broomhandle in the hands of Mrs.
Hicks."

IV

THE HANDBOOK OF HYMEN

'Tis the opinion of myself, Sanderson Pratt, who sets this down, that
the educational system of the United States should be in the hands of
the weather bureau. I can give you good reasons for it; and you can't
tell me why our college professors shouldn't be transferred to the
meteorological department. They have been learned to read; and they
could very easily glance at the morning papers and then wire in to
the main office what kind of weather to expect. But there's the other
side of the proposition. I am going on to tell you how the weather
furnished me and Idaho Green with an elegant education.

We was up in the Bitter Root Mountains over the Montana line
prospecting for gold. A chin-whiskered man in Walla-Walla, carrying a
line of hope as excess baggage, had grubstaked us; and there we was in
the foothills pecking away, with enough grub on hand to last an army
through a peace conference.

Along one day comes a mail-rider over the mountains from Carlos,
and stops to eat three cans of greengages, and leave us a newspaper
of modern date. This paper prints a system of premonitions of the
weather, and the card it dealt Bitter Root Mountains from the bottom
of the deck was "warmer and fair, with light westerly breezes."

That evening it began to snow, with the wind strong in the east. Me
and Idaho moved camp into an old empty cabin higher up the mountain,
thinking it was only a November flurry. But after falling three foot
on a level it went to work in earnest; and we knew we was snowed in.
We got in plenty of firewood before it got deep, and we had grub
enough for two months, so we let the elements rage and cut up all they
thought proper.

If you want to instigate the art of manslaughter just shut two men up
in a eighteen by twenty-foot cabin for a month. Human nature won't
stand it.

When the first snowflakes fell me and Idaho Green laughed at each
other's jokes and praised the stuff we turned out of a skillet and
called bread. At the end of three weeks Idaho makes this kind of a
edict to me. Says he:

"I never exactly heard sour milk dropping out of a balloon on the
bottom of a tin pan, but I have an idea it would be music of the
spears compared to this attenuated stream of asphyxiated thought
that emanates out of your organs of conversation. The kind of
half-masticated noises that you emit every day puts me in mind of a
cow's cu