ment to Washington, and last, but not least,
the superb old White House.

The next step was across the mountains on the Baltimore and Ohio,
the short cut between the East and the West, traversed so often by
George Washington to get good land for the extension of our national
foundations. The space between Cincinnati and Chicago is cleared on the
"Big Four" with a bound through the shadow of the earth, between two
rare days in June, and the next midnight, the roaring train flew high
over the Missouri River at Omaha, and by daylight far on the way to
Ogden. The country was rich in corn and grass, and when one beholds the
fat cattle, lamentations for the lost buffalo cease. It is a delight
to see young orchards and farmhouses, and cribs and sheds fortified
against tornadoes by groves, laid out with irritating precision to
confront the whirling storms from west and south. The broad bad lands
in which the tempests are raised devour the heart of the continent.

I made note of the 888-mile post beyond Omaha, but the 1,000-mile
telegraph pole and tree glided away while I was catching the lights
and shadows on a fearfully tumbled landscape. The alkali has poisoned
enormous tracts, and the tufts of sagebrush have a huge and sinister
monotony. Looking out early in the morning there was in our track
a "gaunt grey wolf" with sharp ears, unabashed by the roar of the
train. His species find occasional scraps along the track and do
not fear the trains. Then I saw something glisten in the herbage,
and it was a rattlesnake, if it were not a whisky bottle.

The gigantic lumps of tawny earth, with castellated crags of stone,
ghostly ruins one would say of cities that perished thousands of years
before the bricks were made for Babylon. Profound beds for vanished
torrents yawned into a scrap of green valley, and the glitter of a
thread of water. A town blossomed from a coal mine, and there was
an array of driven wells with force pumps to quench the thirst of
seething and raging locomotives. A turn in the line and a beautiful
cloud formation like billows of white roses, massive, delicately
outlined fantastic spires like marble mountains, carved--ah! the
cloud comes out clear as if it were a wall of pearl, and there are
the everlasting mighty hills with their brows of exquisite snow!

These are lofty reservoirs from which the long days glowing with
sunshine send down streams of water at whose touch the deserts
bloom. The eye is refreshed a