286 Sport and Life. 



to old Fetch-me-down : ' Just you dry up the Columbia lake, and 

 make a big city, with saloons and hurdy-gurdies and variety shows, 

 and a theatre or two, and streets, where the lake is deepest.' 

 ( Well, Bale, you are an old duffer,' says the old man ; ' can't 

 you think of something that's not quite so easy as that something 

 that'll make me think twice before I can do it ! ' And really, there, 

 deep down in the hole where the lake had been, stood a mighty 

 purty city, full of people and streets and gay places, and I could 

 hear the steam whistles all a-tootling in fine shape. What to wish 

 next I no more knew than that son of a gun of a Chinaman yonder ; 

 but sudden like I did remember what I thought would rattle the old 

 cove, so I up and says to him, ' Well, make Grohman stand a free 

 drink.' And, by Jove, that did the trick, for old Nick turned pale- 

 like, and, after some humming and hawing and scratching of his 

 tassel ears, he says, says he : ( By golly, if you haven't gone and 

 done it this time, old chap ! Make Grohman stand a drink ! Why, 

 that's the one thing even old Nick can't do,' and he shook his 

 horns to let you see he meant it ! " 



Needless to say the drinks I had to stand all round to the crowd 

 of laughing men was not the last I heard of old Bale's dream. 

 Months afterwards, while travelling across the Continent, an 

 objectionable Chicago drummer was good enough to read out 

 to me from a New York newspaper an embellished version of 

 what he called one of the best Western stories he had heard for 

 a long time. He little thought that its victim was sitting opposite 

 to him in the Pullman. 



The Boer Van Moerkerke, better known by his nickname: the 

 Major, was great on trades, i.e., swapping. One day he came to 

 me, requesting me in his quaint Dutch-English to draw up a bill of 

 sale J.P.'s are supposed to be able to do and to know everything 

 in connection with the law by which he conveyed a mining claim 

 he had recently discovered to a French half-breed in consideration 

 of the following articles : a pair of gum-boots, a Colt frontier 

 pistol, the third of an alluvial gold claim, a shotgun, and a saddle. 

 To the latter there seemed to hang a tale, for the vendor in a 



