renewing our resolution to find it.

* * * * *

Although that was twenty years ago, none of us have ever climbed the
Enchanted Bluff. Percy Pound is a stockbroker in Kansas City and
will go nowhere that his red touring-car cannot carry him. Otto
Hassler went on the railroad and lost his foot braking; after which
he and Fritz succeeded their father as the town tailors.

Arthur sat about the sleepy little town all his life--he died before
he was twenty-five. The last time I saw him, when I was home on one
of my college vacations, he was sitting in a steamer-chair under a
cottonwood tree in the little yard behind one of the two Sandtown
saloons. He was very untidy and his hand was not steady, but when he
rose, unabashed, to greet me, his eyes were as clear and warm as
ever. When I had talked with him for an hour and heard him laugh
again, I wondered how it was that when Nature had taken such pains
with a man, from his hands to the arch of his long foot, she had
ever lost him in Sandtown. He joked about Tip Smith's Bluff, and
declared he was going down there just as soon as the weather got
cooler; he thought the Grand Canyon might be worth while, too.

I was perfectly sure when I left him that he would never get beyond
the high plank fence and the comfortable shade of the cottonwood.
And, indeed, it was under that very tree that he died one summer
morning.

Tip Smith still talks about going to New Mexico. He married a
slatternly, unthrifty country girl, has been much tied to a
perambulator, and has grown stooped and gray from irregular meals
and broken sleep. But the worst of his difficulties are now over,
and he has, as he says, come into easy water. When I was last in
Sandtown I walked home with him late one moonlight night, after he
had balanced his cash and shut up his store. We took the long way
around and sat down on the schoolhouse steps, and between us we
quite revived the romance of the lone red rock and the extinct
people. Tip insists that he still means to go down there, but he
thinks now he will wait until his boy, Bert, is old enough to go
with him. Bert has been let into the story, and thinks of nothing
but the Enchanted Bluff.

_Harper's_, April 1909

_The Joy of Nelly Deane_

Nell and I were almost ready to go on for the last act of "Queen
Esther," and we had for the moment got rid of our three patient
dressers, Mrs