SOME YARNS

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XIII, Issue 171, 17 August 1878, Page 4

SOME YARNS

They hovered arouDd the cheerful stove and told dreadful lies, "They talk about dark nights," observed a thin mau, with red whiskers : "1 'member goin' from here to the north end, in the lall 0' sixty-uiue, with a nigger, an' all the way I could see was by making the nigger go ahead. He lit up the sidewalk so 1 could navigate." A silence ensued, broken only by the rushing of the wind out of boors, aud the sizzling of tobacco juice, squirted with unerring precision against the red hot stove. "On the coast of Africa," finally broke in an old sea captain, ' - we was runnin' atore a norther under close reefs, when all of a sudden a bank o' clouds rushed over the sky, and it; shut in so dark ib.ifc you could feel it — and blame me if it wasn't so thick that it tacked the yards in less'n two minutes, an' there we was ; squall blowin' us at the rate of forty knota an hour, an' darkness buckin' agin us so's it held ua dead still. Mos' wonderful experience I ever had." And the old salt shifted his tobacco to the other side of his mouth, and gazed pensively into the blazing coals. " That nearly 'markable as an incident that once happened to me," observed a fleshy man who was sitting on a barrel. " Was on the Michigan Central Railroad, bound for Chicago. I was in a sleeper, and we was boorain' along like lightnin' when all of a sudden somethin' fetched up v kerwhack," and I found myself staudin' on my head in the aisle. I could bear the women screamin' and the men cussin 1 , an* I was mighty glad the lights was out, cos I didn't have on much of anything, to speak of, 'cept a shirfc and a porous plaster. Bime-by we got a little order, an' piled out'n the cars, which had come to a dead stop. The hands had built a fire by the track, to light, up, an' there we saw 'em afc work with pickaxes a-tryin* to dig through one of the biggest chunks of solid darkness I ever see. Fact— solid darkness," and the fleshy man glanced around the room to defect a symptom of unbelief. But the loafers only looked sad, and waited for the next man's experience, He was a solemn looking individual with a east in one eye, and the gravity with which he had listened to the various speakers had imparted an additional shade of eombreness to his countenance. " Those are all nice stories," he began', in an unobtrusive tone, "and all very well as far as they go—for lies j but they are simply commonplace long side a niijht last year, when I was in Belfast, and when it was so dark I couldn't see my hand behind my back." A deep, deep silence brooded o'er the scene, and one by one the liars rose and softly glided out. — lioehland Courier.