Peck's Sunshine. George W. Peck

can be redeemed? I would have an incontrovertible bond, made of Limburger cheese, which is stronger and more durable. When this is done you can tell the rich from the poor man by the smell of his money. Now-a-days many of us do not even get a smell of money, but in the good days which are coming the gentle zephyr will waft to us the able-bodied Limburger, and we shall know that money is plenty.

      The manufacture of cheese is a business that a poor man can engage in as well as a rich man. I say it, without fear of successful contradiction, and say it boldly, that a poor man with, say 200 cows, if he thoroughly understands his business, can market more cheese than a rich man who owns 300 oxen. This is susceptible of demonstration. If my boy showed a desire to become a statesman, I would say to him, “Young man, get married, buy a mooley cow, go to Sheboygan county, and start a cheese factory.”

      Speaking of cows, did it ever occur to you, gentlemen, what a saving it would be to you if you should adopt mooley cows instead of horned cattle? It takes at least three tons of hay and a large quantity of ground feed annually to keep a pair of horns fat, and what earthly use are they? Statistics show that there are annually killed 45,000 grangers by cattle with horns. You pass laws to muzzle dogs, because one in ten thousand goes mad, and yet more people are killed by cattle horns than by dogs. What the country needs is more mooley cows.

      Now that I am on the subject, it may be asked what is the best paying breed for the dairy. My opinion is divided between the south down and the cochin china. Some like one the best and some the other, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death.

      There are many reforms that should be inaugurated in the manufacture of cheese. Why should cheese be made round? I am inclined to the belief that the making of cheese round is a superstition. Who had not rather buy a good square piece of cheese, than a wedge-shape chunk, all rind at one end, and as thin as a Congressman's excuse for voting back pay at the other? Make your cheese square and the consumer will rise up and call you another.

      Another reform that might be inaugurated would be to veneer the cheese with building paper or clapboards, instead of the time-honored piece of towel. I never saw cheese cut that I didn't think that the cloth around it had seen service as a bandage on some other patient. But I may have been wrong. Another thing that does not seem to be right, is to see so many holes in cheese. It seems to me that solid cheese, one made by one of the old masters, with no holes in it—I do not accuse you of cheating, but don't you feel a little ashamed when you see a cheese cut, and the holes are the biggest part of it? The little cells may be handy for the skipper, but the consumer feels the fraud in his innermost soul.

      Among the improvements made in the manufacture of cheese I must not forget that of late years the cheese does not resemble the grindstone as much as it did years ago. The time has been when, if the farmer could not find his grindstone, all he had to do was to mortise a hole in the middle of a cheese, and turn it and grind his scythe. Before the invention of nitro-glycerine, it was a good day's work to hew off cheese enough for a meal. Time has worked wonders in cheese.

COLORED CONCERT TROUPES.

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      Sometimes it seems as though the colored people ought to have a guardian appointed over them. Now, you take a colored concert troupe, and though they may have splendid voices, they do not know enough to take advantage of their opportunities. People go to hear them because they are colored people, and they want to hear old-fashioned negro melodies, and yet these mokes will tackle Italian opera and high toned music that they don't know how to sing.

      They will sing these fancy operas, and people will not pay any attention. Along toward the end of the programme they will sing some old nigger song, and the house fairly goes wild and calls them out half a dozen times. And yet they do not know enough to make up a programme of such music as they can sing, and such as the audience want.

      They get too big, these colored people do, and can't strike their level. People who have heard Kellogg, and Marie Roze, and Gerster, are sick when a black cat with a long red dress comes out and murders the same pieces the prima donnas have sung. We have seen a colored girl attempt a selection from some organ-grinder opera, and she would howl and screech, and catch her breath and come again, and wheel and fire vocal shrapnel, limber up her battery and take a new position, and unlimber and send volleys of soprano grape and cannister into the audience, and then she would catch on to the highest note she could reach and hang to it like a dog to a root, till you would think they would have to throw a pail of water on her to make her let go, and all the time she would be biting and shaking like a terrier with a rat, and finally give one kick at last at her red trail with her hind foot, and back off the stage looking as though she would have to be carried on a dustpan, and the people in the audience would look at each other in pity and never give her a cheer, when, if she had come out and patted her leg, and put one hand up to her ear, and sung, “Ise a Gwine to See Massa Jesus Early in de Mornin',” they would have split the air wide open with cheers, and called her out five times.

      The fact is, they haven't got sense.

      There was a hungry-looking, round-shouldered, sick-looking colored man in that same party, that was on the programme for a violin solo. When he came out the people looked at each other, as much as to say, “Now we will have some fun.” The moke struck an attitude as near Ole Bull as he could with his number eleven feet and his hollow chest, and played some diabolical selection from a foreign cat opera that would have been splendid if Wilhelmjor Ole Bull had played it, but the colored brother couldn't get within a mile of the tune. He rasped his old violin for twenty minutes and tried to look grand, and closed his eyes and seemed to soar away to heaven—and the audience wished to heaven he had—and when he became exhausted and squeezed the last note oat, and the audience saw that he was in a profuse perspiration, they let him go and did not call him back. If he had come out and sat on the back of a chair and sawed off “The Devil's Dream,” or “The Arkansaw Traveler,” that crowd would have cheered him till he thought he was a bigger man than Grant.

      But he didn't have any sense. If some one will send a marked copy of this paper to some of these colored concert troupes, and they will take the hint, and sing nigger songs, they will make a heap of money, where now they have to live on a free lunch route.

COULDN'T GET AWAY FROM HIM.

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      A good many may have wondered why we so suddenly quit speeding our horse on the avenue. For two or three days we couldn't go down the avenue enough, and there is no person but will admit that our old pile driver trotted real spry. We did not get the idea that he was the fastest horse that ever was, but he seemed real soon. It takes a good deal of executive ability for a man who has a third-class horse to keep from going down the road with horses that are too fast. One must be a good judge, and when he finds a horse that he can beat, stick to him.

      We got the thing down pretty fine, but one day a man drove along beside us, going up, who seemed bound to get into conversation. He was a red-faced man, with these side-bar whiskers, evidently a German. He was driving a sorrel horse to a long sled, with a box on behind the seat, a sort of delivery sleigh. He had a barrel in the sleigh, filled with intestines from a slaughter house, two baskets full of the same freight, a cow's head, and two sheep heads. He was evidently owner of a sausage factory somewhere, and as he kept along beside us his company was somewhat annoying. Not that we were proud, but we feared the people on the avenue would think we were a silent partner in a sausage factory, and that we were talking business.

      The man was real entertaining in his conversation, but the load he had was not congenial, and we were glad when the foot of the hill was reached, so we could turn around and go down, and get away from him. We turned and spit on our hands, and begun to pull up on the old horse, and he began to get his legs untangled and to go. We forgot about the sausage butcher, as we went down, the fresh air making every