fair roads toward the rising sun. I am not long out before meeting with
that characteristic feature of a scene on the Western plains, a "prairie
schooner;" and meeting prairie schooners will now be a daily incident
of my eastward journey. Many of these "pilgrims" come from the backwoods
of Missouri and Arkansas, or the rural districts of some other Western
State, where the persevering, but at present circumscribed, cycler has
not yet had time to penetrate, and the bicycle is therefore to them a
wonder to be gazed at and commented on, generally - it must be admitted -
in language more fluent as to words than in knowledge of the subject
discussed. Not far from where the trail leads out of Crow Creek bottom
on to the higher table-land, I find the grassy plain smoother than the
wagon-trail, and bowl along for a short distance as easily as one could
wish. But not for long is this permitted; the ground becomes covered
with a carpeting of small, loose cacti that stick to the rubber tire
with the clinging tenacity of a cuckle-burr to a mule's tail. Of course
they scrape off again as they come round to the bridge of the fork, but
it isn't the tire picking them up that fills me with lynx-eyed vigilance
and alarm; it is the dreaded possibility of taking a header among these
awful vegetables that unnerves one, starts the cold chills chasing each
other up and down my spinal column, and causes staring big beads of
perspiration to ooze out of my forehead. No more appalling physical
calamity on a small scale could befall a person than to take a header
on to a cactus-covered greensward; millions of miniature needles would
fill his tender hide with prickly sensations, and his vision with floating
stars. It would perchance cast clouds of gloom over his whole life.
Henceforth he would be a solemn-visaged, bilious-eyed needle-cushion
among men, and would never smile again. I once knew a young man named
Whipple, who sat down on a bunch of these cacti at a picnic in Virginia
Dale, Wyo., and he never smiled again. Two meek-eyed maidens of the
Rockies invited him to come and take a seat between them on a thin,