store, refused to interfere. Maw told me that she
had been a school-teacher in her not-so-distant youth, but did not tell
me what I was dying to know--how she arrived at this mucky tenement at
the back of beyond, and why. Though preserving the prettinesses of her
New England speech, she had come to regard washing as a luxury. Paw
chewed tobacco and spat from time to time. Yet, when he opened his mouth
for other purposes, he spoke like a well-educated man. There was a story
there, but I couldn't get at it.

Next day the Man with the Sorrow and myself and a few others began the
real ascent of the Rockies; up to that time our climbing didn't count.
The train ran violently up a steep place and was taken to pieces. Five
cars were hitched on to two locomotives, and two cars to one locomotive.
This seemed to be a kind and thoughtful act, but I was idiot enough to
go forward and watch the coupling-on of the two rear cars in which Caesar
and his fortunes were to travel. Some one had lost or eaten the
regularly ordained coupling, and a man picked up from the tailboard of
the engine a single iron link about as thick as a fetter-link
watch-chain, and "guessed it would do." Get hauled up a Simla cliff by
the hook of a lady's parasol if you wish to appreciate my sentiments
when the cars moved uphill and the link drew tight. Miles away and two
thousand feet above our heads rose the shoulder of a hill epauletted
with the long line of a snow-tunnel. The first section of the cars
crawled a quarter of a mile ahead of us, the track snaked and looped
behind, and there was a black drop to the left. So we went up and up
and up till the thin air grew thinner and the _chunk-chunk-chunk_, of
the labouring locomotive was answered by the oppressed beating of the
exhausted heart. Through the chequed light and shade of the snow tunnels
(horrible caverns of rude timbering) we ground our way, halting now and
again to allow a down-train to pass. One monster of forty mineral-cars
slid past, scarce held by four locomotives, their brakes screaming and
chortling in chorus; and in the end, after a glimpse at half America
spread mapwise leagues below us, we halted at the head of the longest
snow tunnel of all, on the crest of the divide, between ten and eleven
thousand feet above the level of the sea. The locomotive wished to draw
breath, and the passengers to gather the flowers that nodded
impertinently through the chinks of the boarding. A lady passenger's