literature? But even this
would be crude. We have hopes of something from electricity. There ought
to be somewhere a reservoir of knowledge, connected by wires with every
house, and a professional switch-tender, who, upon the pressure of a
button in any house, could turn on the intellectual stream desired.
--[Prophecy of the Internet of the year 2000 from 110 years ago. D.W.]
--There must be discovered in time a method by which not only information
but intellectual life can be infused into the system by an electric
current. It would save a world of trouble and expense. For some clubs
even are a weariness, and it costs money to hire other people to read and
think for us.

A LOCOED NOVELIST

Either we have been indulging in an expensive mistake, or a great foreign
novelist who preaches the gospel of despair is locoed.

This word, which may be new to most of our readers, has long been current
in the Far West, and is likely to be adopted into the language, and
become as indispensable as the typic words taboo and tabooed, which
Herman Melville gave us some forty years ago. There grows upon the
deserts and the cattle ranges of the Rockies a plant of the leguminosae
family, with a purple blossom, which is called the 'loco'. It is sweet to
the taste; horses and cattle are fond of it, and when they have once
eaten it they prefer it to anything else, and often refuse other food.
But the plant is poisonous, or, rather, to speak exactly, it is a weed of
insanity. Its effect upon the horse seems to be mental quite as much as
physical. He behaves queerly, he is full of whims; one would say he was
"possessed." He takes freaks, he trembles, he will not go in certain
places, he will not pull straight, his mind is evidently affected, he is
mildly insane. In point of fact, he is ruined; that is to say, he is
'locoed'. Further indulgence in the plant results in death, but rarely
does an animal recover from even one eating of the insane weed.

The shepherd on the great sheep ranges leads an absolutely isolated life.
For weeks, sometimes for months together, he does not see a human being.
His only companions are his dogs and the three or four thousand sheep he
is herding. All day long, under the burning sun, he follows the herd over
the rainless prairie, as it nibbles here and there the short grass and
slowly gathers its food. At night he drives the sheep back to the corral,
and lies down alone in his hut. He speaks to no one; he a