Kosciusko came to me one night in winter, with no baggage and
unidentified. When I opened the door he came in as though he had left
something in there by mistake and had returned for it.
He stayed with us two years as a watch-dog. In a desultory way, he was a
good watch-dog. If he had watched other people with the same unrelenting
scrutiny with which he watched me, I might have felt his death more keenly
than I do now.
The second year that little Kosciusko was with us, I shaved off a full
beard one day while down town, put on a clean collar and otherwise
disguised myself, intending to surprise my wife.
Kosciusko sat on the front porch when I returned. He looked at me as the
cashier of a bank does when a newspaper man goes in to get a suspiciously
large check cashed. He did not know me. I said, “Kosciusko, have you
forgotten your master's voice?”
He smiled sarcastically, showing his glorious wealth of mouth, but still
sat there as though he had stuck his tail into the door-steps and couldn't
get it out.
So I waived the formality of going in at the front door, and went around
to the portcullis, on the off side of the house, but Kosciusko was there
when I arrived. The cook, seeing a stranger lurking around the manor
house, encouraged Kosciusko to come and gorge himself with a part of my
leg, which he did. Acting on this hint I went to the barn. I do not know
why I went to the barn, but somehow there was nothing in the house that I
wanted. When a man wants to be by himself, there is no place like a good,
quiet barn for thought. So I went into the barn, about three feet prior to
Kosciusko.
[Illustration: THE COMBAT.]
Noticing the stairway, I ascended it in an aimless kind of way, about four
steps at a time. What happened when we got into the haymow I do not now
recall, only that Kosciusko and I frolicked around there in the hay for
some time. Occasionally I would be on top, and then he would have all the
delegates, until finally I got hold of a pitchfork, and freedom shrieked
when Kosciusko fell. I wrapped myself up in an old horse-net and went into
the house. Some of my clothes were afterward found in the hay, and the
doctor pried a part of my person out of Kosciusko's jaws, but not enough
to do me any good.
I have owned, in all, eleven dogs, and they all died violent deaths, and
went out of the world totally unprepared to die.
A Picturesque Picnic.
Railroads have made the Rocky Mountain country familiar and contiguous, I
may say, to the whole world; but the somber canon, the bald and blackened
cliff, the velvety park and the snowy, silent peak that forever rests
against the soft, blue sky, are ever new. The foamy green of the torrent
has whirled past the giant walls of nature's mighty fortress myriads of
years, perhaps, and the stars have looked down into the great heart of
earth for centuries, where the silver thread of streams, thousands of feet
below, has been patiently carving out the dark canon where the eagle and
the solemn echo have their home.
I said this to a gentleman from Leadville a short time ago as we toiled up
Kenoska Hill, between Platte canon and the South Park, on the South Park
and Pacific Railway. He said that might be true in some cases and even
more so, perhaps, depending entirely on whether it would or not.
I do not believe at this moment that he thoroughly understood me. He was
only a millionaire and his soul, very likely, had never throbbed and
thrilled with the mysterious music nature yields to her poet child.
He could talk on and on of porphyry walls and contact veins, gray copper
and ruby silver, and sulphurets and pyrites of iron, but when my eye
kindled with the majestic beauty of these eternal battlements and my voice
trembled a little with awe and wonder; while my heart throbbed and
thrilled in the midst of nature's eloquent, golden silence, this man sat
there like an Etruscan ham and refused to throb or thrill. He was about as
unsatisfactory a throbber and thriller as I have met for years.
At an elevation of over 10,000 feet above high water mark, Fahrenheit, the
South Park, a hundred miles long, surrounded by precipitous mountains or
green and sloping foot-hills, burst upon us, In the clear, still air, a
hundred miles away, at Pueblo, I could hear a promissory note and
cut-throat mortgage drawing three per cent a month. So calm and unruffled
was the rarified air that I fancied I could hear the thirteenth assessment
on a share of stock at Leadville toiling away at the bottom of a two
hundred and fifty foot shaft.
Colorado air is so pure that men in New York have, in several instances,
heard the dull rumble of an assessment working as far away as the San Juan
country.
At Como, in the park, I met Col. Wellington Wade, the Duke of Dirty
Woman's Ranch, and barber extraordinary to old Stand-up-and-Yowl, chief of
the Piebiters.
Colonel Wade is a reformed temperance lecturer. I went to his shop to get
shaved, but he was absent. I could smell hair oil through the keyhole, but
the Colonel was not in his slab-inlaid emporium. He had been preparing
another lecture on temperance, and was at that moment studying the habits
of his adversary at a neighboring gin palace. I sat down on the steps and
devoured the beautiful landscape till he came. Then I sat down in the
chair, and he hovered over me while he talked about an essay he had
written on the flowing bowl. His arguments were not so strong as his
breath seemed to be. I asked him if he wouldn't breathe the other way
awhile and let me sober up. I learned afterward that although his nose was
red, his essay was not.
He would shave me for a few moments, and then he would hone the razor on
his breath and begin over again. I think he must have been pickling his
lungs in alcohol. I never met a more pronounced gin cocktail symphony and
bologna sausage study in my life.
I think Sir Walter Scott must have referred to Colonel Wade when he said,
“Breathes there a man with soul so dead?” Colonel Wade's soul might not
have been dead, but it certainly did not enjoy perfect health.
I went over the mountains to Breckenridge the next day, climbed two miles
perpendicularly into the sky, rode on a special train one day, a push car
the next and a narrow-gauge engine the next. Saw all the beauty of the
country, in charge of Superintendent Smith, went over to Buena Vista and
had a congestion of the spine and a good time generally. You can leave
Denver on a morning train and see enough wild, grand, picturesque
loveliness before supper, to store away in your heart and hang upon the
walls of memory, to last all through your busy, humdrum life, and it is a
good investment, too.
Taxidermy.
This name is from two Greek words which signify “arrangement” and “skin,”
so that the ancient Greeks, no doubt, regarded taxidermy as the original
skin-game of that period. Taxidermy did not flourish in America prior to
the year 1828. At that time an Englishman named Scudder established a
museum and general repository for upholstered beasts.
Since then the art has advanced quite rapidly. To properly taxiderm,
requires a fine taste and a close study of the subject itself in life,
akin to the requirements necessary in order to succeed as a sculptor. I
have seen taxidermed animals that would not fool anybody. I recall, at
this time especially, a mountain lion, stuffed after death by a party who
had not made this matter a subject of close study. The lion was
represented in a crouching attitude, with open jaws and red gums. As time
passed on and year succeeded year, this lion continued to crouch. His tail
became less rampant and drooped like a hired man on a hot day. His gums
became less fiery red and his reddish skin hung over his bones in a loose
and distraught manner, like an old buffalo robe thrown over the knees of a
vinegary old maid. Spiders spun their webs across his dull, white fangs.
Mice made their nests in his abdominal cavity. His glass eye became
hopelessly strabismussed, and the moths left him bald-headed on the
stomach. He was a sad commentary on the extremely transitory nature of all
things terrestrial and the hollowness of the stuffed beast.
I had a stuffed bird for a long time, which showed the cunning of the
stuffer to a great degree. It afforded me a great deal of unalloyed
pleasure, because I liked to get old hunters to look at it and tell me
what kind of a bird it was. They did not generally agree. A bitter and
acrimonious fight grew out of a discussion in relation to this bird. A man
from Vinegar Hill named Lyons and a party called Soiled Murphy (since
deceased), were in my office one morning--Mr. Lyons as a witness, and Mr.
Murphy in his great specialty as a drunk and disorderly. We had just
disposed of the case, and had just stepped down from the bench, intending
to take off the judicial ermine and put some more coal in the stove, when
the attention of Soiled Murphy was attracted to the bird. He allowed that
it was a common “hell-diver with an abnormal head,” while Lyons claimed
that it was a kingfisher.
The bird had a duck's body, the head of a common eagle and the feet of a
sage hen. These parts had been adjusted with great care and the tail
loaded with lead somehow, so that the powerful head would not tip the bird
up behind. With this _rara avis_, to use a foreign term, I loved to amuse
and instruct old hunters, who had been hunting all their lives for a free
drink, and hear them tell how they had killed hundred of these birds over
on the Poudre in an early day, or over near Elk Mountain when the country
was new.
So Lyons claimed that he had killed millions of these fowls, and Soiled
Murphy, who was known as the tomato can and beer-remnant savant of that
country, said that before the Union Pacific Railroad got into that
section, these birds swarmed around Hutton's lakes and lived on horned
toads.
The feeling got more and more partisan till Mr. Lyons made a pass at
Soiled Murphy with a large red cuspidor that had been presented to me by
Valentine Baker, a dealer in abandoned furniture and mines. Mr. Murphy
then welted Lyons over the head with the judicial scales. He then adroitly
caught a lump of bituminous coal with his countenance and fell to the
floor with a low cry of pain.
I called in an outside party as a witness, and in the afternoon both men
were convicted of assault and battery. Soiled Murphy asked for a change of
venue on the ground that I was prejudiced. I told him that I did not allow
anything whatever to prejudice me, and went on with the case.
This great taxidermic masterpiece led to other assaults afterward, all of
which proved remunerative in a small way. My successor claimed that the
bird was a part of the perquisites of the office, and so I had to turn it
over with the docket.
I also had a stuffed weasel from Cummins City that attracted a great deal
of attention, both in this country and in Europe. It looked some like a
weasel and some like an equestrian sausage with hair on it.
The Ways of Doctors.
“There's a big difference in doctors, I tell you,” said an old-timer to me
the other day. “You think you know something about 'em, but you are still
in the fluff and bloom, and kindergarten of life, Wait till you've been
through what I have.”
“Where, for instance?” I asked him.
“Well, say nothing about anything else, just look at the doctors we had in
the war. We had a doctor in our regiment that looked as if he knew so much
that it made him unhappy. I found out afterward that he ran a kind of cow
foundling asylum, in Utah before the war, and when he had to prescribe for
a human being, it seemed to kind of rattle him.
“I fell off'n my horse early in the campaign and broke my leg, I
rickolect, and he sot the bone. He thought that a bone should be sot
similar to a hen. He made what he called a good splice, but the break was
above the knee, and he got the cow idea into his head in a way that set
the knee behind. That was bad.
[Illustration: HE GAVE ME A CIGAR.]
“I told him one day that he was a blamed fool. He gave me a cigar and told
me I must be a mind reader.
“For several weeks our colonel couldn't eat anything, and seemed to feel
kind of billious. He didn't know what the trouble was till he went to the
doctor. He looked at the colonel a few moments, examined his tongue, and
told him right off that he had lost his cud.
“He bragged a good deal on his diagnosis. He said he'd like to see the
disease he couldn't diagnose with one hand tied behind him.
“He was always telling me how he had resuscitated a man they hung over at
T---- City in the early day. He was hung by mistake, it seemed. It was a
dark night and the Vigilance committee was in something of a hurry, having
another party to hang over at Dirty Woman's ranch that night, and so they
erroneously hung a quiet young feller from Illinois, who had been sent
west to cure a case of bronchitis. He was right in the middle of an
explanation when the head vigilanter kicked the board from under him and
broke his neck.
[Illustration: BURIED WITH MILITARY HONORS.]
“All at once, some one said: 'My God, we have made a ridiculous blunder.
Boys, we can't be too careful about hanging total strangers. A few more
such breaks as these, and people from the States will hesitate about
coming here to make their homes. We have always claimed that this was a
good country for bronchitis, but if we write to Illinois and tell this
young feller's parents the facts, we needn't look for a very large hegira
from Illinois next season. Doc., can't you do anything for the young man?'
“Then this young physician stepped forward, he says, and put his knee on
the back of the boy's neck, give it a little push, at the same time pulled
the head back with a snap that straightened the neck, and the young
feller, who was in the middle of a large word, something like 'contumely,'
when the barrel tipped over, finished out the word and went right on with
the explanation. The doctor said he lived a good many years, and was loved
and esteemed by all who knew him.
“The doctor was always telling of his triumphs in surgery. He did save a
good many lives, too, toward the close of the war. He did it in an odd
way, too.
“He had about one year more to serve, and, with his doctoring on one side
and the hostility of the enemy on the other, our regiment was wore down to
about five hundred men. Everybody said we couldn't stand it more than
another year. One day, however, the doctor had just measured a man for a
porus plaster, and had laid the stub of his cigar carefully down on the
top of a red powder-keg, when there was a slight atmospheric disturbance,
the smell of burnt clothes, and our regiment had to apply for a new
surgeon.
“The wife of our late surgeon wrote to have her husband's remains
forwarded to her, but I told her that it would be very difficult to do so,
owing to the nature of the accident. I said, however, that we had found an
upper set of store teeth imbedded in a palmetto tree near by, and had
buried them with military honors, erecting over the grave a large board,
on which was inscribed the name and age of the deceased and this
inscription:
“_Not dead, but spontaneously distributed. Gone to meet his glorified
throng of patients. Ta, ta, vain world_.”
Absent Minded.
I remember an attorney, who practiced law out West years ago, who used to
fill his pipe with brass paper fasteners, and try to light it with a
ruling pen about twice a day. That was his usual average.
He would talk in unknown tongues, and was considered a thorough and
revised encyclopedia on everything from the tariff on a meerschaum pipe to
the latitude of Crazy Woman's Fork west of Greenwich, and yet if he went
to the postoffice he would probably mail his pocketbook and carefully
bring his letter back to the office.
One day he got to thinking about the Monroe doctrine, or the sudden and
horrible death of Judas Iscariot, and actually lost his office. He walked
up and down for an hour, scouring the town for the evanescent office that
had escaped his notice while he was sorrowing over the shocking death of
Judas, or Noah's struggles against malaria and a damp, late spring.
Martin Luther Brandt was the name of this eccentric jurist. He got up in
the night once, and dressed himself, and taking a night train in that
dreamy way of his, rode on to Denver, took the Rio Grande train in the
morning and drifted away into old Mexico somewhere. He must have been in
that same old half comatose state when he went away, for he made a most
ludicrous error in getting his wife in the train. When he arrived in old
Mexico he found that he had brought another man's wife, and by some
strange oversight had left his own at home with five children. It hardly
seems possible that a man could be so completely enveloped in a brown
study that he would err in the matter of a wife and five children, but
such was the case with Martin Luther. Martin Luther couldn't tell you his
own name if you asked him suddenly, so as to give him a nervous shock.
This dreamy, absent-minded, wool-gathering disease is sometimes
contagious. Pretty soon after Martin Luther struck Mexico the malignant
form of brown study broke out among the greasers, and an alarming mania
on the somnambulistic order seemed to follow it. A party of Mexican
somnambuloes one night got together, and while the disease was at its
height tied Martin Luther to the gable of a 'dobe hen palace. His soul
is probably at this moment floundering around through space, trying to
find the evergreen shore.
An old hunter, who was a friend of mine, had this odd way of walking
aimlessly around with his thoughts in some other world.
I used to tell him that some day he would regret it, but he only laughed
and continued to do the same fool thing.
Last fall he saw a grizzly go into a cave in the upper waters of the
Platte, and strolled in there to kill her. As he has not returned up to
this moment, I am sure he has erroneously allowed himself to get mixed up
as to the points of the compass, and has fallen a victim to this fatal
brown study. Some think that the brown study had hair on it.
Woman's Wonderful Influence.
“Woman wields a wonderful influence over man's destinies,” said Woodtick
William, the other day, as he breathed gently on a chunk of blossom rock
and then wiped it carefully with the tail of his coat.
“Woman in most cases is gentle and long suffering, but if you observe
close for several consecutive weeks you will notice that she generally
gets there with both feet.
“I've been quite a student of the female mind myself. I have, therefore,
had a good deal of opportunity to compare the everedge man with the
everedge woman as regards ketchin' on in our great general farewell
journey to the tomb.
[Illustration: “YOU GO ON WITH YOUR PETITION.”]
“Woman has figgered a good deal in my own destinies. My first wife was a
large, powerful woman, who married me before I hardly knew it. She married
me down near Provost, in an early day. Her name was Lorena. The name
didn't seem to suit her complexion and phizzeek as a general thing. It was
like calling the fat woman in the museum Lily. Lorena was a woman of great
strength of purpose. She was also strong in the wrists. Lorena was of
foreign extraction, with far-away eyes and large, earnest red hands. You
ought to have saw her preserve order during the hour for morning prayers.
I had a hired man there in Utah, in them days, who was inclined to be a
scoffer at our plain home-made style of religion. So I told Lorena that I
was a little afraid that Orlando Whoopenkaugh would rise up suddenly while
I was at prayer and spatter my thinker all over the cook stove, or create
some other ruction that would cast a gloom over our devotions.
“Lorena said: 'Never mind, William. You are more successful in prayer,
while I am more successful in disturbances. You go on with your petition,
and I will preserve order.”
“Lorena saved my life once in a singular manner. Being a large, powerful
woman, of course she no doubt preserved me from harm a great many times;
but on this occasion it was a clear case.
“I was then sinking on the Coopon claim, and had got the prospect shaft
down a couple of hundred foot and was drifting for the side wall with
indifferent success. We was working a day shift of six men, blasting,
hysting and a little timbering. I was in charge of the crew and eastern
capital was furnishing the ready John Davis, if you will allow me that low
term.
[Illustration: LORENA JUMPING NINE FEET HIGH.]
“Lorena and me had been a little edgeways for several days, owing to a
little sassy remark made by her and a retort on my part in which I
thoughtlessly alluded to her brother, who was at that time serving out a
little term for life down at Canyon City, and who, if his life is spared,
is at it yet. If I wanted to make Lorena jump nine feet high and holler,
all I had to do was just to allude in a jeering way to her family record,
so she got madder and madder, till at last it ripened into open hostility,
and about noon on the 13th day of September Lorena attacked me with a
large butcher knife and drove me into the adjoining county. She told me,
also, that if I ever returned to Provost she would cut me in two right
between the pancreas and the watch pocket and feed me to the hens.
“I thought if she felt that way about it I would not return. I felt so
hurt and so grieved about it that I never stopped till I got to Omaha.
Then I heard how Lorena, as a means in the hands of Providence, had saved
my unprofitable life.
“When she got back to the house and had put away her butcher knife, a man
came rushing in to tell her that the boys had struck a big pay streak of
water, and that the whole crew in the Coopon was drowned, her husband
among the rest.
“Then it dawned on Lorena how she had saved me, and for the first time in
her life she burst into tears. People who saw her said her grief was
terrible. Tears are sad enough when shed by a man, but when we see a
strong woman bowed in grief, we shudder.
“No one who has never deserted his wife at her urgent request can fully
realize the pain and anguish it costs. I have been married many times
since, but the sensation is just the same to-day as it was the first time
I ever deserted my wife.
“As I said, though, a woman has a wonderful influence over a man's whole
life. If I had a chance to change the great social fabric any, though, I
should ask woman to be more thoughtful of her husband, and, if possible,
less severe. I would say to woman, be a man. Rise above these petty little
tyrannical ways. Instead of asking your husband what he does with every
cent you give him, learn to trust him. Teach him that you have confidence
in him. Make him think you have anyway, whether you have or not. Do not
seek to get a whiff of his breath every ten minutes to see whether he has
been drinking or not. If you keep doing that you will sock him into a
drunkard's grave, sure pop. He will at first lie about it, then he will
use disinfectants for the breath, and then he will stay away till he gets
over it. The timid young man says, 'Pass the cloves, please. I've got to
get ready to go home pretty soon.' The man whose wife really has fun with
him says, 'Well, boys, good-night. I'm sorry for you.' Then he goes home.
“Very few men have had the opportunities for observation in a matrimonial
way that I have, William. You see, one man judges all the wives in
Christendom by his'n. Another does ditto, and so it goes. But I have made
matrimony a study. It has been a life-work for me. Others have simply
dabbled into it. I have studied all its phases and I am an expert. So I
say to you that woman, in one way or another, either by strategy and
winnin' ways or by main strength and awkwardness, is absolutely sure to
wield an all-fired influence over poor, weak man, and while grass grows
and water runs, pardner, you will always find her presiding over man's
destinies and his ducats.”
Causes for Thanksgiving.
We are now rapidly approaching the date of our great national
thanksgiving. Another year has almost passed by on the wings of tireless
time.
Since last we gathered about the festive board and spattered the true
inwardness of the family gobbler over the table cloth, remorseless time,
who knows not the weight of weariness, has sought out the good, the true
and the beautiful, as well as the old, the sinful and the tough, and has
laid his heavy hand upon them. We have no more fitting illustration of the
great truth that death prefers the young and tender than the deceased
turkey upon which we are soon to operate. How still he lies, mowed down in
life's young morn to make a yankee holiday.
How changed he seems! Once so gay and festive, now so still, so strangely
quiet and reserved. How calmly he lies, with his bare limbs buried in the
lurid atmosphere like those of a hippytehop artist on the west side.
Soon the amateur carver will plunge the shining blade into the unresisting
bird, and the air will be filled with stuffing and half smothered
profanity. The Thanksgiving turkey is a grim humorist, and nothing pleases
him so well as to hide his joint in a new place and then flip over and
smile when the student misses it and buries the knife in the bosom of a
personal friend. Few men can retain their _sang froid_ before company when
they have to get a step ladder and take down the second joint and the
merry thought from the chandelier while people are looking at them.
And what has the past year brought us? Speaking from a Republican
standpoint, it has brought us a large wad of dark blue gloom. Speaking
from a Democratic standpoint, it has been very prolific of fourth-class
postoffices worth from $200 down to $1.35 per annum. Politically, the past
year has been one of wonderful changes. Many have, during the year just
past, held office for the first time. Many, also, have gone out into the
cold world since last Thanksgiving and seriously considered the great
problem of how to invest a small amount of actual perspiration in plain
groceries.
Many who considered the life of a politician to be one of high priced food
and inglorious ease, have found, now that they have the fruit, that it is
ashes on their lips.
Our foreign relations have been mutually pleasant, and those who dwell
across the raging main, far removed from the refining influences of our
prohibitory laws, have still made many grand strides toward the
amelioration of our lost and undone race. Many foreigners who have never
experienced the pleasure of drinking mysterious beverages from gas
fixtures and burial caskets in Maine, or from a blind pig in Iowa, or a
Babcock fire extinguisher in Kansas, still enjoy life by bombarding the
Czar as he goes out after a scuttle of coal at night, or by putting a
surprise package of dynamite on the throne of a tottering dynasty, where
said tottering dynasty will have to sit down upon it and then pass rapidly
to another sphere of existence.
Many startling changes have taken place since last November. The political
fabric in our own land has assumed a different hue, and men who a year ago
were unnoticed and unknown are even more so now. This is indeed a healthy
sign. No matter what party or faction may be responsible for this, I say
in a wholly non-partisan spirit, that I am glad of it.
I am glad to notice that, owing to the active enforcement of the Edmunds
bill in Utah, polygamy has been made odorous. The day is not far distant
when Utah will be admitted as a State and her motto will be “one country,
one flag, and one wife at a time.” Then will peace and prosperity unite to
make the modern Zion the habitation of men. The old style of hand-made
valley tan will give place to a less harmful beverage, and we will welcome
the new sister in the great family circle of States, not clothed in the
disagreeable endowment robe, but dressed up in the Mother Hubbard wrapper,
with a surcingle around it, such as the goddess of liberty wears when she
has her picture taken.
Crops throughout the northwest have been fairly good, though the gain
yield has been less in quantity and inferior in quality to that of last
year. A Democratic administration has certainly frowned upon the
professional, partisan office seekers, but it has been unable to stay the
onward march of the chintz bug or to produce a perceptible falling off in
pip among the yellow-limbed fowls. While Jeffersonian purity and economy
have seemed to rage with great virulence at Washington, in the northwest
heaves and botts among horses and common, old-fashioned hollow horn among
cattle have been the prevailing complaints.
And yet there is much for which we should be thankful. Many broad-browed
men who knew how a good paper ought to be conducted, but who had no other
visible means of support, have passed on to another field of labor,
leaving the work almost solely in the hands of the vast army of novices
who at the present are at the head of journalism throughout the country,
and who sadly miss those timely words of caution that were wont to fall
from the lips of those men whose spirits are floating through space,
finding fault with the arrangement of the solar system.
The fool-killer, in the meantime, has not been idle. With his old, rusty,
unloaded musket, he has gathered in enough to make his old heart swell
with pride, and to this number he has added many by using “rough on rats,”
a preparation that never killed anything except those that were
unfortunate enough to belong to the human family.
Still the fool-killer has missed a good many on account of the great rush
of business in his line, and I presume that no one has a greater reason to
be thankful for this oversight than I have.
Farming in Maine.
The State of Maine is a good place in which to experiment with
prohibition, but it is not a good place to farm it in very largely.
In the first place, the season is generally a little reluctant. When I was
up near Moosehead Lake, a short time ago, people were driving across that
body of water on the ice with perfect impunity. That is one thing that
interferes with the farming business in Maine. If a young man is
sleigh-riding every night till midnight, he don't feel like hoeing corn
the following day. Any man who has ever had his feet frost-bitten while
bugging potatoes, will agree with me that it takes away the charm of
pastoral pursuits. It is this desire to amalgamate dog days and Santa
Claus, that has injured Maine as an agricultural hot-bed.
[Illustration: A DAY-DREAM.]
Another reason that might be assigned for refraining from agricultural
pursuits in Maine, is that the agitator of the soil finds when it is too
late that soil itself, which is essential to the successful propagation of
crops, has not been in use in Maine for years. While all over the State
there is a magnificent stone foundation on which a farm might safely rest,
the superstructure, or farm proper, has not been secured.
If I had known when I passed through Minnesota and Illinois what a soil
famine there was in Maine, I would have brought some with me. The stone
crop this year in Maine will be very great. If they do not crack open
during the dry weather, there will be a great many. The stone bruise is
also looking unusually well for this season of the year, and chilblains
were in full bloom when I was there.
In the neighborhood of Pittsfield, the country seems to run largely to
cold water and chattel mortgages. Some think that rum has always kept
Maine back, but I claim that it has been wet feet. In another article I
refer to the matter of rum in Maine more fully.
The agricultural resources of Pittsfield and vicinity are not great, the
principal exports being spruce gum and Christmas trees. Here also the
huckleberry hath her home. But the country seems to run largely to
Christmas trees. They were not yet in bloom when I visited the State, so
it was too early to gather popcorn balls and Christmas presents.
Here, near Pittsfield, is the birthplace of the only original wormless
dried apple pie, with which we generally insult our gastric economy when
we lunch along the railroad. These pies, when properly kiln-dried and
rivetted, with German silver monogram on top, if fitted out with Yale time
lock, make the best fire and burglar-proof wormless pies of commerce. They
take the place of civil war, and as a promoter of intestine strife they
have no equal.
The farms in Maine are fenced in with stone walls. I do not know way this
is done, for I did not see anything on these farms that anyone would
naturally yearn to carry away with him.
I saw some sheep in one of these enclosures. Their steel-pointed bills
were lying on the wall near them, and they were resting their jaws in the
crisp, frosty morning air. In another enclosure a farmer was planting
clover seed with a hypodermic syringe, and covering it with a mustard
plaster. He said that last year his clover was a complete failure because
his mustard plasters were no good. He had tried to save money by using
second-hand mustard plasters, and of course the clover seed, missing the
warm stimulus, neglected to rally, and the crop was a failure.
Here may be noticed the canvas-back moose and a strong antipathy to good
rum. I do not wonder that the people of Maine are hostile to rum--if they
judge all rum by Maine rum. The moose is one of the most gamey of the
finny tribe. He is caught in the fall of the year with a double-barrel
shotgun and a pair of snow-shoes. He does not bite unless irritated, but
little boys should not go near the female moose while she is on her nest.
The masculine moose wears a harelip, and a hat rack on his head to which
is attached a placard on which is printed: