which was itself the desert outpost of a desert town: and her blood
stirred to these splendid horizons. The mysterious desert scoffed and
questioned, drew her with promise of strange joys and strange griefs.
The iron-hard mountains beckoned and challenged from afar, wove her
their spells of wavering lights and shadows; the misty warp and woof of
them shifting to swift fantastic hues of trembling rose and blue and
violet, half-veiling, half-revealing, steeps unguessed and dreamed-of
sheltered valleys--and all the myriad-voice of moaning waste and
world-rimming hill cried "Come!"

Faint, fitful undertone of drowsy chords, far pealing of elfin bells;
that was pulsing of busy _acequias_, tinkling of mimic waterfalls. The
clean breath of the desert crooned by, bearing a grateful fragrance of
apple-blossoms near; it rippled the deepest green of alfalfa to
undulating sheen of purple and flashing gold.

The broad fields were dwarfed to play-garden prettiness by the vastness
of overwhelming desert, to right, to left, before; whose nearer
blotches of black and gray and brown faded, far off, to a nameless
shimmer, its silent leagues dwindling to immeasurable blur, merging
indistinguishable in the burning sunset.

"East by up," overguarding the oasis, the colossal bulk of Rainbow
walled out the world with grim-tiered cliffs, cleft only by the
deep-gashed gates of Rainbow Pass, where the swift river broke through
to the rich fields of Rainbow's End, bringing fulfilment of the fabled
pot of gold--or, unused, to shrink and fail and die in the thirsty sand.

Below, the whilom channel wandered forlorn--Rainbow no longer, but Lost
River--to a disconsolate delta, waterless save as infrequent floods
found turbulent way to the Sink, when wild horse and antelope revisited
their old haunts for the tender green luxury of these brief, belated
springs.

Incidentally, Miss Hoffman's outpost commanded a good view of Arcadia
road, winding white through the black tar-brush. Had she looked, she
might have seen a slow horseman, tiny on the bare plain below the
tar-brush, larger as he climbed the gentle slope along that
white-winding road.

But she bent industrious to her work, smiling to herself, half-singing,
half-humming a foolish and lilty little tune:

"A tisket, a tasket--a green and yellow basket;
I wrote a letter to my love and on the road I lost it--
I crissed it, I crossed it--I locked it in a casket;
I missed i