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WHILE trying to reconstruct a telescoped spine and put some new copper rivets in the lumbar vertebrae, this spring, I have had occasion to thoroughly investigate the subject of so-called health food, such as gruels, beef tea inundations, toasts, oat meal mush, bran mash, soups, condition powders, graham gem, ground feed, pepsin, laudable mush, and other hen feed usually poked into the invalid who is too weak to defend himself.

Of course it stands to reason that the reluctant and fluttering spirit may not be won back to earth, and joy once more beam in the leaden eye unless due care be taken relative to the food by means of which nature may be made to assert herself.

I do not care to say to the world through the columns of the Free Press, that we may woo from eternity the trembling life with pie. Welsh rabbit and other wild game will not do at first. But I think I am speaking the sentiments of a large and emaciated constituency when I say, that there is getting to be a strong feeling against oat meal submerged in milk and in favor of strawberry short cake.

I almost ate myself into an early grave in April by flying into the face of Providence and demoralizing old Gastric with oat meal. I ate oat meal two weeks, and at the end of that time my friends were telegraphed for, but before it was too late, I threw off the shackles that bound me. With a desperation born of a terrible apprehension, I rose and shook off the fatal oat meal habit and began to eat beefsteak. At first life hung trembling in the balance and there was no change in the quotations of beef, but later on there was a slight, delicate bloom on the wan cheek, and range cattle that had barely escaped a long, severe winter on the plains, began to apprehend a new danger and to seek the secluded canyons of the inaccessible mountains.

I often thought while I was eating health food and waiting for death, how the doctor and other invited guests at the post mortem would start back in amazement to find the remnants of an eminent man filled with bran!

Through all the painful hours of the long, long night and the eventless day, while the mad throng rushed onward like a great river toward eternity's ocean, this thought was uppermost in my mind. I tried to get the physician to promise that he would not expose me, and show the world what a hollow mockery I had been, and how I had deceived my best friends. I told him the whole truth, and asked him to spare my family the humiliation of knowing that though I might have led a blameless life, my sunny exterior was only a thin covering for bran and shorts and middlings, cracked wheat and pearl barley.

I dreamed last night of being in a large city where the streets were paved with dry toast, and the buildings were roofed with toast, and the soil was bran and oat meal, and the water was beef tea and gruel. All at once it came over me that I had solved the great mystery of death, and had been consigned to a place of eternal punishment. The thought was horrible! A million eternities in a city built of dry toast and oat meal! A home for never-ending cycles of ages, where the principal hotel and the post-office building and the opera house were all built of toast, and the fire department squirted gruel at the devouring element forever!

It was only a dream, but it has made me more thoughtful, and people notice that I am not so giddy as I was.

A NEW POET

A NEW and dazzling literary star has risen above the horizon, and is just about to shoot athwart the starry vault of poesy. How wisely are all things ordered, and how promptly does the new star begin to beam, upon the decline of the old.

Hardly had the sweet singer of Michigan commenced to wane and to flicker, when, rising above the western hills, the glad light of the rising star is seen, and adown the canyons and gulches of the Rocky mountains comes the melodious cadences of the poet of the Greeley Eye.

Couched in the rough terms of the west; robed in the untutored language of the Michael Angelo slang of the miner and the cowboy, the poet at first twitters a little on a bough far up the canyon, gradually waking the echoes, until the song is taken up and handed back by every rock and crag along the rugged ramparts of the mighty mountain barrier.

Listen to the opening stanza of "The Dying Cowboy and the Preacher:"

``So, old gospel shark, they tell me I must die;

``That the wheels of life's wagon have rolled into their last rut,

``Well, I will "pass in my checks" without a whimper or a cry,

``And die as I have lived – "a hard nut."=

This is no time-worn simile, no hackneyed illustration or bald-headed decrepit comparison, but a new, fresh illustration that appeals to the western character, and lifts the very soul out of the kinks, as it were.

"Wheels of life's wagon have rolled into their last rut."

Ah! how true to nature and yet how grand. How broad and sweeping. How melodious and yet how real. Hone but the true poet would have thought to compare the close of life to the sudden and unfortunate chuck of the off hind wheel of a lumber wagon into a rut.

In fancy we can see it all. We hear the low, sad kerplunk of the wheel, the loud burst of earnest, logical profanity, and then all is still.

How and then the swish of a mule's tail through the air, or the sigh of the rawhide as it shimmers and hurtles through the silent air, and then a calm falls upon the scene. Anon, the driver bangs the mule that is ostensibly pulling his daylights out, but who is, in fact, humping up like an angle worm, without pulling a pound.

Then the poet comes to the close of the cowboy's career in this style:

```"Do I repent?" No – of nothing present or past;

```So skip, old preach, on gospel pap I won't be fed;

```My breath comes hard; I – am going – but – I – am game to

`````the – last.

```And reckless of the future, as the present, the cowboy was

`````dead.=

If we could write poetry like that, do you think we would plod along the dreary pathway of the journalist? Do you suppose that if we had the heaven-born gift of song to such a degree that we could take hold of the hearts of millions and warble two or three little ditties like that, or write an effigy before breakfast, or construct an ionic, anapestic twitter like the foregoing, that we would carry in our own coal, and trim our own lamps, and wear a shirt two weeks at a time?

No, sir, he would hie us away to Europe or Salt Lake, and let our hair grow long, and we would write some obituary truck that would make people disgusted with life, and they would sigh for death that they might leave their insurance and their obituaries to their survivors.

A WORD IN SELF-DEFENSE

IT might be well in closing to say a word in defense of myself.

The varied and uniformly erroneous notions expressed recently as to my plans for the future, naturally call for some kind of an expression on this point over my own signature. In the first place, it devolves upon me to regain my health in full if it takes fourteen years. I shall not, therefore, "publish a book,"

"prepare an youmorous lecture,"

"visit Florida,"

"probate the estate of Lydia E. Pinkham, deceased," nor make any other grand break till I have once more the old vigor and elasticity, and gurgling laugh of other days.

In the meantime, let it be remembered that my home is in Laramie City, and that unless the common council pass an ordinance against it, I shall return in July if I can make the trip between snow storms, and evade the peculiarities of a tardy and reluctant spring. Bill Nye.