Recent occurrences here have seemed to absolutely demand that something be said relative to newspaper-men.

During my residence here I have been brought face to face with more fraud journalists than ever before, and I am forced to lift up my voice against it. I have met the ordinary-tramp who is pleased and happy if he be allowed to eat cold-grub and sleep beneath the twinkling stars, but the newspaper-tramp is meaner, more self assumed and has brighter prospects for perdition than all the rest. He stands out ahead of the rank and file of tramps as a kind of Major-General tramp, fearless and self reliant.

He feels the nobility of the profession of journalism, and indeed it is a calling of which its followers may well be proud, but the snide representative of the press is too proud. He puts on too many frills.

Perhaps I am too easily picked up in this manner, but I cannot help sympathizing with deserving newspaper men who lack many of the comforts of life. I have been there. I know what it is to battle with a cold world and wrestle with hunger. But now in the midst of prosperity, my heart goes out for these vagrants in such a way that just as I begin to get affluent, I find some subject for my charity, and I have to begin over again.

On Monday last a young man with a hopeful light in his eye, alighted from the eastern-bound train, and going into the Thornburg House, registered his name, at least we will play that it was his name, for no one else has since called in to claim it.

We will call him Brown as a matter of convenience. His front name, as I afterward learned, was Ward. I might say that, in putting this report together, another Ward has been heard from, but I leave that for the docile reader to do as he or she may see fit.

Mr. Brown then proceeded to get acquainted with the people of Laramie and be sociable. He was not so reticent as some prominent newspaper men are, but seemed to be the rollicking, jovial kind. He said that he was the travelling correspondent of the Salt Lake Tribune and also represented the Louisville Courier-Journal.

I wondered at the time what in the name of all that was handsome, the Courier-Journal wanted to pay a man and send him to the front for, with Laramie City as his objective point. Bye-and-bye he crossed my path and made himself known. Said he knew me by reputation, and then I began to get alarmed. I was afraid he was a detective. But he wasn't. I drew him out on the subject of Harry Watterson. He knew blank. Knew him well. Had slept with him. He and Hank had been drunk together several times.

Then I felt proud. He was an intimate friend of a great man, and sitting there talking with an unsophisticated youth like me just as naturally as life. It sounds like a book. I asked him up to my office, and made him sit in my best chair—the one with the four good legs—while I took the foundered one. I told him to make himself perfectly free with the luxuriant furniture of the office, and invited him to spit on the floor whenever it came handy. I told him that I knew great men didn't want to feel hampered while chewing tobacco, and that I wanted my guests to feel at ease.

He then took his knife, cut off a piece of tobacco, about the size of a paper weight, threw it back till it struck the gable-end of his mouth with a hollow thud, and proceeded to unroll the most gorgeous panorama of falsehoods that I ever listened to. Casually, while putting the fresco work on my floor, he took out a letter from Watterson, and showed it to me. Watterson writes about the same kind of a copper-plate hand that I do.

I wanted to take the letter and make a plaster cast of it, but Mr. Brown said Hank wouldn't like it. The letter went on in a free and easy way to joke Brown about looking too often on the maddening bowl, and then asked him to be a correspondent for the C. J.

The next day I came down town thinking about how easy it was for any one, by a straightforward, honest course, to rise in the world, and get acquainted with prominent men. Bye and bye I met the Sheriff. He asked me if I didn't want to go up to the jail and take a last look at my journalistic friend. I went up. Brown lay there in an easy position on an old blanket, in one of the cells.

The surroundings seemed to be in perfect harmony with the general appearance of Mr. Brown. He had taken off the large satin arrangement which served partly as a necktie, and partly to throw the public off its guard in relation to his shirt. The shirt was there, slightly disfigured, but still in the ring. It was the same shirt that he had started out in life with. He had outgrown it, and it looked feeble, but it was evidently determined to stay by Mr. Brown.

I looked at him and then broke into tears. Large $2.00 sobs convulsed my frame. I told him that he had basely imposed upon me, and led me to believe that he was a Republican, and now he had removed the mask as it were, and I could see that he was a Democrat. With these stone walls and iron grates, and that soiled shirt, I could no longer doubt.

I left him, resolving that hereafter I would not be betrayed by appearances. He will drift away into the mighty, surging mass of humanity, and we shall forget it. Perhaps, when the Governor of Maine holds a mass meeting and re-union at Augusta, he will be there. But he will drop out of my horizon like the memory of a red-headed girl, and I shall go on my way until some other newspaper man with a letter from Whitelaw Reid, or George Washington, or Noah, or some other prominent man, comes along, and then I shall, no doubt, open up to his view the same untold wealth of confidence and generous trust.

Those who are looking anxiously every mail for a copy of the Louisville Courier-Journal or the Salt Lake Tribune, containing a long letter about their town, will be disappointed. They will never come. Through the long visita of years and down through the mellow softened atmosphere of the Sweet Bye and Bye I hear the low, sad refrain, and it is refraining, "Never More." Instead of the merry prattle of Mr. Brown amid the loud echo of his expectorations as they fall with a startling crash upon the marble floor of my office, I only hear the rattle of the cast iron "come-alongs" and the tearful "Never More."