tion that there
was no profit in monkeying with the North Pacific Railway.

Night was falling as we cleared the forests and sailed out upon a
wilderness of sage brush. The desolation of Montgomery, the wilderness
of Sind, the hummock-studded desert of Bikaneer, are joyous and homelike
compared to the impoverished misery of the sage. It is blue, it is
stunted, it is dusty. It wraps the rolling hills as a mildewed shroud
wraps the body of a long-dead man. It makes you weep for sheer
loneliness, and there is no getting away from it. When Childe Roland
came to the dark Tower he traversed the sage brush.

Yet there is one thing worse than sage unadulterated, and that is a
prairie city. We stopped at Pasco Junction, and a man told me that it
was the Queen City of the Prairie. I wish Americans didn't tell such
useless lies. I counted fourteen or fifteen frame-houses, and a portion
of a road that showed like a bruise on the untouched surface of the blue
sage, running away and away up to the setting sun. The sailor sleeps
with a half-inch plank between himself and death. He is at home beside
the handful of people who curl themselves up o' nights with nothing but
a frail scantling, almost as thin as a blanket, to shut out the
unmeasurable loneliness of the sage.

When the train stopped on the road, as it did once or twice, the solid
silence of the sage got up and shouted at us. It was like a nightmare,
and one not in the least improved by having to sleep in an emigrant-car;
the regularly ordained sleepers being full. There was a row in our car
toward morning, a man having managed to get querulously drunk in the
night. Up rose a Cornishman with a red head full of strategy, and
strapped the obstreperous one, smiling largely as he did so, and a
delicate little woman in a far bunk watched the fray and called the
drunken man a "damned hog," which he certainly was, though she needn't
have put it quite so coarsely. Emigrant cars are clean, but the
accommodation is as hard as a plank bed.

Later we laid our bones down to crossing the Rockies. An American train
can climb up the side of a house if need be, but it is not pleasant to
sit in it. We clomb till we struck violent cold and an Indian
reservation, and the noble savage came to look at us. He was a Flathead
and unlovely. Most Americans are charmingly frank about the Indian. "Let
us get rid of him as soon as possible," they say. "We have no use for
him." Some of the men I meet hav