ak!

I sat at a dinner table one day when the salted almonds were handed me
with the remark: "I suppose you never saw anything like these out West.
Try some." And my wife has been quite gravely asked if we feared any
raids by the Indians and if they troubled us by their marauding in
Kansas. I have found it necessary to inform the curious that we did not
live in tepees or wigwams when in Nebraska or Colorado.

Shortly after I came East to live I was talking with a man and a very
stupid man at that, who informed me that he graduated from Harvard; to
which surprising statement he added the startling information, for the
benefit of my presumably untutored occidental mind, that it was a
college near Boston! They have everything in the West that the East has
so far as their sometimes limited means will provide them and when they
have no money they have patience, endurance, grim determination, and
courage, which are better than money in the long run.

The cities and smaller towns especially as a rule are cleaner, better
governed, more progressive, better provided with improvements and
comforts than corresponding places in the East. Scarcely a community
exists without its water works, electric light plant, telephone system,
trolleys, paved streets, etc. Of course, this does not apply to the
extreme frontier in which my field of work largely lay so many years
ago. The conditions were different there--the people too in that now
far-distant time.

But to return to Christmas. One Christmas day I left my family at one
o'clock in the morning. Christmas salutations were exchanged at that
very sleepy hour and I took the fast express to a certain station whence
I could drive up country to a little church in a farming country in
which there had never been a Christmas service. It was a bitter cold
morning, deep snow on the ground, and a furious north wind raging.

The climate is variable indeed out West. I have spent Christmas days on
which it rained all day and of all days in the year on which to have it
rain, Christmas is the worst. Still, the farmers would be thankful. It
was usually safe to be thankful out there whenever it rained. I knew a
man once who said you could make a fortune by always betting two to one
that it would not rain, no matter what the present promise of the
weather was. You were bound to win nine times out of ten.

I hired a good sleigh and two horses, and drove to my destination. The
church was a little old b