is standing also rigid and intent, to
experience this reverent and collective silence * * * is at once to
understand and to dedicate that day's work."

Now all this is very beautiful. But its very beauty is what makes the
heroism of the soldier as easy as the heroism of others is oftentimes
difficult. Compare, for example, the courage of even the most gallant
soldier with the courage of the pioneer, who goes alone into vast and
unfamiliar solitudes, and there amid killing labors and strange perils,
hews out a path to life, with never the face of a comrade or the voice
of a woman to give him cheer. I think that I never knew the meaning of
loneliness, and never understood therefore the sublime heroism of the
pioneer until I journeyed through the prairies of Kansas, the deserts of
Arizona and the pasture lands of Idaho and Montana. Those of you who
have traveled through the great west will recognize the sensation that
came over me as, hour after hour, I gazed upon those uninhabited wastes
and saw only at rarest intervals the traces of human beings. I remember
looking out upon the prairies late one afternoon and watching the slow
fading of the day. For three hours, from four until seven o'clock, I saw
on the passing landscape one horseman, as lonely as a solitary sail at
sea, one prairie wagon with three men gathered about the evening camp
fire, and two houses on the far horizon. From seven to eight o'clock
came on the darkness, and soon we were riding through impenetrable
night; and twice, perhaps three times, at intervals of an hour or more,
I saw a single light twinkling in the distance, marking where some man
or perhaps some family, was living in the solitudes. And I dreamed that
night of the men, and the women, too, who first came out into these vast
spaces, leaving home, friends, companionship behind to make a trail,
build a home, prepare the way for the coming of civilization. The very
road over which my train was moving was the old trail of the Santa Fe,
which had been trod by the feet of thousands of lonely and intrepid
souls, who dared the wilderness and the desert as the forerunners of the
nation's life. These men, and the women also who were with them, to rear
their homes and bear their children, were heroes of a type
sublime--heroes who never knew the joy of comradeship, the consolation
of co-operation, but lived and toiled and died alone, with only a dream
of the future in their hearts to give them courage. It