o, with sorrow in her heart and a hundred Sister-Anne glances
up the road, she waited upon the strangers and, I doubt not, cursed them
for the wants that stood between her and her need for tears. It was
a genuine little tragedy. The mother, in a heavy, passionless voice,
rebuked her impatience, yet sat up far into the night, bowed over a heap
of sewing for the daughter's benefit.

These things I beheld in the long marigold-scented twilight and
whispering night, loafing round the little house with California, who
un-folded himself like a lotus to the moon, or in the little boarded
bunk that was our bedroom, swap-ping tales with Portland and the old
man.

Most of the yarns began in this way:--"Red Larry was a bull-puncher back
of Lone County, Montana," or "There was a man riding the trail met a
jack-rabbit sitting in a cactus," or "'Bout the time of the San Diego
land boom, a woman from Monterey," etc.

You can try to piece out for yourselves what sort of stories they were.

IV. THE YELLOWSTONE

ONCE upon a time there was a carter who brought his team and a friend
into the Yellowstone Park without due thought. Presently they came upon
a few of the natural beauties of the place, and that carter turned his
team into his friend's team, howling:--"Get out o' this, Jim. All hell's
alight under our noses!"

And they called the place Hell's Half-Acre to this day to witness if the
carter lied.

We, too, the old lady from Chicago, her husband, Tom, and the good
little mares, came to Hell's Half-Acre, which is about sixty acres in
extent, and when Tom said:--"Would you like to drive over it?"

We said:--"Certainly not, and if you do we shall report you to the park
authorities."

There was a plain, blistered, peeled, and abominable, and it was given
over to the sportings and spoutings of devils who threw mud, and steam,
and dirt at each other with whoops, and halloos, and bellowing curses.

The places smelled of the refuse of the pit, and that odor mixed with
the clean, wholesome aroma of the pines in our nostrils throughout the
day.

This Yellowstone Park is laid out like Ollendorf, in exercises of
progressive difficulty. Hell's Half-Acre was a prelude to ten or twelve
miles of geyser formation.

We passed hot streams boiling in the forest; saw whiffs of steam beyond
these, and yet other whiffs breaking through the misty green hills in
the far distance; we trampled on sulphur in crystals, and sniffed things
mu