ands. Here a wide field opens up to the scholar. The adult
steer in the great realm of beef is now a walking Chinese wash bill, a
Hindoo poem in the original junk shop alphabet, a four-legged Greek
inscription, punctuated with jim-jams, a stenographer's notes of a riot,
a bird's-eye view of a premature explosion in a hardware store.

The cowboy who can at once grapple with the great problem of where to
put the steer with "B bar B" on left shoulder, "Key circle G" on left
side, "Heart D Heart" on right hip, left ear crop, wattle te wattle, and
seven hands round with "Dash B Dash" on right shoulder "vented," wattle
on dew lap vented, and "P. D. Q.," "C. O. D.," and "N. G." vented on
right side, keeping track of transfers, range and post-office of last
owner, has certainly got a future, which lies mostly ahead of him.

But now that the idea has been turned loose, I shall look forward to the
time when wealthy men who have been in the habit of dying and leaving
their money to other institutions, will meet with a change of heart, and
begin to endow the cowboys' college, and the Maverick hotbed of broncho
sciences.

We live in an age of rapid advancement in all branches of learning, and
people who do not rise early in the morning will not retain their
position in the procession. I look forward with confidence to the day
when no cowboy will undertake to ride the range without a diploma.
Educated labor is what we need. Cowboys who can tell you in scientific
terms why it is always the biggest steer that eats "pigeon weed" in the
spring and why he should swell up and bust on a rising Chicago market.

I hope that the day is not far distant when in the holster of the cowboy
we will find the Iliad instead of the killiad, the unabridged dictionary
instead of Mr. Remington's great work on homicide. As it is now on the
ranges you might ride till your Mexican saddle ached before you would
find a cowboy who carries a dictionary with him. For that reason the
language used on the general roundup is at times grammatically
incorrect, and many of our leading cowboys spell "cavvy-yard" with a
"k."

A college for riding, roping, branding, cutting out, corralling, loading
and unloading, and handling cattle generally, would be a great boon to
our young men, who are at present groping in dark and pitiable ignorance
of the habits of the untutored cow. Let the young man first learn how to
sit up three nights in succession, through a bad March sno