The San Francisco Call. Newspaper, December 15, 1895, Page 15

A THE SAN FRANCISCO CALL, SUNDAY, DECEMBER 15, 1895. 15 = “In those days there'were giants in the land * * mighty men of old thai were of power and renown.” El Dorado! classic, staried, dulcet El Dorado; a name that meant fortune, glory, audacity and manly daring for centuries to the cavaliers of Spain,and even the buccaneers of England. It is, even to this a word of romance the wide world and, on Spanish lips, the sweetest ling word thatcan be uttered. And here permit a protest to be filed iinst our coarse and mushy mouthing of the soft and alliterative names that are mean intention. The very name of State is poetry and song on Spanish lips and could and should be music on our own if we only would have it so. El Do- rado is not only one of the charter counties of this mighty commonwealth, with its vne Golden Gate open to the Orient, but she is the mother of all the mines and mountain sounties up and down the land. For it sin her great, warm, rich heart, right the heart of her heart, that gold was st discovered. Fremont and Kit Carson left bleeding footprints here long before the days of In fact El Dorado, it would seem, ays El Dorado—the heart of gold, t of California, asshe must forever zold d now let me cite a fact not publisbed. rement has been derided, this sold ator, settler and cavalier, for not I > found gold before Marshall found i i a fact that he led directly to the g of it by Marshall. More than forty vears ago Marshall took down a dusty book from a shelf in his cabin and read me lowin vernmen ebruary of snow smong the timber, chance to seramble along; but eep and slippery with snow the tough evergreens of the impeded our way, tore our austed our patie 1 to reconnoiter the the afternoon, the et of the lake. ( across a place where tt mong rocks, but the asin glanced from the icy ipitated me into the river. It road, er which e current, and Carson, thinking ed in after me, and we both had We tried to search aw 1 had been lost in eusout. We afterward fo 1ad been slung under the i the banks of the creek. * * * vas imposing to-duy in the magnifi :some of the pines, beer; ore ten feet in diameter. Cedars also ided, and we meas twenty-eight d & half feet in circumference four from round (redwoods). Here this noble tree o be in its proper soil and climate. it on both sides of the Sierra, but undant on the west. I came up here to look for those big tr losed the book with a bang. *I found u, began to build the mill to make into lumber, and that is the way e came to find goid away up in the heart old El Dorado.” You must know Marshall had not been Jong fromy Oregon, only a year or so, and se Jnew nothing about the Califor- r except what he gathered from ial reports of Fremont. I am not ntrude my opinions, but I can’t i s if Fremont much to do with leading up Its of our great Civil War as Cap- ter; even more, for if Sutter had helped Marshall, the millwright, to tue big redwoods out of which to shion lumber for the vast treeless valleys, e one else would surely have done so, oon; for the city-builders, the world- lders, the blue-eyed people, were arriv- ng, arriving, and they must have lumber to build with. To the right and to the left, up the river to the everlasting snow, down the river to and into the very cornfields of the Sacramento Valley the inflowing passed like a ceaseless torrent, 1 Dorado was not only denuded of her noble forests, but literally laid bare to the bone. Never was seen such ceaseless =loaquin BliLLerR= from Fremont’s report to the | This was our most difficult | We Wwere enforced off the ridges by the and take to the mountain sides, where, rocks and a southern exposure we on sprang cam was | partieche | conds before 1 could recover | g large | language, incident, color, character, in them delight the world, they had far less application to El Dorado than London. Of course our great humorist, Mark Twain, never expected us to take his “Roughing It” quite seriousl We have laughed at his broad charcoal work and it has done us good. But sentiment tales that people old El Dorado only with ‘‘honest gamblers and virtuous women of the town, swear- ing to noble deeds in a London dialect,” mislead the young and disgust the old. Let nowledge orconsent, I want to find an example of tie sort of men I found here forty-one years ago. I find the same sort of people here to-day, earnest, very earn- est; notonly very earnest but better read, far better read, than people of cities. You see they have no broad lighted streets on which to find_ diversion at nigh | theaters; nothing but_bcoks, music, a the sweel little courtesies of refined fire- side iife. But here is the paragraph, the picture from the grandly brave old heart that has battled and patiently borne de- | feat after defeat here for nearly fifty years. Not a word misspelled, not even | 50 much as a comma out of place, yet the hand that penned it has done more hard all. the features in fact that once made | us haye done with such stuff: and, without | | Placerville was at one_time only known, and which is now not unfrequently applied, had its origin in the hanging by a mob, in 1849, | of two Frenchmen and & Spaniard, {0 an oak tree at the northwes: corner of Main and Co- loma streets. The victims had been arrested for highway robbery. While being tried by & jury oi citizens for this offense, and while it Wwas doubtiul what penalty would be inflicted on them, an officer from one of the lower coun- ties arrived, in search of the perpetrators of a horrible murder in his section, and at once recognized two of them as the murderers for whom _he sought. This at once settled their iate. Death was decreed, and the sentence carried out immediately at the place and in the manner mentioned. No; this place was never what the terse and terrible name might imply. It was never “lawless’’; that is, it was never in the hands of a mob as New York, Chicago, | San Franciscoand like places that publish and sell books of “‘blood and thunder” about it have been. The fact is Hangtown had no | law there then, this hanging having been | done in 1848, and not in 1849. as here set down. The early miners, and we old ones still, liked the striking name, for now it | seems nearly half a century of history, and we will use it to the end. You know a woman may be so hideously ugly that she is positively beautiful in her plainness. So it is with this weird and_ghastly name, | which really means nothing ugly to us | old ones. | Ah, me!ah, me! if I had only two lives | instead of this flayed and raveled fragment of and end of one! And what would I do? I would, with the best one of them, | go right off to sparkling, sunlitold El | Dorado and there sit down on a bit of the richest and most generous soil on this globe and go to work. If I gotoutof bread I would dig it out of a gulch in my orchard or pasture and then go back again to work with my vines and fruit trees. I could and would in only a little time make a place much prettier than the one where I have spent the past ten years; for the soil and climate is many times more giori- | ous in EI Dorado. All this land, plenty | “HANGTOWN " Reproduced from an o detine engravin;.) IN ‘49, ¥ |'work than any fifty men to be found in city you can name. “Soon none will be left to tell the story of that wonderful drama played among the rocks in ‘the high Sierras—none to record the irailties or_sing the virtues of the actors. Soon all will be prospecting | along the shores of that mysterious river | where gold counts for nothing. Y love to occasionally look back through the misty tw gulche: | wor R out with pick and pan a greater sword of the Ceesars. | " “But they are going—all going—those hirted miners of the long ago—this ithout their blankets. Softly and lently we see them stealing, one by one, over the rocks and down | their cabin doors. | ““Go with me if you please, down into | yonder deeply shaded gulch and see if you will that brown-faced but beardless young overy that led up to the victori- | miner bending feverishly over that pan of | clay and sand and gold. Oh, those little specks of zold! How they glimmer and shimmer and shine in that young miner’s eyes. They tell of mother and a home— perbaps of wife or babe or bird in nome- and. | ““Now be is going home. Home! How the heart throbs and beats and bounds. Those little specks of gold have done it. | In his dazed condition he lives over again the life of a year ago. He stands again at the garden gate where a thousand farewell kisses left their sadness and their sweet- ness on his lips.” The strong impulse toward the mines | to-day_makes tie old times new, and the old scenery new also. Hangtown | literally smellsof paint. They tell you < PLACERVILLE .(FORMERLY “HANGTOWN ”) TO-DAY. energy; such tireless induetry. It meant Home. And who the men? Many came from Oregon, following Marshall. Here in Hangtown still isa man, famous and be- Joved in Oregon, who was of the first to join his old comrade. He has been here nearly fifty years, and now verges on to 90. e is one of those who met under the claiming to the world that they were “not subjects of England. but citizens of the United States,” sent Joe Weeks at midwinter all the way to Washington on lorseback as delegate! Truly, “in those davs there were giants in the land. Haskins, author of “The Argonauts of California,”’ says of this man, Judge Rus- sell, that he is perhaps one of the bestread men on the globe; that he has done noth- ing else but read and read and meditate and meditate there in the new littie red- wood groves for nearly half a century; read and “rock” out gold enough for his simple wants. 3 The men from the other side of the con- tinent came mainly by sea, and they too were “bookish’” men, men of the very best material to be found. Here was Senator Stanford, Senator Conners, Senator Cole, pioneers; halfway up the long nrn’gglme street of Hangtown, half an hour’s gal- lop from where goid was first found, is the old house of Judge Sanderson, where Sybil Sanderson was born. In truth this sketch would be mainly a catalogue of names should it hold all the renowned names of El Dorado. ¥ And this brings me to a matter which I have had much at heart for a quarterof a century; the people here were from the first and are still of the best, the very best in this broad land. I don’t know that the littie libelous stories, ‘‘sentimental rot, that bright authors have asked El Dorado great fir trees of Oregon_in 1846 and pro- | here that the year now closing has been the best one El Dorado has seen for twenty | vears past; not a vacant store, nor | 2 vacant house of any sort in all | Hangtown. Will itlast? {do not know, | but believe it will. You remember when Australasia got out of mining and had to | go back to her mines lately? You know. | among other old mines, that had been abandoned, they—by a new process for re- ducing ores—opened the old ‘‘Morgan | Hill mme.” Result? The Morgan Hiil mine the past year has yielded twelve millions net profit in’ dividends! Well, we may have fifty Morgan Hills in old El Dorado easily. Hanztown—gardon me, El Dorado. I am of the old boys, the ‘‘has beens,” and Hangtown wili always be Hangtown tome. Call it Placerville and ‘‘resolute,” as vou please. Hangtown hides up under the aaf)phire heavens that are propped up by pillars of the whitest snow peaks under the | sun. This means pure water, pure air. This means health. And do you know El Dorado 1s one continuous vineyard and orchard, as well as gold mine? “Come and see.” Here isa picture of Placerville as drawn by Haskins and now in nis ““Argonauts.” The tree before ihe tavern is the famous hangman’s tree that gave the gruesome name to the town and creek. ‘When I went to look for this tree yester- day I located it, after more than forty ears’ absence, under the porch of a new ard ware-store. “Yes, sir, there is just where the old stump is, down under the asphalt pave- ment and about where that big plow stands,” said the proprietor. Think of it! The antithesis! I went and got a photog- rapher. Look upon that picture and then upon this. Surely the six-shooters had been tuarned into plowshares! X The story of the unbappy hanging! tc father have done great harm or that the people here had cared about them one way or the other, but I do know that iu Here it is, taken from the voluminous his- tory of El Dorado: The sobriquet of “Hengtows,” by which | ight into those deeply shaded | where red-shirted miners were | the gulches. | | Their scattering footmarks grow dimmer | and dimmer as the years go by, and lower | and lower hang the cypress boughs about d close Lo the road, with natural water running to waste, is to be had for the tzking. Miles and miles of it almost ready for tue plow; and a soil o deep, as revealed by the banks of washed-out mines, practically bottomless. Some such lands were pointed out to me by the road- side in the seven miles’ drive from the old Marshall millsite of Coloma to Hangtown —and running water, too. What a_place for healthy, happy bomes is dear old El Do- rado to-day. I remain, of 1t a i - f Fremont’s,” said Marshall, as_he | good to mankind than from the hand or | M . SOCIETY, A CORRUPTION. Professional Society Women Parasites Upon the World’s Heart-Growth. Mrs. A D. T. Whitney in discussing so- ciety with her girl friends, in December | Ladies’ Home Journal, has this stinging | charge to make against modern Society, as | itis spelled with a capital 8: “Society as | a pursuit, an end, is a thing withouta | soul. The home spirit, from the sharing | of which between home and home it grew, | has departed out of it. It is dead. It is a corruption. A professional society woman is a parasite upon the world’s heart-growth; helping, as & mi- crobe of disease, to eat out its vitality. There is a terrible reaction in tne influence of what we make society to be, without its true heart and center. *It is to blame for the many confused problems of our time; it is responsible for the frantic turning of the world upside down. Conventional- 1ties, false effort and restriction crowd in upon and choke out our most beautiful | and sacred realities. True homes become | more_and more scarce. Society women abandon them; they make of them mere | arrival and departure stations in the rush of a whirling round. Women who cannot or who will not maintain the modern arti- | ficial conditions are discouraged and re- pelled from any home-making at all. They are forced, through the very necd of their natures, to outside work and interest for feliowship; and so there is a great deal attempted from strong desire for the best that is yet, in its turn, untrue, one-sided; adding a fresh derangement to our per- plexed systems and theories—our transi- tional social and political economies.” —————— Tragedy of the Conceited Mouse. A little mouse once lived under a pantry where all manner of good things were stored. He fed so well on these dainties that he became quite fat and very con- ceited, too, for he thought that the good things were placed in the pantry for his especial benefit. ‘‘These good people,” saia he, *‘do all in their power to make me happy. I, too, can make them happy by tasting of all the nice things they place before me.” So every night he went regu- larly from dish to disk, nibbling a little bit from one and a little bit from another, until he had nibbled at all the dainties. One very hot sumnier's night as he crept into the pantry he saw there two tall white things with beautiful shining bodies. He didn’t know that they were only wax candles; so he gazed in admiration of their geamy, wondering whe or what they could e. “Perhaps,” said he, ‘‘they are the good people of the house,” and as he mused thus the candles began to bend over with the heat. “Oh!” said he, “they are bowing to me!” 8o he drew himself up proudly snd then bowed stiffly to the candles, while they bent lower and lower until their heads almost touched their feet. Then the mouse ran off and began his round of tasting of the dainties on the dishes. Well, it happened that he felt very sleepy that ni;:gc, so presently he sat down and rested against one of the candles, and there soon fell fast asieep. Now while he slept the candle melted with the heat and dropped upon him until it quite covered all but his nose; but when the early morn- ing came the air grew chilly and the wax became hard again, so that the mouse was held a prisoner in the candle’s coid clutch. _ At last the mouse awoke and was horri- fied to find that he could not move hand or foot, for he was completely covered with hard, cold wax, which held "him as firmly as an iron case. He squeaked and whimpered, but no help came; then he cried, *‘Oh, fool that 1 was to fall into such a trap; my father has often said, ‘Beware of the ‘exalted when they bend low to the humble.’ As he said these words a servant entered the pantry and took up the candlestick, but when she saw the mouse’s nose she screamed, and threw the candlestick into a pail of water, and the poor mouse was drowned—and that was the sad end of the conceited little mouse.—R. H. in the New Budget. In comparison with population *the wealth of the United Statesis by no means wonderful, the ratio per head being sur- assed in three countries of Europe—Great ritain, France and Holland. VENEZOELAN BOUNDARY, Real and Ultimate Object of Great Britain’s Present Attitude. OUR DUTY IN THE PREMISES. We Must Shut England Out of the Control of That Rich Country. The intimation in the recent dispatches as to the tenor of Lord Salisbury’s reply to Secretary Olney’s proposition to submit the Venezuelan boundary question to arbi- tration and his refusal to do so causes a new interest to befelt in the question and the probable outcome of the situation. That Congress will speedily take some action indorsing the Monroe doctrine and making it a principle of our National pol- icy and a vital factor in the consideration and settlement of this question and all others that may arise in future seems cer- tain, It is to be hoped that the administra- tion will awaken to some realization of the interests involved and vigorously and em- phatically insist on such a settlement as will secure to our weak sister republic all the rights ‘and territory that she wrested from Spain—with none of which has she ever parted. No verbiage or profusion of alleged facts of surveys and explorations or boundary lines run by British subjects should be allowed to ob- scure the real merits of the question and cloak Great Britain’s purpose 1n this mat- ter for one moment. 5 B The true bearing of this question on the future commercial interests of this country can be clearly seen by any one who will give it a little consideration, and the tem- per of the American people is to protect those 1nterests at any cost. “Always after the great mouth of the Orinoco’’ can be truly said to have been the inspiration of every move that Great Britain has made and every position she has taken on the question of the boundary between her province of British Guiana and the republic of Venezuela. This object has been kept steadily in view from the time she first acquired possession of the three small Dutch colonies lying on the coast, between the Essequibo and Corinto rivers. Spain was the possessor by right of discovery. The Dutch only held pos- session by sufferance on the part of Spain— and they could pass no more title to Great Britain than they held themselves. And in any case her cession wasin no respect binding on Spain, as she was no party to the treaty of 1814 and never by any act confirmed it, nor has Venezuela, after her, ever conceded a foot of territory west of the Essequibo River to Great Britain. No sooner did these colonies, with their shadow of title, come into the possession of Great Britain than began the series of moves, ““Always after the great mouth of the Orinoco.”” And this policy bas been steadily followed through all the succeeding years and the various and changing Ministries that have held the belm of statein England. Her diplomats, well trained in the history of her colonial acquisitions and the art of letting time de- velop a small holding into a claim to an empire, have kept in view during all these years the golden stream of wealth that would ultimately flow into her coffers could she but make good her foothold on the great mouth of the Orinoco and so con- trol the future commerce of the tributary regions. Once thus established it will take something more than protests and remon- strances to induce ger to withdraw. The T other streams that make up the 30,000 .miles of navigable water in the Amazon Valley. The Cassiquian is 160 miles long and as broad as the Rhine. Though now lying useless, as it were, between and connecting | these great river basins, it is destined in time to play as important a part in the commerce of the world as the Suez canal now does. Boats descending the tributaries of the Amazon from the very Pacific coasts of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia will find a ready exit with their freights to the Atlantic through the Rio Negro, the Cassiquian and the Orinoco rivers. The trade of this region naturally belongs | to the United States,and the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico form the only inland body of water on the Western con- tinent—barring Hudson Bay—and this | inland sea is bound to play as great a part in the future history and progress of civ- | ilization as the Mediterranean has done in | the past. Bordering its shores on the north we have our own country, on the south this vast and rich Amazon-Orinoco region r*—the two brought into close connection by the Mississippi and Orinoco rivers. The difference in people and products will exercise a mutually happy influence on the commercial industries and develop- ment of the two regions and their trade relations, and stimulate their growth in | population. Great Britain has long had this in view and placed upon it a value which constitutes no small factor in her calculations as to the importance of 'the control of Venezuela’s great river. Ske lost the control of the Mississippi and the empire behind it. Here she can repair | her one great mistake. The trade and commerce of a country ten times as large as Spain, enriched by the greatest variety of products, both veg- etable and mineral, watered in every direc- tion by navigable rivers, capable of sus- ! | taining four times the population of | Europe, is by means of tge Cassiquian | i and Orinoco rivers made tributary to the | power that conirols the mouth of the Ori- noco. That control belongs to Venezuela and to ensure her in the full exercise and en- joyment thereof is the province and high grlvllege as well as the duty of the United States. ! The people of this country demand that it be done. Let the Monroe doctrine be made by Congress a living principle and | let the administration enforce it to the letterat any cost. A. L. McDo~ALD. THE BARON AND LIEUTENANT. | A Story of American Independence and Official Etiquette. The Washington Capital publishes the following story of Lieutenant Lucien Young, the naval officer who isnot per- mitted to publish his book on Hawaii, because it is considered to reflect on the | record of the Cleveland administration. The scene of the present incident is laid during the Harrison regime, when Benja- min F. Tracy was Secretary of the Navy. It was Lieutenant Young, according to the story, who a few years ago offered to teach Baron Fava, the Italian Embassa- dor, a lesson in American manners. The international episode was the request made by the Embassador to the Secretary of the Navy for a report upon a subject of might be delivered the same evening, in order that he could forward it to his Gov- ernment in the morning mail. Lieutenant Young was detailed to prepare the information. He worked all dey and all the evening, with only a sandwich and a cup of coffee, excused himself from a dinner party and from an engage- ment he had made to take some ladies to a ball. The memorandum was completed about midnight, when he got a cab and drove to the Italian legation. It was closed and dark, and no one answered his sum- mons. Then he went to Baron Fava's residence, where he was told that the Embassador was dining out. He went to the house where the dinner had been given and learned that the Baron was at the ball which he himself wanted to attend, but utes before. Then Young gave up the search and went to his club. The first man he saw great importance to him, which he begged | found there the Baron haa left a few min- | BY W. C. THE STRANGE EXPERIENCES OF A NIGHT OF BURGLARIES MORROW. If there are those inclined to doubt the probability of the following story, told to me as the truth by an eminent and trust- worthy gentleman of San Francisco, they have yet to learn and comprehend some of the most vital things of life. He said to me: A few summers ago my family left town to spend some weeks in the country. I gave the servants a vacation and arranged to stay alone at my house. For a change I had a bed placed in the drawing-room, which was in the front of the house on the lower floor. On one side of this room was the vestibule,into which the outer door opened, and on the other an exterior pas- sage which opened upon the street through a gate, and which ran back alongside the house to the rear of the premises. It was paved with boards, some of which had worn slightly loose. The gate was closed with an ordinary lift latch. We had lived in the house a number of years, but I had never slept in that room before. The front of the room was taken up with a bay-window, which was fur- nished on the inside with ordinary slat- blinds. My bed was placed at the oppo- | site end of the room, against the sliding- doors. I had arranged to take my meals down- town. On the first evening of my solitary after dinner and read in my improvised bedroom till 10 o’clock. Then I puiled down one of the upper sashes of the win- dow, closed the blinds and went to bed. Ordinarily I would fall quickly asleep on retiring, but the novelty of my position, and perhaps some business anxieties, kept me awake for an hour or two. ried me and made me nervous. ness of midnight came on, but still I re- mained awake. It was while I waslying in this state that I heard the latch of the gate opening into the side passage cau- tiously raised, then some one step softly within, leaving the gate open, and then footfalls proceeding stealthily down the | passage toward the rear of the house, caus- ing a loose board here and there to squeak. I listenel with the most eager and strained alertness, for my immediate con- clusion was that a burglar, perhaps having observed the departure of the family and | place. I heard him try and then abandon the securely barred door opening from the rear porch upon the passage. A lattice extended from the lower rear porch to the upper. Without moving I heard the intruder slowly but nimbly scale the lattice and step upon the floor of the upper porch. A hall door and a bed- chamber window both opened upon this | porch, and I was curious to note which the | burglar would attack, and began to wonder if they had been locked. | He chose the window. I heard the sash- lock snap under the pressure of his cold chisel. After a pause he stepped into the room and proceeded to'ransack it. It was my wife’s room, and although I knew that she had provided elsewhere for the safe care of her furs and other more valuable | clothes, I reflected that there must have | been left a number of things which a burglar | might think worthy of attention. I heard o MAP SHOWING THE SITUATION IN VENEZUELA. control of this river means to Great Britain the control of a region far greater in ex- tent than her vast Indian empire and far richer in natural wealth and resources— a region as large as our Mississippi Valley, embracing within its borders, Rx broad and varied zones, all the ranges of climate and product to be found in a jour- ney from the sources of the Nile to the Arctic Ocean. It means the control of 00,000 square leagues of the best watered and most fertile country in the world—a country whose soil is still virgin and its rich and varied resources practically un- touched. The control of the Orinoco means the control of the development of this vast empire and centuries, maybe, of continued and increasing wealth to be skimmed from the deep and broad stream of trade that in time will flow from this region through this its natural gateway. The Orinoco is a much more important stream from a commercial point of view than its neighbor the Amazon. The latter for nearly 3000 miles runs under the same parallel of latitude and with little difference of altitude and consequently little difference of products to stimulate trade between different fiints along its course as in case of our Mississippi. Its broad mouth, (50 miles wide, and the ?ogltlon and direction of the stream in re- ation to the ocean tidal wave form a great hindrance to safe navi§nlon, to say nothing of the uninhabitable character of its “‘silvas,” which stretch from its mouth nearly to the borders of Peru. With the Orinoco it is very different. It presents few if any obstacles to navigation from its month to its junction with the Cassiquian River, near 1600 miles. It receives from the west a broad sheet of affluents that take their rise almost within sight of the Pacific Ocean, giving the broad and fertile after entering the door was the Italan Embassador drinking wine with a part; offriends. Lieutenant Young approach him with a proper salute and, after a few words of explanation, offered him the. papers. The Baron haughtily declined them. . “You impertinent fellow,” said he; “why did you follow me all over the town? Iam the Embassador of Italy,and I do my business at the legation of my Gov- ernment. You should have had the }mpers there before I left this afternoon. nstead of that you disturb my friends by entering their houses and intrude upon my club. I will report your impertinence to the Secretary of the Navy to-morrow.” The sea dog from Kentucky was very red in the face by this time, and made the fol- lowing remarks: 3 “You ungrateful old mncuoni-eh;mng monkey tamer, I am a member of thisclul and you are only a guest, but if you will come out into the street for five minutes I will teach you a lesson in North American manners. There are the papers I have spent fifteen hours in prenmng for yon,”’ and he threw them on the table. *‘You can take them or leave them, as you like.” The Baron called upon Secretary Tracy the next day and complained that Lieuten- ant Young had instlted him. The Secre- tary sent_for the offender, who related the affair as I haye told it, including the bene- diction he had pronounced. The Sec- retary had pressing business in the next room for a few moments and when he recovered himself asked what the Em- bassador had to suggest. Baron Fava de- manded that the lieutenant be repri- manded. ¥ 5 “‘Consider yourself reprimanded,” said the Secretary gravely, and Lieutenant Young bowed and left the room. The English newspapers are circulating re%ions which they drain easy access to the Ati;ant‘i;.. Cassiqui: he O y the iquian the Orinoco is con- nected with the Rio Negro, one largest tributaries of the 6 e the report that it cost 20 cent more to build the steamers St. Lounis and St. Paul ot-t:s | than the price of the New York and Paris, built in OWs ® him strip a blanket from the bed, spread it upon the floor and proceed to pile upon it the plunder which he found in the trunks, chiffoniers, closets and the like. Then he stepped to the open door intp the passage and stood listening & momert. These occurrences had a surprising effect upon my nerves. The door between my temporary bedroom and the vestibule was open for ventilation, and I realized that I was almost in physical touch with a man, who would not ‘hesitate ‘to kill me should that prove necessary to his safety. I knew that sooner or later he would descend the stairs, at the foot of which wss the open door of my room. It would not have been difficult for me to waylay him and make an effort to cripple or kill him in the darkness with oneof a dozen convenient articles which I remem- bered were in the roem, including a heavy poker, some bronze statuettes, chairs, stools and the like. Ordinarily, as you are aware, I am not a timid man, but I teil you now that an unaccountable fear as- sailed me and held me a prisoner. It re- quires a good deal of candor to make that admission, but it 1s necessary to a com- plete understanding of this remarkable ex- perience. After standing in a listening attitude a moment the burglar slowly ana cautiously descended the stairs and, as I expected, left my room alone and proceeded to the dining-room. I knew that the solid silver- ware had been sent away for safe keeping, and so I was not surprised when the burglar, after handling the plated-ware which he found and making it tinkle softly and gently, left it, made an un- profitable search of other rooms and then returned to the foot of the stairs. This brought him again to my door. He / occupancy I returned to the house shortly | This wor- | The still- | assumed that the house had been tempo- | rarily deserted, had come to plunder the | T | paused on the threshold, listened in silence a moment and then started upstairs. In that moment I suffered such a reasonless agony of terror as cannot be exvlained on ordinary grounds. Iheld my breath till I was nearly suffocated, and when the man turned to leave I was cold to the marrow. He reascended the stairs, tied up his bundle, passed through the window and closed it, dropped the parcel over the rail, clambered down the lattice and wentaway as he had come, shutting the gate behind him. I felt intensely relieved when he had gone, and a reaction set in that composed my nerves for slumber. Drowsiness was already approaching when I was startled by the soft clicking of the gate-latch. It was very unlikely that the same burglar had returned and would have been extra- ordinary if another had come. And yet, try as hard as I might to reason out some other possibility, there came the stealthy footstep of a thief on the boards of the outer passage. I studied this step so intently and analytically that I was certain the intruder was not the same as the first. Then I began to wonder what he would do. I was not surprised to hear him try the door of the lower porch and find it stronely barred within, nor greatly to hear him climb the lattice as the other had done. I was curious to know whether he would attack the door or the window after he had landed on" the porch. By a singular coincidence he chose the window. I heard him try it, and imagined that he started upon discovering "hat the latch had been broken. It was evidentthatupon entering | the room he was surprised and confused to see its disorder. But he drew a sheet from the bed, spread it on the floor and | proceeded to ransack the room. Evidently | his bewilderment increased, and he must : have been discouraged to find so little worth taking. He was not long in completing the loot- ing of the room, and then he went to the door and stood a moment in the passage, listening intently. After that he began carefully to descend the stairs. His con- duct thenceforward was exactly a repeti- tion of his predecessor’'s. He passed my door, tinkled the plated silverware in the dining-room, left it alore, returned to the vestibule, stood a moment listening at my open door, cautiously retraced his steps | upstairs, passed through the window, | closed it, dropped his parcel to the ground, | clambered down the lattice and passed out, | closing the gate behind him. It may be subposed that the coincidences amazed me beyond measure. This, more than anything else, seemed to unnerve me all the more. All this time I realized that I had been acting the part of a coward. Merely to havelighted the gas in my room would have cleared the house of the second burglar, but I had not the courage to do that. My alarm and nervousness became so great that I arose from bed and was just about to strike a match with which to light the gas in the chandelier when I heard the gate-latch click for the third time. My match remained unstruck and I listened with a fascinated intentness to | this last invasion. In all particulars it was identical with the second, down to the point when the burglar descended the stairs and passed my open door on his way to the dining-room. To light the gas then would have been to place the man in a corner and compel him to fight. I real- ized not only that it is taking one’s life in one’s hands to cut off a burglar’s retreat before attacking him (as a knowledge of a chance to escape diverts his attention from the necessity for self-defense ana renders him easier to overcome), but that I was now in a condition in which I lacked both the courage and the strength to make the attempt. The position which I now occupied in the room was half way between the bed and the window. As I was so much nearer the window than before I could hear sounds from without with much more dis- tinctness. While I stood there listening to the thira burglar tinkle the plated- ware I was startled to hear the gate-latch click again and the footfall of the fourth burglar on the board-paved passage. As he was climbing the lattice a fifth burglar entered the gate, then a sixth, then others, until burglars in an endless procession were entering my premises and rifling my house on one common and unvarying plan. It is useless to say that an intelligent man should not have entertained such an idea for a moment. We know I might have reasoned that perhaps there had been only one, or at most two, burglars after all, and that the fright which they gave me caused me to conjure.up the otbers from a fear-deranged imagination. It might be profitable to indulge in a great many other speculations on this subject, but the truth remains that I could not reason at all. In simple desperation, perhaps moved by a sort of fascination, I crept to the window in order Yo observe with idle curi- osity the procession of burglars entering the gate. I turned the slats of a lower blind and looked out. Not a soul was visible, and yet burglars were still pouring through the gate! The explanation came like a shocking revelation. The wind was playing with some loose blind-slats immediately above my head as I stood there, and-out of that slight and varying sound my imagination had constructed the phantasy from begin- ning to end. No burglar at all had in- vaded my house. I amused and teased myself for some time afterward by com- pelling my attention to leave the rattling slats at intervals and fill my house with burglars. BROWN STOUT FOR A SICK HORSE The Curious Diet Ordered for an Army Equine in India. London Truth. The following order has just been issued at one of the India stations: Rations—No. 312—On the recommendation of the veterinary officer in charge Twenty- seventh F. B.R. A, and in accordance with paragraph 856, A. R. L, vol. v, commissariat, the officer commanding the station sanctions the issue of extra aiet,as under, to horse 69 for seven days, commencing from the 18th inst.: Two gallons milk, twelve eggs, three bottles of stoul (imperial quart). 3 ‘““Who wouldn’'t be a Royal Artillery horse?’’ asks the warrior who sends me this item, and one can understand Tommy's feelings under the circum- stances. “My dear fellow,” said a society woman of great candor to an awkward., timid voung Harvard graduate whom she was i to_present, ‘“you have any amount of talent, you have position, you have money, but you will never be at your ease, never show at your best, until you know what to . do with your hands and feet. You must lose them. lorset them, be unconscious of them.”’—New Orleans Times-Democrat, ~