What will become of Mormonism? We all know and admit it to be a hideous wrong a great immoral stain upon the 'scutcheon of the United States. My belief is that its existence is dependent upon the life of Brigham Young. His administrative ability holds the system togetherhis power of will maintains it as the faith of a community. When he dies, Mormonism will die too. The men who are around him have neither his talent nor his energy. By means of his strength, it is held together. When he fallsMormonism will also fall to pieces.

That lion-you perceive-has a tail. It is a long one already. Like mine-it is to be continued in our next.

ROBERT JONES BURDETTE

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE MUSTACHE

[Lecture by Robert J. Burdette, The Hawkeye Man," humorist (born in Greensborough, Penn., July 30, 1844; -), delivered originally in Western cities. This is called the best exposition of Mr. Burdette's humor as displayed in the several lectures of his series given since he first took the platform in 1876. At that time Mr. Burdette was managing editor of the "Burlington Hawkeye," through which he won his reputation as a humorist, his humorous paragraphs and sketches, often tinged with gentle satire, first appearing in its columns some years before. Subsequently, Mr. Burdette became a licensed minister of the Baptist Church, but he continued on the lecture platform.]

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:-Adam raised Cain, but he did not raise a mustache. He was born a man, a full-grown man, and with a mustache already raised.

If Adam wore a mustache, he never raised it. It raised itself. It evolved itself out of its own inner consciousness, like a primordial germ. It grew, like the weeds on his farm, in spite of him, and to torment him. For Adam had hardly got his farm reduced to a kind of turbulent, weed-producing, granger fighting, regular order of things-had scarcely settled down to the quiet, happy, care-free, independent life of a jocund farmer, with nothing under the canopy to molest or make him afraid, with everything on the plantation going on smoothly and lovely, with a little rust in the oats; army-worm in the corn; Colorado beetles swarming up and down the potato patch; cutworms laying waste the cucumbers; curculio in the plums and borers in the apple-trees; a new kind of bug that he didn't know the name of desolating the wheat fields; dry weather burning up the wheat; wet weather blighting the corn; too cold for the melons, too dreadfully hot for the From "Kings of Platform and Pulpit," edited by "Eli Perkins" and published by the Saalfield Publishing Co., Akron, Ohio. Copyrighted.

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strawberries; chickens dying with the pip; hogs being gathered to their fathers with the cholera; sheep fading away with a complication of things that no man could remember; horses getting along as well as could be expected, with a little spavin, ring-bone, wolf-teeth, distemper, heaves, blind staggers, collar chafes, saddle galls, colic now and then, founder occasionally, epizootic when there was nothing else; cattle going wild with the horn ail; moth in the bee-hives; snakes in the milk-house; moles in the kitchen garden-Adam had just about got through breaking wild land with a crooked stick, and settled down comfortably, when the sound of the boy was heard in the land.

Did it ever occur to you that Adam was probably the most troubled and worried man that ever lived?

We have always pictured Adam as a careworn-looking man; a puzzled-looking granger who would sigh fifty times. a day, and sit down on a log and run his irresolute fingers through his hair while he wondered what under the canopy he was going to do with those boys, and whatever was going to become of them. We have thought, too, that as often as our esteemed parent asked himself this conundrum, he gave it up. They must have been a source of constant trouble and mystification to him. For you see they were the first boys that humanity ever had any experience with. And there was no one else in the neighborhood who had any boy, with whom Adam, in his moments of perplexity, could consult. There wasn't a boy in the country with whom Adam's boys were on speaking terms, and with whom they could play and fight.

Adam, you see, labored under the most distressing disadvantages that ever opposed a married man, and the father of a family. He had never been a boy himself, and what could he know about boy nature or boy troubles and pleasure. His perplexity began at an early date.

Cain, when he made his appearance, was the first and only boy in the fair young world. And all his education depended on his inexperienced parents, who had never in their lives seen a boy until they saw Cain. And there wasn't an educational help in the market. There wasn't an alphabetblock in the county; not even a Centennial illustrated handkerchief. There were no other boys in the republic, to

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teach young Cain to lie, and swear, and smoke, and drink, fight, and steal, and thus develop the boy's dormant statesmanship, and prepare him for the sterner political duties. of his maturer years. There wasn't a pocket-knife in the universe that he could borrow-and lose, and when he wanted to cut his finger, as all boys must do, now and then, he had to cut it with a clam-shell. There were no country relations upon whom little Cain could be inflicted for two or three weeks at a time, when his wearied parents wanted a little rest. There was nothing for him to play with. Adam couldn't show him how to make a kite. He had a much better idea of angels' wings than he had of a kite. And if little Cain had even asked for such a simple bit of mechanism as a shinny-club, Adam would have gone out into the depths of the primeval forest and wept in sheer mortification and helpless, confessed ignorance. here

I don't wonder that Cain turned out bad I always said he would. For his entire education depended upon a most ignorant man, a man in the very palmiest days of his ignorance, who couldn't have known less if he had tried all his life on a high salary and had a man to help him. And the boy's education had to be conducted entirely upon the catechetical system; only, in this instance, the boy pupil asked the questions, and his parent teachers, heaven help them, tried to answer them. And they had to answer at them. For they could not take refuge from the steady stream of questions that poured in upon them day after day, by interpolating a fairy story, as you do when your boy asks you questions about something of which you never heard. For how could Adam begin, "Once upon a time," when with one quick, incisive question, Cain could pin him right back against the dead-wall of creation, and make him either specify exactly what time, or acknowledge the fraud? How could Eve tell him about " Jack and the bean-stalk," when Cain, fairly crazy for someone to play with, knew perfectly well there was not, and never had been, another boy on the plantation? And as day by day Cain brought home things in his hands about which to ask questions that no mortal could answer, how grateful his bewildered parents must have been that he had no pockets in which to transport his collections. For many generations came into the fair young

world, got into no end of trouble, and died out of it, before a boy's pocket solved the problem how to make the thing contained seven times greater than the container.

The only thing that saved Adam and Eve from interrogational insanity was the paucity of language. If little Cain. had possessed the verbal abundance of the language in which men are to-day talked to death, his father's bald-head would have gone down in shining flight to the end of the earth to escape him, leaving Eve to look after the stock, save the crop, and raise her boy as best she could. Which would have been 6,000 years ago, as to-day, just like a man.

Because, it was no off-hand, absent-minded work answering questions about things in those spacious old days, when there was crowds of room, and everything grew by the acre. When a placid but exceedingly unanimous looking animal went rolling by, producing the general effect of an eclipse, and Cain would shout:

"Oh, lookee, lookee Pa! what's that?"

Then the patient Adam, trying to saw enough kitchenwood to last over Sunday, with a piece of flint, would have to pause and gather up words enough to say:

"That, my son? That is only a mastodon giganteus; he has a bad look, but a Christian temper."

And then presently:

"Oh, pa! pa! What's that over yon?"

'Oh, bother," Adam would reply; "it's only a paleotherium, mammalia pachydermata." [Laughter.]

"Oh, yes; theliocomeafterus. Oh! lookee, lookee at this 'un!"

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Where, Cainny? Oh, that in the mud? That's only an acephala lamelli branchiata. It won't bite you, but you mustn't eat it. It's poison as politics."

"Whee! See there! see, see, see! What's him?"

"Oh, that? Looks like a plesiosaurus; keep out of his way; he has a jaw like your mother."

poppy?'

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And what's that fellow,

That's a silurus malaptorus. Don't you go near him,

for he has the disposition of a Georgia mule."

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Oh, yes; a slapterus. And what's this little one?"

"Oh, it's nothing but an aristolochioid. Where did you