ves. It is a drought or a deluge, a dead calm or a
cyclone. How can it be otherwise! From the Rockies to the Alleghanies,
it is all a vast, curving plain. The fluid air, in such a wide area,
when influenced in any way, must be on a gigantic scale. A tilt of half
an inch at one point, will be a mile in height, thousands of miles
farther on. Such a proportion of oscillation tells.

One could but dream of coming empire and Western enterprise and power
yet unthought of, while lounging about in our flying train, homeward,
still homeward, every moment, over those vast plains. We had ample
leisure for this delicious, idle dreaming. We looked on, as if we were
denizens of another world, as we saw the bustle at passing stations,
and the play of varied human interests which disported themselves
before our magnificent heedlessness of it all. We were cut off, for the
nonce, from all such care or thought, flying onward, filled with
pleasure, to our Eastern home.

It was night when we made our first stop of any length. That was at
Kansas City. We here crossed the "Big Muddy," or the Missouri River,
swollen by the extraordinary rains, and looking more than ever like a
tawny lion.

As we neared Kansas City we could see across the waters of the river to
the other side, where myriads of cattle wandered like spectres,
awaiting further immediate shipment east, or, the nearer end of the
adjacent slaughter-houses. How sad it all seemed. The cattle, magnified
by the intervening air, loomed up hugely across the brown waters of the
river. They seemed like victims of destiny, conscious of their doom;
and the sullen river, and the shades of the falling day, gave fitting
color and setting to the melancholy picture.

I asked a lady by my side, "Do you see all those cattle?" "Yes," said
she; "I cannot bear to look at them." Our thoughts were the same.

How fortunate it is for us that our poor, four-footed brethren cannot
probe our motives as we fatten our flocks and herds, and tend them with
tireless assiduity! The beasts do love us, perhaps, and think us good
and kind, and their best friend. I wonder, as they face the knife or
the mallet, at the sublime moment of the end, are they awakened at last
to the true inwardness of their false friend, man!

All this great prairie journey was a pleasant contrast to the great
deserts and mountains we had passed, since we flew down through Jersey,
the Southern States, across Texas and Arizona, out to Cal