LE SHOOTING AFFRAY.

Those were troublesome times, indeed, when we were trying to settle up
the new world and a few other matters at the same time.

Little do the soft-eyed sons of prosperity understand to-day, as they
walk the paved streets of the west under the cold glitter of the
electric light, surrounded by all that can go to make life sweet and
desirable, that not many years ago on that same ground their fathers
fought the untutored savage by night and chased the bounding buffalo by
day.

All, all is changed. Time in his restless and resistless flight has
filed away those early years in the county clerk's office, and these
times are not the old times. With the march of civilization I notice
that it is safer for a man to attend a theatre than in the early days of
the wild and wooly west. Time has made it easier for one to go to the
opera and bring his daylights home with him than it used to be.

It seems but a few short years since my room-mate came home one night
with a long red furrow plowed along the top of his head, where some
gentleman at the theatre had shot him by mistake. My room-mate said
that a tall man had objected to the pianist and suggested that he was
playing pianissimo when he should have played fortissimo, and trouble
grew out of this which had ended in the death of the pianist and the
injury of several disinterested spectators.

And yet the excitement of knowing that you might be killed at any moment
made the theatre more attractive, and instead of scaring men away it
rather induced patronage. Of course it prevented the attendance of
ladies who were at all timid, but it did not cause any falling off in
the receipts. Some thought it aided a good deal, especially where the
show itself didn't have much blood in it.

The Bella Union was a pretty fair sample of the theatre in those days.
It was a low wooden structure with a perpetual band on the outside, that
played gay and festive circus tunes early and often. Inside you could
poison your soul at the bar and see the show at one and the same price
of admission. In an adjoining room silent men joined the hosts of faro
and the timid tenderfoot gamboled o'er the green.

I visited this place of amusement one evening in the capacity of a
reporter for the paper. I would not admit this, even at this late day,
only that it has been overlooked in Mr. Talmage since; and if he could
go through such an ordeal in the interests of humanity, I might be
forg