innocuous-looking layer of hay. Smilingly poor, unsuspecting Whipple
accepted the invitation; jokingly he suggested that it would be a rose
between two thorns. But immediately he sat down he became convinced that
it was the liveliest thorn - or rather millions of thorns - between two
roses. Of course the two meek-eyed maidens didn't know it was there, how
should they. But, all the same, he never smiled again - not on them.

At the section-house, where I call for dinner, I make the mistake of
leaving the bicycle behind the house, and the woman takes me for an
uncommercial traveller - yes, a tramp. She snaps out, "We can't feed
everybody that comes along," and shuts the door in my face. Yesterday I
was the centre of admiring crowds in the richest city of its size in
America; to-day I am mistaken for a hungry-eyed tramp, and spurned from
the door by a woman with a faded calico dress and a wrathy what - are?
look in her eye. Such is life in the Far West.

Gradually the Rockies have receded from my range of vision, and I am
alone on the boundless prairie. There is a feeling of utter isolation
at finding one's self alone on the plains that is not experienced in the
mountain country. There is something tangible and companionable about a
mountain; but here, where there is no object in view anywhere - nothing
but the boundless, level plains, stretching away on every hand as far
as the eye can reach, I and all around, whichever way one looks, nothing
but the green carpet below and the cerulean arch above-one feels that
he is the sole occupant of a vast region of otherwise unoccupied space.
This evening, while fording Pole Creek with the bicycle, my clothes, and
shoes - all at the same time - the latter fall in the river; and m my wild
scramble after the shoes I drop some of the clothes; then I drop the
machine in my effort to save the clothes, and wind up by falling down
in the water with everything. Everything is fished out again all right,