Uncle Dick and Lisa's Old Time Animal Tales

Won a Grasshopper Race. Mackay was an early riser, a hard worker, and, exceedingly hospitable. He could seldom be induced to play cards for money and then for only nominal stakes. The only game that seemed to attract him was the “grasshopper races.” Boys caught grasshoppers and sold them to the players at 25 and 50 cents each. Each player paid a fixed stake, ranging from $1 to $20, into a pool, and the man whose hopper made the longest jump captured the pool. On the day before Christmas it was agreed to celebrate that holiday with a pool, the stakes in which were to be $100 for each player.
The terms were “Play or pay” and at the instance of a German professor who was a superintendent of a leading mine each man was allowed to use any means that he might devise to stimulate his grasshopper. The professor was so full of his scheme to scientifically capture the $1,000 pool-for there were ten entries-that he communicated it to a young manager who was not a grasshopper plunger. The professor had experimented and ascertained that a grasshopper that was touched with a feather dipped in a weak solution of aqua ammonia would jump for his life. The young man also experimented and as a result he filled a bottle of the same size and appearance with cyanide of potassium and managed to substitute it for the other in the professor’s laboratory. The next day, when the professor, after much boasting about his scientific attainments, dipped a feather in the substituted bottle and touched his insect with it, the grasshopper rolled over as dead as a mackerel, amid the roars of the crowd. Mackay,s hopper won the big pool, and two widows, whose husbands had been killed in the Yellow Jacket mine, received a gift of $500 each from an unknown source-San Francisco California.