  Recently I have taken a little recreation when I felt despondent, by witnessing the difficult and dangerous feat of shoeing a bronco. Whenever I get low spirited and feel that a critical public don't appreciate my wonderful genius as a spring poet, I go around to Brown & Poole's blacksmith shop on A street, and watch them shoe a vicious bronco. I always go back to the office cheered and soothed, and better prepared to fight the battle of life. They have a new rig now for this purpose. It consists of two broad sinches, which together cover the thorax and abdomen of the bronco, to the ends of which—the sinches, I mean—are attached ropes, four in number, which each pass over a pulley above the animal, and then are wrapped about a windlass. The bronco is led to the proper position, like a young man who is going to have a photograph taken, the sinches slipped under his body and attached to the ropes. Then the man at the wheel makes two or three turns in rapid succession. The bronco is seen to hump himself, like the boss camel of the grand aggregation of living wonders. He grunts a good deal and switches his tail, while the ropes continue to work in the pulleys and the man at the capstan spits on his hands and rolls up on the wheel. After a while the bronco hangs from the ceiling like a discouraged dish rag, and after trying for two or three hundred times unsuccessfully to kick a hole in the starry firmament, he yields and hangs at half mast while the blacksmith shoes him. Yesterday I felt as though I must see something cheerful, and so I went over to watch a bronco getting his shoes on for the round-up. I was fortunate. They led up a quiet, gentlemanly appearing plug with all the weary, despondent air of a disappointed bronco who has had aspirations for being a circus horse, and has "got left." When they put the sinches around him he sighed as though his heart would break, and his great, soulful eyes were wet with tears. One man said it was a shame to put a gentle pony into a sling like that in order to shoe him, and the general feeling seemed to be that a great wrong was being perpetrated. Gradually the ropes tightened on him and his abdomen began to disappear. He rose till he looked like a dead dog that had been fished out of the river with a grappling iron. Then he gave a grunt that shook the walls of the firmament, and he reached out about five yards till his hind feet felt of a Greaser's eye, and with an athletic movement he jumped through the sling and lit on the blacksmith's forge with his head about three feet up the chimney. He proceeded then to do some extra ground and lofty tumbling and kicking. A large anvil was held up for him to kick till he tired himself out, and then the blacksmith put a fire and burglar proof safe over his head and shod him. The bronco is full of spirit, and, although docile under ordinary circumstances, he will at times get enthusiastic and do things which he afterwards, in his sober moments, bitterly regrets. Some broncos have formed the habit of bucking. They do not all buck. Only those that are alive do so. When they are dead they are more subdued and gentle. A bronco often becomes so attached to his master that he will lay down his life if necessary. His master's life, I mean. When a bronco comes up to me and lays his head over my shoulder, and asks me to scratch his chilblain for him, I always excuse myself on the ground that I have a family dependent on me, and furthermore, that I am a United States Commissioner, and to a certain extent the government hinges on me. Think what a ghastly hole there would be in the official staff of the republic if I were launched into eternity now, when good men are so scarce. Some days I worry a good deal over this question. Suppose that some unprincipled political enemy who wanted to be United States Commissioner or Notary Public in my place should assassinate me!!! Lots of people never see this. They sec how smoothly the machinery of government moves along, and they do not dream of possible harm. They do not know how quick she might slip a cog, or the eccentric get jammed through the indicator, if, some evening when I am at the opera house, or the minstrel show, the assassin should steal up on me, and shoot a large, irregular aperture into my cerebellum. This may not happen, of course; but I suggest it, so that the public will, as it were, throw its protecting arms about me, and not neglect me while I am alive.
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