An esteemed Western correspondent says: "I picked up an arrow head in the nursery and that reminded me that I sent you one from Kansas that did not reach you, so I send this in place of it. If I recollect right you like living Indians; I like them dead. I attended when the remains of Judge McComas and his wife were brought to Fort Scott a month ago, murdered by Indians from pure cussedness, and I have seen so much of this in the past forty years that I view them much as I do dogs that kill sheep. Probably I am all wrong, but I can't help it. Page 147, May number of Monthly, says when railroad sleepers are properly treated they last a century. This would be rather hard to prove; for I recollect when a small boy going with my father to see the 'iron horse,' the first one Geo. Stephenson put on a colliery railroad. My father was a millwright and worked a number of hands on the machinery of Lord Ravensworth's collieries when George Stephenson attended one of the engines.

" If I recollect right, railroad sleepers were not used then, and as that was not one hundred years ago there cannot be any specimens to show that they will last one hundred years. It would depend in a measure, I should think, on the kind of timber that is prepared, about the time it would last. It does not seem to me that any preparation would give the poplar the strength of the oak. I had a good laugh with the boys on reading your comments on Forestry Associations. These convention foresters write us letters telling us how much they are doing for us, but we don't see it, and with the exception of Jos. S. Fay and Dr. Warder I cannot bring to mind any one of them that I ever heard of planting a tree."

[The Indians simply have the editor's sympathy and they afford excellent material for the study of the human race. Our troubles with them began from treating with them on wrong principles. For the sake of peace, we commenced to buy from them what they never owned. The only right to land comes from society, not from nature - and is based on the owner doing something to it which shall benefit the community. Running overground, and hunting over it gives a man no more right to it than has the buffalo or the rabbit which he hunts. For peace sake we pretend they own it, give them a few red rags and a string of beads, - and profit hugely by their simple ignorance. They find out as they grow wiser that they have given away empires for a song, and they feel just as other people do, who learn that they have been fooled. It is all very well to point to the treaty and to demand that they stick to it. Tell a drowning man that he bargained to take the risk, - or preach to a starving man that he must not steal! The writer of this has just been among the Flatheads. Here is the same old story. They have been induced to sell "their" lands. The price was made to look very large. They are already beginning to feel that they cannot possibly live on the price.

Their land is gone, their game is gone, the "agency" cannot possibly keep them. Is it natural to suppose they will lie down and die? We have not seen any whisper of it in the papers yet, but as sure as fate there will be the usual trouble with the Crows, Flatheads and other "savages" of Dakota and Montana. Innocent people will suffer, as it has always been, for the sins of the race. Of course we must not permit this. Indians must be shot and killed when they interfere with innocent individuals. There is no help for it - but for all there is our sympathy for the poor benighted creatures on whose ignorance our own people have so richly traded.

Looking at the paragraph on sleepers referred to we are unable to account for how it got there. We are usually extremely careful to give credit to every one, and seldom fail in this, - but that paragraph is evidently founded on something outside of the editor's personal knowledge, and should have had proper credit given to it. It really looks as if it was a part of some essay before a forestry association. Our correspondent's remarks on it are just and timely. - Ed. G. M].