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It is seldom indeed that I give any attention to insulting letters, but I cannot refrain from paying my respects to one Byron Jassack Wales, who, with gray goose-quill for Pelian spear, charges down on the ICONOCLAST as blithely as a gay moss-trooper making an English swine-herd hard to catch. Such insults usually come unsigned–are simply crass insolence which their cowardly authors fear to father; but Byron sets down all the dreaful things he thinks of Brann, boldly signs his name and adds an ornamental flourish of defiance. The possibility of some long- legged, slouch-hatted, wire-moustached cowboy ambling into his august presence armed with a shooting iron carrying iron bullets as big as goose-eggs and hurling him with a flash and whoop into the problematical hitherto, does not shake to its base the heroic fortitude of the man whose mother named him for the most notorious chippy-chaser known to history. Byron proposed to express his opinion, to say what he dad-burned pleases, though the redoubtable Lieutenant-Colonel Rienzi Miltiades Johnsing, of Houston, who does all the ICONOCLAST’S fighting under yearly contract, should swoop down upon him like a double-barreled besom of destruction,

“With death-shot glowing in his fiery hand And eye that scorcheth all it looks upon.”

Byron is offended because I saw fit to criticize New York’s priorient parvenues for exploiting the pregnancy of their wives in the public-prints, and he lets me know where he can be found in case his remarks offend, by daringly dating his letter “New York.” True, he refrains from giving his street and number–even tears the printed headings off the letter paper he employs; but that does not matter, as in a little village like New York a Texan with a hair-trigger temper has only to inquire of the first man he meets to be directed to the one he wants. Byron insists that I print his letter to show people what a desperate dare-devil he is; but I refrain lest it scare all the cattle off the range and cause Bill Fewell and Doc Yandell of EL Paso to move over into Mexico. Among other dreadful things he promises to have my paper suppressed by the postal authorities if I speak of him disrespectfully, which proves that he has a tremendous political pull concealed about his person. I guess I’m safe so far as he is concerned for a careful inspection of his letter makes apparent the utter impossibility of speaking of Lord Byron Jassack Wales disrespectfully–indicates that it were fulsome flattery to refer to him as a blind pile on the body politic, a suppurating sore on the hedonistic society of Sodom.

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T. Shelley Sutton, of Boise City, Idaho, has “writ a pome” entitled “That Man Brann,” and the proud author sends me an A.P.A. paper containing his production. It is an excellent composition–of its kind; and I am gratified to learn that it has at least gravitated to its proper level. Some six months ago a commercial traveller sent me substantially the same thing, saying that he had copied from the walls of a water closet in a Kentucky hotel. It appears that it was too foul to harmonize with the place in which it was composed, so it was stolen by a thieving yahoo in search of carrion and puked into the putrid columns of an A.P.A. paper. T. Shelley Sutton can probably find more “original poetry” in the same place.

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“Rev.” Bill Homan, who conducts a little pecasmman paper somewhere in North Texas for the long green and the misguidance of three or four hundred fork-o’-the-creek Campbellites, devotes two more columns of his raucous tommyrot and brainless balderdash to the Howell-Jones imbroglio. Although he manages to tell at least three deliberate lies in his idiotic eructation, he dares not deny that the trial committee, of which he was a member, permitted Jones to continue belching his fetid bile in the Christian pulpit after being cornered and compelled to confess to a cowardly crime which should be rewarded with a rope. Until this corticiferous little cur explains why he is defending a fourth-class preacher who confesses to having foully insulted, by a base forgery, a motherless young girl committed to his care, the ICONOCLAST must, for the sake of its own self-respect, decline further controversy.