Lungy took it, looked it over, read the assignment, and broke down and cried. * * * * * "How did it come out?" asked the Bride. "Oh," said the Hired Man, "Lungy waited till the last minute, flashed the paper and the money, and swiped the mine. The company wanted to give a check and redeem, but the clerk stood out for currency, and it was too late to get it. He got the mine, and Lucy, and is the big Mr. Addison, now. No, me for where you can carry off things that are too big for the grand larceny statutes. This business of farming is too much like chicken-feed for me!" CHAPTER VIII "I came on this trip," said Colonel Baggs, "to rest my vocal organs, and not to talk. In this ambition I have been greatly aided by the willingness of Professor Boggs to assume the conversational burden in our seat. However, now that my name has been drawn from the hat, I shall have the pleasure, and honor, lady and gentlemen, to entertain you for a very few minutes--after which, thanking you for your very kind attention and liberal patronage, the hay--the hay, my friends, for me!" At the Lake Hotel, to which they had come by boat, they found their tents pitched and their dinner awaiting them--for which they were indebted to the efficiency of Aconite and the Hired Man, who had come overland; and the latter of whom assured them that they had missed the greatest curiosity of the Park in failing to see the Natural Bridge. "On your way, Bill!" said the Groom. "You didn't see the petrified sea serpent swimming off Gull Point, did you?" "Dumb it all, no!" exclaimed Bill. "I never am around when anything good is pulled off!" THE LAW AND AMELIA WHINNERY THE TALE OF COLONEL BAGGS OF OMAHA I was much interested (said the Colonel, beginning his story), in the tale told by my learned brother, Mr. Snoke. The story of the way Mr. Lungy Addison committed grand larceny in getting away with the Mortal Cinch mine is one that, falling from the mouth, as it does, of a person not learned in the law and its beauties, must be true. Nobody but a lawyer could have invented it--and I assure you that lawyers are too busy with the strange phases of truth to monkey--if I may use a term not yet laundered by the philologists--with fiction. The law is the perfection of human wisdom. Our courts are the God-ordained instruments by which these perfections are made manifest to the eyes of mere human beings. To be sure the courts are composed of men who were but even now lawyers--but that's neither here, there, nor yonder--when the anointment of their judicial consecration runs down their beard, as did the oil down that of Aaron, human imperfections are at end with them, and it's all off with frailty. And this brings me to the brief story which is my contribution to the Yellowstone Nights' Entertainment. I sing, my beloved, the saga of The Law and Amelia Whinnery.