a calf chewing off the tail of a shirt on a
clothes-line?"

"I put it to you straight, Sandy," says Idaho, quiet. "It's a poem
book," says he, "by Homer K. M. I couldn't get colour out of it at
first, but there's a vein if you follow it up. I wouldn't have missed
this book for a pair of red blankets."

"You're welcome to it," says I. "What I want is a disinterested
statement of facts for the mind to work on, and that's what I seem to
find in the book I've drawn."

"What you've got," says Idaho, "is statistics, the lowest grade of
information that exists. They'll poison your mind. Give me old K. M.'s
system of surmises. He seems to be a kind of a wine agent. His regular
toast is 'nothing doing,' and he seems to have a grouch, but he keeps
it so well lubricated with booze that his worst kicks sound like an
invitation to split a quart. But it's poetry," says Idaho, "and I
have sensations of scorn for that truck of yours that tries to convey
sense in feet and inches. When it comes to explaining the instinct of
philosophy through the art of nature, old K. M. has got your man beat
by drills, rows, paragraphs, chest measurement, and average annual
rainfall."

So that's the way me and Idaho had it. Day and night all the
excitement we got was studying our books. That snowstorm sure fixed us
with a fine lot of attainments apiece. By the time the snow melted,
if you had stepped up to me suddenly and said: "Sanderson Pratt,
what would it cost per square foot to lay a roof with twenty by
twenty-eight tin at nine dollars and fifty cents per box?" I'd have
told you as quick as light could travel the length of a spade handle
at the rate of one hundred and ninety-two thousand miles per second.
How many can do it? You wake up 'most any man you know in the middle
of the night, and ask him quick to tell you the number of bones in
the human skeleton exclusive of the teeth, or what percentage of the
vote of the Nebraska Legislature overrules a veto. Will he tell you?
Try him and see.

About what benefit Idaho got out of his poetry book I didn't exactly
know. Idaho boosted the wine-agent every time he opened his mouth; but
I wasn't so sure.

This Homer K. M., from what leaked out of his libretto through Idaho,
seemed to me to be a kind of a dog who looked at life like it was a
tin can tied to his tail. After running himself half to death, he
sits down, hangs his tongue out, and looks at the can and says:

"Oh, well, since we can't