I wanted to take the letter and make a plaster cast of it, but Mr. Brown said Hank wouldn't like it. The letter went on in a free and easy way to joke Brown about looking too often on the maddening bowl, and then asked him to be a correspondent for the C. J. The next day I came down town thinking about how easy it was for any one, by a straightforward, honest course, to rise in the world, and get acquainted with prominent men. Bye and bye I met the Sheriff. He asked me if I didn't want to go up to the jail and take a last look at my journalistic friend. I went up. Brown lay there in an easy position on an old blanket, in one of the cells. The surroundings seemed to be in perfect harmony with the general appearance of Mr. Brown. He had taken off the large satin arrangement which served partly as a necktie, and partly to throw the public off its guard in relation to his shirt. The shirt was there, slightly disfigured, but still in the ring. It was the same shirt that he had started out in life with. He had outgrown it, and it looked feeble, but it was evidently determined to stay by Mr. Brown. I looked at him and then broke into tears. Large $2.00 sobs convulsed my frame. I told him that he had basely imposed upon me, and led me to believe that he was a Republican, and now he had removed the mask as it were, and I could see that he was a Democrat. With these stone walls and iron grates, and that soiled shirt, I could no longer doubt. I left him, resolving that hereafter I would not be betrayed by appearances. He will drift away into the mighty, surging mass of humanity, and we shall forget it. Perhaps, when the Governor of Maine holds a mass meeting and re-union at Augusta, he will be there. But he will drop out of my horizon like the memory of a red-headed girl, and I shall go on my way until some other newspaper man with a letter from Whitelaw Reid, or George Washington, or Noah, or some other prominent man, comes along, and then I shall, no doubt, open up to his view the same untold wealth of confidence and generous trust. Those who are looking anxiously every mail for a copy of the Louisville _Courier-Journal_ or the Salt Lake _Tribune_, containing a long letter about their town, will be disappointed. They will never come. Through the long visita of years and down through the mellow softened atmosphere of the Sweet Bye and Bye I hear the low, sad refrain, and it is refraining, "Never More." Instead of the merry prattle of Mr. Brown amid the loud echo of his expectorations as they fall with a startling crash upon the marble floor of my office, I only hear the rattle of the cast iron "come-alongs" and the tearful "Never More." HE WAS BLIND. |While engaged the other day in writing a little ode to the liver pad, I heard a slight noise, and on looking toward the door I saw a boy with his hat in his hand standing on one leg and thoughtfully scratching it with the superior toe of the other foot.