Who had seen the hammer?  It was remembered that little Johnny had been playing with it.  Johnny was looked for, and finally brought, but was unable or unwilling to find the tool so essential to our progress.  “Look for it, Johnny,” said the blacksmith; and he looked, but to no purpose.  After waiting an hour for reason to dawn upon the mind of this infant, the blacksmith put on the shoe with the help of a hatchet, and we proceeded; but so much time had been lost night overtook us twelve miles from Denver.  We tried at two taverns, which were full of teamsters, and we were obliged to diverge three miles down Bear’s Creek Canon to the house of Strauss.  The good woman, after a mild protest, admitted us and gave us a supper of venison, with good beds.  Strauss has a fine ranch along the creek, where he raises forty bushels of wheat to the acre, and his wife milks thirty-six cows and makes two hundred pounds of butter at a churning.  Besides this, she cultivates a flower-garden, with many varieties of bloom, irrigated by a ditch from the creek.

Arrived at Denver at noon of the 26th, and found the mercury at 90 deg., and were glad to leave the crowded hotel next morning for Chicago.

I have only described what we actually saw, which was but a small part of the wonders and delights of Colorado.  We were humble travelers, unattached to any party of Congressmen or of railroad potentates:  we were not ushered into the Garden of the Gods, assisted up Gray’s Park, or introduced to the Petrified Forest; but we saw enough of the new and beautiful to give us lasting recollections of Colorado and the South Park.

S.C.  CLARKE.

THE PATRONS OF HUSBANDRY.

“Do you know anything about this ‘grange’ business?” asked a lady from the city the other day; and she added, “I can hardly take up a magazine or newspaper without falling on the words ‘grange,’ ’Patrons of Husbandry,’ ‘farmers’ movement,’ and all that.”

“Why, I am a Patron myself,” I replied.

“What! you have a grange here in this little New Jersey sandbank?” she exclaimed incredulously, and plied me with a storm of questions.

It was a quiet, rainy evening, and I devoted the whole of it to answering her queries, reading documents from our head-quarters, and quoting Mr. Adams’s treatise on the Railroad Systems and other authorities to explain the present war between producers and carriers; and, believing that there are many others who, like my friend, are disposed to look into this “grange business,” I will give them the substance of our conversation.  A great deal of that which has found its way into the press touching our order is more characterized by confidence than correctness of statement.  In a late magazine article it is stated that the organization known as the Patrons of Husbandry “was originally borrowed from an association which for many years had maintained