is fast filling up and everybody swears it is the most enjoyable place on the continent.  It is certainly the cheapest for us La Crosse folks to go.  We don’t know of a place where, for the money invested, one can have so much fun and get so much health.  You can leave La Crosse at 5:45, and arrive at Sparta at 6:20, after a delightful ride of thirty miles, and you will enjoy a race, your train beating the Northwestern train, and running like lightning.  If you have a pass, or sit on the hind platform, it will cost you nothing.  You can walk down town, at small expense.  You want to take supper before leaving home, if economy is what you are seeking in addition to health.  Go to Condit, at the Warner House, and talk as though you were looking for a place to send your family, and he will hitch up and drive you all over town.  Tell Doc.  Nichols you never tried a Turkish bath, but that you are troubled with hypochondria and often wish you were dead, and that if you were sure the baths would help you, you would come down and take them regular.  He will put you through for nothing, and give you a cigar.  Then you can get a tooth pick at Condit’s and put your thumb under your vest and go to the springs and talk loud about railroad stocks and bonds and speculating in wheat. (It takes two to do it up right.  Frank Hatch and the writer are going down some night to “do” the watering place).  Then you can swell around till half past ten, and sneak off to the depot on foot and come home, and your pocket book will be just as empty as when you started, unless you get a subscriber, and you will have added bloom to your cheek, and had a high old time, and next winter you can talk about the delightful time you passed at Sparta last summer during the heated term.

Let’s get up a party and go down some night.

WHAT THE COUNTRY NEEDS.

What the country needs is a melon from which the incendiary ingredients have been removed.  It seems to me that by proper care, when the melon is growing on the vines, the cholera morbus can be decreased, at least, the same as the cranberry has been improved, by cultivation.  The experiment of planting homeopathic pills in the hill with the melon has been tried, but homeopathy, while perhaps good in certain cases, does not seem to reach the seat of disease in the watermelon.  What I would advise, and the advice is free to all, is that a porous plaster be placed upon watermelons, just as they are begining to ripen, with a view to draw out the cholera morbus.  A mustard plaster might have the same effect, but the porous plaster seems to me to be the article to fill a want long felt.  If, by this means, a breed of watermelon can be raised that will not strike terror to the heart of the consumer, this agricultural address will not have been delivered in vain.

THE MAN FROM DUBUQUE.

Last week, a young man from the country west of here came in on the evening train and walked up to Grand avenue, with a fresh looking young woman hanging on to one handle of a satchel while he held the other.  They turned into the Plankinton House, and with a wild light in his eye the man went to the book and registered his name and that of the lady with him.