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new b mCMreni nktmlallure3Swery ■MM ti finfM Mtor minalhatn alib.ie;ht-haslis—kdeHr.ngtedF.edCBS[idite188®»O-be» •Hark Twain has started oa a journey round tbe world in theBuffalo Express.That is, Prof. J. B. Ford does the actual traveling. and writes letters, while Twain improves upon them, and publishes them in the Buffalo Express.Twain says:“I stay at homo and stand the fetigue, and the Professor travels and stands the expense. While my Double is roaming about the Great Plains, and Nevada and California, my half of the letters will be at a disadvantage, because 1 shall be hampered by an intimate personal knowledge of those localities ; but when he gets into Japan, and China and India, I oan soar with agorgeous freedom because I don’t know anything about these lands.” The Professor has got to Salt Lake, but Twain did n’t receive any letters from him, so he got impatientand began the correspondence himself. His first letter is about Mono Lake, California. We give a few paragraphs:The lake is two hundred feet deep, and its sluggish waters are so strongwith alkali that if you only dip the most hopelessly soiled garment intothem once or twice, and wring it out,it will be found as clean aa if it had been through your ablest waehermo-man’s hands, while we camped there our laundry work was easy. We tied the week’s washing astern of our boat, and sailed a quarter of a mile, and theUrnallt;1Job was complete, all to wringingheads and latheresp three inches high. This good for bruised places and;ncty18n__________ had a valuable dog. He had raw1 places on him. He had more raw places on him than sound ones. He was the rawest dog I almost ever saw. He jumped overboard one day to get clear of the flies; but it was baa judgment. In his condition it would have been just as comfortable to have jumped into the fire. The alkali water nipped him in all the raw places simultaneously, and he stiuck out for the shore with considerable interest. He yelped and barkedand howled as he went—and by the time he got to tbe shore there was no bark to him, for he had barked the bark all out of his inside, and the alkali water had cleaned the bark all off his outside, and he probably wished he had never embarked in such an enterprise. He ran round and round in a circle, and pawed the earth and clawed the air, and threw double summersets, sometimes backwards and sometimes forwards, in the most frantic and extraordinary manner. He was not a demonstrative dog, as a general thing, but rather of a grave and serious turn of mind, and 1 never saw him take soxopch interest inknyching before. He finally struck out over the mountains, at a gait which we estimated at about 250 miles an hour and he is going yet. This was about fivo years ago. We look for what is left of him along here every day.NATURAL PRODUCTIONS.There are no fish in Mono Lake—no frogs, no snakes, no pollywogs—-nothing, in fact, that goes to make life desirable. Millions of wild ducks and sea gulls swini about the surface, but no living thing exists under the surface, except a white feathery sort of worm, one-half an^ inch long, whichthread frayedout at the sides. If you dip up a gallon of water you will get about fifteen thousand of these. They give to the water a sort of grayish-white appearance. Then there is a fly, which looks something like our house fly. These settle on tie beach to eat the worms that wash ashore—and any .time you can sj there a belt of flies an iuch deep and six feet wide, and this belt extends clear around the lake—a belt of flies one hundred miles long.If you throw a etone among them, they swarm up so thick that they look dense, like a cloud. You can hold them under water as long as you please —they don’t mind it—they are onlyproud of it. When yon let them go, they pop up to tbe surface as dry as a patent office report, and walk off as un-y os it tnev had been ,11ted especially with a view to affording instructive enteitainuient to man in tb at particular way. Providence leavesthingsbavo their uses and their part anl propr. Thlt;t*r place in Nature’s economy, xue ducks and gulls eat tbe ^ flies—the flies i at the worms—the Indians eat the flies —the wild cats cat the Indians—thewhite folks eat the.wild cats when the crops fail—and thus all things are lovely.M GULL STORY.boa gull’s eggs being entirely nseles* to anybody unless they bo cooked. Nature has provided an unfailing spring of boiling water on the largest island,and you can put your eggs in there, and in four minutes you can boil them as hard as anv statement I have madeduring the past fifteen years. ^ Within net of the boiling anting. is aten feet w . w.spring of pure cold water, sweet and wholesome. Bo, in that Island you can get your board and washing freeof charge—and if nature had gone further and furnished a mds Americancrusty and disobliging, and didn’t know anythingor the railroadtime tablegoates—or—anything—and was proud of it—I would not wish for a more desirable boarding house.H. a.*8 OPINION OF A JOXft.A white man cannot drink the water of Mono Lake, for it is nearly pure lye.It is said that the Indians in the vicinity drink it sometimes, though. It is not improbable, tor they are amongI ever saw. [Thereofial charge for thisjoke, except to parties requiring anexplanation of it Thia jeke haa receiv-ed high* oeauuendxtkm fromi ablestthe airiest men of the age. Horace Greely remarked to a friend of mine that if he werO ever to make a joke like that, he would not desire to live any longer.]THE CLIMATE.There are only two seasons in tbe region round about Mono Lake—and these are, the breaking up Gf the winter and the beginning of the next. More than onoe I have seen a perfectly blistering morning open up with the thermometer at ninety degrees in right o'clock, aadrseem tbe snow fell fourteen inches deep and that same identical thermometer go down to forty-fourdegrees under shriter befoavfi o’clock atnight. Under favorable circa m-anoes it i iowa *i leeet onoe in every agio month la the year, hi tbe lit m% of . Mono. So uncertain ie the6mm H .Mr. fkU.eUA0i li(Mk te l*
Newspaper Details
Fort Wayne Daily Democrat
Fort Wayne, Indiana, US
Sat, Oct 23, 1869
Page 1
Full Page
Clipped by
Dean T.
USA 30 Nov 2022
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