against the sky-line of memory? Years that we wish we could live again,
so that we might revel in every full-blooded hour. For we so seldom get
the proper focus on things until we look at them through the clarifying
telescope of Time; and then one realizes with a pang that he can't
back-track into the past and take his old place in the passing show.

Would we, if we could? It's an idle question, I know; wise men and musty
philosophers say that regrets are foolish. But I speak for myself only
when I say that I would gladly wheedle old, gray-bearded _Tempus_ into
making the wheels click backward till I could see again the
buffalo-herds darkening the green of Northwestern prairies. They and the
blanket Indian have passed, and the cowpuncher and Texas longhorns that
replaced them will soon be little more than a vivid memory. Already the
man with the plow is tearing up the brown sod that was a stamping-ground
for each in turn; the wheat-fields have doomed the sage-brush, and
truck-farms line the rivers where the wild cattle and the elk came down
to drink.

It was a big life while it lasted--primitive, exhilarating, spiced with
dangers that added zest to the game; the petty, sordid things of life
only came in on the iron trail. There was no place for them in the old
West, the dead-and-gone West that will soon be forgotten.

I expect nearly everybody between the Arctic Circle and the Isthmus of
Panama has heard more or less of the Northwest Mounted Police. They're
changing with the years, like everything else in this one-time buffalo
country, but when Canada sent them out to keep law and order in a
territory that was a City of Refuge for a lot of tough people who had
played their string out south of the line, they were, as a dry old
codger said about the Indian as a scalp-lifter, naturally fitted for the