"Why, Percival," exclaimed his mother, reprovingly, "do you mean to say
there aren't any Christians in Montana City? How you talk! There are
lots of good Christian people there, though I must say I have my doubts
about that new Christian Science church they started last spring." "The
term, Mrs. Thorndike, was used in its social rather than its
theological significance," replied her son, urbanely. "Far be it from
me to impugn the religion of that community of which we are ceasing to
be integers at the pleasing rate of sixty miles an hour. God knows they
need their faith in a different kind of land hereafter!"

And even Mrs. Bines was not without a sense of quiet and rest induced
by the gentler contours of the landscape through which they now sped.

"The country here does seem a lot cosier," she admitted.

The hills rolled away amiably and reassuringly; the wooded slopes in
their gay colouring of autumn invited confidence. Here were no
forbidding stretches of the grey alkali desert, no grim bare mountains,
no solitude of desolation. It was a kind land, fat with riches. The
shorn yellow fields, the capacious red barns, the well-conditioned
homes, all told eloquently of peace and plenty. So, too, did the
villages--those lively little clearing-houses for immense farming
districts. To the adventurer from New York they seem always new and
crude. To our travellers from a newer, cruder region they were actually
aesthetic in their suggestions of an old and well-established
civilisation.

In due time they were rattling over a tangled maze of switches, dodging
interminable processions of freight-cars, barely missing crowded
passenger trains whose bells struck clear and then flatted as the