the Sierras the old man would be leading, as he had long chosen to lead
each summer, the lonely life of a prospector. The young man, two years
out of Harvard, and but recently back from an extended European tour,
was at some point on the North Atlantic coast, beginning the season's
pursuit of happiness as he listed.

Only in a land so young that almost the present dwellers therein have
made it might we find individualities which so decisively failed to
blend. So little congruous was the family of Bines in root, branch, and
blossom, that it might, indeed, be taken to picture an epic of Western
life as the romancer would tell it. First of the line stands the figure
of Peter Bines, the pioneer, contemporary with the stirring days of
Fremont, of Kit Carson, of Harney, and Bridger; the fearless strivers
toward an ever-receding West, fascinating for its untried dangers as
for its fabled wealth,--the sturdy, grave men who fought and toiled and
hoped, and realised in varying measure, but who led in sober truth a
life such as the colours of no taleteller shall ever be high enough to
reproduce.

Next came Daniel J. Bines, a type of the builder and organiser who
followed the trail blazed by the earlier pioneer; the genius who,
finding the magic realm opened, forthwith became its exploiter to its
vast renown and his own large profit, coining its wealth of minerals,
lumber, cattle, and grain, and adventurously building the railroads
that must always be had to drain a new land of savagery.

Nor would there be wanting a third--a figure of this present day,
containing, in potency at least, the stanch qualities of his two rugged
forbears,--the venturesome spirit that set his restless grandsire to
roving westward, the power to group and coordinate, to "think three