orately gilt saloons; in one a banquet seemed
to be spread, served by white-jacketed servants; in another were men
playing cards around marble-topped tables; in another the light flashed
back again from the mirrors and glistening glasses and decanters of
a gorgeous refreshment saloon; in smaller openings there was the shy
disclosure of dainty white curtains and velvet lounges of more intimate
apartments.

Martin Morse stood enthralled and mystified. It was as if some invisible
Asmodeus had revealed to this simple frontiersman a world of which he
had never dreamed. It was THE world--a world of which he knew nothing
in his simple, rustic habits and profound Western isolation--sweeping by
him with the rush of an unknown planet. In another moment it was gone; a
shower of sparks shot up from one of the towers and fell all around him,
and then vanished, even as he remembered the set piece of "Fourth of
July" fireworks had vanished in his own rural town when he was a boy.
The darkness fell with it too. But such was his utter absorption and
breathless preoccupation that only a cold chill recalled him to himself,
and he found he was standing mid-leg deep in the surge cast over the low
banks by this passage of the first steamboat he had ever seen!

He waited for it the next night, when it appeared a little later from
the opposite direction on its return trip. He watched it the next night
and the next. Hereafter he never missed it, coming or going--whatever
the hard and weary preoccupations of his new and lonely life. He felt he
could not have slept without seeing it go by. Oddly enough, his interest
and desire did not go further. Even had he the time and money to spend
in a passage on the boat, and thus actively realize the great world of
which he had only these rare glimpses, a certain proud, rustic shyness
kept him from it. It was not HIS world; he could not affront the snubs
that his ignorance and inexperience would have provoked, and he was
dimly conscious, as so many of us are in our ignorance, that in mingling
with it he would simply lose the easy privileges of alien criticism. For
there was much that he did not understand, and some things that grated
upon his lonely independence.

One night, a lighter one than those previous, he lingered a little
longer in the moonlight to watch the phosphorescent wake of the
retreating boat. Suddenly it struck him that there was a certain
irregular splashing in the water, quite differen