Geraldine, however, set herself at once about procuring food for her soul's idol. Taking some salt she went out along the wooded slope to find a jack-rabbit on whose tail she could throw the salt, thus securing him as an easy prey. She soon scared up one with a broken leg. Most all of my gentle, refined, and intellectual readers of the Rocky mountains have frightened from his lair, at some time or other, a jack-rabbit with a broken leg. Jackrabbits with shattered limbs are very common in the West. Geraldine followed hopefully on. Up hill and down, over low parks covered with hunch-grass, across little mountain streams, through long stretches of greasewood and sagebrush, starting the owl from some blasted pine tree, or frightening the smiling coyote from his course, onward and ever onward she flew like a hunted fawn. Her every motion was grace and poetry itself. The limber sun bonnet flopped to and fro with a merry Runic flop, but the crippled John rabbit did not tarry. For an invalid, he seemed to make very fair time. Occasionally he would look around over his shoulder, and laugh a merry, taunting laugh. Then he would give his attention to getting over the ground. Geraldine got mad, and resolved to overtake her game and mete out to him a horrible death. Now and then she would wildly throw a lump of salt in the direction of the fleeing rabbit; but it always failed to connect. It was, indeed, an exciting chase, and, in fact, is yet, for as we go to press, Geraldine is still madly pursuing the ostensibly disabled jack-rabbit with a handful of common table salt poised in the air, ready to throw upon the tail of her rapidly retreating adversary. ***** Jesse James, alias Pumpkin Jim, waited a reasonable length of time for the return of Geraldine; but as she cometh not he said, he arose, and bestriding his narrow guage mule, he rode away. He readily laid down his life again wherever he went, and although he died a miserable death in almost every corner of the earth, he never more met Geraldine Carboline O'Toole, the Italian Countess, to whom he was betrothed. It is thought that she chased the crippled jack-rabbit into the realms of space. WILLIAM NYE AND THE HEATHEN CHINEE. |The subject of agriculture, which really lies nearest my heart of anything I can think of, naturally brings to the front the oriental buckwheater. The Chinaman, as an agriculturalist, is generally successful in a small way, and I love to watch him work. Whenever I get bilious and need exercise, I go over to the southend of town and vicariously hoe radishes for an hour or two till the pores are open, and I feel that delightful languor and the chastened sense of hunger and honesty which comes to the man who is not afraid to toil.