he insignificant sum of $8,280. Rather than remain in
ignorance of this astonishing fact, I would willingly pay the money
myself--out of the public treasury. It is rumored that parties employed by
the State to dive down into the ground and bring up sand in their claws,
have discovered symptoms that the world was at one time sick to its
stomach, and threw up divers and sundry kinds of rocks and things, and
there is a probability that lead ore may be discovered. This will be
valuable to make bullets in case of a war with Oshkosh. In peace it is
always best to prepare for war, and I trust you will lend your countenance
to the able men who are investigating the Lower Silurian age.

FOOLING WITH THE BIBLE.

Reports from the stationers show that there is no demand at all for the
revised edition of the Bible, and had it not been for the newspapers
publishing the whole affair there would have been very few persons that
took the trouble to even glance at it, and it is believed that not one
reader of the daily papers in a hundred read any of the Bible, and not one
in ten thousand read all of it which was published. Who originated this
scheme of revising the Bible we do not know, but whoever it was made a
miscue. There was no one suffering particularly for a revision of the
Bible. It was good enough as it was. No literary sharp of the present day
has got any license to change anything in the Bible.

Why, the cheeky ghouls have actually altered over the Lord's Prayer, cut
it biased, and thrown the parts about giving us this day our daily bread
into the rag bag. How do they know that the Lord said more than he wanted
to in that prayer? He wanted that daily bread in there, or He never would
have put it in. The only wonder is that those revisers did not insert
strawberry shortcake and ice cream in place of daily bread. Some of these
ministers who are writing speeches for the Lord think they are smart. They
have fooled with Christ's sermon on the Mount until He couldn't tell it if
He was to meet it in the Chicago _Times_.

This thing has gone on long enough, and we want a stop put to it. We have
kept still about the piracy that has been going on in the Bible because
people who are better than we are have seemed to endorse it, but now we
are sick of it, and if there is going to be an annual clerical picnic to
cut gashes in the Bible and stick new precepts and examples on where they
will do the most hurt, we shall lock up our old Bib