But to recur for a moment to the fistic carnival: Have any of you been able to determine how the Dallas News stood in regard to that great enterprise? Sometimes, when I want to go on an intellectual debauch, I read the News-- or Ayer's Almanac. It appears to entertain but two opinions, namely, that Uncle Sam should black the boots of John Bull, and that Grover Cleveland carries the brains of the world in his beegum. This brace of abortive ideas constitute its confession of faith--the only things of which it feels absolutely certain. When it tackles anything else it wobbles in and it wobbles out like an unhappy married man trying to find his way home at five o'clock in the morning. A great diplomat once declared that language was made to conceal thought; but the Dallas News employs it to disguise an intellectual vacuum. It can use more language to say less than any other publication on earth. In this particular it is like Napoleon--it stands wrapt in the solitude of its own originality. The eating of thirty quail in thirty days was once a popular test of human endurance; but I can propose a more crucial one--one that will attract more people to Dallas than would even the Corbett-Fitzsimmons fight. Let the people of this city offer a fat purse for the man who can read the editorial page of the Dallas News thirty days in succession without degenerating into a driveling idiot. It is a mental impossibility, of course; but perhaps my good friend "Dorry" can be persuaded to attempt it--to hoist himself with his own petard. No man born of woman will ever accomplish it. Massillon would become a mental bankrupt within the month and Socrates have to be tapped for the simples before reaching the half- way house. The News is troubled with a chronic case of Anglo- mania. Whenever Columbia has a controversy of any kind with Britannia, the News hastens to ally itself with the Britisher; but in matters concerning the welfare of the city of Dallas it has little to say. It did manifest a slight inclination to take up for the fistic enterprise-- fearfully slid one foot to terra-firma; but when the success of the carnival became doubtful the News hastened to resume its time-honored position astride the fence, and it has hung there ever since--like a foul dish-rag across a wire clothes line. It's the greatest journalistic 'Fraid on the face of the earth. It doesn't dare to risk the opinion that water is wet. But probably it isn't sure of it. It is just as well, however, for if it did know, it couldn't leak the information in less than a column. The editorial page of the Dallas News reminds me of the Desert of Sahara after a simoon--it is such an awful waste of space. If I had a five-year-old boy who couldn't say more in fifteen minutes than the Dallas News has said in the last dozen years, I'd refuse to father him.