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 shake the growler, let's get it filled at
the corner, and all have a drink on me."

Besides that, it seems he was a Persian; and I never hear of Persia
producing anything worth mentioning unless it was Turkish rugs and
Maltese cats.

That spring me and Idaho struck pay ore. It was a habit of ours to
sell out quick and keep moving. We unloaded our grubstaker for eight
thousand dollars apiece; and then we drifted down to this little town
of Rosa, on the Salmon river, to rest up, and get some human grub, and
have our whiskers harvested.

Rosa was no mining-camp. It laid in the valley, and was as free of
uproar and pestilence as one of them rural towns in the country. There
was a three-mile trolley line champing its bit in the environs; and me
and Idaho spent a week riding on one of the cars, dropping off at
nights at the Sunset View Hotel. Being now well read as well as
travelled, we was soon /pro re nata/ with the best society in Rosa,
and was invited out to the most dressed-up and high-toned
entertainments. It was at a piano recital and quail-eating contest in
the city hall, for the benefit of the fire company, that me and Idaho
first met Mrs. De Ormond Sampson, the queen of Rosa society.

Mrs. Sampson was a widow, and owned the only two-story house in town.
It was painted yellow, and whichever way you looked from you could see
it as plain as egg on the chin of an O'Grady on a Friday. Twenty-two
men in Rosa besides me and Idaho was trying to s