The Weekly Elko Independent

Our Liar.

Mr. Dickens, in one of his reprinted pieces, very faithfully and humorously describes "Our Bore," a creature to be found in every village and hamlet in the world; indeed, so truly did he depict him that when reading it I imagined that the bore I knew best must have sat for the picture. There is another character equally ubiquitous with the bore, and possessing many of his qualities, which I shall make the subject of the present sketch. I shall write of "Our Liar."

Everybody knows a liar. You see them, meet them, every day. Go where you will, on the cars, in a steamboat, in a saloon, to a circus, a town meeting, a public assemblage of any kind, or anywhere, and you will find "Our Liar" the centre of a little coterie. He is an orator in his way, and very eloquent. He attracts men like sugar does flies. You may not believe in him; you may despise him; but you want to hear him, and when he is done you will pronounce him the greatest liar you ever saw. There are many kinds of liars. There is the profound liar, who is generally an old man with white hair and sober mien. He walks about with a cane, and daily sits in the post-office or grocery. He tells the most marvelous stories of what he saw and did when a young man, and speaks with such apparent candor and truthfulness, that you are compelled to say to yourself: "I cannot believe his story, but there certainly must be some truth in it." Then there is the shallow liar; he is the fellow with expressionless face and big mouth; he lives to lie; he never deceives anybody, however. He is as transparent as a clean window-pane. He never told the truth in his life, purposely, and you never expected him to; he lies about the commonest affairs of life. He has seen a great many wonderful things that nobody else ever saw. It was his peculiar good fortune to see a white squirrel with three eyes that no other human being ever saw. He once had in his possession a hen named "Betty," that raised six orphan pigs, and if he had that hen now he wouldn't take a million dollars for her; no sir, he wouldn't! When that hen died there wasn't a dry eye in the village where he lived. Owing to a singular streak of good luck years ago, he saw at Bucks County, Pennsylvania, a man at a circus swallow a boa constrictor eight feet long. He wouldn't have believed it could have been done if he hadn't seen it with his own eyes. The other people who were at the circus are all dead now, and the men who performed in it are all dead, too; if any of them were living he could prove it by them.

Then there is the itinerant commercial liar. He is keen, sharp and cunning. You have seen him probably peddling razor-strops and paste, sir, that had won the distinguished admiration of the crowned heads of Europe. You have heard him on a street-corner vending the wonderful and sublime corn extractor, which is instantaneous and painless; took the premium at the world's fair against 97,000 competitors; $2 a bottle and recipe thrown in. Or perhaps you have seen him trying to induce the pig-headed populace to buy the celebrated South Sea Island Pile Remedy (50 cents a box), which has been extolled to the skies by President Grant, Peter Cooper, Bismarck and Pope Pius IX. Secret obtained from an aged Indian. Or you may have heard him say to a gaping crowd: "Gentlemen; this is probably your last chance to get a bottle of the world-renowned, sublimely famous and justly celebrated Wizard Oil; which cures all diseases flesh is heir to. It cures piles in fifteen minutes, gout in sixteen, cholera in seventeen, black tongue in twelve, spotted fever in ten, headache and consumption in thirty seconds. For God's sake, my Christian friends, do not neglect your physical welfare. You are rapidly rolling towards eternity; only $1 per bottle; walk up, walk up, gentlemen, to the great fountain of health and drink from its exhaustless depths. Any man failing to buy this renowned and illustrious medicine is a murderer at heart; only $1 per bottle, and full directions enclosed in English, German and French." Or you have seen him in a thousand other places lying to the best of his ability.