'Eastman would agree to water. Water and daughter
would go, but is frequently used, and spoils the meter.' So I fiddled
with my pencil down in the telegraph office, and I fixed the thing up.
How's this?

'So now am I come with this beautiful maid
To lead but one measure, drink one lemonade.'

Eastman accepts that. Says it's purer. Oh, it's not all sadness here!"

"How did you come to be in Sharon?" I asked my exotic acquaintance.

"Ah, how did I? How did all our crowd at the railroad? Somebody has got
to sell tickets, somebody has got to run that hotel, and telegraphs have
got to exist here. That's how we foreigners came. Many travellers change
cars here, and one train usually misses the other, because the two
companies do not love each other. You hear lots of language, especially
in December. Eastern consumptives bound for southern California get left
here, and drummers are also thick. Remarks range from 'How provoking!'
to things I would not even say myself. So that big hotel and depot has
to be kept running, and we fellows get a laugh now and then. Our lot is
better than these people's." He made a general gesture at Sharon.

"I should have thought it was worse," said I. "No, for we'll be
transferred some day. These poor folks are shipwrecked. Though it is
their own foolishness, all this."

Again my eye followed as he indicated the town with a sweep of his hand;
and from the town I looked to the four quarters of heaven. I may have
seen across into Old Mexico. No sign labels the boundary; the vacuum
of continent goes on, you might think, to Patagonia. Symptoms of
neighboring Mexico basked on the sand heaps along Sharon's spacious
avenues--little torpid, indecent gnomes in sashes and open rags, with
crowning-steeple straw hats, and murder dozing in their small black
eyes. They might have crawled from holes in the sand, or hatched out
of brown cracked pods on some weeds that trailed through the broken
bottles, the old shoes, and the wire fences. Outside these ramparts
began the vacuum, white, gray, indigo, florescent, where all the year
the sun shines. Not the semblance of any tree dances in the heat; only
rocks and lumps of higher sand waver and dissolve and reappear in the
shaking crystal of mirage. Not the scar of any river-bed furrows the
void. A river there is, flowing somewhere out of the shiny violet
mountains to the north, but it dies subterraneously on its way to
Sharon, misses the town, and eme