the better classes at the foot of Pizen Ivy avenue.

We are pained to learn that the free reading room, established over
Amalgamation Brown's store, has been closed up by the police. Blue Ruin
has clamored for a free temperance reading room and brain retort for ten
years, and now a ruction between two of our best known citizens, over
the relative merits of a natural pair and a doctored flush, has called
down the vengeance of the authorities, and shut up what was a credit to
the place and a quiet resort, where young men could come night after
night and kind of complicate themselves at. There are two or three men
in this place that will bully or bust everything they can get into, and
they have perforated more outrages on Blue Ruin than we are entitled to
put up with.

There was a successful doings at the creek last Sabbath, during which
baptism was administered to four grown people and a dude from Sandy
Mush. The pastor thinks it will take first-rate, though it is still too
soon to tell.

Surrender Adams got a letter last Friday from his son Gladstone, who
filed on a homestead near Porcupine, Dak., two years ago. He says they
have had another of those unprecedented winters there for which Dakota
is so justly celebrated. He thinks this one has been even more so that
any of the others. He wishes he was back here at Blue Ruin, where a man
can go out doors for half an hour without getting ostracized by the
elements. He says they brag a good deal on their ozone there, but he
allows that it can be overdone. He states that when the ozone in Dakota
is feeling pretty well and humping itself and curling up sheet-iron
roofs and blowing trains of the track, a man has to tie a clothes-line
to himself, with the other end fastened to the door knob, before it is
safe to visit his own hen-house. He says that his nearest neighbor is
seventeen miles away, and a man might as well buy his own chickens as to
fool his money away on seventeen miles of clothes-line.

It is a first-rate letter, and the old man wonders who Gladstone got to
write it for him.

The valuable ecru dog of our distinguished townsman, Mr. Piedmont
Babbit, was seriously impaired last Saturday morning by an east-bound
freight.

He will not wrinkle up his nose at another freight train.

George Wellington, of Hickory, was in town the front end of the week. He
has accepted a position in the livery, feed and sale stable at Sandy
Mush. Call again, George.

Gabriel Brant