Its foremost practitioners, the mule-skinners, are shorn of their deadliest weapon of offense and defense by a recent order which directs them to use honeyed words when addressing their feathery-eared charges, instead of employing the plain, direct United States to which the mules' painfully obvious hearing organs have hitherto been attuned. Kindness, the order says in effect, will work wonders with the genus Missouri nightingale or Indiana canary; if spoken to with proper regard for his or her feelings, a mule will oftentimes go so far as to place his or her hoof in a driver's lap. When one is able, with impunity, to tickle a mule behind the ear (either ear will do) one is adjudged proficient in interpreting the aesthetic aspirations of the beast; and all mule-skinners are exhorted to apply the ear-tickling proposition as a sort of acid test both as to the tractability of their charges and their own ability as mule-tamers. The application of this test, it is held, will keep the mule-skinners too fully occupied to be able to cuss or to care a cuss about cussing. This Stuff is Out o' Date. But, men of the Old Army, particularly those who have trained with mountain batteries, think of what is passing! Think of what the younger and more effete generation of mules is missing! No more beneath the starry flag will be heard such he-language as this:-- "Come on, Maud, you ---- Hoosier ----! Get a wiggle on your ---- good-for-nothing carcass! GIDDAP, Bill! You long-eared, flea-bitten, hay-demolishing, muddy-flanked, rock-ribbed ----, ---- I said it! GIDDAP!" Or with the native product: "Depechez-vous, vous ----. Oh, h--l, I'm out of French! Say, Jimmy! What's the word for ----? Never mind; all mules understand ----! Hey there, you ----! Make tracks!" Now, all is changed and such dulcet appeals to His Muleship as this are the order of the day: "Get a gait on, Sapphira, you ----! Oh, hell, I forgot! Aw, c'me on now, old girl! We ain't got the whole morning t' waste! Be a sport, old lady! Forward ---- hoh! "Say, for ----. Oh, hell--I mean Heaven! Dammit, I forgot again! You, Ananias, will you do me the esteemed favor to start the process? Will you condescend to lift at least one leg?" But This Stuff Does the Job. Ananias puts one hoof forward in experimental manner, then stops. About this time a brother mule-skinner enters, mouthing a corncob pipe. Says he to the first mule-skinner: "Whattamatter, Jerry? Don't they budge? Livin' up to orders, be yeh? Aw, wee; way to talk to'm is third person--get me?--third person. None o' this crude 'you' and 'yeze' stuff--same as talking to the Skipper, y'know."