HE wish so often expressed by mothers in the West that their daughters should have a "good time," suggests an inquiry as to what precisely is meant by this fond aspiration.

A mother's idea of a "good time" for her daughter usually signifies the sort of time she has failed to have herself. If she has been a hard-working woman, with many children to care for, she will desire that her daughter shall live easy and be blessed, in the way of offspring, with something less than a quiver-full. Where in the past labor has urged her, often beyond her strength, pleasure in the future shall invite her child.

So the mothers of the West, women of the heroic days of pioneering, unconsciously tell the story of their own struggles and deprivations in the ambitions which they indulge for their children.

Along the roads over which her parents journeyed in their white-topped wagon, their tent by night, their tabernacle, their fortress in time of danger, the settler's daughter shall ride in a tailor-made habit, or fare luxuriously in a drawing-room car. Where the mother's steadfast face grew brown with the glare of the alkali plain, the daughter shall glance out carelessly from behind the tapestry blind of her Pullman "section." Where the mother's hands washed and cooked and mended, and dressed wounds, and fanned the coals of the camp-fire, the daughter's shall trifle with books and music, shall be soft and " manicured" and daintily gloved.

It is one of the curious sights in the shops of a little town of frame houses-chiefly of one story, where the work of the house is not unfrequently done by the house-mother, not from poverty, but from the want in a new community of a servant class- to behold about Christmas time the display of sumptuous toilet articles implying hours spent upon the care of the feminine person, especially the feminine hands. This may be one of the indications of the sort of good time that is preparing for the daughters of the town. There are other and more hopeful suggestions, but none that seriously counteract the plainly projected revolt, on the part of the mothers, against a future of physical effort for their girls.

There are girls and girls in the West, of all VOL. XXXVIII.— 115.

degrees and styles of prettiness; but here, as elsewhere, and in all her glory, is seen the preeminently pretty girl-who by that patent exists, to herself, to her world, and in the imagination of her parents. The career of this young lady in her native environment is something amazing to persons of a sober imagination as to what should constitute a girl's "good time." The risks that she takes, no less than her extraordinary escapes from the usual consequences, are enough to make one's timehonored principles reel on the judgment seat of propriety.

It is true she does not always escape; but she escapes so often that it is quite impossible to draw any wholesome deductions from her. The only thing that can be done with her is to disapprove of her (with the consciousness that she will not mind in the least) and forgive her, because she knows not what she does. Why should she not take the good time for which, and for little else, she has been trained the life of pleasure for which some one else pays!

In the novels she goes abroad and marries an English duke; in real life not quite so often; but she is an element of confusion, morally, in all one's prophecies with regard to her. She may have talent and make an actress or a singer, if she has any capacity for work; or she may marry the man she loves and become an exemplary wife. That which in her history appeals most deeply to one's imagination is the contrast between her fortunes and those of her mother.

If Creusa had survived the fall of Troy to accompany Æneas on his wanderings, with a brood of fast-growing boys and girls, whose travel-worn garments she would have been mending while her hero entertained Dido with the tale of his misfortunes, it is not unlikely that that much-tried woman would have had her ideas as to those qualities in her sex that make for a "good time," and those which mostly go to supply a good time for others. And we may be sure that in planning the futures of the Misses Æneas she would not have chosen for them the virtues that go unrewarded; rather shall they sit, white-handed and royally clad, and turn a smiling face upon some eloquent adventurer-who shall not be, in all respects, a copy of father Æneas.

Whoever has lived in the West must have

observed that here it is the unexpected that always happens; therefore it will be a mistake to take the pretty girl too seriously, or to regard her as a fatal sign of the tendency of the life she is so fitted to enjoy. She is merely a phase, an entertaining if not an instructive one, for which her parents' hard lives and changes of fortune are mainly responsible. Her children will reverse the tendency, or carry it to the point of fracture, where nature steps in, in her significant way, and rubs out the false sum.

But as often as not nature permits the whole illogical proceeding to go on, and nothing happens of all that we have prophesied. We see that the fountain does rise higher than its source, that grapes do grow upon thorns and figs upon thistles, on some theory of cause and effect unknown to social dynamics.

The pretty girl from the East is hardly enough of a "rusher" to please the young Western masculine taste; but there will not be wanting pilgrims to her shrine. Her Eastern hostess will be proud of the chance to demonstrate that she is n't at all the same sort of pretty girl as her sister of the West,-it is the shades of difference that are vital,- and she will receive an almost pathetic welcome at the hands of her young countrymen, stranded upon cattle-ranches, or in railroad or mining camps, or engaged in hardy attempts of one sort or another wherein there is room for feminine sympathy.

Whether she takes her pleasure actively, in the saddle or in the canoe, or sits out the red summer twilights on the ranch piazza, or tunes her guitar to the ear of a single listener who has ridden over miles of desert plain for the privilege, she will be conscious that she supplies a motive, a new meaning to the life around her.

All this is very dangerous. She is in a world of illusions capable of turning into ordeals for those who put them to the proof-ordeals for which there has been no preparation in the life of the pretty girl. Even the ordeal of taste is not to be despised-taste, which en

virons and consoles and unites and stimulates women in the East, and which disunites and tortures and sets them at defiance, one with another, in the West.

The life of the men may be large and dramatic, even in failure; but the life of women, here, as everywhere, is made up of very small matters-a badly cooked dinner, a horrible wall-paper, a wind that tears the nerves, a child with something the matter with it which the doctor" does n't understand," an acquaintance that is just near enough not to be a friend: it is the little shocks for which one is never prepared, the little disappointments and insecurities and failures and postponements, the want of completeness and perfection in anything, that harrows a woman's soul and makes her forget, too often, that she has a soul.

So let our pretty Eastern girl remember, before she pledges herself irrevocably to follow the fortunes of some charming young man she has had a "good time" with on the frontier, that - all good times and masculine assurances to the contrary notwithstanding the frontier is not yet ready for her kind of pretty girl. There is more than one generation between her and the mother of a new community-unless she be minded to offer herself up on the altar of social enlightenment, or for the particular benefit of her particular young man. This is a fate which will always have a baleful fascination for the young woman who is capable of arguing that, if the frontier be not ready for her, the young man is.

The pity of it is that these young gentlemen. always will pick out the pretty girl, when a less expensive choice would be so much more serviceable and fit the conditions of their lives so much better. But they are all potential millionaires, these energetic dreamers. They do not pinch themselves in their prospective arrangements, including the prospective wife. Between them both, the girl who expects to have a good time, and the young man who is confident that he can give it to her, there will probably be a good deal to learn.

HE eccentric old telegraph editor, in his little sleeping-den in the great publication building of the "Democratic Banner," was writing a compendium of Kant's philosophy, and kept a colony of white mice in a squirrel-cage, feeding them upon soda-crackers and milk. He was a patient, uncomplaining, and gentle slave, who toiled the ten hours of night without a word unless it were asked, and then it was freely, even generously, given. Somehow, with the knowledge that he knew enough to make a compendium of Kant, there came to the young men of the force the conviction that he knew everything else. And thus, in addition to his labors at the telegraph desk, he discharged the important function of encyclopedia-in-chief to the "Banner" staff.

Did anybody want to know the meaning of a word? Kant's disciple nimbly followed it to its Latin, Greek, or even Phenician root. Those curious expeditions into the infinitude of astronomic lore which the young reporter, in happy and unsuspecting ignorance, is so fond of making when assigned to "a paragraph on the partial eclipse of the moon to-night," were always more or less piloted by the friendly hand of the patient old philosopher, who turned from his work only to lighten that of somebody else. Touching all the astounding and deeply hidden mysteries of earth, air, science, philosophy, and religion that placid mind was a never-failing fount of information.

These things, it is true, were as airy nothings to the stern and immutable mission of the daily newspaper; they merely served to give pedants on the staff an opportunity to "kill space "on the days when storms and electrical phenomena reduced the capacity of the telegraph wires to convey sufficient "copy." But the young men felt a veneration for that mind so deeply stored with knowledge they could not understand, and a kindly pity that it stopped short of the important names upon the 2.30 class of trotters. Alas! it was a blank upon those stirring and absorbing subjects that engage the best intellect of the city editor's practical department. When he passed away it was perhaps in the fullness of a ripe, dry, and musty scholarship, but there was not a regular," a "special," an "extra," or a "loose" man on the staff who did not recognize with

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something of kindly compassion that that gentle spirit had gone to its eternal rest without knowing-or even caring to know, so sublime is the indifference of simple scholarship - the order of finish of the League base-ball clubs for the previous season, and all regardless of the fame of that single batsman who could face Pitchington, the curve terror, with any hope of a safe hit.

It is not pleasant to record these blots upon an otherwise fair page of life. It is, indeed, somewhat of gratuitous cruelty to set them down, for the telegraph editor had nothing whatever to do with Robert Longworth or "The Longworth Mystery." It may be excused, then, as a touch of that local color which accompanies the action of life as the painted scene gives emphasis to the actor's spoutings. It is even true that if the stupendously informed but sadly ignorant delver into Kant's philosophy had never lived, Longworth's career would have been in no wise changed. They occupied adjoining apartments in the building for a year, these two singular and interesting men, without knowing each other, although each knew the firmament and the stars and planets therein as familiarly as Mr. Forrest, the dramatic critic, knew the stars of his peculiar firmament, or Mr. Burke, the sporting editor, knew the planets that revolved around the twenty-four-foot ring or the mile circle at the racing-park.

These two men, though they resembled each other in the immensity of their knowledge and in the open-handed way in which it was dispensed, were entirely dissimilar. They supplemented, and, as it were, completed each other as practical factors of that staff of talented and industrious journalists. What the patient telegraph editor knew of things so hoary and impracticable as to pass all modern understanding in journalism, Longworth knew of that which was the prime meat, the juice, the essence, the all, of the local newspapers. His wonderful mind reached back and enveloped in the symmetry of minutest detail the prizefights of the last century; the winners of the Derby when that famous stake was in puling infancy in England; the names and records of the champion high, long, and clear jumpers; the" averages" of the giants of the great baseball profession; and the gossip, private but reliable, of those smirched in the extension of the

franchise of the Paradise and Paddy's Run Street Railway. Upon the personalities of politics, the drift of issues, and the progress of legislation his mind was a fruitful expanse of information.

Looking back now it is comparatively easy to sum up and credit his great talents and his great services, but these were evolved slowly into recognition. The writer hereof, an entire stranger to the city, had scarcely settled himself in the august chair of the city editorship when Longworth made the almost unnoticed entry through which his genius was destined to filter, enlarging as it came, until it had flooded the local department of the "Democratic Banner" with shame, mortification, and base hatred.

The negligent copy-reader and the unspeakable proof-reader had both passed, in the course of an elaborate description of the new gymnasium, the absurd statement that Sayres had once fought the Tipton Slasher to his knees in the first round. Next morning there lay on the city editor's desk this note:

TO THE EDITOR OF THE "DEMOCRATIC BANNER."

In the otherwise admirable report of the opening of the new gymnasium, in your valuable paper of this morning, your reporter falls into a common but inexcusable error regarding the mill between Sayres and The Slasher, fought at Tunbridge Wells, May 23, 1857. Sayres did not fight The Slasher to his knees during the first or any subsequent round of that remarkable contest. The misstatement originated in the Tunbridge Wells "Gazette's" report of the 24th of May, 1857, and was promptly corrected in "Bell's Life" of the succeeding week. Crapster's "Life of Sayres" expressly says that The Slasher slipped upon a pebble which had been overlooked in preparing the ring, and fell to one knee -not his knees-by accident. There is no stronger admirer of Sayres than his biographer, Crapster, and if any well-informed person felt any necessity

to claim even a doubt of the cause of The Slasher's

fall, that doubt would have been perpetuated in Sayres's "Life." But Crapster distinctly disavows any claim for his hero on that point.

ROBERT LONGWORTH.

This communication, written in a feeble and straggling hand, was published. It gave the copy-reader pain, it rebuked the unspeakable proof-reader, and it covered with the first heavy mantle of humiliation the sporting editor himself. That oracular member of the staff had never before experienced the salutary discovery of an equal, much less a superior, mind in the domain of his own peculiar information. Who "Robert Longworth" was the sporting editor did not know; no more did the city editor; but there was the note itself, proof of the presumption that its writer had read the classic of fistiana, with which the sporting editor had no acquaintance. And, knowing

nothing about it at all, the city editor, with that impartial dignity and quick decision which imparts so much strength to his position and elevates him in the respect of the staff, pronounced Longworth's correction to be welltimed, accurate, and due to the truth of history. This decision at once gave the city editor rank in the estimation of the force, which as a stranger he much needed, and he was henceforth looked upon as a remarkably well-informed and cultured journalist. Soon, when he passed opinions upon sporting topics, they were occasionally echoed in the sporting column in the easily detected phraseology of the sporting editor.

But it must be said of Mr. Burke that his first impulse, smarting under the sting of so bold a rebuke, was bitterness to Longworth.

"As if it made a cussed bit of difference," he explained with picturesque animation to Mr. Forrest, the dramatic critic, that night, seated at their regular midnight lunch over Drinkworth's beer and oysters. "The point of my reference was to illustrate the perfection to which the cultivation of the dukes might be carried not to insist merely, begad, that Sayres had knocked The Slasher down in the

first There's lots of duffers that have go. knocked handy men to their knees in the first round, and that sustains the point. But I happened to hit on Sayres just by accident, because it was a great name, I suppose, and this Longworth wants to come along and knock the whole point out. What difference does it make, anyhow, over a fight fought in '57 ?"

And the dramatic critic, an unapproachable and gloomy person, who unbent to nobody upon earth save Mr. Burke,- and whose reasons for unbending in that direction were basely attributed to certain selfish desires to obtain passes to all slugging-matches, cockwhich passes were the sole perquisites and enmains, race-meetings, and base-ball games, tirely within the influence of the sporting editor to obtain, agreed mutely, but with a bored air, to his friend's defense.

It was soon apparent, however, that Longworth had no petty desire personally to annoy or humiliate the sporting editor. If he had, his malevolence must certainly have extended to other and finally to all the members of the staff; for within a week the note that had been forgotten was followed by another in the same quavering, straggling hand, and which, to the unconcealed delight of the force in whole, was directed to uncovering the fallibility of the religious department. It was plain that Longworth could not have any feeling of malignity towards the pale, amiable, and yearning youth whose duty of once a week, on Saturday, throwing the contributed religious

notices into shape had earned for him the title of the religious editor. He was a rustic youth, with remarkable capacity for enjoying all the privileges of journalism and escaping its grinding demands. The religious editor regarded Mr. Burke, the sporting editor, with a veneration born of similar, but as yet unsatisfied, ambition. Nothing more delighted him than the occurrence of what was technically known as a "double sporting event," in which case he left no pleading unattempted to secure the assignment for reporting the lesser, while Mr. Burke himself attended the greater in person and, with patronizing kindness, corrected the "copy" of his youthful and rapidly fledging emulator. It is painful to record that these associations and the peculiar ambition of the religious editor soon brought rumors that he was beginning to be seen about the gamblinghouses. From that to cigarettes and the chewing of tobacco, with not yet entirely concealed repugnance, was a short step, and he began to swear vigorously as he compiled the church notices on Saturday nights. But he retained a boyish geniality and an engaging amiability, and his elasticity of imagination in circulating unimportant facts that he picked up at random diverted and amused all of us. And thus his title of religious editor was fastened upon him, it is only proper to confess, for purely ribald and satirical reasons.

The religious editor, it appears, in editing a paragraph announcing the subject of the Rev. Dr. Calvain's sermon for the next day had incautiously accepted an opening for pedantic display, the bane of young journalists, and upon the result of his attempt (which Burke declared revolutionized at one swoop all preconceived notions of the Mosaic code) Longworth came down in a note that was brief but which weighed like a ton upon the religious editor's self-satisfaction.

This note attracted our attention sharply to Longworth, though nobody had the remotest idea who Longworth was. But the time came when there was no room to doubt that Longworth knew the "Democratic Banner" with a critical intimacy that was wonderful. The office soon learned to fancy Longworth's Eye as being in itself some insatiate monster, roaming up and down the columns of the paper, searching everywhere, penetrating all departments, finding and dragging to light unwary inaccuracies and blunders. Nothing escaped his relentless scrutiny. He challenged alike the book reviewer's reference to the date of the publication of a French work on infidelity and the haughty dramatic critic's smuggled reminiscences of the elder Booth. When a typographical error in the market reports put up the price of eggs seven cents in the dozen

Longworth sent in a communication, full of appalling statistics, to show that it must be a mistake, because in no year since 1817 had eggs ever reached such a figure at that season. He knew the productions of the unsung hen as thoroughly as those of more renowned authors. He sent up, from nobody knew where, in little dirty envelopes, memoranda of all sorts and conditions, setting the court reporter right in regard to the date of certain ordinances and reminding the art critic of facts hitherto unknown to that authority about the origin of pottery in Japan. He fell upon the "Answers to Correspondents," and for weeks the timid bookworm of that department, who stood intrenched behind the awful array of information he had himself heaped up, sat silent, aghast, and stricken with remorse at the ignorance and blunders that had crept into what he had heretofore considered an impregnable wall of passionless and impartial fact.

It was not long until the rumor grew that even the throned omnipotence that fulminated the tariff articles had received a note in which his figures upon the prime cost of pig iron in the southern water-shed were ruthlessly challenged, scattered, and put to flight. Whether this was true will never be demonstrable by actual proof, for no secrets leaked out of the gloomy chamber in which were written articles upon the necessity of a tariff revision, upon a plan that nobody understood, and which could not be explained to anybody. But it was certainly more than a coincidence that about this time the tariff editor's evolvements became tinged with acrid but obscure references to "certain emissaries of the arrogant money classes who, led by gross ignorance and upheld by intolerable effrontery, have questioned our accuracy upon this point." Then followed arrays of figures, with the first cost of raw material multiplied by classifications of multiples and divided by divisors, "selected for reasons explained at length in our articles upon this absorbing subject last year." A few days later the tariff editor fulminated a great broadside of sweeping sarcasm and bitter abuse against the still mysterious "emissary" who, "not content with disputing our facts, actually has the impertinence to deny the correctness of our multiples and divisors."

The young gentlemen who prepared with facile pens the light and airy chronicles of the local page listened to the thunder and roar and watched the flashes of this battle between the giants with openly expressed delight. The denounced "emissary" was never unmasked by name, but continued to stalk purely as an "emissary"; yet we knew, with the accuracy of unerring instinct, that it was Longworth who