ty of the dead.

The great question of how best to down the demon rum is before the
American people, and it will not be put aside until it is settled; but
while this is being attended to, Mr. Jaynes, I would start a drug store
farther away from the center of conflict and go on joyously, sacrificing
expensive tinctures, compounds, and syrups at bed-rock prices.

Go on, Mr. Jaynes, dealing out to the yearning, panting public, drugs,
paints, oils, glass, putty, varnish, patent medicines, and prescriptions
carefully compounded, with none to molest or make afraid, but shun, oh
shun the wild-eyed pharmacopeia that contains naught but the festering
fluid so popular in Kansas, a compound that holds crime in solution and
ruin in bulk, that shrivels up a man's gastric economy, and sears great
ragged holes into his immortal soul. Take this advice home to your heart
and you will ever command the hearty cooperation of "yours for health,"
as the late Lydia E. Pinkham so succinctly said.

_Bill Nye._

A WOULD-BE HOSTELRY.

BILL NYE STOPS AT A PLACE WHERE TWO ROADS FORK.

HIS MOURNFUL PILGRIMAGE THROUGH DESOLATE WILDS IN COMPANY WITH THE
SOULFUL HOOSIER POET--A TALE OF GLOOM WITHOUT A RAY OF HOPE.

We are moving about over the country, James Whitcomb Riley and I, in the
capacity of a moral and spectacular show, I attend to the spectacular
part of the business. That is more in my line.

I am writing this at an imitation hotel where the roads fork. I will
call it the Fifth Avenue Hotel because the hotel at a railroad junction
is generally called the Fifth Avenue, or the Gem City House, or the
Palace Hotel. I stopped at an inn some years since called the Palace,
and I can truly say that if it had ever been a palace it was very much
run down when I visited it.

Just as the fond parent of a white-eyed, two-legged freak of nature
loves to name his mentally-diluted son Napoleon, and for the same reason
that a prominent horse owner in Illinois last year socked my name on a
tall, buckskin-colored colt that did not resemble me, intellectually or
physically, a colt that did not know enough to go around a barbed-wire
fence, but sought to sift himself through it into an untimely grave, so
this man has named his sway-backed wigwam the Fifth Avenue Hotel.

It is different from the Fifth Avenue in many ways. In the first place
there is not so much travel and business in its neighborhood. As I said
before, this is where two railr