Bismarck daily tribune. [volume] (Bismarck, Dakota [N.D.]) 1881-1916, 1906-02-15
HE WAS FINED
Reautified His Premises and Received
an Increase in Assessment
His Views.

an Increase in Assessment
His Views.
It was a calm and balmy evening in
May last, says the Sharpshooter in
the MINNEAPOLIS Commercial West;
one of those choice evenings when
Sues tulip border was holding up
500 cups of royal red and gold to the
setting sun; when the bridal wreath
spirea in the shrubery skirting the
cottage made snowy splashes in the
virgin green about it, and a few other
flowers of spring were peeping out
here and there; when the sharpshoot-
er had halted the long and continuous
fusillade of his moving mitraileuse,
and Sue with her trowe1 in hand was
watching those witching tree shadows
that just at this moment stretch long
with the level sunset rays up and
across the smooth shaver green. Just
at this psychological moment in the
haioo| VI IHAo ouI-uoo. SlolJ luSiS
came by on our front walk biped
thing of evil eye. He paused. He
cast, glance down across the velvet
lawn, at the belt of flaming tulips,
then up at the cottage in it's setting
OF shrubery and green sward. "By
Mighty quoth he to himself, Here
is a house that will stand raise
He made a notation and passed on.
He was the assessor
Physicians tell us that the typhoid
microbe, the tuberculosis bacterium
and other low lived heterogeneous
may enter the human interior on a
bright May morning when the birds
are singing and you are kissing your
baby goodby for the day; that the
devilish thing will lurk and finger in
your vitals, giving no sign of it's ne
farious grubbings till some sneezy
day in December it gets the sure
strange hold on your inner works and
down you go in helpless heap. You
were a goner from away back, but
you didn't know it. All last spring
and through the summer and the
glorious autumn this column preached
the gospel of municipal tidiness, of
garden color, of cleanliness in front
and back yard; preached in print and
in person, in season and out of sea-
son, nudging, cheering, kicking and
lifting ad libitum ct ad exasperandum,
making show of itself and gleefully
Turing it's neighbors into the same
performance. This he did, all and
utterly oblivious to the fact that the
big books in the county auditors Of
flee had him writ down for a fool.
Today I got my tax statement. Sues
us fine from the city authorities of
SN.26. That thing of evil eye had
socked an additional assessment of
$3.50 on our little house because of
the sunshine and the tulips and the
clean sward! Will some gentle read
er, more accustomed to profanity
than is this column, kindly come to
our assistance at this juncture? We
pause for reply.
AS for this column, it has year after
year regularly taken off its coat after
supper and fought till dark the devil
of door-yard dirt and messy musss it
has battled with drouth and with
flood, with the multiform plague Of
the usurping weed, and every sneak
ing form of creeping, crawling, Dor
| ing, biting bug and worm and biting
fungus. II this column had built with
the same money a house made of four
square walls and a lid: il it had let
the tin cans and the ashes accumulate
in the front yard; If it had run q
poultry netting fence up to the back
porch and filed the back lot with
chickens and clutter, IL 1t had kept a
goat instead of lawn mower, and
had sat and smoked. instead Of killing
weeds and worms: IL 1t had had a
gad-aboat instead of a real live florist
for wife and had habisuaIly rallied
Fat the corner grocery and damned the