“Very likely you've got a family,” said I, “and you mustn't forget that we've got a long, cold, hard winter ahead of us. Hang on to your wheat. Don't let Tom, Dick and Harry come along and chisel you out of your last kernel, just to be neighborly.”
I remained in the room an hour and a half, the cynosure of all eyes. There is a great deal of sociability there. Three hundred men all talking diagonally at each other at the same time, reminds me of a tete-a-tete I once had with a warm personal friend, who was a boiler-maker. He invited me to come around to the shop and visit him. He said we could crawl down through the manhole into the boiler and have a nice visit while he worked.
I remember of following him down through the hole into the boiler; then they began to head boiler rivets, and I knew nothing more till I returned to consciousness the next day to find myself in my own luxuriously-furnished apartments.
The family physician was holding my hand. My wife asked: “Is he conscious yet, do you think, doctor?”
“Yes,” he replied, “your husband begins to show signs of life. He may live for many years, but his intellect seems to have been mislaid during his illness. Do you know whether the cat has carried anything out of this room lately?”
Then my wife said: “Yes, the cat did get something out of this room only the other day and ate it. Poor thing!”
The Cow-Boy.
So much amusing talk is being made recently anent the blood-bedraggled cow-boy of the wild West, that I rise as one man to say a few things, not in a dictatorial style, but regarding this so-called or so esteemed dry land pirate who, mounted on a little cow-pony and under the black flag, sails out across the green surge of the plains to scatter the rocky shores of Time with the bones of his fellow-man.