upon them afterwards, seemed to have passed in a dream.

No less strange and visionary to them seemed the real transitions they
noted from the moving train. How one morning they missed the changeless,
motionless, low, dark line along the horizon, and before noon found
themselves among the rocks and trees and a swiftly rushing river.
How there suddenly appeared beside them a few days later a great gray
cloud-covered ridge of mountains that they were convinced was that same
dark line that they had seen so often. How the men laughed at them, and
said that for the last three days they had been CROSSING that dark line,
and that it was HIGHER than the great gray-clouded range before them,
which it had always hidden from their view! How Susy firmly believed
that these changes took place in her sleep, when she always "kinder felt
they were crawlin' up," and how Clarence, in the happy depreciation of
extreme youth, expressed his conviction that they "weren't a bit high,
after all." How the weather became cold, though it was already summer,
and at night the camp fire was a necessity, and there was a stove in
the tent with Susy; and yet how all this faded away, and they were again
upon a dazzling, burnt, and sun-dried plain! But always as in a dream!

More real were the persons who composed the party--whom they seemed to
have always known--and who, in the innocent caprice of children, had
become to them more actual than the dead had even been. There was Mr.
Peyton, who they now knew owned the train, and who was so rich that he
"needn't go to California if he didn't want to, and was going to buy
a great deal of it if he liked it," and who was also a lawyer and
"policeman"--which was Susy's rendering of "politician"--and was called
"Squire" and "Judge" at the frontier outpost, and could order anybody to
be "took up if he wanted to," and who knew everybody by their Christian
names; and Mrs. Peyton, who had been delicate and was ordered by the