ur
army was very poor, had done nothing, and had been nowhere. This
exasperated him, for he expected an argument, and he trampled on the
British Lion generally. Failing to move me, he vowed that I had no
patriotism like his own. I said I had not, and further ventured that
very few Englishmen had; which, when you come to think of it, is quite
true. By the time he had proved conclusively that before the Prince of
Wales came to the throne we should be a blethering republic, we struck a
road that overhung a river, and my interest in "politics" was lost in
admiration of the driver's skill as he sent his four big horses along
that winding road. There was no room for any sort of accident--a shy or
a swerve would have dropped us sixty feet into the roaring Gardiner
River. Some of the persons in the coach remarked that the scenery, was
"elegant." Wherefore, even at the risk of my own life, I did urgently
desire an accident and the massacre of some of the more prominent
citizens. What "elegance" lies in a thousand-foot pile of honey-coloured
rock, riven into peak and battlement, the highest peak defiantly
crowned by an eagle's nest, the eaglet peering into the gulf and
screaming for his food, I could not for the life of me understand. But
they speak a strange tongue.

_En route_ we passed other carriages full of trippers, who had done
their appointed five days in the Park, and yelped at us fraternally as
they disappeared in clouds of red dust. When we struck the Mammoth Hot
Spring Hotel--a huge yellow barn--a sign-board informed us that the
altitude was six thousand two hundred feet. The Park is just a howling
wilderness of three thousand square miles, full of all imaginable freaks
of a fiery nature. An hotel company, assisted by the Secretary of State
for the Interior, appears to control it; there are hotels at all the
points of interest, guide-books, stalls for the sale of minerals, and so
forth, after the model of Swiss summer places.

The tourists--may their master die an evil death at the hand of a mad
locomotive!--poured into that place with a joyful whoop, and, scarce
washing the dust from themselves, began to celebrate the 4th of July.
They called it "patriotic exercises"; elected a clergyman of their own
faith as president, and, sitting on the landing of the first floor,
began to make speeches and read the Declaration of Independence. The
clergyman rose up and told them they were the greatest, freest,
sublimest, most c