[Illustration:  AN INTRUSIVE NIGGER.]

“I tried to get a little sleep on the cars, but every little while a conductor would wake me up and roll me over in the seat to look at my ticket, and brakemen would run against my legs in the aisle of the car, and shout the names of stations till I was sorry I ever left home.  Now, I want to have rest and quietude.  Can I have it here?”

The manager told him to go to his room, and if he wanted any coal or ice water to ring for it, and if anybody knocked at his door without being sent for, to begin shooting bullets through the door.  That settled it, and when the parties returned to Iowa they said this country was a mighty sight different from Dubuque.

A PLEA FOR THE BULL HEAD.

The late meeting of the State Fish Commissioners at Milwaukee was an important event, and the discussions the wise men indulged in will be valuable additions to the literature of the country, and future readers of profane history will rise up and call them blessed.  It seems that the action of the Milwaukee common council in withdrawing the use of the water works from the commissioners, will put a stop to the hatching of whitefish.  This is as it should be.  The white fish is an aristocratic bird, that will not bite a hook, and the propagation of this species of fish is wholly in the interest of wealthy owners of fishing tugs, who have nets.  By strict attention to business they can catch all the whitefish out of the lake a little faster than the State machine can put them in.  Poor people cannot get a smell of whitefish.  The same may be said of brook trout.  While they will bite a hook, it requires more machinery to catch them than ordinary people can possess without mortgaging a house.  A man has got to have a morocco book of expensive flies, a fifteen dollar bamboo jointed rod, a three dollar trout basket with a hole mortised in the top, a corduroy suit made in the latest style, top boots of the Wellington pattern, with red tassels in the straps, and a flask of Otard brandy in a side pocket.  Unless a man is got up in that style, a speckled trout will see him in Chicago, first, and then it won’t bite.  The brook trout is even more aristocratic than the whitefish, and should not be propagated at public expense.

But there are fish that should be propagated in the interest of the people.  There is a species of fish that never looks at the clothes of the man who throws in the bait, a fish that takes whatever is thrown to it, and when once hold of the hook never tries to shake a friend, but submits to the inevitable, crosses its legs and says “Now I lay me,” and comes out on the bank and seems to enjoy being taken.  It is a fish that is a friend of the poor, and one that will sacrifice itself in the interest of humanity.  This is the fish that the State should adopt as its trade mark, and cultivate friendly relations with, and stand by.  We allude to the bullhead.