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

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.

"If it be alleged that such holdings are not applicable to fissure veins, at once a distinction is made between the two classes of veins in their consideration under the act; and if a single distinction in their legal status be admitted, no reason can be alleged against further distinctions with reference to their essential points at difference."

How, few who have not toiled over the long and wearisome works upon mining as a legal branch of human knowledge, would care a cold, dead clam, whether such lodes as have perpendicular bases, or those which have stratigraphical deposits, are to be allowed under the law in relation to pinched out or intersecting veins.

But to the student, whose whole life is wrapped up in the investigation of this beautiful mystery, these logical sequences break upon his mind with a beautiful effulgence that fills him with unstratified and purely igneous or nomicaseous joy.

Reading farther in the thrilling work, above referred to, we find this little garland of fragrant literary wood violets:

"Another point to be guarded against in the conveyance of a segregated portion of a claim on a fissure vein, is, that a line drawn at right angles to the side lines at the surface, and which is intended as the dividing fine between the part retained and the part sold, may, when carried vertically downward, cut off the vein on its dip in such a way as to divide it, for instance, at the surface. It begins 'at the west end of discovery shaft,' it may leave the bottom of such shaft entirely in the west fraction of the lode within a comparatively few feet of sinking. Such result, or a similar result, will invariably occur where the vein has a dip, unless the end lines are at an exact right angle to the strike of the vein."

Now, however, supposing that, for the sake of argument, the above be true; but, in addition thereto, a segregation of non-metallic vertically heterogeneous quartzite in non-conformity to presupposed notions of horizontal deposits of mineral in place should be agatized and truncated with diverging lines meeting at the point of intersection and disappearing with the pinched veins or departing from known proximity in company with the dividends, we have then to consider whether a winze coming in at this juncture and pinching out the assessments, would thereby invalidate tertiary flux, and thereby, in the light of a close legal examination of the slide, bar out the placer or riparian rights of contesting parties, or, if so, why in thunder should it not, or at least, what could be done about it in case the same or a totally different set of surrounding circumstances should or should not take place?

DRAWBACKS OF ROYALTY

IT seems from our late dispatches that the prevailing assassin has made his appearance in England, and has fired at Her Royal Tallness, the Queen. The dispatch does not say why the man fired at Victoria, but the chances are that she at some time in a careless moment refused him the appointment of Book-keeper to the Queen's Livery Stable Extraordinary, or neglected to confirm his nomination to the position as Usher Plenipotentiary to the Royal Bath Room and Knight of the Queen's Cuspidor.

Royalty gets it in the nose every day or two, and yet after the family has hung onto the salary for several centuries it does not occur to the average king that he could strike a job as humorist on some London paper, at about the same salary and with none of the annoyances. The most of those people who have worn a great, heavy cast iron crown, with diamonds on it as big as a peanut, have become so attached to it that they can't swear off in a moment.

We do not see where the orchestra comes in on a thing like that. The average American would rather sell mining stock, and get wealthy without a tail on his name and his hair all worn off with a crown two sizes too large for him, than to be King of the Cannibal Islands with a missionary baby on toast twice a day.

ENGLISH HUMOR

THE London Spectator says that "the humor of the United States, if closely examined, will be found to depend in a great measure on the ascendancy which the principle of utility has gained over the imaginations of a rather imaginative people." The humor of England, if closely examined, will be found just about ready to drop over the picket fence into the arena, but never quite making connections. If we scan the English literary horizon, we will find the humorist up a tall tree, depending from a sharp knot thereof by the slack of his overalls. He is just out of sight at the time you look in that direction. He always has a man working in his place, however. The man who works in his place is just paring down the half sole, and newly pegging a joke, that has recently been sent in by the foreman for repairs.

ABOUT THE AUTOPSY

WE have been carefully reading and investigating the report of Dr. Lamb, relative to the anatomical condition of the late remnants of Charles J. Gluiteau, and also a partial or minority report furnished by the other two doctors, who got on their ear at the time of the autopsy. We are permitted to print the fragment of a private letter addressed personally to the editor from one of these gentlemen, whose name we are not permitted to use. He says:

"We found the late lamented, and after looking him over thoroughly, and removing what works he had inside of him, agreed, almost at once, that he was dead. This was the only point upon which we agreed.

"Shortly after we began to remove the internal economy of the deceased, some little discussion arose between Doc Lamb and myself about the extravasation of blood in the right pectoralis and the peculiar position of the dewflicker on the dome of the diaphragm. I made a suggestion about the causes that had led to this, stating, in my opinion, the pericarditis had crossed the median line and congested the dewdad.

"He said it was no such thing, and that I didn't know the difference between a malpighian capsule and an abdominal viscera.

"That insulted me, but I held my temper, going on with my work, removing the gall-bladder and other things, as though nothing had been said.