a lover's fond desire that his friend should be in love, too.

"To those wilds? To a redwood shanty in California, or a turf hovel
in Colorado? What nice girl would go? 'I will take some savage woman,
she shall rear my dusky race.'"

"I don't like to have you take any risks of degenerating,"
began Dunham.

"With what you know to be my natural tendencies? Your prophetic eye
prefigures my pantaloons in the tops of my boots. Well, there is time
yet to turn back from the brutality of a patriarchal life. You must
allow that I've taken the longest way round in going West. In Italy
there are many chances; and besides, you know, I like to talk."

It seemed to be an old subject between them, and they discussed it
languidly, like some abstract topic rather than a reality.

"If you only had some tie to bind you to the East, I should feel
pretty safe about you," said Dunham, presently.

"I have you," answered his friend, demurely.

"Oh, I'm nothing," said Dunham, with sincerity.

"Well, I may form some tie in Italy. Art may fall in love with me,
there. How would you like to have me settle in Florence, and set up
a studio instead of a ranch,--choose between sculpture and painting,
instead of cattle and sheep? After all, it does grind me to have lost
that money! If I had only been swindled out of it, I shouldn't have