at-granddaddy of all the bullsnakes up at Lead in the Black Hills. I
was only a kid then. This wasn't no such tur'ble long a snake, but he
was more'n a foot thick. Looked just like a sahuaro stalk. Man name of
Terwilliger Smith catched it. He named this yere bull-snake Clarence,
and got it so plumb gentle it followed him everywhere. One day old P. T.
Barnum come along and wanted to buy this Clarence snake--offered
Terwilliger a thousand cold--but Smith wouldn't part with the snake
nohow. So finally they fixed up a deal so Smith could go along with the
show. They shoved Clarence in a box in the baggage car, but after a
while Mr. Snake gets so lonesome he gnaws out and starts to crawl back
to find his master. Just as he is half-way between the baggage car and
the smoker, the couplin' give way--right on that heavy grade between
Custer and Rocky Point. Well, sir, Clarence wound his head 'round one
brake wheel and his tail around the other, and held that train together
to the bottom of the grade. But it stretched him twenty-eight feet and
they had to advertise him as a boa-constrictor."

Windy Bill's history of the faithful bull-snake aroused to reminiscence
the grizzled stranger, who thereupon held forth as follows:

Wall, I've see things and I've heerd things, some of them ornery, and
some you'd love to believe, they was that gorgeous and improbable.
Nat'ral history was always my hobby and sportin' events my special
pleasure--and this yarn of Windy's reminds me of the only chanst I ever
had to ring in business and pleasure and hobby all in one grand
merry-go-round of joy. It come about like this:

One day, a few year back, I was sittin' on the beach at Santa Barbara
watchin' the sky stay up, and wonderin' what to do with my year's wages,
when a little squinch-eye round-face with big bow spectacles came and
plumped down beside me.

"Did you ever stop to think," says he, shovin' back his hat, "that if
the horse-power delivered by them waves on this beach in one single hour
could be concentrated behind washin' machines, it would be enough to
wash all the shirts for a city of four hundred and fifty-one thousand
one hundred and thirty-six people?"

"Can't say I ever did," says I, squintin' at him sideways.

"Fact," says he, "and did it ever occur to you that if all the food a
man eats in the course of a natural life could be gathered together at
one time, it would fill a wagon-train twelve miles long?"

"You make me hung