uld think. Why, once over on Snake River, when Andrew
McWilliams' saddle horse got the botts, he sent a buckboard ten miles
for one of these strangers that claimed to be a botanist. But that
horse died.

One morning Idaho was poking around with a stick on top of a little
shelf that was too high to reach. Two books fell down to the floor. I
started toward 'em, but caught Idaho's eye. He speaks for the first
time in a week.

"Don't burn your fingers," says he. "In spite of the fact that you're
only fit to be the companion of a sleeping mud-turtle, I'll give you a
square deal. And that's more than your parents did when they turned
you loose in the world with the sociability of a rattle-snake and the
bedside manner of a frozen turnip. I'll play you a game of seven-up,
the winner to pick up his choice of the book, the loser to take the
other."

We played; and Idaho won. He picked up his book; and I took mine. Then
each of us got on his side of the house and went to reading.

I never was as glad to see a ten-ounce nugget as I was that book. And
Idaho took at his like a kid looks at a stick of candy.

Mine was a little book about five by six inches called "Herkimer's
Handbook of Indispensable Information." I may be wrong, but I think
that was the greatest book that ever was written. I've got it to-day;
and I can stump you or any man fifty times in five minutes with the
information in it. Talk about Solomon or the New York /Tribune/!
Herkimer had cases on both of 'em. That man must have put in fifty
years and travelled a million miles to find out all that stuff. There
was the population of all cities in it, and the way to tell a girl's
age, and the number of teeth a camel has. It told you the longest
tunnel in the world, the number of the stars, how long it takes for
chicken pox to break out, what a lady's neck ought to measure, the
veto powers of Governors, the dates of the Roman aqueducts, how many
pounds of rice going without three beers a day would buy, the average
annual temperature of Augusta, Maine, the quantity of seed required to
plant an acre of carrots in drills, antidotes for poisons, the number
of hairs on a blond lady's head, how to preserve eggs, the height of
all the mountains in the world, and the dates of all wars and battles,
and how to restore drowned persons, and sunstroke, and the number of
tacks in a pound, and how to make dynamite and flowers and beds, and
what to do before the doctor comes--and a