If you meet the party on the Whitefish Bay road at 10 o’clock at night, the horses are walking as quietly as oxen, and they never wake up until coming into town, and then he pulls up the team and drives through the town like a cyclone, and when he drives up to the house the old man is on the steps, and he thinks John must be awful tired trying to hold that team.  And he is.

It is thought by some that horses have no intelligence, but a team that knows enough to take in a sporadic case of buggy sparking has got sense.  These teams come high, but the boys have to have them.

BASE INGRATITUDE.

I remember once of offering a lady from Eau Claire a slice of bread and a half of a red onion in a railroad car.  She looked hungry, and yet she said she didn’t care to eat.  Thinking she had a delicacy about accepting food at the hands of one who was almost a stranger to her, I turned the bread and onion into her lap, and said she was entirely welcome to it.  What did she do?  Instead of eating it, and thanking me, she threw it out of the window, and went and sat by the stove.  I was never so offended in my life.  That woman may see the time she will want that onion, and I would see her almost perish of starvation before she could have any more of my onion.

THE DIFFERENCE.

One of the great female writers on dress reform, in trying to illustrate how terrible the female dress is, says: 

“Take a man and pin three or four table cloths about him, fastened back with elastic, and looped up with ribbons, draw all his hair to the middle of his head and tie it tight, and hairpin on five pounds of other hair and a big bow of ribbon.  Keep the front locks on pins all night, and let them tickle his eyes all day, pinch his waist into a corset, and give him gloves a size too small, and shoes the same, and a hat that will not stay on without torturing elastic, and a little lace veil to blind his eyes whenever he goes out to walk, and he will know what a woman’s dress is.”

Now you think you have done it, don’t you sis?  Why, bless you, that toggery would be heaven compared to what a man has to contend with.  Take a woman and put a pair of men’s four shilling drawers on her that are so tight that when they get damp, from perspiration, sis, they stick so you can’t cross your legs without an abrasion of the skin, the buckle in the back turning a somersault and sticking its points into your spinal meningitis; put on an undershirt that draws across the chest so you feel as though you must cut a hole in it, or two, and which is so short that it works up under your arms, and allows the starched upper shirt to sand paper around and file off the skin until you wish it was night, the tail of which will not stay tucked more than half a block, though you tuck, and tuck, and tuck; and then fasten a collar made of sheet zinc, two sizes