The American man only develops himself and spreads himself and grows "for
all he is worth" in the Great West. He is more free and limber there, and
unfolds those generous peculiarities and largenesses of humanity which
never blossomed before. The "environment" has much to do with it. The
great spaces over which he roams contribute to the enlargement of his
mental horizon. There have been races before who roamed the illimitable
desert, but they traveled on foot or on camelback, and were limited in
their range. There was nothing continental about them, as there is about
our railway desert travelers, who swing along through thousands of miles
of sand and sage-bush with a growing contempt for time and space. But
expansive and great as these people have become under the new conditions,
we have a fancy that the development of the race has only just begun, and
that the future will show us in perfection a kind of man new to the
world. Out somewhere on the Santa Fe route, where the desert of one day
was like the desert of the day before, and the Pullman car rolls and
swings over the wide waste beneath the blue sky day after day, under its
black flag of smoke, in the early gray of morning, when the men were
waiting their turns at the ablution bowls, a slip of a boy, perhaps aged
seven, stood balancing himself on his little legs, clad in
knicker-bockers, biding his time, with all the nonchalance of an old
campaigner. "How did you sleep, cap?" asked a well-meaning elderly
gentleman. "Well, thank you," was the dignified response; "as I always do
on a sleeping-car." Always does? Great horrors! Hardly out of his
swaddling-clothes, and yet he always sleeps well in a sleeper! Was he
born on the wheels? was he cradled in a Pullman? He has always been in
motion, probably; he was started at thirty miles an hour, no doubt, this
marvelous boy of our new era. He was not born in a house at rest, but the
locomotive snatched him along with a shriek and a roar before his eyes
were fairly open, and he was rocked in a "section," and his first
sensation of life was that of moving rapidly over vast arid spaces,