones or other indigestible debris.

Toothpicks are generally the last course, and children should not be permitted to pick their teeth and kick the table through the other exercises. While grace is being said at table, children should know that it is a breach of good breeding to smouge fruit cake just because their parents' heads are bowed down, and their attention for the moment turned in another direction. Children ought not to be permitted to find fault with the dinner, or fool with the cat while they are eating. Boys should, before going to the table, empty all the frogs and grasshoppers out of their pockets, or those insects might crawl out during the festivities, and jump into the gravy.

If a fly wades into your jelly up to his gambrels, do not mash him with your spoon before all the guests, as death is at all times depressing to those who are at dinner, and retards digestion. Take the fly out carefully, with what naturally adheres to his person, and wipe him on the table cloth. It will demonstrate your perfect command of yourself, and afford much amusement for the company. Do not stand up in your chair and try to spear a roll with your fork. It is not good manners to do so, and you might slip and bust your crust, by so doing. Say "thank you," and "much obliged," and "beg pardon," wherever you can work in these remarks, as it throws people off their guard, and gives you an opportunity to get in your work on the pastry and other bric-a-brac near you at the time.

WHAT IT MEANT

WHEN Billy Boot was a little boy, he was of a philosophical and investigating turn of mind, and wanted to know almost everything. He also desired to know it immediately. He could not wait for time to develop his intellect, but he crowded things and wore out the patience of his father, a learned savant, who was president of a livery stable in Chicago.

One day Billy ran across the grand hailing sign, which is generally represented as a tapeworm in the beak of the American eagle, on which is inscribed "E Pluribus Unum." Billy, of course, asked his father what "E Pluribus Unum" meant. He wanted to gather in all the knowledge he could, so that when he came out west he could associate with some of our best men.

"I admire your strong appetite for knowledge, Billy," said Mr. Root; "you have a morbid craving for cold hunks of ancient history and cyclopedia that does my soul good; and I am glad, too, that you come to your father to get accurate data for your collection. That is right. Your father will always lay aside his work at any time and gorge your young mind with knowledge that will be as useful to you as a farrow cow. 'E Pluri-bus Unum' is an old Greek inscription that has been handed down from generation to generation, preserved in brine, and signifies that 'the tail goes with the hide.'"

VOTERS IN UTAH

THIS is the form of the oath required of voters in Utah under the new law:

Territory of Utah, County of Salt Lake. I – being first duly sworn (or affirmed), depose and say that I am over twenty-one years of age, and have resided in the territory of Utah for six months, and in the precinct of – one month immediately preceding the date thereof, and (if a male) am a native born or naturalized (as the case may be) citizen of the United States and a tax payer in this territory. (Or, if a female) I am native born, or naturalized, or the widow or daughter (as the case may be) of a native born or naturalized citizen of the United States. And I do further solemnly swear (or affirm) that I am not a bigamist or polygamist; that I am not a violater of the laws of the United States prohibiting bigamy or polygamy; that I do not live or cohabit with more than one woman in the marriage relation, nor does any relation exist between me and any woman which has been entered into or continued in violation of said laws of the United States, prohibiting bigamy or polygamy, (and if a woman) that I am not the wife of a polygamist, nor have I entered into any relation with any man in violation of the laws of the United States concerning polygamy or bigamy.

Subscribed and sworn to before me this – day of – , 1882. Registration Officer – Precinct.

It will be seen that at the next election some of the brethren and sisters in Zion will be disfranchised unless they do some pretty tall swearing. This is a terrible state of affairs, and the whole civilized world will feel badly to know that some of our people are going to be left out in the cold, cold world with no voice and no vote just because they have been too zealous in the wedlock business.

Matrimony is a glorious thing, but it can be overdone. A man can become a victim to the nuptial habit just the same as he can the opium habit. It then assumes entire control over him, and he has to be chained up or paralyzed with a club, or he would marry all creation. This law, therefore, is salutary in its operations. It is intended as a gentle check on those who have allowed themselves to become matrimony's maniacs. If we marry one of the daughters of a family, and are happy over it, is that any reason why we should marry the other daughters and the old lady and the colored cook? We think not. It is natural for man to acquire railroads and promissory notes and houses and lands, but he should not undertake to acquire a corner on the wife trade.

Hence we say the law is just and must be permitted to take its course, even though it may disfranchise many of the most prominent pelicans of the Mormon church. Matrimony in Utah has been allowed to run riot, as it were. The cruel and relentless hand of this hydra-headed monster has been laid upon the youngest and the fairest of the Mormon people.

Matrimony has broken out there in a large family in some instances, and has not even spared the widowed and toothless mother. It generally seeks its prey among the youngest and fairest, but in Utah it has not spared even the old and the infirm. Like a cruel epidemic, it has at first raked in the blooming maidens of Mormondom and at last spotted the lantern jawed dregs of foreign female emigration. In one community, this great scourge entered and took all the women under forty-five, and then got into a block where there were nineteen old women who didn't average a tooth apiece, and swept them away like a cyclone.

People who do not know anything of this great evil, can have no knowledge of it. Those who have not investigated this question have certainly failed to look into it. We cannot find out about this question without ascertaining something of it.

INCONGRUITY

OUR attention has been called recently to an illustration by Hopkins in a work called Forty Liars, in which a miner is represented as sliding down a mountain in a gold pan with a handle on it. Mr. Hopkins, no doubt, labors under a wrong impression of some kind, relative to the gold pan. He seems to consider the gold pan and the frying pan as synonymous. In this he is wrong.

The gold pan is a large low pan without a handle and made of very different metal from a skillet or frying pan.

The artist should study as far as possible to imitate nature and not make a fool of himself. Some artists consider it funny to represent a farmer milking a cow on the wrong side. They also show the same farmer, later on, plowing with a plow that turns the furrow over to the left, another eccentricity of genius. There are many little things like this that the artist should look into more closely so as not to bust up the eternal fitness of things.

We presume that Mr Hopkins would represent a gang of miners working a placer with giant powder and washing out smelting ore in a tin dipper. Its pretty hard, though, for an artist who never saw a mining camp, to sit and watch a New York beer tournament and draw pictures of life in a mining camp, and people ought not to expect too much.

RIDING DOWN A MOUNTAIN

GUNNISON CITY is one of the peculiarities of a mining boom. It spreads out and slops over the plain like a huge camp meeting, but without shape or beauty.

The plains there are red and sandy; the trees are not nearer than the foot-hills; and the city, which claims 5,000 inhabitants, though 3,000 would, no doubt, be more accurate, is composed of a wide area of ground, with scattering houses that look lonely in the midst of the desolation. Mining in Colorado, this season, has not advanced with the wonderful impetus which characterized it in previous years. Wherever you go, you hear first one reason, and then another, why good mines are not being worked. There is trouble among the stock-holders; a game of freeze out; lack of capital to put in proper machinery, or excessive railroad freights, to pay which virtually paralyzes the reduction of ore owned by men too poor to erect the expensive works necessary to the realization of profit from the mines.

Returning from Gunnison City, now, you rise at a rate of over 200 feet to the mile, zig-zagging up the almost perpendicular mountain, near the summit of which is the Alpine tunnel. As you near the tunnel, there is a perpendicular and sometimes even a jutting wall above you, hundreds of feet at your right, while far below you, on your left, is a yellow streak, which at first you take to be an old mountain trail, but which you soon discover is the circuitous track over which you have just come.

Near here, while the road was being built, a fine span of horses balked on the grade, and like all balky horses, proceeded to back off the road. The owner got out of the wagon, and told them they could keep that thing up if they wanted to, but he could not endorse their policy. They kept backing off until the wagon went over the brink, and then there was a little scratching of loose stones, the kaleidoscope of legs and hoofs, a little rush and rumble, and the world was wealthier by one less balky team. The owner never went down to see where they went to, or how they lit. He was afraid they would not survive their injuries, so he did not go down there. Later, the carrion crows and turkey buzzards indicated where the refractory team had landed; and deep in the mountain gorge the white bones lie amid the wreck of a lumber wagon, as monuments of equine folly.

On Saturday evening we had the pleasure of riding down the dizzy grade from Hancock, a distance of eighteen miles, at which time we descended a mile perpendicularly in a push car, with Superintendent Wilbur as conductor and engineer. A push car is a plain flat-car, about as big as a dining-table, with four wheels, and nothing to propel it but gravity, and nothing to stop it but a sharpened piece of two-by-four scantling. Hancock is near the Alpine tunnel, at the summit of the mountains, about 11,000 feet high. Secretary Morgan, Mrs. Morgan, with their little daughter Gertrude; E. A. Slack, of the Sun, Frank Clark, of the Leader, Superintendent Wilbur and ourself, constituted the party.

At first everybody was a little nervous with the accumulating velocity of the car, and the yawning abyss below us; but later we got more accustomed to it, and the solemn grandeur of the green pine-covered canons, the lofty snow-covered peaks, apparently so near us; and the rushing, foaming torrent far below us, were all we saw. Like lightning we rounded the sharp curves where the road seemed to hang over instant destruction, and we held our breath as we thought that, like Dutch Charlie and other great men, only a piece of two-by-four scantling stood between us and death.

Again and again the abrupt curve loomed up ahead, and below us, while we flew along the narrow gauge at such a pace that we were almost sure the car would, leave the track before it would round such a point, and each time the two-by-four went down on the drive wheel with a pressure that sent up volumes of blue smoke.

It was a wild, grand ride – so wild and grand in fact that even yet we wake up at night with a start from a dream in which the same party is riding down that canon at lightning speed, and Mr. Wilbur, in a thoughtless moment, has dropped his pine brake overboard!

Shades of Sam Patch, but wouldn't it scatter the average excurter over southern Colorado if such a thing should happen some day! Why, the woods would be full of them, and for years to come, the prospector along Chalk Creek Canon would find pyrites of editorial poverty, and indications of collar buttons, and fragments of Archimedean levers, and other mementoes of the great editorial hegira of 1882.

CORRALED HIM

LAST May Sheriff Boswell received a postal card from a man up near Fort McKinney, describing a pair of horses that had just been stolen and asking that Mr. Boswell would keep his eye peeled for the thief and arrest him on sight.

Last week the sheriff discovered the identical team with color, brands and everything to correspond. He told the driver that he would have to turn over that team and come along to the bastile. The man stoutly protested his innocence and claimed that he owned the team, but Boswell laughed him to scorn and said he often got such games of talk as that when he arrested horse thieves.

Just as they were going down into the damp corridors, Judge Blair met the criminal, recognized him at once and called him by name. It seems that he was the man who had originally written Boswell, and having found his horses he had neglected to inform him. Thus, when he came to town four months afterward, he got snatched. You not only have to call the officer's attention to a larceny in this country, but it is absolutely necessary that you call off the sleuth hound of eternal justice when you have found the property, or you will be gathered in unless you can identify yourself. Boswell's initials are N. K., and now the boys call him Nemesis K. Boswell.

THE London Lancet upsets the popular theory that abundant hair is a sign of bodily or mental strength. The fact is, it says, that notwithstanding the Samson precedent, the Chinese, who are the most enduring of all races, are mostly bald; and as to the supposition that long and thick hair is a sign of intellectuality, all antiquity, all madhouses and all common observation are against it. The easily-wheedled Esau was hairy. The mighty Caesar was bald. Long haired men are generally weak and fanatical, and men with scant hair are the philosophers, and soldiers, and statesmen, of the world. Oscar Wilde, Theodore Tilton, and others of the long-haired fraternity, should read these statements with soulful and heart-yearning delight.

Will the editor of the Lancet please step over to the saloon, opposite the royal palace, and take something at our expense? Pard, we shake with you. Count us in also. Reckon us along with Cæsar, and Elijah, and Aristotle, please. Though young, we can show more polished intellect to the superficial foot than many who have lived longer than we have.

Will the editor of the Lancet please put our name on his list of subscribers and send the bill to us? What we want is a good, live paper that knows something, and isn't afraid to say it.

WE were pained to see a large mule brought into town yesterday with his side worn away until it looked very thin. It looked as though the pensive mule had laid down to think over his past life, and being in the company of seven other able-bodied mules, all of whom were attached to a government freight wagon going down a mountain, this, particular animal, while wrapped in a brown study, had been pulled several miles with so much unction, as it were, that when the train stopped it was found that this large and highly accomplished mule had worn his side off so thin that you could see his inmost thoughts.

FIRMNESS

WHEN we saw him, he looked as though, if he had his life to live over again, he would select a different time to ponder over his previous history. Sometimes a mule's firmness causes his teetotal and everlasting overthrow.

Firmness is a good thing in its place, but we should early learn that to be firm, we need not stand up against a cyclone till our eternal economy is blown into the tops of the neighboring trees. Moral courage is a good thing, but it is useless unless you have a liver to go along with it. Sometimes a man is required to lay down his life for his principles, but the cases where he is expected to lay down his digester on the altar of his belief, are comparatively seldom.

We may often learn a valuable lesson from the stubborn mule, and guard against the too protruberant use of our own ideas in opposition to other powers against which it is useless to contend. It may be wrong for giant powder to blow the top of a man's head off without cause, but repealed contests have proved that even when giant powder is in the wrong, it is eventually victorious.

Let us, therefore, while reasonably fixed in our purpose, avoid the display of a degree of firmness which will scatter us around over two school districts, and confuse the coroner in his inquest.

PUT IN A SUMP

THE president of the North Park and Vandaliar Mining Company not long ago got a letter from the superintendent which closed by saying that everything was working splendidly. The ore body was increasing, and the quality and richness of the rock improving with every foot. He also added that he had constructed a sump in the mine.

The president having spent most of his life in military and political affairs, had never found it necessary to use a sump, and so he didn't know to a dead moral certainty what it was that the superintendent had put in.

He hoped, however, that the expense would not cripple the company, and that by handling it carefully, they might escape damage from an explosion of the sump at an unlooked-for time.

He proceeded, however, to examine the unabridged, and found that it meant a cistern, which is constructed at the bottom of a mine for the purpose of collecting the water, and from which it is pumped.

The president, having posted himself, concluded to go and have a little conversation with one of the directors, who is a druggist in the city, and see if he knew the nature of a sump.

The president, in answer to the questions of the director relative to the latest news from the mine, said that it was looking better all the time, and that the superintendent had constructed a sump.

The director never blinked his eye. He acted like a man who has lived on sumps all his life.

"Do you know what a sump is?" asked the president. "Why, of course, anybody knows what a sump is. It's the place where they collect water from a mine, and pump it from, to free the mine from water. A man who don't know what a sump is, don't know his business, that's all I've got to say."

The president looked hurt about something. He hadn't looked for the conversation to assume just exactly the shape that it had. Finally he said, "Well you needn't point your withering sarcasm at me. I know what a sump is. I just wanted to see whether a man who had been in the pill business all his life, knew what a sump was. I knew you claimed to know almost everything, but I didn't believe you was up on that word. Now, if it's a proper question, I'd like to know just how long you have been so all-fired fluent about mining terms."

Then the director said that there was no use in putting on airs, and swelling up with pride over a little thing like that. He, for one, didn't propose to crow over other men who had not had the advantages that he had, and he would be frank with the president, and admit that an hour ago he didn't know the difference between a sump and a certiorari.

It seems that a passenger, who had come in on the same coach that brought in the superintendent's letter, had casually dropped the remark to the director that Smith had put a sump in the "Endomile," and the director had lit out for a dictionary without loss of time, so that when the two great miners got together, they were both proud and confident. Each was proud because he knew what a sump was, and confident that the other one didn't know.

MINING AS A SCIENCE

THE study of mining as a science is one which brings with it a quiet joy, which the novice knows nothing of. In Morrison's Mining Eights we find the following:

"If all classes of lode deposits are to be regarded as legally identical, it follows that where a vein is pinched for a considerable distance, it is lost to the owner; if its apex is found in the slide, it can not be located as a lode.

"The distinction which would relieve these points would be to allow the dip to such lodes Only as have a perpendicular base and are not on the nature of stratigraphical deposits! all the inconsistencies apparent from the previous paragraph are the sequence to any other ruling.