to! the magic of a single season does it--green fields of
clover and alfalfa smile in the sun!

But Heaven forbid that this should smack of "boosting"! (There, by the
way, you have the most-used, and best-abused, word in all the West.) It
is not so intended, for the literature of professional optimism is
legion, and needs no reinforcement. The Oregon country is no more wedded
to success than many another, nor is it a land where woman can wrestle
with man's problems more happily than elsewhere. The incidents of these
pages mean simply that beneath the dull surface may be found, ever and
anon, a glow of something stirring; prick the dust, and blood may run.

The West, which is viewed here chiefly as a playland, is a mighty
interesting workaday land, too, and numberless are the modern tragedies
and comedies of its varied peoples at their varied tasks. Rules and
precedents are few and far between; it is each for himself in his own
way. The blond Scandinavian to his logged-off lands, the Basque to his
sheep herding; the man from Iowa dairies, and the Carolinian, who never
before saw alfalfa, sets about raising it; the Connecticut Yankee, with
an unconscionable instinct for wooden nutmegs, sells real estate; the
college man with poor eyes or a damaged liver, as the case may be,
becomes an orchardist at Hood River or Medford. Somehow, some place,
there is room for each and every one, and the big Westland smiles and
receives them all, the strong to prosper and the weak to fail, according
to the inexorable way of life.

Some come for wealth and some for health--a vast army for the latter,
were the truth always known. The highness and the dryness of the
hinterland draw many to it in their battle against the White Plague, and
while victory often comes, there comes, too, defeat.

An empty shack I know could tell such a tale--the tragedy of a good
fight lost. They were consumptives, both of them, and they lived in a
lowland city, west of the mountains. The Doctor gave the old, old edict:
the only chance was to get away from the damp, to live out of doors in
a higher, sunnier climate. The boy--he was scarcely more than that--bade
farewell to his sweetheart and came over the mountains, where he found
land and built the shack that was to be their home and their
haven--where they were to become sun-browned and robust. The
self-evident conclusion outruns the tale, I fear. The girl, who
smilingly sent her lover eastward, dreaming of th