Watching the entire discomfiture of the birds adds, I must own, a keener zest even to the delicious view and air, and to the racy stories of Western life poured out by one or another of the loaf-brethren. A specimen or two may amuse your readers. Placard over the piano in a favourite resort of Texan cowboys: “Don’t shoot the musician; he is doing his best.” Cowboy entering the cars at midnight, thermometer below zero, after snorting for a minute, lets down a window, is remonstrated with, and replies, “Wal, I’d as soon sleep with my head in a dead horse as in this car with the windows shut!” Another tale I repeat with hesitation, though it was seriously vouched for by the narrator as going on in his neighbourhood, and within his own cognisance. An eccentric settler, who played the fiddle powerfully, and lived next a man who had thrown a bridge over a creek, in respect of which the knotty question of “right of way” had arisen between them, read, or discovered somehow, that excessive vibration was the cause of the fall of bridges, and that a well-known railway iron bridge had been distinctly felt to vibrate to the notes of a fiddle, all that was necessary being to find the right chord and play up. Thereupon he set himself on the peccant bridge, and fiddled till he had hit on the sympathetic chord to his own satisfaction; since which he has put in all his spare time at the bridge, fiddling on the right chord and looking for the signs of a crash and the discomfiture of his neighbour. A mad world, my masters! And lucky for the world, say I. But for the cracked fellows going up and down, what a dull place it would be! The whole neighbourhood, or, at any rate, the men of hunting age, have suddenly been roused into unwonted excitement and activity by the presence of a specimen of the larger carnivora close to this town. It is either a large panther or what they call a Mexican lion--at any rate, as big a beast of this kind as are bred over here, as his footprint, seen of many persons, clearly proves. He has been heard to roar by numbers, and Giles, the saw-mill man, who, passing along wholly unarmed, saw him gliding through the bush close by, puts him at five feet from nose to tail (root, not tip) at least. Giles adds that, at the sight, his hair stood up and distinctly lifted his straw hat--so perhaps his evidence must be discounted considerably. Any way, a party, now collecting dogs to bring him to bay, start to-morrow at dawn to give an account of him. It is more than a year since one has ventured down this way. A slaughter-house which has lately been set up in the woods near by would seem to have drawn him. Let us hope that no cunning old sportsman will watch there to-night and bag him single-handed, and I may possibly have to tell you of a memorable hunt next week. American Opinion on the Union, SS. Umbria, 5th October 1887.