GREEN FIELDS AND PASTURES NEW

The Imperial Limited lurched with a swing around the last hairpin curve
of the Yale canyon. Ahead opened out a timbered valley,--narrow on its
floor, flanked with bold mountains, but nevertheless a valley,--down
which the rails lay straight and shining on an easy grade. The river
that for a hundred miles had boiled and snarled parallel to the tracks,
roaring through the granite sluice that cuts the Cascade Range, took a
wider channel and a leisurely flow. The mad haste had fallen from it as
haste falls from one who, with time to spare, sees his destination near
at hand; and the turgid Fraser had time to spare, for now it was but
threescore miles to tidewater. So the great river moved placidly--as an
old man moves when all the headlong urge of youth is spent and his race
near run.

On the river side of the first coach behind the diner, Estella Benton
nursed her round chin in the palm of one hand, leaning her elbow on the
window sill. It was a relief to look over a widening valley instead of a
bare-walled gorge all scarred with slides, to see wooded heights lift
green in place of barren cliffs, to watch banks of fern massed against
the right of way where for a day and a night parched sagebrush, brown
tumble-weed, and such scant growth as flourished in the arid uplands of
interior British Columbia had streamed in barren monotony, hot and dry
and still.

She was near the finish of her journey. Pensively she considered the end
of the road. How would it be there? What manner of folk and country?
Between her past mode of life and the new that she was hurrying toward
lay the vast gulf of distance, of custom, of class even. It was bound to
be crude, to be full of inconveniences and uncouthness. Her brother's