my note-book this morning, but when I read them
over, and then looked out of the window, I tore them up. I think the
wonderfully fine, clear, brilliant air transfigures the landscape and
makes it something that must be seen and can't be told. After seeing how
this air makes the ugly sagebrush and the patches of alkali and brown
earth a feast to the eye, one can understand how the light of heaven may
make the ugliest faces beautiful."

The pretty talker is sitting next the window of palace-car No. 30 of
the Central Pacific line, which has already been her flying home for
two days. The gentleman who sits beside her professes to be sharing
the view, but it is only fair I should tell the reader that under this
pretense he is nefariously delighting in the rounded contour of his
companion's half-averted face, as she, in unfeigned engrossment, scans
the panorama unrolled before them by the swift motion of the car. How
sweet and fresh is the bright tint of her cheek against the ghastly
white background of the alkali-patches as they flit by! Still, it can't
be said that he is n't enjoying the scenery too, for surely there is
no such Claude-Lorraine glass to reflect and enhance the beauty of a
landscape as the face of a _spirituelle_ girl.

With a profound sigh, summing up both her admiration and that despair of
attaining the perfect insight and sympathy imagined and longed for which
is always a part of intense appreciation of natural beauty, Miss Dwyer
threw herself back in her seat, and fixed her eyes on the car-ceiling
with an expression as if she were looking at something at least as far
away as the moon.

"I 'm going to make a statue when I get home," she said,--"a statue
which will personify Nevada, and represent the tameless, desolate,
changeless, magnificent beauty and the self-sufficient loneliness of
the desert. I can see it in my mind's eye now. It will probably be the
finest statue in the world."

"If you 'd as lief put your ideal into a painting, I will give you a
suggestion that will be original if nothing else," he observed.

"What's that?"

"Why, having in view these white alkali-patches that chiefly
characterize Nevada, paint her as a leper."

"That's horrid! You need n't talk to me any more," she exclaimed
emphatically.

With this sort of chatter they had beguiled the time since leaving San
Francisco the morning of the day before. Acquaintances are indeed made
as rapidly on an overland train as on an o