He would talk in unknown tongues, and was considered a thorough and
revised encyclopedia on everything from the tariff on a meerschaum pipe to
the latitude of Crazy Woman's Fork west of Greenwich, and yet if he went
to the postoffice he would probably mail his pocketbook and carefully
bring his letter back to the office.
One day he got to thinking about the Monroe doctrine, or the sudden and
horrible death of Judas Iscariot, and actually lost his office. He walked
up and down for an hour, scouring the town for the evanescent office that
had escaped his notice while he was sorrowing over the shocking death of
Judas, or Noah's struggles against malaria and a damp, late spring.
Martin Luther Brandt was the name of this eccentric jurist. He got up in
the night once, and dressed himself, and taking a night train in that
dreamy way of his, rode on to Denver, took the Rio Grande train in the
morning and drifted away into old Mexico somewhere. He must have been in
that same old half comatose state when he went away, for he made a most
ludicrous error in getting his wife in the train. When he arrived in old
Mexico he found that he had brought another man's wife, and by some
strange oversight had left his own at home with five children. It hardly
seems possible that a man could be so completely enveloped in a brown
study that he would err in the matter of a wife and five children, but
such was the case with Martin Luther. Martin Luther couldn't tell you his
own name if you asked him suddenly, so as to give him a nervous shock.
This dreamy, absent-minded, wool-gathering disease is sometimes
contagious. Pretty soon after Martin Luther struck Mexico the malignant
form of brown study broke out among the greasers, and an alarming mania
on the somnambulistic order seemed to follow it. A party of Mexican
somnambuloes one night got together, and while the disease was at its
height tied Martin Luther to the gable of a 'dobe hen palace. His soul
is probably at this moment floundering around through space, trying to
find the evergreen shore.
An old hunter, who was a friend of mine, had this odd way of walking
aimlessly around with his thoughts in some other world.
I used to tell him that some day he would regret it, but he only laughed
and continued to do the same fool thing.
Last fall he saw a grizzly go into a cave in the upper waters of the
Platte, and strolled in there to kill her. As he has not returned up to
this moment, I am sure he has erroneously allowed himself to get mixed up
as to the points of the compass, and has fallen a victim to this fatal
brown study. Some think that the brown study had hair on it.
Woman's Wonderful Influence.
“Woman wields a wonderful influence over man's destinies,” said Woodtick
William, the other day, as he breathed gently on a chunk of blossom rock
and then wiped it carefully with the tail of his coat.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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