her; and her eyes
were kind, dark, and steady. She sold milk with patriarchal grace. There
was not a line in her countenance, not a note in her soft and sleepy
voice, but spoke of an entire contentment with her life. It would have
been fatuous arrogance to pity such a woman. Yet the place where she
lived was to me almost ghastly. Less than a dozen wooden houses, all of
a shape and all nearly of a size, stood planted along the railway lines.
Each stood apart in its own lot. Each opened direct off the
billiard-board, as if it were a billiard-board indeed, and these only
models that had been set down upon it ready made. Her own, into which I
looked, was clean but very empty, and showed nothing homelike but the
burning fire. This extreme newness, above all in so naked and flat a
country, gives a strong impression of artificiality. With none of the
litter and discoloration of human life; with the paths unworn, and the
houses still sweating from the axe, such a settlement as this seems
purely scenic. The mind is loth to accept it for a piece of reality; and
it seems incredible that life can go on with so few properties, or the
great child, man, find entertainment in so bare a playroom.

And truly it is as yet an incomplete society in some points; or at least
it contained, as I passed through, one person incompletely civilised. At
North Platte, where we supped that evening, one man asked another to
pass the milk-jug. This other was well dressed and of what we should
call a respectable appearance; a darkish man, high-spoken, eating as
though he had some usage of society; but he turned upon the first
speaker with extraordinary vehemence of tone--

"There's a waiter here!" he cried.

"I only asked you to pass the milk," explained the first.

Here is the retort verbatim--

"Pass! Hell! I'm not paid for that business; the waiter's paid for it.
You should use civility at table, and, by God, I'll show you how!"

The other man very wisely made no answer, and the bully went on with his
supper as though nothing had occurred. It pleases me to think that some
day soon he will meet one of his own kidney; and perhaps both may fall.

THE DESERT OF WYOMING

To cross such a plain is to grow homesick for the mountains. I longed
for the Black Hills of Wyoming, which I knew we were soon to enter, like
an ice-bound whaler for the spring. Alas! and it was a worse country
than the other. All Sunday and Monda