he catastrophe.

We had just cleared the Black Canyon and another gorge, and were sailing
out into open country nine thousand feet above the level of the sea,
when we came most suddenly round a corner upon a causeway across a waste
water--half dam and half quarry-pool. The locomotive gave one wild "Hoo!
Hoo! Hoo!" but it was too late. He was a beautiful bull, and goodness
only knows why he had chosen the track for a constitutional with his
wife. _She_ was flung to the left, but the cow-catcher caught _him_, and
turning him round, heaved him shoulder deep into the pool. The
expression of blank, blind bewilderment on his bovine, jovine face was
wonderful to behold. He was not angry. I don't think he was even scared,
though he must have flown ten yards through the air. All he wanted to
know was: "Will somebody have the goodness to tell a respectable old
gentleman what in the world, or out of it, has occurred?" And five
minutes later the stream that had been snapping at our heels in the
gorges split itself into a dozen silver threads on a breezy upland, and
became an innocent trout beck, and we halted at a half-dead city, the
name of which does not remain with me. It had originally been built on
the crest of a wave of prosperity. Once ten thousand people had walked
its street; but the boom had collapsed. The great brick houses and the
factories were empty. The population lived in little timber shanties on
the fringes of the deserted town. There were some railway workshops and
things, and the hotel (whose pavement formed the platform of the
railway) contained one hundred and more rooms--empty. The place, in its
half-inhabitedness, was more desolate than Amber or Chitor. But a man
said: "Trout--six pounds--two miles away," and the Sorrowful Man and
myself went in search of 'em. The town was ringed by a circle of hills
all alive with little thunder-storms that broke across the soft green of
the plain in wisps and washes of smoke and amber.

To our tiny party associated himself a lawyer from Chicago. We
foregathered on the question of flies, but I didn't expect to meet
Elijah Pogram in the flesh. He delivered orations on the future of
England and America, and of the Great Federation that the years will
bring forth when America and England will belt the globe with their
linked hands. According to the notions of the British, he made an ass of
himself, but for all his high-falutin he talked sense. I might knock
through England on