ld man was on a holiday in search of fish. When he
discovered a brother-loafer he proposed a confederation of rods. Quoth
the insurance-agent, "I'm not staying any time in Portland, but I will
introduce you to a man there who'll tell you about fishing." The two
told strange tales as we slid through the forests and saw afar off the
snowy head of a great mountain. There were vineyards, fruit orchards,
and wheat fields where the land opened out, and every ten miles or so,
twenty or thirty wooden houses and at least three churches. A large town
would have a population of two thousand and an infinite belief in its
own capacities. Sometimes a flaring advertisement flanked the line,
calling for men to settle down, take up the ground, and make their home
there. At a big town we could pick up the local newspaper, narrow as the
cutting edge of a chisel and twice as keen--a journal filled with the
prices of stock, notices of improved reaping and binding machines,
movements of eminent citizens--"whose fame beyond their own abode
extends--for miles along the Harlem road." There was not much grace
about these papers, but all breathed the same need for good men, steady
men who would plough, and till, and build schools for their children,
and make a township in the hills. Once only I found a sharp change in
the note and a very pathetic one. I think it was a young soul in trouble
who was writing poetry. The editor had jammed the verses between the
flamboyant advertisement of a real-estate agent--a man who sells you
land and lies about it--and that of a Jew tailor who disposed of "nobby"
suits at "cut-throat prices." Here are two verses; I think they tell
their own story:--

"God made the pine with its root in the earth,
Its top in the sky;
They have burned the pine to increase the worth
Of the wheat and the silver rye.

"Go weigh the cost of the soul of the pine
Cut off from the sky;
And the price of the wheat that grows so fine
And the worth of the silver rye!"

The thin-lipped, keen-eyed men who boarded the train would not read that
poetry, or, if they did, would not understand. Heaven guard that poor
pine in the desert and keep "its top in the sky"!

When the train took to itself an extra engine and began to breathe
heavily, some one said that we were ascending the Siskiyou Mountains. We
had been climbing steadily from San Francisco, and at last won to over
four thousand feet abov