Sometimes I wish that Wyoming had more vegetation and less catarrh, more bloom and summer and fragrance and less Christmas and New Year's through the summer.

I like the clear, bracing air of 7,500 feet above the civilized world, but I get weary of putting on and taking off my buffalo overcoat for meals all through dog days. I yearn for a land where a man can take off his ulster and overshoes while he delivers a Fourth of July oration, without flying into the face of Providence and dying of pneumonia.

Perhaps I am unreasonable, but I can't help it. I have my own peculiar notions, and I am not to blame for them.

As I write these lines I look out across the wide sweep of brownish gray plains dotted here and there with ranches and defunct buffalo craniums, and I see shutting down over the sides of the abrupt mountains, and meeting the foothills, a white mist which melts into the gray sky. It is a snow storm in the mountains.

I saw this with wonder and admiration for the first two or three million times. When it became a matter of daily occurrence as a wonder or curiosity, it was below mediocrity. Last July a snow storm gathered one afternoon and fell among the foothills and whitened the whole line to within four or five miles of town, and it certainly was a peculiar freak of nature, but it convinced me that whatever enterprises I might launch into here I would not try to raise oranges and figs until the isothermal line should meet with a change of heart.

I have just been reading Colonel Downey's poem. It is very good what there is of it, but somehow we lay aside the Congressional Record wishing that there had been more of it.

Just as we get interested and carried away with it, having read the first five or six thousand words, it comes to an abrupt termination.

I have often wished that I could write poetry. It would do me a heap of good. I would like to write a little book of poems with a blue cover and beveled edges and an index to it. It would tickle me pretty near to death.

But I can't seem to do it. When I write a poem and devote a good deal of study and thought to it, and get it to suit me, the great seething mass of humanity, regardless of my feelings, get down on the grass and yell and hoot and kick up the green sward, and whoop at the idea of calling that poetry. It hurts me and grieves me, and has a tendency to sour my disposition, so that when a really deserving poet comes to the front I haven't the good nature and sweetness of disposition to enter dispassionately upon the subject and say a kind word where I ought to, but I will say of Colonel Downey's poem that it certainly has great depth and width and length, and as you go on, it seems to broaden out and extend farther on and cover more ground and take in more territory and branch out and widen and lay hold of great tracts of thought and open up new fields and fresh pastures and make homestead claims and enter large desert land tracts and prove up under the timber culture act and the bounty land act and throw open the Indian reservation to settlement.

The matter of decorating the Capitol with sacred subjects is one which would receive the hearty approval of all the people of the country, and I often wish that the Colonel had alluded to it in his poem.

I have some curiosity to know what his ideas are on that point.

I, for one, would be glad to see appropriate paintings of scriptural subjects decorating the walls of our national capitol, and have often been on the verge of offering to do it at my own expense.

A cheerful painting to adorn the walls back of the Speaker's desk, would be a study by some great artist, representing Sampson mashing the Philistines with the jawbone of an ass.

It would be historical and also symbolical; but principally symbolical.

Then another painting might be executed representing Balaam's ass delivering a speech on the Indian question. It would take first rate, and when visitors from abroad made a flying trip to Washington during the summer, and missed seeing Wade Hampton, and felt disappointed, they could go and see Balaam's ass, and go home with their curiosity gratified.

I have seen a very spirited painting somewhere; I think it was at the Louvre, or the Vatican, or Fort Collins, by either Michael Angelo, or Raphael, or Eli Perkins, which represented Joseph presenting a portion of his ulster overcoat to Potiphar's wife, and lighting out for the Cairo and Palestine 11 o'clock train, with a great deal of earnestness. This would be a good painting to hang on the walls of the Capitol, dedicated to Ben Hill and some other Congressional soiled doves.

Then there are some simpler subjects which might be worked up and hung in the Congressional nursery to please the children till the session closed for the day, and their miscellaneous dads came to carry them home.

I could think of lots of nice subjects for a painter to paint, or a sculptor to sculp, if I were to give my attention to it# But I haven't the time.