We are pained to learn that the free reading room, established over Amalgamation Brown's store, has been closed up by the police. Blue Ruin has clamored for a free temperance reading room and brain retort for ten years, and now a ruction between two of our best known citizens, over the relative merits of a natural pair and a doctored flush, has called down the vengeance of the authorities, and shut up what was a credit to the place and a quiet resort, where young men could come night after night and kind of complicate themselves at. There are two or three men in this place that will bully or bust everything they can get into, and they have perforated more outrages on Blue Ruin than we are entitled to put up with. There was a successful doings at the creek last Sabbath, during which baptism was administered to four grown people and a dude from Sandy Mush. The pastor thinks it will take first-rate, though it is still too soon to tell. Surrender Adams got a letter last Friday from his son Gladstone, who filed on a homestead near Porcupine, Dak., two years ago. He says they have had another of those unprecedented winters there for which Dakota is so justly celebrated. He thinks this one has been even more so that any of the others. He wishes he was back here at Blue Ruin, where a man can go out doors for half an hour without getting ostracized by the elements. He says they brag a good deal on their ozone there, but he allows that it can be overdone. He states that when the ozone in Dakota is feeling pretty well and humping itself and curling up sheet-iron roofs and blowing trains of the track, a man has to tie a clothes-line to himself, with the other end fastened to the door knob, before it is safe to visit his own hen-house. He says that his nearest neighbor is seventeen miles away, and a man might as well buy his own chickens as to fool his money away on seventeen miles of clothes-line. It is a first-rate letter, and the old man wonders who Gladstone got to write it for him. The valuable ecru dog of our distinguished townsman, Mr. Piedmont Babbit, was seriously impaired last Saturday morning by an east-bound freight. He will not wrinkle up his nose at another freight train. George Wellington, of Hickory, was in town the front end of the week. He has accepted a position in the livery, feed and sale stable at Sandy Mush. Call again, George. Gabriel Brant met with a sad mishap a few days since while crossing the French Broad river, by which he lost his leg. Any one who may find an extra leg below where the accident occurred will confer a favor on Mr. Brant by returning same to No. 06-1/2 Pneumonia street. It may be readily identified by any one, as it is made of an old pickhandle and weighs four pounds.