of arms, the havoc of storm,
fire, pestilence, famine."

"Your career has been a stirring one. Might I ask how you came to locate
in these dull Kansas woods, when you have been so accustomed to
excitement during what I might term so protracted a period, not to put
too fine a point on it?"

"Listen. Once I was the honoured servitor of the noble and illustrious"
(here he heaved a sigh, and passed his hairy hand across his eyes) "but
in these degenerate days I am become the slave of quack doctors and
newspapers. I am driven from pillar to post and hurried up and down,
sometimes with stencil-plate and paste-brush to defile the fences with
cabalistic legends, and sometimes in grotesque and extravagant character
at the behest 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 th