intimacy with you. It may serve the interests of mankind also to
inform them that the greatest wit may be found in a character without
impairing the most unaffected piety." I repeat, I am all but moved
to write these lines of you. It would tell my case at least; and
while description might limp in so far as you lack somewhat of that
snuffle of "true piety" so often engaging the Johnsonian nose, you
make up the defect with possession of a wider philosophy, a better
humour and a brighter, quicker wit than visited or dwelt beneath the
candle-scorched wig of our old bully lexicographer.

ALFRED HENRY LEWIS.




Some Cowboy Facts.

There are certain truths of a botanical character that are not
generally known. Each year the trees in their occupation creep
further west. There are regions in Missouri--not bottom lands--which
sixty years ago were bald and bare of trees. Today they are heavy
with timber. Westward, beyond the trees, lie the prairies, and
beyond the prairies, the plains; the first are green with long
grasses, the latter bare, brown and with a crisp, scorched, sparse
vesture of vegetation scarce worth the name. As the trees march
slowly westward in conquest of the prairies, so also do the prairies,
in their verdant turn, become aggressors and push westward upon the
plains. These last stretches, extending to the base of that bluff
and sudden bulwark, the Rocky Mountains, can go no further. The
Rockies hold the plains at bay and break, as it were, the teeth of