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Show A Restless Spirit. There is a bird with a home on the sea shore that seems never to be quite itself unless a storm is on and old ocean in his wrath is roaring and beating the trembling shore with furious billows. Then the bird, the stormy petrel,' poises its wings goes out exultingly in the storm above the waves and adds its screams, to the screaming of the gale. There are men who have this restless daring always al-ways throbbing in their natures. To such men the plodding of the every day life is intolerable. Such a man died here last week. Born in Oregon when Oregon was but a wilderness, we suspect that Walter S. Moss was a restless baby in his Cradle, that as he advanced into boyhood the pioneer home on the frontier became a prison to his restless spirit and so while yet of tender years he ran away. How he got to Kentucky is not told, he probably half worked and half beat his way by steamer to New Orleans and then up the river. How natural that in a blooded race horse he should find what seemed to him a kindred spirit, how natural nat-ural that he should, in the excitement of hot races, be In full accord. He was until he became too heavy a jockey and we suspect he told many thoroughbreds the simple story of his career. Then he took to the stage. He found and played with Lottie Crabtree when she was a favorite in the East and the especial pride of California; for Lottie's girlhood was passed under the shade of the great pines that give an everlasting glory to the California Sierras, and she, too, when but a child broke away from the solemn heights to find the excitement she coveted in the cities. Then as manager and actor he roved from city to city until the war with Spain came on. That was something he had never tried, so he enlisted. Fortune favored him. He was on board the Brooklyn when the Spanish fleet came out of Santiago harbor; he was to the front in that running run-ning magnificlent fight until the last one of the enemy's beautiful ships was on shore and on. fire. The war over he went back to his profession and continued in harness until the fatal illness that seized upon him, prostrated his strength. His was a bright and genial and generous life. Every city in the broad land had scores of his friends, from everywhere farewells were waved to - his soul as It took its flight. To those who believe in heredity it would be interesting to know how long after his parents reached Oregon before he was born, for it is not hard to believe that in the long journey across the plains, in the cramped environments of a cabin in the wilderness, there were days and weeks and months and years, when it seemed to his mother that she must break the meshes of the net that bound her life around and fly away. And the longings she suffered, the repression that she was forced to place upon her Impatient soul, were transmitted to her boy and in all the fifty-eight years of his life he seemed to be but giving those longings expression. |