tly to Paris! It would be difficult to imagine a more
amazing translation--and yet, now that she was back in the midst of it,
she gave no sign of the disheartenment she must have felt. She met all
her old friends and neighbors with unaffected interest and gayety.

Twenty-four hours later we were in the midst of a wide, sunny prairie,
across which, in white-topped prairie schooners, settlers were moving
just as they had passed our door in Iowa thirty years before. Plowmen
were breaking the sod as my father had done in '71, and their women
washing and cooking in the open air, offered familiar phases of the
immemorial American drama,--only the stations on the railway broke the
spell of the past with a modern word.

Swarms of bearded, slouchy, broad-hatted men filled the train and
crowded the platforms of the villages. Cow-boys, Indians in white men's
clothing, negroes (black and brown), and tall, blonde Tennessee
mountaineers made up this amazing population--a population in which
libraries were of small value, a tobacco-chewing, ceaselessly spitting
unkempt horde, whose stage of culture was almost precisely that which
Dickens and other travelers from the old world had found in the Central
West in the forties.

How these scenes affected my young wife I will not undertake to say; but
I remember that she kept pretty close to my elbow whenever we mingled
with the crowd, and the deeper we got into this raw world the more
uneasy she became. "Where shall we spend the night?" she asked.

Had I been alone I would not have worried about a hotel, but with a
young wife who knew nothing of roughing it, I became worried. To the
conductor I put an anxious question, "Is there a decent hotel in Reno?"

His answer was a bit contemptuous, "Sure," he exclaimed. "What do you
think you're doing--exploring?"

This was precisely what I feared we _were_ doing. I said no more about
it, although I hadn't much confidence in his notions of a first class
hotel. There was nothing for it but to rest upon his assurance and go
hopefully forward to the end of the line.

It must have been about ten of a dark warm night as we came to a final
halt beside a low station marked "Reno," and at the suggestion of the
brakeman I called for "the Palace Hotel Bus," although none of the
waiting carriages or drivers seemed even remotely related to a palace.
My wife, filled with a high sense of our adventure, took her seat in
the muddy and smelly carriage, with tou