Secretary Spates, the silver-tongued orator and gilt-edged mouth organ of Wyoming, acting general superintendent and governor extraordinary of Wyoming, expressed a wish the other day for a dog. He had a light yellow cane, and wanted a dog to match. He said that he wanted something to love. If he could wake up in the stillness of the night and hear his faithful dog fighting fleas, and licking his chops, and coughing, he (the secretary) would feel as though he was loved, at least? by one. Some friends thought it would be a pleasant thing to surprise Mr. Spates with a dog. So they procured a duplicate key to his room and organized themselves into a dog vigilance committee. There were several yellow dogs around Cheyenne that were not in use, and their owners consented to part with them and try to control their grief while they worried along from day to day without them. These dogs were collected and placed in the secretary's room.

Throwing a heterogeneous mass of dogs together in that way, and all of them total strangers to each other, in the natural course of things creates something of a disturbance, and that was the result in this case. When the secretary arrived, the dogs were holding a session with closed doors. The presiding officer had lost control, and a surging crowd of yellow dogs had the floor. Only one dog was excepted. He was struggling with all his strength against the most collossal attack of colic that ever convulsed a pale, yellow dog. Just as he would get to feeling kind of comfortable, a spasm would catch him on the starboard quarter and his back would hump itself like a 1,000-legged worm, and with such force as to thump the floor with the stumpy tail of the demoralized dog and jar the bric-a-brac on the brackets and what-nots of the Secretary of Wyoming Territory.

Just then the secretary arrived. He was whistling a trill or two from the "Turkish Patrol," when he got within earshot of the convention. Several people met him and asked him what was going on up in his room. The secretary blushed and said he guessed there was nothing out of character, and wondered if someone was putting up a Conkling story on him, to kill a Spates boom.

When he got to the door and went in, thirty-seven dogs ran between his legs? and went out the door with a good deal of intensity. More of them would have run between the secretary's legs, but they couldn't all make it.

Mr. Spates was mad. He felt hurt and grieved. The dogs had jumped on the bed and torn the pillow shams into minute bandages, and wiped their feet on the coverlid. They had licked the blacking off his boots, and eaten his toilet soap. One of them had tried on the secretary's dressing gown; but it was not large enough, and he had taken it off in a good deal of a hurry.

Long after it was supposed that the last dog had gone out, yellow dogs, of different degrees of yellowishness, and moving in irregular orbits, would be thrown from the secretary's room with great force. Some of them were killed, while others were painfully injured. It is said that there are fewer yellow dogs in Cheyenne now than there used to be, and those that are there are more subdued, and reserved, and taciturn, and skinned on the back, than they used to be; while the secretary has a far-away look in his eye, like a man who has trusted humanity once too often, and been everlastingly and unanimously left.