is boots."

Saturday afternoon, May 6.--Near Los Angeles. I have been writing all
day, to be sure and get everything in, and now Sharon is twenty-four
hours ago, and here there are roses, gardens, and many nice houses at
the way-stations. Oh, George Washington, father of your country, what a
brindled litter have you sired!

But here the moral reflections begin again, and I copy no more diary.
Mrs. Brewton liked my names for the twins. "They'll pronounce it
Loyo'la," she said, "and that sounds right lovely." Later she sent me
her paper for the Golden Daughters. It is full of poetry and sentiment
and all the things I have missed. She wrote that if she had been sure
the agent had helped Aqua Marine to swallow the ring, she would have let
them smash his boxes. And I think she was a little in love with Shot-gun
Smith. But what a pity we shall soon have no more Mrs. Brewtons! The
causes that produced her--slavery, isolation, literary tendencies,
adversity, game blood--that combination is broken forever. I shall speak
to Mr. Howells about her. She ought to be recorded.

The Promised Land

Perhaps there were ten of them--these galloping dots were hard to
count--down in the distant bottom across the river. Their swiftly moving
dust hung with them close, thinning to a yellow veil when they halted
short. They clustered a moment, then parted like beads, and went wide
asunder on the plain. They veered singly over the level, merged in twos
and threes, apparently racing, shrank together like elastic, and broke
ranks again to swerve over the stretching waste. From this visioned
pantomime presently came a sound, a tiny shot. The figures were too
far for discerning which fired it. It evidently did no harm, and was
repeated at once. A babel of diminutive explosions followed, while the
horsemen galloped on in unexpected circles. Soon, for no visible reason,
the dots ran together, bunching compactly. The shooting stopped, the
dust rose thick again from the crowded hoofs, cloaking the group, and so
passed back and was lost among the silent barren hills.

Four emigrants had watched this from the high bleak rim of the Big Bend.
They stood where the flat of the desert broke and tilted down in grooves
and bulges deep to the lurking Columbia. Empty levels lay opposite,
narrowing up into the high country.

"That's the Colville Reservation across the river from us," said the
man.

"Another!" sighed his wife.

"The last Indians we'