is cheered by the novel sight of
one homestead striving to jump another.

Toward evening James Trilobite Eton gave a wild shriek of joy and ran to
us from the bed of an old creek, where he had found an ichthyosaurus.
The animal was dead! Not only that, but it had been dead a long, long
time!

James Milton Sherrod said that "if a college education was of no more
use to a man than that he, for one, allowed that his boy would have to
grope through life with an academical education, and very little of
_it_."

I uncocked my gun and went back to camp a sadder and madder man, and,
though years have come and gone, I am still irritable when I think of
the five days we tramped along Bitter creek searching for an animal
that was no longer alive, and our guide knew it before he started.

I ventured to say to J. Trilobite Eton that night as we all sat together
in the gloaming discussing whether he should be taken home with us in
the capacity of a guide or as a remains, that it seemed to me a man
ought to have better sense than to wear his young life away trying to
have fun with his superiors in that way.

"Why, blame it all," says James, "what did you expect? You ought to know
yourself that that animal is extinct!"

"Extinck!" says James Milton Sherrod, in shrill, angry tones. "I should
say he was extinck. That's what we're kickin' about. What gallded me was
that you should of waited till the old cuss was extinck before you come
to us like a man and told us about it. You pull us through the sand for
a week and blister our heels and condemb near kill us, and all the time
you know that the blame brute is layin' there in the hot sun gittin'
more and more extinck every minute. Fun is fun, and I like a little
nonsense now and then just as well as you do, but I'll be eternally
banished to Bitter creek if I think it's square or right or white to
play it on your friends this kind of a way.

"You claim that the animal has been dead goin' on five thousand years,
or some such thing as that, and try to get out of it that way, but long
as you knew it and we didn't it shows that you're a low cuss not to
speak of it.

"What difference does it make to us, I say, whether this brute was or
was not dead and swelled up like a pizen'd steer long before Nore got
his zoologickle show together? We didn't know it. We haven't seen the
Salt Lake papers for weeks. You use your edjecation to fool people with.
My opinion is that the day is not far dist