t, where the hinges are kept from
rusting and the dust from the air is swept continually away.

Such was the environment of Edith Whittlesey. Nothing happened. It
could scarcely be called a happening, when, at the age of twenty-five,
she accompanied her mistress on a bit of travel to the United States. The
groove merely changed its direction. It was still the same groove and
well oiled. It was a groove that bridged the Atlantic with
uneventfulness, so that the ship was not a ship in the midst of the sea,
but a capacious, many-corridored hotel that moved swiftly and placidly,
crushing the waves into submission with its colossal bulk until the sea
was a mill-pond, monotonous with quietude. And at the other side the
groove continued on over the land--a well-disposed, respectable groove
that supplied hotels at every stopping-place, and hotels on wheels
between the stopping-places.

In Chicago, while her mistress saw one side of social life, Edith
Whittlesey saw another side; and when she left her lady's service and
became Edith Nelson, she betrayed, perhaps faintly, her ability to
grapple with the unexpected and to master it. Hans Nelson, immigrant,
Swede by birth and carpenter by occupation, had in him that Teutonic
unrest that drives the race ever westward on its great adventure. He was
a large-muscled, stolid sort of a man, in whom little imagination was
coupled with immense initiative, and who possessed, withal, loyalty and
affection as sturdy as his own strength.

"When I have worked hard and saved me some money, I will go to Colorado,"
he had told Edith on the day after their wedding. A year later they were
in Colorado, where Hans Nelson saw his first mining and caught the mining-
fever himself. His prospecting led him through the Dakotas, Idaho, and
eastern Oregon, and on into the mountains of British Columbia. In camp
and on trail, Edith Nelson was always with him, sharing his luck, his
hardship, and his toil. The short step of the house-reared woman she
exchanged for the long stride of the mountaineer. She learned to look
upon danger clear-eyed and with understanding, losing forever that panic
fear which is bred of ignorance and which afflicts the city-reared,
making them as silly as silly horses, so that they await fate in frozen
horror instead of grappling with it, or stampede in blind self-destroying
terror which clutters the way with their crushed carcasses.

Edith Nelson met the unexpected at e