n the souls of the great mass of his American readers. Students
of our social life have pointed out again and again how deeply our
national temperament has been affected by the existence, during nearly
three hundred years, of an alien aboriginal race forever lurking upon
the borders of our civilization. "Playing Indian" has been immensely
significant, not merely in stimulating the outdoor activity of
generations of American boys, but in teaching them the perennial
importance of certain pioneer qualities of observation,
resourcefulness, courage, and endurance which date from the time when
the Indians were a daily and nightly menace. Even when the Indian has
been succeeded by the cowboy, the spirit of romance still lingers,--as
any collection of cowboy ballads will abundantly prove. And when the
cowboys pass, and the real-estate dealers take possession of the
field, one is tempted to say that romance flourishes more than ever.

In short, things are what we make them at the moment, what we believe
them to be. In my grandfather's youth the West was in the neighborhood
of Port Byron, New York, and when he journeyed thither from
Massachusetts in the eighteen-twenties, the glory of adventure enfolded
him as completely as the boys of the preceding generation had been
glorified in the War of the Revolution, or the boys of the next
generation when they went gold-seeking in California in 1849. The West,
in short, means simply the retreating horizon, the beckoning finger of
opportunity. Like Boston, it has been not a place, but a "state of
mind."

"We must go, go, go away from here,
On the other side the world we're overdue."

That is the song which sings itself forever in the heart of youth.
Champlain and Cartier heard it in the sixteenth century, Bradford no
less than Morton in the seventeenth. Some Eldorado has always been
calling to the more adventurous spirits upon American soil. The
passion of the forty-niner neither began nor ended with the discovery
of gold in California. It is within us. It transmutes the harsh or
drab-colored everyday routine into tissue of fairyland. It makes our
"winning of the West" a magnificent national epic. It changes to-day
the black belt of Texas, or the wheat-fields of Dakota, into pots of
gold that lie at the end of rainbows, only that the pot of gold is
actually there. The human hunger of it all, the gorgeous dream-like
quality of it all, the boundlessness of the vast American space