An Interesting Diary—Corn and Small Fruits Suffer—A Fourth of July Dinner—A Good Ice Cream Country—The Diary Abruptly Ends.
A reporter sent out to find the North Pole some years ago, has just been heard from. An exploring party recently found portions of his remains in latitude 4-11-14, longitude sou'west by sou' from the pole, and near the remains the following fragment of a diary: July 1, 1884.—Have just been out searching for a sunstroke and signs of a thaw. Saw nothing but ice floe and snow as far as the eye could reach. Think we will have snow this evening unless the wind changes.
July 2.—Spent the forenoon exploring to the northwest for right of way for a new equatorial and North Pole railroad that I think would be of immense value to commerce. The grade is easy and the expense would be slight. Ate my last dog to-day. Had intended him for the 4th, but got too hungry, and ate him raw with vinegar. I wish I was at home eating pie.
July 3.—We had quite a frost last night, and it looks this morning as though the corn and small fruits must have suffered. It is now two weeks since the last of the crew died and left me alone. Ate the leather ends of my suspenders to-day for dinner. I did not need the suspenders, anyway, for by tightening up my pants I find they will stay on all right, and I don't look for any ladies to call, so that even if my pants came off by some oversight or other, nobody would be shocked.
July 4.—Saved up some tar roofing and a bottle of mucilage for my Fourth of July dinner, and gorged myself to day. The exercises were very poorly attended and the celebration rather a failure. It is clouding up in the west, and I'm afraid we're going to have snow. Seems to me we're having an all-fired late spring here this year.
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July 5.—Didn't drink a drop yesterday. It was the quietest Fourth I ever put in. I never felt so little remorse over the way I celebrated as I do to-day. I didn't do a thing yesterday that I was ashamed of except to eat the remainder of a box of shoe blacking for supper. To-day I ate my last boot-heel, stewed. Looks as though we might have a hard winter.
July 6.—Feel a little apprehension about something to eat. My credit is all right here, but there is no competition, and prices are therefore very high. Ice, however, is still firm. This would be a good ice-cream country if there were any demand, but the country is so sparsely settled that a man feels as lonesome here as a greenbacker at a presidential election. Ate a pound of cotton waste soaked in machine oil, to-day. There is nothing left for to-morrow but ice-water and an old pocket-book for dinner. Looks as though we might have snow.
July 7.—This is a good, cool place to spend the summer if provisions were more plenty. I am wearing a seal-skin undershirt, with three woolen overshirts and two bear-skin vests, to-day, and when the dew begins to fall I have to put on my buffalo ulster to keep off the night air. I wish I was home. It seems pretty lonesome here since the other boys died. I do not know what I will get for dinner to-morrow, unless the neighbors bring in something. A big bear is coming down the hatchway as I write. I wish I could eat him. It would be the first square meal for two months. It is, however, a little mixed whether I will eat him or he eat me. It will be a cold day for me if he——
Here the diary breaks off abruptly, and from the chewed-up appearance of the book, we are led to entertain a horrible fear as to his safety.
A HAT DEPOSIT IN THE BLACK HILLS.
An old hunter was out among the Black Hills, east of town, last summer, hunting for cotton-tails and sage hens, and he ran across a little gulch where the abrupt rocks closed together and formed a little atmospheric eddy, so to speak. There in that lonely reservoir he found what he at first considered a petrified hat store. It was a genuine deposit of escaped straw hats and plug hats that the frolicsome zephyrs had caught up and carried for ten miles, until this natural hat-rack had secured them. Of course there were other articles of apparel, and some debilitated umbrellas, but the deposit seemed to assay mostly hats.
