| Show t J BILL IUB IN TEXAS I Che Enormous Wealth Invested in Big Hats FAREWELL TOUR OF THE STATE I trance Scenes and Moving Incidents Down by the Rio Grande Hospitality ot the Con > o Club s IFon Tun SUNDAY HERALD By special arrangement with the author IN TEXAS t t DON BY THE RIO GBAKDE f I I am preparing at this time a large Hnid costly testimonial for the young man who suggested the idea of making tins spring my first grand annual farewell fare-well tour of Texas It has been a great success from a boxofnce and social standpoint Artistically of course the carping critic might see places where he could have done a great deal better himself him-self Texas as we know already is a mighty empire of itself connecting tho stern find sturdy elements of tho Farmers t I 51 + a i 4 i Ip i 11 t SI i Cr r x TALKING WITH A DRUNKARD Alliance of Kansas < on the north with the romantic yet peppery Quixote of the south Here the sad and solemn lubricator lubri-cator vulgarly called the greaser spends his patrimony on an 8pound hat and with what ho has left he buys a horse 1 never tire of looking at the delirious clothes of a prosperous greaser They are wildly beautiful to one who loves as I do to see a hand to hand contest to a finish between strong colors On Sunday I attended divine worship at the Mexican cathedral in San Antonio It afforded me a grand opportunity to look at the clothes of the congregation as we do at home also to study the I faces of the people as they came out Religion does not seem to afford the Mexican much joy or comfort He I goes through it however as one gets his teeth repairednot for the delirious thrill of joy he finds lurking in the job itself but as a precautionary measure and as an evidence of his powers of endurance en-durance The ladies of the congregation it seemed to me showed better taste in proportion to their means than the gentlemen gen-tlemen They dressed plainly and seemed to favor deep mourning wherever there was an excuse for it Some of them 1 judge were mourning on very slight provocationthat is if they were mourning mourn-ing the loss of such husbands as I was permitted to see samples of The men wore large hats heavily embroidered em-broidered and whatever else they could get in the way of clothes I never saw people run so much to hats or seem so indifferent to outer clothes 1 saw one man at church who wore a massive Mexican Mex-ican hat with two or three pounds of I silver braid on it and a leather cinch i with two silver buckles for a band Ho also wore a beautiful pair of lilac trousers trou-sers One man in the amen corner of the cathedral wore no coat or vest but had a shirt made of buff calico with grim figures on it and ii was made with puffed sleeves and a Stewart collar He had also socked his inheritance into a hat and wore heliotrope trousers of the time of Queen Elizabeth Dallas is probably the most prosperous of Texas cities Some well known writerup of townspossibly Charles Dudley Warnerstates that if you draw a circle using a radius of 100 miles with Dallas as tho center you will have therein there-in thirtyfour counties I was too tired to try it while at Dallas and could not r get a 100 mile radius at any of the places where I looked Some of the stores didnt seem to have any radius at all These thirtyfour counties produce nearly half the cotton of Texas also more than half the oats and wheat It is a very fertile district indeed The soil is rich and deep and cotton just naturally natu-rally grows here with the very slightest slight-est encouragement I never saw so much cotton anywhere before as I have seen on this trip Down near Wacopronounced Waycothere is an old time cotton planter who runs his plantation just as they used to before the war only of course he cant show as good an abstract of title to his help but he has the large black negro with the white eye and that negro knows his place He is fed watered wa-tered and looked out for every day The mules are locked up also so that there is no frolicking over the country at night with the stock Severe system is the rule and 20000 a year is the cotton crop while the negroes themselves are any of them fat enough to kill and their happy songs in the cottonfields show that healthful discipline regular hours and regular meals agree with them In this way they have also very little temptation to monkey with the flowing bowL Rum is highly injurious to the i i negro While unquestionably beneficial I to the white man making him bright and highly conversational it is not proper prop-er for the negro It dulls his sensibilities sensibili-ties and makes him almost coarse I met one of them here in Texas who had become somewhat addicted to the use of liquor for medical purposes He said that he lost his wife several years ago and had been ever since trying to drown his sorrows in the flowing bowL He admitted i i ad-mitted though that it was not a success I He said he had drowned several of his I more sickly and feeble sorrows in that C way but he said they always swelled up and came to the surface on the follow ing day bigger and more disagreeable than ever I said that was a good simile j He said he didnt I know what it was but it Was 50 i I found that he was talkative and so I conversed with him He said that he had got all his work done up ahead and got all over the rush before I came so that he could have a real good visit with me when I got here I judged that it had been several years since he had been busy however He said that Texas was advancing rap Idly Ixe thought in the matter of civili zatioA I said yes with a rising in flefftion He said that she was now safely past the crisis he thought between be-tween the customs of the cliff dwellers and finger bowls Some of us of cose is raw yet but we are advancing I would like to have you the guest of our club here this evenin1 Bah if you will I come downthe Upper Congo club it is balled sale We run it on economical principles sah but it is a quiet homelike home-like place whah you kin go for a hour or two check you old razor and iujoin youseff It was a quiet and rather unpretentious unpreten-tious place the Upper Congo club occupied occu-pied during the day as a laundry and Tuesdays and Fridays as a club loom The franchise of the club consisted of the inalienable right to meet meditate and adjourn The club properly consisted consist-ed of a guests register made in imitation of a butchers order book with a pine lead pencil tied to it by a string a gallon beer pail and a set of dominos i 1 I The Upper Congo club allows no millionaires mill-ionaires sons to join Of course if a I II member should become a millionaires son after he had united with the club he cannot be expelled without a twothirds vote but I was told that brains and brains only was the qualificationself I made brains Wealth could not come in II and corrupt the pure thought ganglia of I the Upper Congo club I Sam Jones preached in Texas and lectured lect-ured and licked the mayor of Palestine last fall Everywhere one goes he hears I of Sam Jones and the good work done ay him > Also by Dr Talmage who with Mr Jones another well known revivalist I and myself furnished a star course of i lectures the past season for Texas with great success people coming in some in j stances for hundreds of miles bringing their dinners and paying a dollar apiece j I Looking upon us with awestruck features for a few moments and then retiring cheerfully to their distant homes Texas people say that Sam Jones reminds re-minds them of John the Forerunner in some ways only that John so far as they I know did not eat with his knife Sam however is a plain offhand man and I since he and I and Dr Talmage have worked together in Texas I do not feel like hearing either one criticised and I I know that neither of them will sit calmly calm-ly by and allow me to be run down Dallas is beautifully surrounded by I the state of Texas and Oak Cliff a handsome hand-some suburb with a thriving hotel and I a vigorous girls college Also a pavil ion for sneakers and concerts during I the summer and a menagerie There is a train running between Oak Cliff and I Dallas which is called an accommodation accommoda-tion It is owned by the hotel and goes j along with the reading room parlor and washroom You board at the hotel and the proprietor throws in the railroad I say this so that the interstate commerce com-merce outfit may look into the matter and throttle this giant evil Dallas did a business in 18S9 of over i 31000000 Since then trade has greatly i I increased While there I met a corn pauy of Boston capitalists headed by ex i Governor Brackett They had just bought a building for 250000 that day I Four million dollars are or is invested in factories and the yearly product is over 8000000 I was also in Dallas two days and put quite a little sum of money in circulation while there I cannot can-not help it The western spirit of free1 I i dom and reckless expenditure comes over me and I buy the morning paper sometimes and do not read half of it I went to see the Clemenceau Case while in Dallas I hid avoided it in New York but the pictures and printing were so beautiful that I accepted the invitation in-vitation of a real nice man and went to see the Clemenceau Case I will never tl t y 1 lypl y ri 1 J1pi f 4 r ONE OF THE GRIPS i have to do so any more I write down my confession that I did go with much sorrow and regret but I cannot conceal it any longer The play is said to have a beautiful moral concealed in it There was no concealment in the play with this exception ex-ception though The story is on the order of a train book now meeting with a large sale called The Sin of the Strawberry Straw-berry Blonde or Drowning Out the Gopher in My Grandmothers Grave by Pearl Studebaker The heroine is strangely beautiful ia her lithographsand poses as an artists model in one of the acts It was very still during this scene You could almost al-most have heard a cough drop After it was over and the artist threw a piano coyer over the shoulders of his model the entire audience turned around and looked at mo with a keen searching glance I looked around also as who should say Whom is it but that did not work I was discovered It taught mea me-a lessonthis little incident It was that he that advertiseth and billeth a town should not seek to conceal himself in an audience especially if his lithograph litho-graph shows a marked reseinblKpso to himThe The Knights ot Pythias held a conclave con-clave at Dallas while I was there 3 I wore a badge in order to be sociable and by that means learned of different grips and signs of distress I think now that I could work my way into a lodge if I could have time and a large corkscrew In shaking hands with many strangers during the past year or two while traveling trav-eling and making a wide acquaintance I looking to any accidental turn in affairs I in 1892 I am struck by the lafce and varied number of grips given me which I am not able to classify I would think that a man who belonged be-longed to most all of the secret societies must have very little time to devote to his business after successfully remembering remem-bering all the grips signs passwords explanations signals rituals work of degrees constitutions bylaws reports of committees initiations communications communica-tions and new business good of the order or-der violation of obligations opening odes manual of arms laying of cornerstones corner-stones and funeral services If I had all these in my head I could just about remember the combination of my safe but I would not be mentally adequate W anything further than that If it rained some good friend who had my best interests in-terests at heart would probably have to take me by the hand and bring me in A t |
