The Arkansaw traveler., 1885-03-21
A woMANLEss WONDERLAND.
lcoi. P. Donan, in New York Sum-

older he grows the crankier he gets. He is bigger iool-maker to day than he was four thousand years ago, when he induced Colonel Samson, the great orig inal lion-tail-twister and congressional jawbone-swinger to lay his wool and his glory in the lap of half negro, Delilah. He is more resistiesS moral-tangler and onmon-sense-smasher in this tooth year of Yankee Doodle than when he made the psalmist David Mormon and ah assassin. He is more egregious ninny-breeder now than when he led all Homer's heroes on that wild Grecian bender after the Sarah Bernhardt of the | Trojan era. He is a more ineffable idiot manufacturer this moment than when, twenty centuries agone, he wheedled Marc Antony-the ancestor of Susan B., who spells it with an "h"-into casting aside the scepter of the word for a happy patted Egyptian mulattress. He is a more unconscionable heathen, amid all our nineteenth century blaze of gospel light and liberty, than when he and his scant.shirted mamma, Mrs. Venus, led the pagan orgies of Athenian damsels be- meath the shade of the ancient olive groves. He is creation's marplot, dig. nity's dethroner, reasons upsetter and scoffer.
 Fang of ofhydrophobic cur never punched as many madcap fancies into its victims body as the slightest graze of one of his tiny molasses-candy shafts. Aged sena- tors, slightly stricken, oil their rusty joints and caper around infantile treasury clerkesses, like hand organ monkeys with ringworms on their Darwinian continua- tions. Old women, toothless and shriv- eled, touched by the pestiferous little archer who turks in rosebuds and cab bage-heads, plaster their graveyard coun- tenances with enam els and paints enough to gorge camp of Kickapoo squaws, swing gawds and gewgaws to every avail able protuberance, pile on sweet. sixteen toggery, and smirk and giggle in style dinary lunatics to suicide. Seventy-year- old christiancys go spooneying after six teen-yearling girl clerks. Antiquated Major General Harneys, after escaping cannon, musketry, bombs, and scalping knives for century or more, tumble be- fore the smiles and wiles of buxom, pet ticoated private secretaries; queenly Widow Hickses hirt with octogenarian O'Conors, and eiope with antediluvian Tom Lords; and she Methuselahs, like Burdett- Coutts, surrender $500 900 year for the pleasure of calling lackadaisical | lily. boy Bartlett "hubby.o
 The bigger the folly the surer the stroke. No man ever was truly in love who did not make a joyous ass of him. self, and the huger the ears the purer the | flame. No woman ever loved who was not prepared to discount a whole as- silly-um of man-iacs at a moments mo- tice. No freak is too wild, no vagary too monstrous. Eagles mate with moles, and swans with hedgehogs. Tom Thumbs pipe for she Goliaths; sons of Anak wed human hummingbirds; mighty-brained heroes and statesmen rave over inane little butterflies, puny wax dolls and taf1y-faced pigmies; kings bow down to ballet dancers, and queens take refuge in the arms of cooks and coachmen and in all lands and climes, in every condition and state, the Cupid-wounded gosling and goslingess have hard road to travel to paradise of squash-an imaginary elysium, who;e roses are too often rue.
 All masculinity is doomed, sooner or later, to be smitten, punctured, har- pooned, and sheltered beneath the mantle or wings-whichever he wears-ot swift coming Saint Valentine. wish to tell all womankind that nowhere else on earth is that smiting, puncturing and harpoon- ing so easily done nowhere else beneath the sapphirean dome of heaven does Cupid, the Lilliputian gizz ard-piercer, come so near having, like death, all sea- sons for his own nowhere else in all the grand rounds of the sun and moon and peeping stars are the victims so plentiful and so readily catchable, crazable and smashable as in the vast imperial regions of the new northwest, the womanless wonderland of the world.
 Girls of America, look at Dakota, with four and half men and boys to every woman and grill Thousands of young and enterprising men, bonanza farmers and miners, raisers of gold and golden grain, bankers, merchants, town-site pro- prietors and boomers, mining engineers and experts, lawyers, doctors, ranchmen, army officers and millionaire editors, coming congressman, governors, sena- tors, and constables of the proud, soon- to-be northwestern giantess of the union sisterhood, all dying to be struck with l tCWSACo SAoiess tCu4StiuS StCu luc tIllSSIy of it delicious. Thousands on thousands of young men of noble heart and brain and brawn, too brave and tend,r and true to be wasted, all signing and longing to be heart-spitted, gigged like senti- mental founders-and not one marriage able girl to every halfhundred of them I Nearly every town in this greatest and grandest of the territories is in the same deplorable fix, counting its girls over every night as carefully as old-time ladies do their chickens or spoons, and never able, by any arithmetic, to scare up more than one to every fifty fellows. The whole great American northwest groans under the woes of similar destitution. Think of single missionary in Manitoba, two or three years ago, with eight hundred bachelors under his charge, and not one weddable girl or gushing widowl
 Girls of the woman crowded, old-maid- accumulating older states, here is the