of some driving journal.  I attended to that Ocean Bank robbery some weeks ago, when I was hardly rested from finishing up the pow-wow about the completion of the Pacific Railroad; immediately I was spirited off to do an atrocious, murder for the benefit of the New York papers; next to attend the wedding of a patriarchal millionaire; next to raise a hurrah about the great boat race; and then, just when I had begun to hope that my old bones would have a rest, I am bundled off to this howling wilderness to strip, and jibber, and be ugly and hairy, and pull down fences and waylay sheep, and waltz around with a club, and play ‘Wild Man’ generally—­and all to gratify the whim of a bedlam of crazy newspaper scribblers?  From one end of the continent to the other, I am described as a gorilla, with a sort of human seeming about me—­and all to gratify this quill-driving scum of the earth!”

“Poor old carpet bagger!”

“I have been served infamously, often, in modern and semi-modern times.  I have been compelled by base men to create fraudulent history, and to perpetrate all sorts of humbugs.  I wrote those crazy Junius letters, I moped in a French dungeon for fifteen years, and wore a ridiculous Iron Mask; I poked around your Northern forests, among your vagabond Indians, a solemn French idiot, personating the ghost of a dead Dauphin, that the gaping world might wonder if we had ‘a Bourbon among us’; I have played sea-serpent off Nahant, and Woolly-Horse and What-is-it for the museums; I have interviewed politicians for the Sun, worked up all manner of miracles for the Herald, ciphered up election returns for the World, and thundered Political Economy through the Tribune.  I have done all the extravagant things that the wildest invention could contrive, and done them well, and this is my reward—­playing Wild Man in Kansas without a shirt!”

“Mysterious being, a light dawns vaguely upon me—­it grows apace—­what —­what is your name.”

“Sensation!”

“Hence, horrible shape!”

It spoke again: 

“Oh pitiless fate, my destiny hounds me once more.  I am called.  I go.  Alas, is there no rest for me?”

In a moment the Wild Man’s features seemed to soften and refine, and his form to assume a more human grace and symmetry.  His club changed to a spade, and he shouldered it and started away sighing profoundly and shedding tears.

“Whither, poor shade?”

“To dig up the Byron family!”

Such was the response that floated back upon the wind as the sad spirit shook its ringlets to the breeze, flourished its shovel aloft, and disappeared beyond the brow of the hill.

All of which is in strict accordance with the facts.

M. T.

Last words of great men—­[From the Buffalo Express, September 11, 1889.]

     Marshal Neil’s last words were:  “L’armee fran-caise!” (The French
     army.)—­Exchange.