at literary work of art, which all mankind
would look upon with awe, but which he, standing apart, would eye with
indifference, all joy being stricken dead by his memories of the past.
But that was in the future. Just now he was in the gloom business. So,
being a wealthy youth, he decided to go far, far away. This was
necessary in order that he might bury his grief.

He rather fancied battle-fields and carnage, but there were no wars. It
would add to the picture if he could return bronzed and battle-scarred,
but as that was impossible, he resolved to return bronzed, at any rate.
So he bought a ticket to a small town in Wyoming. There he and his
steamer-trunk boarded Thompson's stage, and journeyed to Placer Creek,
where the two of them, he and the trunk, took up their quarters in a
little board-ceiled room in the Prairie Dog Hotel.

The place was admirably adapted for glooming. It was a ramshackle affair
of four streets and sixteen saloons. Some of the houses, and all of the
saloons, had once been painted. In front were hitching-rails. To the
hitching-rails, at all times of the day, were tied ponies patiently
turning their tails to the Wyoming breezes. Wyoming breezes are always
going somewhere at the rate of from thirty to sixty miles an hour.
Beyond the town, in one direction, were some low mountains, well
supplied with dark gorges, narrow canons, murmuring water-falls, dashing
brooks, and precipitous descents. Beyond the town, in the other
direction, lay a broad, rolling country, on which cattle and cowboys
dwelt amid profanity and dust. Severne arose in a cold room, washed his
face in hard water, and descended to breakfast. The breakfast could not
have been better adapted to beginning a day of gloom. It started out
with sticky oatmeal, and ended with clammy cakes, between which was
much horror. After breakfast, he wandered in the dark gorges, narrow
canons, _et cetera_, and contemplated with melancholy but approving
interest his noble sacrifice and the wreck of his life. Thence he
returned to town.

In town, various incomprehensible individuals with a misguided sense of
humour did things to him, the reason of which he could not understand in
the least, mainly because he had himself no sense of humour, misguided
or otherwise. The things they did frightened and bewildered him. But he
examined them gravely through his shortsighted spectacles, noting just
how they were done, just how their perpetrators looked and acte