MODERN FICTION IS UNRELIABLE.
Modern fiction has reached that pass where the twentieth chapter may wind up with a funeral of twins. Death or dyspepsia may befall the hero at any moment, and the old-time schedule has been abandoned. It is as delightfully surprising as prospecting for a quartz lead. You may discover a bonanza or sit down on a tarantula at any moment. You may tumble out of an ore bucket and reach the foot of the shaft with your shoulder blade in your pistol pocket, or you may sit down on an ostensibly extinct blast to think over your past life and the next moment go crashing through the milky way without clothes enough to keep off the night air.
CHESTNUT-BURR XXXIX—SOME FACTS OF SCIENCE.
An Interesting Diary—Corn and Small Fruits Suffer—A Fourth of July Dinner—A Good Ice Cream Country—The Diary Abruptly Ends.
A reporter sent out to find the North Pole some years ago, has just been heard from. An exploring party recently found portions of his remains in latitude 4-11-14, longitude sou'west by sou' from the pole, and near the remains the following fragment of a diary: July 1, 1884.—Have just been out searching for a sunstroke and signs of a thaw. Saw nothing but ice floe and snow as far as the eye could reach. Think we will have snow this evening unless the wind changes.
July 2.—Spent the forenoon exploring to the northwest for right of way for a new equatorial and North Pole railroad that I think would be of immense value to commerce. The grade is easy and the expense would be slight. Ate my last dog to-day. Had intended him for the 4th, but got too hungry, and ate him raw with vinegar. I wish I was at home eating pie.
July 3.—We had quite a frost last night, and it looks this morning as though the corn and small fruits must have suffered. It is now two weeks since the last of the crew died and left me alone. Ate the leather ends of my suspenders to-day for dinner. I did not need the suspenders, anyway, for by tightening up my pants I find they will stay on all right, and I don't look for any ladies to call, so that even if my pants came off by some oversight or other, nobody would be shocked.
July 4.—Saved up some tar roofing and a bottle of mucilage for my Fourth of July dinner, and gorged myself to day. The exercises were very poorly attended and the celebration rather a failure. It is clouding up in the west, and I'm afraid we're going to have snow. Seems to me we're having an all-fired late spring here this year.
July 5.—Didn't drink a drop yesterday. It was the quietest Fourth I ever put in. I never felt so little remorse over the way I celebrated as I do to-day. I didn't do a thing yesterday that I was ashamed of except to eat the remainder of a box of shoe blacking for supper. To-day I ate my last boot-heel, stewed. Looks as though we might have a hard winter.
July 6.—Feel a little apprehension about something to eat. My credit is all right here, but there is no competition, and prices are therefore very high. Ice, however, is still firm. This would be a good ice-cream country if there were any demand, but the country is so sparsely settled that a man feels as lonesome here as a greenbacker at a presidential election. Ate a pound of cotton waste soaked in machine oil, to-day. There is nothing left for to-morrow but ice-water and an old pocket-book for dinner. Looks as though we might have snow.
July 7.—This is a good, cool place to spend the summer if provisions were more plenty. I am wearing a seal-skin undershirt, with three woolen overshirts and two bear-skin vests, to-day, and when the dew begins to fall I have to put on my buffalo ulster to keep off the night air. I wish I was home. It seems pretty lonesome here since the other boys died. I do not know what I will get for dinner to-morrow, unless the neighbors bring in something. A big bear is coming down the hatchway as I write. I wish I could eat him. It would be the first square meal for two months. It is, however, a little mixed whether I will eat him or he eat me. It will be a cold day for me if he——
Here the diary breaks off abruptly, and from the chewed-up appearance of the book, we are led to entertain a horrible fear as to his safety.
A HAT DEPOSIT IN THE BLACK HILLS.
An old hunter was out among the Black Hills, east of town, last summer, hunting for cotton-tails and sage hens, and he ran across a little gulch where the abrupt rocks closed together and formed a little atmospheric eddy, so to speak. There in that lonely reservoir he found what he at first considered a petrified hat store. It was a genuine deposit of escaped straw hats and plug hats that the frolicsome zephyrs had caught up and carried for ten miles, until this natural hat-rack had secured them. Of course there were other articles of apparel, and some debilitated umbrellas, but the deposit seemed to assay mostly hats.
CHESTNUT-BURR XL—SORROWS OF A ONE-LEGGED MAN.
The Man with a Cork Leg and a Chastened Air—Remarks on Home Government—A Happy Time in Contemplation—A Wife's Prerogatives—What is to Become of the One-Legged Minority?
Yesterday morning, while the main guy of the sanctum was putting some carbolic acid in the paste pot, and unlimbering his genius, and turning his lyre preparatory to yanking loose a few stanzas on the midsummer cucumber, a man with a cork leg, and the chastened air of one who is second lieutenant in the home circle under the able and efficient command of his wife, came softly in and sat down on a volume containing the complete poems of Noah webster.
He waited patiently till he could catch the eye of the speaker, humming softly to himself—
"Green grows the grave by the wild, dashing river
Where sleeps the brave with his arrow and quiver."
When the time had arrived for the lodge to open up unfinished business, communications and new business, he ran his wooden leg through the rounds of a chair and said:
"I desire to make a few remarks on the subject of home government, and the rights a husband may have which his wife is bound to respect."
"Yes; but we don't enter the family circle with our all-pervading influence. We simply attack evils of a public or general nature. You should pour your tale of woe into the ears of an attorney. He will dish out the required balm to you at so much per balm."
"I know, but this is not strictly a case for the courts. It's a case which raises the question of the husband's priority, and agitates the whole social fabric.
"Last week I celebrated my 43d birthday, or I started to celebrate it, and circumstances over which I had no control arose and busted the programme, as mapped out by the committee of arrangements.
"It was the intention of the party, consisting of myself and several others of our most eminent men, to go over to Sabille canyon with a mountain wagon and a pair of pinto plugs for a little wholesome recreation. We had some weapons for slaying the frolicsome jack rabbit and the timid sage hen, and had provided ourselves against every possible rattlesnake contingency also. We had taken more precautions in this direction, perhaps, than in any other, and were in shape to enjoy the wild grandeur of the eternal hills without fear from the poisonous reptile of the rugged gulches and alkali bottoms of this picturesque western country.
"We were all loaded up in good shape for the trip and drove around to my house to get a camp kettle and some lemons. I went into the pantry to get a couple of pounds of sugar and a nutmeg.
"My wife met me in the pantry and roughly and brutally smelled of my breath.
"This was not the prerogative of a true wife, but she weighs 200 and is middling resolute, so I allowed her to do so, although every man's breath is his own property, and if he allows his wife to take advantage of her marital vows to smell his breath on the most unlooked-for occasions, what is to become of our boasted freedom?
"I then went upstairs into a closet after a lap robe and a pillow to use in case any of us got sunstruck.
"My wife came in just then, and as I started away with the pillow, she tripped me up so I fell inside the closet, and before I could recover from my surprise, she sat down on me in such a solemn and impressive manner that my eyes hung out on my cheeks like the bronze door knobs on a Pullman car.
"There I was in the impenetrable gloom of a closet, with the trusting companion of my home life flattening out my stomach till I could feel my watch chain against my spinal column. She then unscrewed my cork leg in a mechanical kind of a way and locked it up in the bureau drawer, putting the key in her pocket.
"After that she fastened the closet door on the outside, and told the party that I would be unable, owing to the inclemency of the weather, to take part in the exercises at Sabille canyon.
"All through that long, long, weary day, I stood around on one leg and looked out of the window, thinking what a potent spell is exerted over the wooden-legged man by an able-bodied wife.
"It is a question, sir, which is of vital interest to us all. Must the one-legged minority continue thus to subserve the interests of the two-legged majority? I ask you, as the representative of the all civilizing, all leveling, all powerful and all jewhillikin press, how long the cork-limbed, taxation-without-representation masses must limp around the house and sew carpet rags, writhing in the death-like grip of a two-legged oligarchy?"
He did not wait for an answer. He simply gathered up a few of our freshest exchanges and stole softly down the stairs.
We decline to make any comment one way or the other, because we do not know that the country is ripe for the discussion of this question, but it deserves cold, calm, candid thought on the part of all thinking men, to say the least.