; for, whether he was born on the rail or not, he belongs to
the railway system of civilization. Before he gets into trousers he is
old in experience, and he has discounted many of the novelties that
usually break gradually on the pilgrim in this world. He belongs to the
new expansive race that must live in motion, whose proper home is the
Pullman (which will probably be improved in time into a dustless,
sweet-smelling, well-aired bedroom), and whose domestic life will be on
the wing, so to speak. The Inter-State Commerce Bill will pass him along
without friction from end to end of the Union, and perhaps a uniform
divorce law will enable him to change his marital relations at any place
where he happens to dine. This promising lad is only a faint intimation
of what we are all coming to when we fully acquire the freedom of the
continent, and come into that expansiveness of feeling and of language
which characterizes the Great West. It is a burst of joyous exuberance
that comes from the sense of an illimitable horizon. It shows itself in
the tender words of a local newspaper at Bowie, Arizona, on the death of
a beloved citizen: "'Death loves a shining mark,' and she hit a dandy
when she turned loose on Jim." And also in the closing words of a New
Mexico obituary, which the Kansas Magazine quotes: "Her tired spirit was
released from the pain-racking body and soared aloft to eternal glory at
4.30 Denver time." We die, as it were, in motion, as we sleep, and there
is nowhere any boundary to our expansion. Perhaps we shall never again
know any rest as we now understand the term--rest being only change of
motion--and we shall not be able to sleep except on the cars, and whether
we die by Denver time or by the 90th meridian, we shall only change our
time. Blessed be this slip of a boy who is a man before he is an infant,
and teaches us what rapid transit can do for our race! The only thing
that can possibly hinder us in our progress will be second childhood; we
have abolished first.

THE ELECTRIC WAY

We are quite in the electric way. We boast that we have made electricity
our slave, but the slave whom we do not understand is our master. And
before we know him we shall be transformed. Mr. Edison proposes to send
us over the country at the rate of one hundred miles an hour. This
pleases us, because we fancy we shall save time, and because we are
taught that the chief object in life is to "get there" quickly. We really
have