mosquitoes and flies were getting in their best licks at me. I was trying to sleep, and just as I was about succeeding Henderson called out: 'Charles, get your shovel and come quick.' 'What's the matter?' I asked. 'Why, the hogs have played the devil and broke the ditches and the water is running all over Hell.' Mad as I felt about being disturbed, I could not help smiling within at the thought of water running all over hell, and I said to him: 'If those hogs can flood hell with water they ought to be sent to a dime museum.' We went on in silence till we reached the orchard gate, when Henderson said: 'Do you know, I would rather take a licking than open that gate, for it's a back-breaker. It hasn't got a hinge, and is as heavy as an elephant; you have to lift it up and drag it along the ground. It takes more time to hang a gate that way with a band of iron to a post or a bent stick in the place of the iron, than it would to buy two pairs of hinges; and yet that is the only kind he has on the place. It seems as if everything on the place was devised to make work as hard, unhandy, and wrong-end-to as possible.'

"That evening when we had gathered together as usual, Harry opened the conversation by saying: 'What a racket there was to-night at supper! It seems to me the whole family is raising hell all the time, but I don't blame the old woman much for giving the boss a jawing about throwing his old broken harness on her bedroom floor, when he came home in the light rig this afternoon.' 'He is always doing such things,' said George. 'The front room is more like an old store-room than anything else. He don't deserve a house; that man ought to live in a barn.'

"Another of the men said: 'If ever there was any attraction between the boss and his wife, it has long ago disappeared; and the children! What a quarreling gang they are.' Then they proceeded to discuss at length each member of the family, and I must say, father, that although I had become accustomed to much of the roughness of the life of these ranches, I was so shocked over some of the things they said that it took me a long time to get over it. I was not surprised that the boys should be little reprobates, because I didn't see how they could be otherwise, living with such a crew of men around them all the time, but was shocked to hear what they said about the girls. There were two of them: one fifteen years old, the other eighteen. Rather pretty girls they were, too. I had talked with them several times and they seemed modest and quite shy with me. I hadn't seen them much with the other fellows. Well, father, when those men had finished talking, they hadn't left those girls a shred of what the world calls a reputation, and the worst of it was that their stories were for the most part true, as I afterward ascertained. I could scarcely speak to the girls for several days; for somehow one expects more of a girl than of a boy, though I don't know why one should," he added, thoughtfully. "I'm sure I'd want to be as pure as the girl I married.

"Well, I studied over the thing a good deal, and I finally came to this conclusion: Those girls were not bad; they were simply curious. They led such narrow, cramped lives that there was nothing for their active brains to feed on, so they naturally turned to the most interesting thing at hand, themselves, their physical selves. A superabundance of vitality overshadowed their small mental equipment. In the absence of suitable entertainment the physical part of their being had fatally asserted itself. Ignorant of consequences, they sinned innocently. I felt sorry for them, and during the rest of my stay there, I tried to give them some glimpses of a more intellectual life.

"Well," continued Charles, "I stayed in that hell over a year, then left and went to the Lonsdale ranch. There we did not use the barn to sleep in; each man had a bunk to himself in the bunk-house. The interior of the bunk-house was decorated with several choice works of art, one representing three young ladies, in abbreviated costumes, enjoying wine and cigarettes; another showed several men lifting from the water the nude form of a beautiful young woman who had committed suicide; while a third was an exciting picture of a jealous woman, in a much torn garment, holding a pistol to the head of her faithless lover. Some pictures of Fitzsimmons, Jeffries, and Sharkey also adorned the walls. Much time was spent in the evenings discussing the various merits and demerits of the pugilists. I was often surprised at the able and exhaustive manner in which they would handle the subject, and showed some remarkable ability in treating of the qualities of the prize fighting gentlemen. If the same amount of brain power had been turned in other directions, how useful to their country those men might have become. I do not wish to convey the idea that they were always handling such great and momentous topics as the fighting qualities of those noted gentlemen. Very often, by way of variation, they would talk of those feminine types of beauty which appeared so conspicuously in the Police Gazette and the Sporting Times.

"It was astonishing the amount of information they displayed concerning women, what retentive memories they had, and how very familiar they were with the subject of woman, her ways, and her sex nature. Their mental horizon was bounded on the north by the affairs of the ranch, on the east by the boss and his domestic concerns, on the south by woman as manifested by the various phases of her sexual nature, and on the west by the gentry of the prize ring. Within these boundaries was their mental world, their minds never reaching out and beyond these subjects.

"The reading matter on the table was the sensational weekly papers.

"I remember one Sunday to my surprise I saw one of the men reading a book. On looking at the title, it read: 'The Life of Rattlesnake Pete,' and another man had a book lying on his blankets, entitled 'The Adventures of Coyote Bill.' Gambling was their favorite pastime. It was one round of card playing nights and Sundays. When I first went to work on the Lonsdale ranch, the boss put me to cutting oak wood. After I had been at work awhile, he came along and told me that I did not hold the handle of my axe right. The next day he found fault with me for the way I used a cross-cut saw. A week later I was piling brush to burn, and the way I laid the brush did not suit him. He was everlastingly blowing about himself and telling how he did things. I did not seem to be able to do anything right. One night after supper we had all assembled in the bunk-house, when Parsons said: 'I tell you boys, hell went pop this morning. Plaisted gave the boss hell because he commenced to growl at him for the way he held the lines. Plaisted told him he was the greatest old crank that ever run a ranch, and that the devil himself couldn't suit him. He left the team right in the field and called for his money. I tell you the boss's face was as red as a beet. He had to give Simmons six dollars a month more to take the team.'

"Hendricks said, 'I gave the boss a piece of my mind this morning when I tried to open the gate leading into the garden. It is a rod long, and as heavy as hell; the whole weight was on the ground. I told him any man that had such a gate as that on his ranch never ought to own a ranch. I said, 'Why in the devil don't you get some hinges and hang your gates?' Ambrose spoke up, and said, 'Sometimes the boss seems pleasant enough, but he does like to find fault and tell you what big things he has done. To hear him talk you would think that his ranch was the only ranch that was worth anything. He told his visitors to-day that his place would pay the interest on one hundred thousand dollars. You know, boys, it wouldn't sell for twelve thousand.'

"Parsons said: 'The