The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1916-09-01
HAD NOTHING TO WRITE ABOUT, so
 HE DID IT WELL

A letter comes to us. says The Out look, from a New York guardsman who complains that he has nothing to write about upon the border. We are rather inclined to wish that we had more correspondents afflicted with the same lack of literary material. This is his description of nothing at all:
 "Only in fever does one picture Texas For the first days I thought I must be raving, so colossal did 1t seem, so vasty and dead, so baked. parched, endless. From sunrise to sunset it stretches, inevitable, treeless but for scrub bushes, grassless and the epitomac of dreariness.
 "Till came to Texas | never knew what Kipling meant when he said: 'eThe dawn comes up like thunder" I wish you could see dawn on the Mex ican border. Frantic changes of color flashing over the riot of low clouds in the east, then, bursting suddenly, four broad red stripes. radiating out against a green sky. Then the sun, furnace-red, and instantly, from the cold of a night much cooler than the summer nights we know at home, al burning, willing, disheveling, demor- aliZing heat
 "Thus the dawn. We are always up long before, so I never miss it. The first time I saw it I was so wildly ex- cited I stopped grooming my horse and stared aghast, so breaking regu- lations two ways. 1. You must nev- CT get excited. 2. You must never stop grooming your horse unless he kicks you to death.
 Heat. If you take off your hat you die. If you would have it in cold (so to speak, figures, I worked the other day two hours in 138 de- grees Fahrenheit, after which I re- | turned to my tent, where the same meteorologist pronounced it 1O5 de- grees. So much for the heat. Now the flora and fauna.
 fThe mesquite is a craggly tree the shape of a dwarf apple. It looks green and rather lush in places, and has fern-hke leaves. You grasp it and | 10000 thorns, each an inch long and poisonous, penetrate your hand. The cactus is very degenerate-looking plant; looks as if it had grown under | the sea, fed on sewage from a sum- mer resort; covered with long poison- ous thorns. Absurd attempts have
  | now and then you see a group of palms and once I saw yellow flower. Also there is a cornfield. Occasionally you come on real oases in the desert. The other day we found a real pasture of green grass, and the horses became so excited we had to call off the drill and let them graze for IS min- utes in company with a vast herd of | yUh fe
 goatherd 4 years old.
 "The tarantula is brown. hairy spider about eight inches across. His bite is nasty. He has become do- mesticated to the extent of living in tents. Likewise the scorpion. who resembles a white lobster The rat tlesnake comes about UT to five feet long. His warning before he strikes l sounds like escaping steam. The bullsnake is harmless but terrifying. One slept under my bed the other night. He was four feet long, There are many birds which you never sec but which sing all night long. And we have disposed of the animal life | except the house fly of commerce. which is by far the worst pest of all
 Now for the gay life of the soldier I-band playing, flags flying in the breeze, brilliant uniforms, sabers flashing in the sunlight, dauntless war horses galloping over the fields. the merry note of the buge, the gay vol ces united in the strains of 'Tippe- rary," the solemn, thrilling swell of The Star Spangled Banner Doesn't your heart thrill at the thought?
 Monday I hammered nails all the morning and dug a post hole all the afternoon. Tuesday pitched dry ma nure on to wagon, wiped out the eyes and noses of sick horses, peeled pota- toes and onions, dug seven water drains, erected part of a horse shel- ter. Wednesday I fell into the river and three horses rolled on me. And so on. And all the rest of the dash ing, crack regiment of New York City did exactly the same, and expect to continue so during our stay. The most diverting thing we do is to burv dead horses. Our only fight occur red the other day, when 24 men with drawn sabers pursued a bullsnake the length of the troop street, after which he escaped in the scrub.
 .' 'cNow- I've given youas picture