My old friend, Major-General Whistletrigger Vanderhurst, of the Amazonian Guard, minister plenipotentiary of the Gal-Dal News, has just run a superb "scoop" on all his contemporaries. He rustled out one morning all by his lone self and discovered that prosperity had arrived--that every Texan afflicted with chronic hustle hath greenbacks to burn, and blue yarn socks galore stuffed to the bursting point with "yellow boys," while ye farmer simply slings the silver dollar of our sires at marauding blackbirds. Whistletrigger turns up his patrician nose at all "pessimists" and broadly intimates that the man who hasn't a new silk cady, seventeen pair o' tailor-made "pants," a silken nightshirt and sufficient provender in his pantry to run a Methodist camp-meeting for a month, would starve to death in a Paradise whose springs run Pomery Sec, and whose trees grew pumpkin pies, hot weinerwurst and pate de foie gras. Texas, according to this Columbus of prosperity, is a veritable Klondyke bowered with roses instead of imbedded in snowbanks--a place where every financial prospect pleases and only the popocrat is vile. But I note with pained surprise that the farmers are still selling middling cotton below six cents, buying bacon and wearing pea-green patches on the bust of their blue jeans two-dollar hand-me-downs; that I can hire all the common labor I want at 75 cents a day despite the advance in flour; that scores of mechanics are idle; that there is no longer a wage rate in any trade; that the streets are full of able-bodied beggers, while merchants offer me 2 per cent a month for the use of a little money. I note that in every Texas city realty is being cast upon the bargain counter, while great newspapers are cutting down the pay of their employees. There's prosperity and prosperity. Perhaps Whistletrigger has been talking to the agent of some mortgage company or to Colonel Hogg--who's making so much money compromising railroad cases with the Chollie Boy Culberson administration and suppressing prize-fights for $2,500 fees that he really cannot afford to serve Texas in the United States Senate. . . .