SOME REASONS WHY I CAN'T BE AN INDIAN AGENT.

I see by the Western press that my name has been suggested to the Secretary of the Interior as a suitable one for the appointment of Indian Agent at the Uncompahgre Agency to succeed Berry; and, while I must express my grateful acknowledgment for the apparent faith and childlike confidence reposed in me by the people of Colorado, I must gently but firmly decline the proffered distinction.

In the first place, my other duties will not admit of it. My time is very much occupied at present in my journalistic work, and should there be a falling off in my chaste and picturesque contributions to the press, the great surging world of literature would be surprised and grieved.

Again, I could not entirely lay aside this class of work anyway, even were I to accept the position, and as I cannot write without being wrapped in the most opaque gloom and perfect calm I would be annoyed, I know, by the war-whoops of the savage when he got to playing croquet in the front yard, and whenever he got to shooting at me through the window while I was composing a poem, I am perfectly positive that I would get restless and the divine afflatus would cease to give down.

The true poet loves seclusion and soothing rest. That is the secret of his even numbers and smooth cadences. Look at Dryden, and Walt Whitman, and Milton, and Burns, and the Sweet Singer of Michigan. What could any of them have done with the house full of children of the forest who were hankering for a fresh pail of gore for lunch?

Further than this, I have not that gentle magnetic power over the untutored savage that some have. I am agitated all the time by a nervous dread that if I go near him I may lose my self-command and kill him. I would lose my temper some day when I felt irritable, I'm afraid, and shoot into a drove of them and mangle them horribly if they refused to dig the potatoes, or got rebellious and wouldn't do the fall plowing.

Then I would have to hunt up a suitable military post 200 or 300 miles away and stay there till the popular feeling in the tribe had cooled down a little.

Then, again, the Utes would invite me to attend the regular social hops during the winter, and I wouldn't know what to do, for it would be bad policy to refuse, and yet I don't know the first figure of the war-dance. I dance like a club-footed camel, anyway, and when I got mixed up in the scalp-dance the floor-manager would get mad at me probably, and chop some large irregular notches in me with a broad-ax.

Then their costumes are so low-necked and so exceedingly dress, and everything is so all-fired decolette, whatever that is. I would probably insist on wearing a liver-pad on a chilblain, and they wouldn't dance with me all the evening, and I would be a wall-flower, and they would call me a perfect dud, and would laugh at the way my liver-pad was cut, and I would go home and cry myself to sleep over the whole miserable affair.

So that perhaps it would be just as well to plug along as I am and not get ambitious. The life of the ostensible humorist may not be so fraught with untrammeled nature and sylvan retreats, and wild, picturesque canons, and bosky dells, and things of that kind, but it is cheering and comforting to put your hand on the top of your head and feel that it is still on deck, and, although wealth may not come pouring in upon you in such an irresistible torrent as you may desire, you know that if you can get enough to eat from day to day, and dodge the Vigilance Committee and the celluloid pie, you are comparatively safe.