Note 1 — AN IDAHO PICNIC

Poisoned meat was laid near the chicken-house one night after the coyotes had carried off some fine young Plymouth Rocks (with a baleful instinct they always picked out the best of the fowls), and was eaten by them. Two of the robbers were found next day, dead, by the irrigation ditch, where they had crept to quench their thirst, and one was afterward seen, from time to time, in the sage-brush, a hairless spectre. The coyote mothers no doubt told their babies of this gruesome outcast as a warning, not against chicken-stealing, which must be one of the coyote virtues, but against poison and other desperate arts of man.