Benjamin Franklin Taylor

Summary-savory, Gleaned from Rural Nooks in Pleasant Weather Benjamin Franklin Taylor

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1879. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER II. GLIMPSES OF UTAH. DID you ever see a man that had been scalped?--not by the patriarch with his scythe, but by the savage with his knife? Well, it will not pay to see him, as a general thing, unless you have a bit of bluecloset curiosity about you, and almost everybody has. I know a lady who goes to every funeral she can hear of within a Sabbath-day's journey, and looks at the deceased and watches the mourners, and determines the depth and strength and probable length of their sorrow. She is about as sure to be at your funeral as she is to be at her own. But it gives you a queer sensation, and not without a pleasant trace of horror in it, to sit beside a well-favored gentleman, with luxuriant hair showing around the edge of his cap, and think that a savage once had him in his clutch with a whoop, and swept a keen knife around his lifted locks with another whoop, and whirled the trophy aloft with more whoops, every atom as barbarously delighted as a fox-hunter when he flaunts poor Reynard's "brush," and sounds "the treble mort." It brings back the old border tales of the log-cabin times, you used to hear on winter nights, when you flung an eye over your shoulder as the yarn ran off, lest Black Hawk or Red Jacket, or somebody smelling of moccasins, blankets, smoke and kinnikinic, should show a redochre visage at a green window-pane. That very pleasant gentleman is a conductor on the Central Pacific railroad, and beguiled the way for me as we steamed toward Ogden from the west. He ventured to a little stream two miles from a station for trout one day, and Chief-Justice Story's natural nobleman surprised him, scalped him, and left him for dead. I knew all about it, but I had a miserable desire to hear him describe the capillary calamity, though I c...