Colonel Wade is a reformed temperance lecturer. I went to his shop to get
shaved, but he was absent. I could smell hair oil through the keyhole, but
the Colonel was not in his slab-inlaid emporium. He had been preparing
another lecture on temperance, and was at that moment studying the habits
of his adversary at a neighboring gin palace. I sat down on the steps and
devoured the beautiful landscape till he came. Then I sat down in the
chair, and he hovered over me while he talked about an essay he had
written on the flowing bowl. His arguments were not so strong as his
breath seemed to be. I asked him if he wouldn't breathe the other way
awhile and let me sober up. I learned afterward that although his nose was
red, his essay was not.
He would shave me for a few moments, and then he would hone the razor on
his breath and begin over again. I think he must have been pickling his
lungs in alcohol. I never met a more pronounced gin cocktail symphony and
bologna sausage study in my life.
I think Sir Walter Scott must have referred to Colonel Wade when he said,
“Breathes there a man with soul so dead?” Colonel Wade's soul might not
have been dead, but it certainly did not enjoy perfect health.
I went over the mountains to Breckenridge the next day, climbed two miles
perpendicularly into the sky, rode on a special train one day, a push car
the next and a narrow-gauge engine the next. Saw all the beauty of the
country, in charge of Superintendent Smith, went over to Buena Vista and
had a congestion of the spine and a good time generally. You can leave
Denver on a morning train and see enough wild, grand, picturesque
loveliness before supper, to store away in your heart and hang upon the
walls of memory, to last all through your busy, humdrum life, and it is a
good investment, too.
Taxidermy.
This name is from two Greek words which signify “arrangement” and “skin,”
so that the ancient Greeks, no doubt, regarded taxidermy as the original
skin-game of that period. Taxidermy did not flourish in America prior to
the year 1828. At that time an Englishman named Scudder established a
museum and general repository for upholstered beasts.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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