| Summary: | Newsletter of the North Dakota School for the Deaf. 2 THE NORTH DAKOTA BANNER Rime and Reason- By Florence Hamsuy. Some rimes are nonsense, ns you Know. Bui some with reason overflow. All children understand why day Is such a perfect rime for play. And no one will dispute that hot Is properly the rime for pot. Most fittingly it is that rat Forever finds a rime in cat. And every person knows that curl Is just the proper rime for girl. But best of all the rimes is noise When coupled very close with boys. —The Youth’s Companion. The Home of the Conies. “And here above the reach of those scrim, persistent pines, hero in the slide rock where only a few stunted growths and arctic-alpine flowers come into brief bloom, they had told me lived the cony,” relates Dallas Lore Sharp after having described his climb to the “ridge of the world” on the Wallowa range in Oregon “Only at these heights do the conies dwell, only in such slides of broken rock. As for the stork, the Hr trees are her house. The high hills are a refuge for the wild goats; and the rocks for the conies. But this particular side, while not so lofty as some of the Colorado peaks, was unusually bleak and barren, I am sure. There was almost no fodder insight. . . . Could this be the place? I must make sure before settling down to watch, for when would this chance come again? Aud how soon would they put a posse on my trail to fetch me back to camp? “I had been watching for perhaps half an hour when from somewhere, in the rock-side, 1 hoped, though I could not tell,there sounded a shrill, bleating whistle, not unlike that of the mountain ground squirrels or the marmots, yet more tremulous and not so piercing, a voutriloquial, uncentcred sound that I had never heard before. “I held my breath the better to catch the cry. Again it sounded—up or down this side or that of the slide, I could not tell. Again and again, plaintive, whimpering, but pure and clear! I gave over my ears and, looking hard at the slide, my eyes fixed nowhere, I watched for motion. Presently, straight in front of me a little gray form crept over a slab, stopped on all fours and whistled, waited for a moment listening, then disappeared. The cony! “Gone? I didn’t know. I didn’t care. 1 had seen him; and that was almost more than I could believe. The moment was full. . . . But he had not gone. Keeping as still as the stones I waited. “If you will think of a half-grown rabbit, the cottontail, only without a cottontail into a guinea pig with large, round ears, you will got a pretty fair notion of the size, color and shape of the cony, perhaps bettor called ‘pike’ or ‘whistling hare, or ‘little chief hare.’ His legs arc all of a length, so that he runs and walks instead of hops; and the soles of his feet are bare. He gets his name ‘cony’ from the conv of the Bible (a very different animal), because, like the world cony, he lives among the rocks.” “All this while the tremulous call kept coming from the slide. It was not the cry of several voices, not a colony whistling, for, however gregarious they may he in a more favorable environment here I am sure there were very few pairs, if not, indeed, a single pair only. There was hut one small havcock curing in the stones, and not enough uncut grass in the neighborhood to feed more than a pair of conies tor a winter, or so it seemed to me. “As I watched the slide, 1 finally made out the little whistler, and, with eyes sharpened to their work, was now able to follow him from rook to rock as he moved about. He called constantly, and as constantly stopped to listen. . . Now he would stop short on a slab and whistle, would lift his head to listen and. hearing nothing, would dive into some long passage under the rocks to reappear several feet or several rods away.” “This was the only cony that showed itself, the onlj'live one I have overseen; but I followed this one with my eye and with the field-glasses as it went searching over the steep rockslide until long past noon—with the whole camp down the canon looking for me.” “Higher up than the mountain sheep or the goat, . . . where only the burrowing pocket gopher and rare field mice are ever found, dwells the cony . . . Spring, summer and autumn are all crowded together here, a kind of seasonal peak piercing for a few short weeks the unbroken land of winter here above the world. But during this brief period the grass grows, and the conies cut and cure it. . . . Right near me was one of their little haycocks, nearly ready for storing in their barns beneath the rocks.” “Hardy little farmers! Feeble little folk, why do you climb for a home with your tiny, bare-soled feet, up, up, even above the eyrie of the eagle? Why, bold little people, why not descend to the valloys, where winter conies, indeed, but does not stay ? Or farther down, whore the grass is green the year around, with no need to cut and cure a winter’s fodder?”—Christian Science Monitor. The Old Barlow Knife. What has become of the old Barlow knife? We haven’t seen one since wo were a bov. It seems to have been cast into the junk heap together with the gorgeous red-topped boots that boys used to wear, and the skates that curled up at the toes. In its day and generation the Barlow knife was a valuable possession—at least in the eyes of a boy. It was not a thing of beauty, with its half-horn and half-iron handle, and it could boast of only one blade hut that one blade was a marvel of cutlery. It would cut anything from a fishing-pole to the first downy growth on the upper lip, and it was used for both purposes. Nowadays, when the small boy wishes to rouse the envy of his companions he produces his recently-acquired Ingersoll watch, glancqs at it in an ostentatiously careless manner, returns it to his pocket, aud then absent-mindedly fingers the stout gilt chain that spans the front of his Norfolk jacket. There wore no Ingersoll watches in the old days, but the Barlow knife was jts prototype in value. Among the small boy's stock-in-trade it beaded the list of all commodities, and to prove its temper and keenness ho would lick the back of his wrist and let you see how it would shave. We recollect that we traded one to a farm boy schoolmate for a fishing line, with cork, sinker, and two good hooks, and an apple every day during the winter. We did not ask whether the boy’s access to the apple bin was clandestine or otherwise. That was a matter of supreme indifference to us so long as he held to his bargain. The fishing-line and its accessories were all right, but the apple bin was soon empty. We raised a row because the apples didn’t last till March, got into a fight and got whipped. That was the last Barlow kuite we ever owned. — The Virginia tinkle. Sow the seeds of life—humbleness, pure-henrtedness, love; and in the long eternity which lies before the soul, every minutest grain will come up again with an increase of thirty, sixty, or an hundred fold.—Stevenson.
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