companion he had come in with, and with whom he now went away.
In the jostle we had shifted places while his eyes were upon the various
speakers, and to him I seemed an eavesdropper. Both he and his friend
had a curious appearance, and they looked behind them, meeting my gaze
as I watched them going; and then they made to each other some laughing
comment, of which I felt myself to be the inspiration. I was standing
absently on the same spot, still in a mild puzzle over California and
the record on stoves. Certainly I had overheard none of their secrets,
if they had any; I could not even guess what might be their true opinion
about admitting Arizona to our Union.

With this last memory of our Capitol and the statesmen we have
collected there to govern us, I entered upon my holiday, glad that it
was to be passed in such a region of enchantment. For peaches it would
be too early, and with roses and jasmine I did not importantly concern
myself, thinking of them only as a pleasant sight by the way. But on my
gradual journey through Lexington, Bowling Green, Little Rock, and Forth
Worth I dwelt upon the shade of the valleys, and the pasture hills
dotted with the sheep of whose wool the Boy Orator had spoken; and I
wished that our cold Northwest could have been given such a bountiful
climate. Upon the final morning of railroad I looked out of the window
at an earth which during the night had collapsed into a vacuum, as I had
so often seen happen before upon more Northern parallels. The evenness
of this huge nothing was cut by our track's interminable scar, and
broken to the eye by the towns which now and again rose and littered the
horizon like boxes dumped by emigrants. We were still in Texas, not
distant from the Rio Grande, and I looked at the boxes drifting by, and
wondered from which of them the Boy Orator had been let loose. Twice or
three times upon this day of sand I saw green spots shining sudden and
bright and Biblical in the wilderness. Their isolated loveliness was
herald of the valley land I was nearing each hour. The wandering
Mexicans, too, bright in rags and swarthy in nakedness, put me somehow
in mind of the Old Testament.

In the evening I sat at whiskey with my first acquaintance, a Mr. Mowry,
one of several Arizona citizens whom my military friend at San Carlos
had written me to look out for on my way to visit him. My train had
trundled on to the Pacific, and I sat in a house once more--a saloon on
the pl