sleeping-car,--a form of confinement which, like any other, throws the
prisoner considerably on his fancy; and a vision somewhat like the above
smoothed for a moment the pillow of an "upper berth," and pleased better
than the negro porter. Half a dozen of those days of too many paper
novels, of too much tobacco, of too little else, followed each other
with the sameness of so many raw oysters. Then there came a chill night
of wide moonlit vacuity passed on the prairie by the side of the driver
of a "jumper,"--a driver who slumbered, happy man!--and at peep of dawn
I found myself standing, stiff and shivering, in a certain little Texas
town. A much-soiled, white little street, a bit of greenish-yellow,
treeless plain soft in the morning mist, a rosy fringe at the edge of
the sky,--it was of these things, together with a disagreeable sense of
imponderability of body from the cold and sleepless ride, that I was
vaguely aware as the jumper--rigorous vehicle!--disappeared round a
corner. Frontier towns are not lovely, and the death-like peace which
seemed properly to accompany the chalky pallor of the buildings was
somewhat uncanny; but it proved to be only what sleep can do for a
village with railroad influences one hundred miles away. We entered
boldly the adobe before which we had been dropped, and found a genial
landlord in an impromptu costume justified by the hour, an inn-album of
quite cosmopolitan range of inscriptions, and a breakfast for which a
week of traveller's fare had amply fortified the spirit.

The village was the chief, indeed, wellnigh the only, town of a great
west-by-north county, in which Rhode Island would be lost and
Massachusetts find elbow-room. It was an irregular little bunch of
buildings gathered along an arterial street which, after a run of three
hundred yards or so, broke to pieces and scattered its dispersed
shanties about a high, barren plain. It stood on the steep bank of a
little river, and over against it, on a naked hill, was Uncle Sam's