ivilization that the Territory had taken. "Let Pennsylvania
see those blossoming fields for herself," said he, "those boundless
contiguities of shade." And a sort of cluck went off down inside my
neighbor's throat, while the speaker with rising heat gave us the
tonnage of plums exported from the Territory during the past fiscal
year. Wool followed.

"Sock it to 'em, Limber Jim!" murmured the man in the duster, and
executed a sort of step. He was plainly a personal acquaintance of the
speaker's.

Figures never stick by me, nor can I quote accurately the catalogue of
statistic abundance now recited in the House of Representatives; but as
wheat, corn, peaches, apricots, oranges, raisins, spices, the rose and
the jasmine flowered in the Boy Orator's eloquence, the genial antics of
my neighbor increased until he broke into delighted mutterings, such as
"He's a stud-horse," and "Put the kybosh on 'em," and many more that
have escaped my memory. But the Boy Orator's peroration I am glad to
remember, for his fervid convictions lifted him into the domain of
metaphor and cadence; and though to be sure I made due allowance for
enthusiasm, his picture of Arizona remained vivid with me, and I should
have voted to make the Territory a State that very day.

"With her snow-clad summits, with the balm of her Southern vineyards,
she loudly calls for a sister's rights. Not the isles of Greece, nor any
cycle of Cathay, can compete with her horticultural resources, her Salt
River, her Colorado, her San Pedro, her Gila, her hundred irrigated
valleys, each one surpassing the shaded Paradise of the Nile, where
thousands of noble men and elegantly educated ladies have already
located, and to which thousands more, like patient monuments, are
waiting breathless to throng when the franchise is proclaimed. And if my
death could buy that franchise, I would joyfully boast such martyrdom."

The orator cracked his hands together in this supreme moment, and the
bulky gentleman in the duster drove an elbow against my side, whispering
to me at the same time behind his hand, in a hoarse confidence:
"Deserted Jericho! California only holds the record on stoves now."

"I'm afraid I do not catch your allusion," I began. But at my voice he
turned sharply, and, giving me one short, ugly stare, was looking about
him, evidently at some loss, when a man at his farther side pulled at
his duster, and I then saw that he had all along been taking me for a
younger