It seems that the train had gone away some distance, but when it got by itself it remembered that I was not on board, and the peanut boy remembered seeing me get off at this point. So, as the train was already two weeks and four days behind, the conductor decided to go back. He says now that he does not regret it. He says that the life of a conductor at the best has but few bright spots in it, and the oases along the desert which he treads are widely separated, but he told me with tears in his eyes that Providence had made me the humble instrument for great good, and he felt grateful to me. When he breaks out into a glad ripple of childish laughter now without any apparent cause, he takes a piece of checked cassimere out of his pocket and explains how he got it, and tells the whole story to his friends, so there are a great many people along that line of travel who know me by reputation although they have never seen me. A WORD OR TWO ABOUT THE SWALLOW. |Lately I have made some valuable discoveries relative to ornithology, and I will give some of them to the public, for I love to shed information right and left, like a Normal school. When the soft south wind began to kiss our cheeks, and the horse-radish and North Park prospector began to start, the swift-winged swallows drew near to my picturesque home on East Fifth street, and I hoped with a great, anxious, throbbing hope, that they would build beneath the Gothic eaves of my $200 ranche. I would take my guitar at the sunset hour, and sit at my door in a camp-chair, with the fading glory of the dying day bathing me in a flood of golden light, and touching up my chubby form, and I would warble, "When Sparrows Build," an old solo in J, which seems to fit my voice, and the swallows would flit around me on tireless wing, and squeak, and sling mud over me till the cows came home. This thing had gone on for several days, and the little mud houses under the eaves were pretty near ready, and in the meantime the spring bed bug had come with his fragrant breath, and turpentine, and quicksilver, and lime, and aquafortis, and giant-powder, and a feather, has made my home a howling wilderness, that smelled like a city drug store. But it didn't kill the bugs. It pleased them. They called a meeting and tendered me a vote of thanks for the kind attentions with which they had been received. They ate all these diabolical drugs, not only on regular days, but right along through Lent.