education,” or an “interpretation” of Browning, or a new language, or a knowledge of English literature?  But even this would be crude.  We have hopes of something from electricity.  There ought to be somewhere a reservoir of knowledge, connected by wires with every house, and a professional switch-tender, who, upon the pressure of a button in any house, could turn on the intellectual stream desired. —­[Prophecy of the Internet of the year 2000 from 110 years ago.  D.W.] —­There must be discovered in time a method by which not only information but intellectual life can be infused into the system by an electric current.  It would save a world of trouble and expense.  For some clubs even are a weariness, and it costs money to hire other people to read and think for us.

A LOCOED NOVELIST

Either we have been indulging in an expensive mistake, or a great foreign novelist who preaches the gospel of despair is locoed.

This word, which may be new to most of our readers, has long been current in the Far West, and is likely to be adopted into the language, and become as indispensable as the typic words taboo and tabooed, which Herman Melville gave us some forty years ago.  There grows upon the deserts and the cattle ranges of the Rockies a plant of the leguminosae family, with a purple blossom, which is called the ‘loco’.  It is sweet to the taste; horses and cattle are fond of it, and when they have once eaten it they prefer it to anything else, and often refuse other food.  But the plant is poisonous, or, rather, to speak exactly, it is a weed of insanity.  Its effect upon the horse seems to be mental quite as much as physical.  He behaves queerly, he is full of whims; one would say he was “possessed.”  He takes freaks, he trembles, he will not go in certain places, he will not pull straight, his mind is evidently affected, he is mildly insane.  In point of fact, he is ruined; that is to say, he is ‘locoed’.  Further indulgence in the plant results in death, but rarely does an animal recover from even one eating of the insane weed.

The shepherd on the great sheep ranges leads an absolutely isolated life.  For weeks, sometimes for months together, he does not see a human being.  His only companions are his dogs and the three or four thousand sheep he is herding.  All day long, under the burning sun, he follows the herd over the rainless prairie, as it nibbles here and there the short grass and slowly gathers its food.  At night he drives the sheep back to the corral, and lies down alone in his hut.  He speaks to no one; he almost forgets how to speak.  Day and night he hears no sound except the melancholy, monotonous bleat, bleat of the sheep.  It becomes intolerable.  The animal stupidity of the herd enters into him.  Gradually he loses his mind.  They say that he is locoed.  The insane asylums of California contain many shepherds.