Is there plan and purpose in all the meaningless mystery and misery? Is "heaven but the vision of fulfilled desire, hell the shadow of a soul on fire?" And are we both? Are we improving? Look on life within its gates. Are we retrograding? Strip the curtains from the hearts of men and women. And marriage, the great pivot upon which swings life itself, what is it? Is it covenant with deity, or contract with the devil? Boise, Ida., October 1. * * * SALMAGUNDI. My attention has been several times called by the citizens of Nevada, Ia., to a series of articles appearing in a little boiler-plate paper published at that place by an old plug named Payne and his idiot son. The articles purport to have been written by one G. W. Bailey, from West Point, Columbus, McComb, Magnolia, and other places in Mississippi, and are the most brutally slanderous of the South and the Southern people of anything yet put in print. As the writer is too grossly ignorant and hopelesly imbecile to concoct a falsehood to deceive a diapered pickaninny, I should pay no attention to his screeds, but for the indignant protests of the Iowa people. One gentleman sends me some excerpts from the articles and says: "Do not imagine us big enough fools to be deceived by this lying scoundrel. He would, if necessary to get his name in print, defame his own parents. Bailey is an intellectual bawd with an abnormal itch for notoriety. The paper in which his screeds appear has a very limited circulation. I have never detected anybody in the crime of reading it, hence it can do no harm. I was in the federal army and know something about the South. I learned it at Pittsburg Landing. Some mischief-making, blatherskites ought to have their d----d tongues cut out." Another gentleman writes from Iowa: "It seems that this fellow Bailey once got a small Federal appointment to some place in China. He remained their long enough to pick up a few curios, contract the opium habit and the name of 'Tankkee.' He returned and began lecturing on China, but the dope was too much for his little encephalon. He took the Keeley cure for the opium habit, but he's as great a liar as ever. You know what Macaulay says about Bertrand Barere? Well, this fellow can outlie the 'Witling of Terror' and not half try. I think if he should accidentally tell the truth about anything he'd drop dead.