elow, through the length of our
flying university, and made a night of it, without fear of notes or
detentions, and with no prefect stalking ghostlike in their midst.

It would be hard to say which we found most diverting, the long, long
landscape that divided as we passed, through it and closed up in the
rear, leaving only the shining iron seam down the middle; the beautiful,
undulating prairie land; the hot and dusty desolation of the plains;
the delicious temperature of the highlands, as we approached the Rockies
and had our first glimpse of Pike's Peak in its mantle of snow: the
muddy rivers, along whose shores we glided swiftly hour after hour: the
Mississippi by moonlight--we all sat up to see that--or the Missouri at
Kansas City, where we began to scatter our brood among their far Western
homes. At La Junta we said good-bye to the boys bound for Mexico and the
Southwest. It was like a second closing of the scholastic year; the
good-byes were now ringing fast and furious. Jolly fellows began to grow
grave and the serious ones more solemn; for there had been no cloud or
shadow for three rollicking days.

To be sure there was a kind of infantile cyclone out on the plains,
memorable for its superb atmospheric effects, and the rapidity with
which we shut down the windows to keep from being inflated
balloon-fashion. And there was a brisk hail-storm at the gate of the
Rockies that peppered us smartly for a few moments. Then there were some
boys who could not eat enough, and who turned from the dessert in
tearful dismay; and one little kid who dived out of the top bunk in a
moment of rapture, and should have broken his neck--but he didn't!

We were quite sybaritical as to hours, with breakfast and dinner
courses, and mouth-organs and cigarettes and jam between meals. Frosted
cake and oranges were left untouched upon the field after the
gastronomical battles were fought so bravely three or four times a day.
Perhaps the pineapples and bananas, and the open barrel of strawberries,
within reach of all at any hour, may account for the phenomenon.

Pueblo! Ah me, the heat of that infernal junction! Pueblo, with the
stump of its one memorable tree, or a slice of that stump turned up on
end--to make room for a new railway-station, that could just as well
have been built a few feet farther on,--and staring at you, with a full
broadside of patent-medicine placards trying to cover its nakedness. On
closer inspection we read this