m F 595 .B63 Copy 1 il aA/^,^-'!^, . A A A A, ^^^^MMmM)^ ■.^■:^'/-NV A'^;'^A A ^^r\r\''Ars LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. Shelf .j.fii-1 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. fTTf T-f I'-T T^»l«r T IV 1 1 A ■- A A ■•-'■■ h ? lA' AC-N- .^a^A^n^^^^^^^^^ H^m^^. u .'■-.iMM ^%oo, '^oP'^^^:;:^r^nA mmmP^'^'^''-^''^ rS/f^fy ■•A' "•^^"^''r^^ Q^^.^'^Aa A A'";;i'A' .: - '\">^ r^m'^r^ '^^"^mm ^ A' A ^ ■ '^''ivli' On tee Wing. RAMBLING NOTES TEIP TO THE PACIFIC, MARY E. BLAKE, [m. e. u.] Author of ''Poems,'' '' r^ambling Talks," etc., etc. BOSTON: LEE AND SHEPARD, PUBLISHERS. 1883. /■ Copyright, 1883, By Mary E. Blake. PRINTED BY JAMES S. ADAMS, Boston, Mass. INTRODUCTION. A DEM AND from many quarters, — which a servant of the public has no right to disre- gard, — and the interest evinced by a wide circle of readers, when the letters which make up the larger part of these pages appeared last year in the Boston journal, have induced me to offer them again, revised and enlarged, in this more permanent form. Partly because I think no book should ever be published which requires apology for its contents, and partly because the title of the little volume sufficiently explains its want of elaboration, I shall make no excuse for the casual nature of the following: chanters. For what could be expected of one on the wing, but bird's-eve views '^. M. E. B. Boston, January, 1883. C O N T E N T S . Clini^ter. Page. I. A First Flight; from Boston to Chicago . r II. The Beginning of the Great Vv'est . . .11 III. On the Way through Colorado .... 23 IV. The Garden of the Gods 33 V. In the Grand Canons 43 VI. The Border Lands of Ro.mance . . . .61 VII. The City of the Angels 81 VIII. A California Stage-Ride 99 IX. The Valley of the Great Grizzly Bear . . m X. A Climb through the Clouds 121 XI. Within the Golden Gate ..... 135 Xil. Some of the Witcheries of California. . . 145 XIII. Eccentricities of California .... 159 XIV. A.MONG the Mines .... .... i6g XV. In the City of Zion 1S5 XVI. Homeward- Bound Across the Continent . . igg XVII. A Glimpse of Niagara 209 XVIII. Pros and Cons on the Subject of Excursions . 221 ON THE WING. CHAPTER I. A FIRST FLIGHT — FROM BOSTON TO CHICAGO. THE first night in a Wagner "sleeper," oi route for California, is apt to be one of the expe- riences of life. You have not yet got your sea-legs on, so to speak ; you have n't fully mastered the seaman-like roll which is to carry you safely over the heaving deck of the palace car ; the manage- ment of your equilibrium bothers, and you are just sufficiently dazed and tired to be a little miserable whether or no. When the time comes to enter your bunk, even if it has a double berth, you lose heart still more. It looks so straight, and the curtains so heavy, you bump your poor head getting in and your poor back getting out ; you are tingling yet with a sort of sub-acute excitement at the danger and darinir of your rash act in going west on a flying trip through the dark, and the spasms of home-sickness, which have been coming and going at intervals all day, begin to settle into a sober ache of long-ing. In this strait, such minor shocks to your sensitiveness as a glimpse now and again of a gentlemanly young fellow in his shirt-sleeves, or a lady-like young person in her corset cover, become rather exhilarating than otherwise, as proclaiming your release from conventionalities, and as rubbing off that dust of conservatism which naturallv 2 ON THE WING. clings about any bit of New England society. You peep out occasionally to see how the rest are getting on, until nothing is left but the empty, narrow aisle in the middle, and then at last compose your own decorous nightcap to sleep. But a sense of responsi- bility remains with you. Every time through the long night that the car gives a lurch, you sit up to ponder its meaning ; every time the whistle sounds you draw your curtain to know what it means. A vague im- pression that the engineer needs watching and guid- ance rests with you, and weights even your short dreams with personal care. You are not a bit nervous — just as cool as the very hot atmosphere of the car will allow one to be — but you prefer getting up every half-hour to see that things are properly attended to. Farther up, an easy old traveller sleeps soundly and loudly; could habit ever makejK^?^ so selfish ? Your sleepless disinterestedness pays in the end; you get so much more for your money. Why, here last night, in different glimpses, were first an illumi- nated city — its flaring lights streaming high into the misty air like an Aurora; then a gaunt row of spectral poplars standing like soldierly ghosts in the white moonlight ; now a thunderous passage of some flash- ing meteoric train, and again the shadow of a quiet town asleep on a hillside ; once we tore through a tunnel with dismal and awful shriek into the colored signals and electric brilliancy of a great crossing ; and once, just as the sky began to change to the faint opalescence of dawn, there was Cassiopeia, low down in the north, with each of her five stars aflame like a ON THE WING. ^ burning torch, looking in at us in a wholly royal man- ner. And all this thrown in like a side-show at a circus while you are taking flying leaps through the darkness at the rate of forty miles an hour ! A sym- pathising friend wlio heard all this next morning, con- soled me by the prediction that I would sleep like a top to-morrow. But poople who desire to sleep like tops should always stay to hum — that is not what we paid our money and came West for. " How did I get in a Wagner sleeping car? " Well, that's neither here nor there. If a busy home-body chooses to pack her trunk one day and go on a Ray- mond excursion the next, whose business is it.^ Isn't it the only way for a busy home-body to go ? If she stops to consider all the pros and co?is, — the baby's new tooth, the spring house-cleaning, the chances of coughs and colds, the children's changes for summer, the general depravity of inanimate things, in fact, which works such infernal revolutions in a household when its natural head is absent, — if she waits to think of these, — the stay-at-home weight will be so over- whelming in proportion that she could not be pro- pelled away by anything short of a catapult. She w^ho hesitates is lost. The only part for a valiant W'Oman is to buy her ticket, close her eyes, and at one fell swoop leave all behind her. It was the plunge of Curtius which saved Rome. We started on a gray day, teary and dreary like our feelings, but wath occasional bright gleams and fair promise of a joyous to-morrow. A railroad car is never particularly cheery, and is too business-like to 4 ON THE WING. be picturesque ; but by the time you get your wraps disposed in graceful negligence, your extra bundles put away, and the flowers which loving hands have brought to breathe their sweet message of fragrant remembrance disposed to the best advantage, your particular section manages to put on a home look. You find, too, that of all other places it is the best for fraternizing. Strangers in the morning are acquaint- ances at night and friends by breakfast time. There is nothing like travel for giving a person broad views of men and things, and crushing in the bud puerile enthusiasms. For what other reason can the man who goes to Europe for two months sit calmly down on his neighbors for the term of his natural life ? For what other reason could we, who ordinarily would rave so loudly and long over the Berkshire Hills, look at them now with the supercilious, well-bred indiffer- ence of people on their way to Pike's Peak and the Rocky Mountains ? A woman who has a proper regard for her nervous centres cannot afford to begin to gush a hundred miles from the start, when she has nine thousand miles of a journey still before her. The climax would be too terrific. So we crossed the State line into New Vork in heroic silence. But when we began next morning to pass through the beautiful meadows of Pennsylvania and Ohio, when the lagging sun came out at noon and found us still passing fields as level and green as the baize of a billiard table, when night fell while we were seemingly in the midst of that beautiful, fertile, stoneless reach, ■we began to talk in spite of ourselves. Fresh from ON THE WING. 5 the rock-ribbed soil of New England, where only by- mistake a little earth is occasionally found sifted over the granite foundation, these smooth, flawless stretches of country are beyond any conception we can form of them. Even the rich brown soil, covered now with the faint green of freshly-springing wheat and grain, was not so novel to our eyes as this wonderful free- dom from any vestige of stoniness. The brakeman who heard us commenting so delightedly over this was evidently nonplussed. " I shed be more s'prised ef et 1UUZ rocky," said he; "in these parts ef a man scoops in a stun that weighs fifty pounds he -hauls it hum an sets it up in his front }ard for folks to look at." Towards noon we passed the tragic bridge of Ashtabula, looking calm and innocent enough, span- ning the shallow, brawling stream that danced in the sunshine below it, A little later on, the red roofs of the pleasant farm-house, which its dying master so longed to see, showed themselves beyond the little station at Mentor. There was a group of peach trees in full bloom, shining like a pink flush between the tender green of budding apple trees ; the happy fields were smiling at the waking touch of growth, but our hearts went out more in accordance with the sorrow- ing woman who sat by her solitary fireside, than with the living springtime. As we enter Cleveland I find a disappointment in store. In common with most sensible people, certain words have always had a strange power of exciting me to romance and conjecture. Vinelands and vine- yards belonged to this catalogue ; so when they told 6 ON THE WING. US we would reach the grape country soon, visions of sunny, sloping hillsides, with shadows filtering through broad leaves and graceful tendrils climbing over rustic arches were in my mind. It was no use for common sense to say it was not yet summer; common sense is the slave of imagination, and as such ordered about without mercy. Imagine then the shock, of acre after acre of short stakes, thick and clumsy, as if some enterprising Natick boot manufacturer had planted shoe-pegs for seed and they had grown up, for that was all we saw of the vineyards. The vines were not yet out of bed ; but the city itself is a pleasant one, and shows its kindly side to strangers in the beautiful park which skirts the railroad. Lake Erie was in one of her surly moods after a long storm, which had riled her naturally placid com- plexion into muddiness. There was none of the lovely blue of my beloved old ocean, and even the passing sails of far-away ships could not make it have the proper effect. We began after dinner to come across little log cabins here and there, and girls and women dowered with that enormous sunbonnet which seems to be a birthright of the Southern and Western pretty maid. Two rosy-cheeked poppets on the platform of a country station we passed, flirting with an awkward young Iloosier, showed that this sort of inelegant head- gear can be made as eloquent as a Gainsborough hat, when the head it covers is young and beautiful. Still the same level, smiling fields, the rushing train flying in a straight arrow line through them. There 3s very little unpleasant motion. Some drowsy ones ON THE WING. 7 are dreaming away on imi^rovised pillows ; some are reading; some visiting neighbors; — it seems as if we were already so used to the novelty that we have been here a month instead of a day. At Toledo a sonorous gong, which I suppose is the sort of guitar the Toledo blades use in serenading, woos us to supper. The small boy who bangs it evidently means to earn his money. We find the usual unusually good meal wait- ing. On this point the excursionists have made a ten- strike ; they live on the fat of whatever land in which they happen to tarry. It seemed, at first, as if a different atmosphere should mark our passage across each state line, — some change of feeling or temperature to mark our progression between the somewhat finical straight- ness of Eastern limitations, and the broad unfinished mental processes of the West. But though we have tumbled over six boundaries already, I would never have known we had left New England, except for the level country and the queer, slovenly, zigzag fences. And yet the simple consciousness of distance shadows our jubilant spirits as the second day begins to darken, and the thought of home leaves us, like Huldy, — "All kind o' smily round the lips An' teary round the lashes." The porter of our sleeping-car must have moral designs in keeping us so hot. He either wants to frighten us into a belief in eternal punishment, or to frighten us out of it. At five o'clock this morning, when we awoke in the Chicago depot, it would have done 8 ON THE WING. lor a page of Dante's Inferno. I finished my toilet in the open outer air, rather than smother within. But we gave the young African his tip all the same, for he did it out of kindness. After one day of walking and riding around Chicago, our impressions are like a kaleidoscope. So fiat a place was never before known; it seems as if a spirit- level had been taken, and even the usual slight curve of the earth's surface smoothed off. Then they set out Chicago. But they have large hearts and noble ideas, these Western people. The stately, broad avenues go in such magnificently broad lines, straight as an arrow's flight, from lake to prairie. The beauti- ful mansions, each set in its square of green lawn, give a beauty and oddity to the richer part that the business portion does not carry out. Looking from the Sherman House, one might really be looking up State street, except for the extra dinginess which the soft coal adds to the great buildings. You can almost feel\\\^ smutchiness. Looking down across the busi- ness portions, the heavy smoke clouds hang like a pall low down even into the streets. I am afraid it would spoil a good deal of the pleasure of life here for me. We have seen wonders and wonders, but who wants to be bored with details of sight-seeing when they can come some other time and see for themselves — when they can roll magnificently through the gas-lit bowels of the earth with ships sailing above their heads, or stand in awe and admiration before those four gigantic engines at the water-works of which one alone pumps 36,000,000 gallons a day, or see the enor- ON THE WING. 9 mous stock-yards, or investigate the still more enor- mous grain-elevators. The place is meant for a race of giants — and they are giants in energy and large- heartedness. This is why when one of them grasps your hand with that firm, Western clasp, you feel no longer a stranger in a strange city, but a friend made at home by loving kindness, with a strong support behind you which will back you for all it is worth. We are still in the same world as at home, however. The troops of pretty girls you left in Washington street are here walking up Clark street with the same fluffy hair, big hats, and long satin overcoats. Spring dresses are not out yet, though we were passing dandelions and buttercups on the fields for hours yesterday. Men and women may have a shade of better color in their faces, but otherwise there is no change. They talk of " blocks " in describing distances just as they do in New York, and advertise houses "for rent '' instead of to let. They speak with a little more breadth in their vowels and honest attention to consonants, wisely thinking that if they were not in- tended for use the words would have been spelled without them ; otherwise they are bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. The streets on Saturday night are simply swarming. I think nobody can be left at home, and the wooden pavements are in the most awful condition, once you get out of the really busy portion. A ship in a storm is nothing to the tossing our barouche and poor bones got yesterday. It is another of the evils of the lO ON THE WING. republics that such persons as whoever the man may be who took the contract for this work and made such a wretched bungle of it cannot be instantly beheaded^ as a salutary warning to his kind. Two or three sum- mary executions would save enough profanity to work a larger revival than Moody and Sankey's. CHAPTER 11. THE BEGINNING OF THE GREAT WEST. THE more one sees of Chicago, the more the difference between it and an Eastern city- impresses itself. To walk the streets on Sunday and see furniture wagons moving loads of goods, the doors of hundreds of shops open, while buying and selling went on, and crowds bent on evidently temporal business, mingling with decorous church-goers, was strange enough. But to travel at night, under the glare of gas and electric lights, to see theatre doors swarming with pleasure seekers, brilliantly illuminated stores, immense number of Ger- mans with their deep-mouthed gutturals, and the open halls and pleasure gardens, made stronger inroad still on the hereditary prejudices of descendants of the Pilgrims. If another conflagration had swept the place, like Sodom, from the face of the earth, it would have been to many minds among us only the just reward of its iniquities. Yet what right have we to raise our own standard of morals and make every one else doff his hat in passing? The foundations of religious belief ought to lie too deep for such passing winds to shake; and it would take much stronger proof to convince me that there are not as many saints in Chicago as in Boston. 12 ON THE WING. We found a mild flavor of the great fire still in the air; it will take a new generation to heal the scar. Events reckon from before or after, relics linger in private and public places, and the harrowing memories of ruin and desolation still rankle in many hearts. But this is sjib rosa ; outwardly, the brave, lusty city might be a hundred years old for any trace of ruin or imma- turity about it. The same magnificence of resource which shows itself in its 350 acres of stock-yards, in its forest of elevators, in its miles of new avenues, in the stupendous rush of its business streets, is behind everything. It opens the hands and hearts of its people to a hospitality as broad as its dimensions; it puts a fine, impulsive swing into their everyday gait ; it makes a background of reality for the fabulous stories of wealth and enterprise which are in the air. You can fully believe that any Chicagoan, as well as the man pointed out, might have found himself, on re- tiring from business, with a million and a half more than he counted on, or that any other might have answered a friendly sympathizer, with the lordly indifference of Mr. , who indorsed a note for two millions and had to pay it : "0,1 never look back at that sort of thing ! " You can fully believe anything of a place where porter-house steak costs only sixteen cents a pound ; where strawberries come in March and go in November; where the horse cars run without horses; where the people have an amount of spiritual elasticity which enables them to go to church Sunday morning and to opera Sunday night without destroying their usual poise, and where the world is so flat that it seems ON THE WING. 1 3 as if Dame Nature had mistaken the crust of the earth for pastry and rolled it with a rolling-pin. Remembering the markets of Philadelphia and Washington, we were somewhat disappointed in those of Chica<:;o. There was nothing distinctive about them, as '':ompared with the luscious piles of fruits and flowe rs, the sweet-smelling heaps of freshly- grated co( oanut, the tempting pats of butter hidden under gre^-n leaves, and the shining white eyes and black facer, of the turbaned huxters in the spacious southern q larters. Before you begin to question, you might be ^mong any collection of provision dealers, ruddy-cherked and white-aproned, of your native city, but as sorn as you hear the price list, you know that this is nnother world. One does n't wonder that prudent ""iiousekeepers here hesitate about coming to Bostcr to live. We need to come West to understand the luxury of r^odern travel. The spirit of enterprise is so ram- p?nt here — the population are so constantly moving, prospecting, investigating, colonizing, that they lavish time and skill in eliminating every drawback from the comfort of railway life. As a natural consequence their cars are the best in the world. The Pullman is brighter, roomier, and more convenient than the Wag- tier. The sections are larger; the mattress and pillows wider and softer; the toilet arrangements more plenti- ful. Add to this that you have acquired a certain savoir faire — you know what you want and how to get it; you have learned to go from one end to the other of the train while at full speed without too 14 ON THE WING. many false steps. You begin to have a certain home feehng in the tidy compartment, which is your es- pecial property, with its mirror between the two broad windows, its portable table and its silver hooks. The brightest of mulatto boys waits your beck to bring a clean, white pillow for your tired head, to brush your dusty clothes, to fetch messages, to gather up any incidental rubbish of orange-peel or peanut shell or paper scrap. You can write if the mood takes you, or play games, or read your neighbor's books ; if you want anything under the sun, from a cambric needle to a French bonbon, from a postage stamp to an en- cyclopaedia, there are a score of valises besides your own to choose from. There are books, magazines, newspapers, maps, guide-books, and time-tables in be- wildering array to consult ; there are country depots to raid upon, and country people to startle, at queer far- away places ; there are Mayflowers to gather and strange beetles to impale at prairie watering stations ; and there are the observations to make that belong to this new order of things. Each car in the long train has its own special recommendation ; one has the prettiest young girl, one the brightest company, one the most elaborate finish, and so on. We modestly plume ourselves on the most picturesque young man w^ith the most artistic leaning toward the fine arts, and the nattiest and laziest little porter of the party, *' which namin' no names, no offence can be took." Owing to these and a thousand other causes, the third and fourth days of railroad travel are less weary than the first. There is always something unexpected ON thp: wing. 15 to keep one awake and interested ; a long tract of over- flowed country, with pale green cottonwoods growing out of tlie w'ater in a ravishing bit of aesthetic color- ing, a forest of delicately-tinted trees, a bank of bril- liant purple flowers extending for miles along the track, or the long majestic sweep of some great river, turbid and furious, with a flight of wild duck winging their slow way northward. On the Mississippi we passed a great steamboat — the steamboat of Kit, and the Octoroon, and Uncle Tom's Cabin — top-heavy to our sea-used eyes, with a raft of acres of logs float- ing after it from the upper country. At Joliet we came upon a crop of rocks for the first time after hundreds of miles of smooth prairie ; and quarries of stone of the strangest formation, as if the strata were laid in masonry. Farther on was a region of coal mines ; at the mouth of one a miner had just emerged from underground. He was a sohtary and most desolate figure ; his flannel shirt open from throat to waist, his heavy eyes lustreless, his face and bare arms as black as the coal-bed from which he had just risen. As the train slowly drew up at the tank near by, he stood motionless, his tired arms crossed over his patient breast, seemingly beyond being moved to anything else than weary endurance. It gave me a pang to see his pathetic figure merge again into the flat landscape. What right had one part of the world to be butterflies and the rest grubs ? But to return to our Pullmans. There was a deli- cious siesta at early morning when one first woke. The uncertainty which made the night jerkily anxious l6 ON THE WING. Avas over ; you no longer felt obliged to know what every twist or jar meant; your faith in human nature and the employes of the railroad returned, and there were two good hours during which, luxuriantly in- dolent, you could doze and dream, or lazily watch the panoramic world whizzing by your window. The soothing motion, the novelty, the comfort were inde- scribable ; you could meditate, admire, enjoy by turns. Your horizon was absolutely free from care. When it pleased you to get up, you knew that there was a deft man-of-all-work to change your bed-chamber into a drawing-room ; your breakfast would be ready at some clean country station, ordered beforehand by your advance courier ; every petty hindrance of looking after or caring for baggage or checks would be lifted from your shoulders, and there was no draw- back to the blissful ease of perfect freedom. It would be ruinous if this lasted too long; so you rather welcome the sudden jerk that bumps your head against the marble basin while performing your ablu- tions, and then tumbles you into an opposite corner — you feel that it makes you square with fate. To be too happy might anger the gods. It was lying this way one morning, looking, as I thought, toward the west, for the sun had set on that side the evening before, that I saw a glorious sight. Little by little, up through the night, came a tint of loveliest amber climbing above the horizon. Little by little it changed, deepening into mellow orange, and creeping high and higher, while flushes of rose- color ran through it, until at last the entire sky was ON THE WING. T/ oneburnino; glorv of crimson. While I lay breathless, looking in wonder at such a blaze of reflected light, the great round sun lifted itself above the world, and I realized only then that our direction had changed during the darkness, so that I had really seen day dawn over the plains of Kansas. It was about this time we were introduced to the altogether delightful idea of the dining-car. Clean, bright, and airy, with snowy linen — the whitest we had seen since leaving home — with tiny sideboards, set above the tables, gay with glasses and a bit or two of Kiota, with a cuisine that would tempt a gourmet, what a nice bit of variety show^ it made for us. From the speck of a kitchen at one end, about three feet by six, surrounded by ovens, steamiers and stew-pans, came a bill of fare with everything from green-turtle soup to canvas-back duck, English snipe, and olives. The cook was a cordon bleu, a real chef in his honorable profession. How he created the forty-seven dishes on his bill of fare from such a mite of a laboratory would puzzle any one but such a black conjurer as himself. I would n't mind putting a girdle round the earth at any time with such a com- missariat in front of me. Kansas City is an absurd jumble of ups and downs. We thought at first the inhabitants must be aeron- auts, who went , in balloons to reach their dwelling houses, but on nearer inspection we found goat-paths leading up the edges of the precipices, and graded roads reaching around them by wide curves. Look- ing at it from the standpoint of babies, it would be a l8 ON THE WING. dreadful town to live in. A single misstep would roll any well regulated child from fifty to three hundred feet, according to locality. I wonder all the grown-up people are not cripples. The business town is on the flats by the river. It is a place of great activity. Thirteen railroad lines begin or terminate in it, and the result is stupendous. That train on your right will take you to Mexico; this on your left to Boston; just across there is one placarded " For Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Nebraska, Montana, Oregon and Cali- fornia," which is a sort of multum in parvo only pos- sible in a western station. Kansas itself is a delightful country. All day we rode between luxuriant fields of winter wheat or springing corn, interspersed with huge stock-raising farms, each divided by hedges of osage-orange in the full green strength of early summer. We saw, too, substantial walls of stone — a pretty, cream-colored stone, that makes a charming contrast with the vegeta- tion — and neat. New England rail fences. The slovenly Virginia fence, which is neither strong nor lovely, seems to be discarded. In these immense fields, all kinds of mechanical implements, moved by horse-power, enable one man to do the w^ork of a dozen. Such is the luxuriant richness of the loam that it is absolutely black and seems of inexhaustible fertility. It could be a granary for the world. In the towns one is constantly surprised by the beauty of the public buildings, the finest of which is usually the school-house. Miles and miles away from any vestige of civilization, bevond this alv/avs beautiful culti\'a- ON THE WING. I9 tion, you come upon a commodious two-story farm- house, with a colony of smaller habitations clustered near. Across the prairie roads you seldom see a single horse driven, except for riding ; usually a pair of fine animals are harnessed to even the smallest vehicle. Here and there, by the bank of a river, or on some overhanging cliff, the strange geological foun- dation of the country shows itself; a geometrically regular layer of cream-colored stone, two or three feet in depth, set in a deep bed of clay which the touch of time has dried into a resemblance of sandstone. In the distance now and again a beautiful rolling country fills the horizon, or a fine forest of straight young trees comes down to the foreground. Sometimes for miles we follow the course of the river, but ever and always the great marv^el to us is the richness of the soil. It is a country of which one might truly say, " Tickle it with a hoe and it laughs into a harvest," I can see the old New England farmer who sits opposite growing gray hour by hour as he looks upon this para- dise of produce lands, and thinks of the rocky hill- sides at home. We rode on the engine for an hour one day, thanks to the kind offices of a friend. Perched snugly on the fireman's seat, the supple, sturdy monster, scarcely trembling, except as now and then a fiery breath quiv- ered through his throttle valves, the dust and cinders which had been the bane of our lives in the cars behind, floating entirely out of our atmosphere, we dashed serenely through thirty miles of space as easily as if we were passing the sixty minutes in a home 20 ON THE WING. rocking-chair. (By the way, the happy man who ever finds a Yankee notion for consuming the dust and ashes on railway trains will enter into his reward even in the flesh; blessing, fame and money — I put the rewards in their proper order of progression — await him). The wild western dash of speed, the unholy noise of steam and motion, and the fragile look of the narrow white track flying before us across the world, would have alarmed my usually quiet nerves, if I did not understand my surroundings. The engine was built at Hinckley & WiUiams's on Harrison avenue ; the engineer and his assistant were born, one in Somerville and the other in Lawrence; my companion was a slim young Bostonian, who could lead a German or give you the Ottello Fantasie of Ernst one night and climb Mont Blanc next morning, so I felt per- fectly at home. Such a New England crowd would never go back on me. The gallant fireman, when not engaged in shoveling coal, explained the country through which we were passing. "Wouldn't think, would you, that that wheat 'u'd be tall enough to hide a man on horseback next August.'"' he said. "Its the truth ; I boxed some up 'n' sent it home last year, for I'm a eastern man myself. My father stands six foot two in his stockin's, an' 'twas taller 'n him. But ef they kin beat us on corn we 've got the bulge on them in brains. They got to fall back on us yit." Indeed, so far we have not been brought in contact with any really Western people. They all seem to have drifted here from other places. But they begin ON THE WING. 2 1 to have mail-boxes at the stations labeled for "the East," so that we feel we are at least drawing nearer the star of empire. Meantime, we have made up our minds that it is non- sense to talk of the " tiresomeness " of railway travel. Think of the tribulations of our grandmothers in going from New York to Boston ! Think of their rough roads and their jolting, draughty carriages, their cold comfort and weary days ; then compare it with the indolent, well-warmed, well-lighted entourage of this royal progress, and imagine yourself a martyr — if you dare ! CHAPTER III. ON THE WAY THROUGH COLORADO. IT is in Missouri that we first come upon Summer and the mule. This much abused but indispen- sable animal is a feature henceforth in every land- scape. Old negroes drive or lead them along stump- lined roads ; fat piccaninies shy stones at their patient noses from the door-yards of lowly wayside cabins; gay youths, flannel -shirted and wide -belted, snap long whips as they guide teams drawn by four or six animals over the broad prairies. This and the strange hieroglyphics on the lines of freight-cars wc pass, would tell us we were far from home even without the aid of any other moral eccentricity. We arc pointed out such landmarks as where the cow-boys raided upon and robbed a train, where Jesse James lies buried in state in his mother's door-yard, or where the spring floods tore their path of desolation through a country side. At one place we passed two young Indians holding a plough, drawn by four horses, at the end of a furrow a full mile long across one unbroken field, set like a picture of Millet against a sunset sky. The great, bare, desert-like plain of Colorado in the parts through which we pass, forms the dreariest con- trast to the green beauty of Kansas. There is scarcely any relief to the desolate outlook. The small settle- ments are of the most primitive description. The soil 24 ON THE WING. looks baked and caked even in this early spring-time. A few far-apart clumps of immature, spiritless trees dot the landscape ; an occasional small stream shows the prints of countless cattle-hoofs on its muddy banks, and long reaches of sage-brush and cactus intersperse the gray country. For heaven's sake, beware of the cactus ! In the gush and enthusiasm of first acquain- tance, and as being the only really original thing you have met since leaving home, you will l)e tempted at first to interview it. Take the elder Weller's advice in regard to widows — "don't." It looks harmless and inoffensive enough; it does not flaunt its thorny ban- ner in your faces ; it clings lowly and modestly to the soil and seems to shun observation. But that is all a dodge to rouse your curiosity. It is, like Bunthome, an accursed thing. The most subtly fine cambric needle is not so delicate as its thread-like spikes; the most highly tempered steel crowbar is not so strong. Age cannot wither nor custom stale its in- finite prickliness ; and a glove of hippopotamus hide will not save you from its hidden sting. As a speci- men of Western ingenuity to show how much vicious- ness can be put into a small parcel it takes the palm; it is the infernal machine of the vegetable kingdom. There is only the heavenly air and jocund sunshine to mitig-ate the universal blankness. But when we stop for breakfast at the little station of La Junta — which you will please pronounce La Hoonta — so wonderful is the atmosphere, so invigorating each delicious breath, that it is like -drinking nectar, and one can be content with the simple boon of living. ON THE WING. 25 This queer little town, whicli was scarcely born a year ago, and is still, so to speak, in long clothes, is an example of the country's rapidity of growth. Already "masons are at work on blocks of stone buildings ; new stores on the main avenue are filled with complete assortments of goods ; neat rows of small wooden houses mark the direction of a dozen different streets ; the clean little station dining-room has copies of Raphael's cherubs and lambrequins of embroidered towels, and there is pure water from an artesian well. By the time you have tasted the different compounds which have been offered under this name since leaving home, you will understand the full force of this last clause. Even after a good strong dose of old cochitu- ate it may be appreciated. If, in places hke this, the store should be only a shanty, ten feet by twelve, do not let your untrained Eastern instincts lead you on a wrong trail of con- tempt. The owner of one of these infinitesimal trading posts put $550,000 in bank last week after one sale of cattle from his back country ranches, — the owner of another could draw a check for quarter cf a million, and present it to you without letting his business suffer. The people look more like the soil than the climate — long, lean and haggard, — a sort of patient, drag- gled air about the women — an unkempt hairiness about the men. It seems as if an ounce of New England grit would stiffen even back-bones in the country. At one place we passed in the gloaming, last evening, the male population had turned out en. 26 ON THE WING. masse at the station, and every individual creature stood on the platform with the same leg bent at the same angle, both hands deep in breeches-pocket, pon- dering, with the same dejected wistfulness through the smoke of his corn-cob pipe, the volatile spirits of our party. They were too far gone in hopelessness even to smile upon us. On country roads, in small settlements, and around station-houses, one is constantly meeting the different characters of the modern Western drama. The "Jedge " of the Danites squirted tobacco juice with artistic nicety within a hair's breadth of my head at Emporia. M'hss looked at us from under her tangled hair at a cabin door just this side of Las Animas. " My Partner " walked into the waiting-room at Flor- ence as if he had mistaken it for the theatre dressing- room, and Kit with his two "beats" have rej>eated themselves until it is fully time to take a farewell per- formance. The women nearly all belong to one of two types : lank, thin-haired, sad-eyed, sun-bonneted and calico-gowned, while they are still drudges, — showily dressed, jerky, self-complacent and montagued, when they wax prosperous and idle. When the Spanish Peaks first come into sight, snow-crowned and symmetrical, with a long range be- hind clothed in that far-away blue mistiness which ever makes mountains beautiful, one draws a long breath of surprise and delight. From some unex- plained atmospheric condition, they have the effect of rising from a deep blue sea, which is a cure for home-sick eyes. It is the first glimpse of the natural ON THE WING. 2/ loveliness of Colorado. Still further, beyond the Cheyenne Range, the white head of Pike's Peak rises in the still, luminous air. There is no object in nature so grandly impres- sive as a range of snow-clad summits. The dream of my life had been to see Mont Blanc, — Mont Blanc with the blue Swiss lakes asleep at its foot, the fair Swiss valleys at rest on its bosom, and the wonderful beauty of the Swiss landscape throwing its soaring majesty into fullest relief. I wonder now whether, if Fortune is ever kind enough to let me look upon it, some thought of the desolate grandeur of these its brother monarchs, rising from the awful calm of their grey plains, will not come like the shadow of a still more imperial state. Pueblo, where we stop to change cars for the nar- row-guage road leading to Denver, is by far the most characteristic town we have met yet. Any of the others might with little change be set down in the early stages of an Eastern settlement, and not be much out of place ; but here the acres of canvas houses, the groups of emigrant v/agons and prairie schooners cor- raled under trees or by streams, the quantities of "dug- outs," where a door surmounted by a bit of thatched roof gives entrance to a tenement hollowed out of the hill-side, and the adobe houses — built Mexican fashion, with large doors and windows opening on an upper balcony — stamp it as belonging to a strange world. Up vistas opening from the sandy plains one sees broad streets flanked by long rows of stone and brick buildings ; three or four railways go zigzaging 28 ON THE WING. in as many different directions ; the suburbs are full of large manufacturing interests ; it is swarming with active business crowds; yet ten minutes — five min- utes — after you have left, just as five minutes before reaching it, you cannot believe that anything like civilization is within a day's ride of the solemn grey sandy desert, with its clumps of sword-grass and cactus. There had been a little dread in lookinsf forward to the change from the spacious roominess of the Pull- man to the contracted quarters of the narrower cars ; but to our great relief we found the ease of the reclin- ing chairs, which fill the carriages of this road, beyond anything we had yet used for comfort. One could sleep, resting horizontally as in a berth, or sit erect, at will, by simply touching a spring under each seat. There w^as another unlooked-for pleasure in the total absence of dust and ashes during this short ride, that, added to the pleasant looking forward to a few days* complete rest at Manitou, made the hours passed in this way really comfortable. We had long ago passed the point where self-respect received any shock from the consciousness of dirty hands and faces ; we could keep up an air of profound respectability with grimy smooches mingled despair- ingly with sunburn and tan on our faces, as if in mourning for the original virgin white which was once theirs. We had broadened into the kind of muscular Christianity which Thoreau believed belonged to true manhood, and could retain unconsciousness of self and surround' ngs under the most desperate straits. This ON THE WING. 29 is one of the liberal uses of travelling. Anyone can be charminof and natural and vivacious in a Worth cos- tume and a Queen Anne boudoir ; but to be fascinat- ing, and meny, and altogether lovely in a travel- stained dress, a crushed hat and a pair of torn gloves, with soot at the roots of your hair, and patches too big for beauty-spots over all the visible creature — as some of our feminine women managed — that is to be great indeed ! The quality of accommodations provided in these far-away wilds has been a constant surprise ; the fare has been uniformly good, plentiful and well- cooked. At the strangest stopping-places, where one would imao-ine sandwiches and thick coffee to be the extent of resources, we have found a variety always abundant and often luxurious. How they manage such a quantity of fresh supplies would be perplex- ing, if the number of empty tin cans about each new settlement did not tell the tale. We are beginning to believe the tin can, and its contents, the pioneers of civihzation, they make impossibilities possible. Butter and coffee, two of the tests of good living, have been almost invariably excellent; the exceptions, strangely enough, were where one would least look for lapses. We have been somewhat sorry not to find more changes in the bill of fare; one would think that two or three thousand miles of distance might inspire some local differences of jnenu, but steaks and chops, Saratoga potatoes and broiled kidneys, duck and green peas, ice cream and apple-charlotte, follow you in pro- cession from one end of the continent to the other. 30 • ON THE WING. There is not much hardship involved in travelhng in such company; still an occasional bit of Bohemianism in the shape of a ragout of prairie dog, a sirloin of prairie chicken, an olla podrida of cactus and cream, or a fricassee of horned toads, would be, to say the least, a novelty. There can be nothing extremely wrong in any of these, when giddy Paris dines on horse-flesh and frogs' legs. Shall we pretend to higher standards than French gourmets ? There is fortune yet in store for the especial Colorado cuisine. There was a pleasant little interlude on this same narrow-gauge road. We were brought to a stand on a side-track for half an hour while waiting for the express, which was expressly behind time at this particular point, to pass, while it was so ordained by fate that four companies of United States cavalry, en route for New Mexico and the Indian troubles — going in fact, over the very line we were to take a fortnight later — should be halted on the same siding. We learned a good deal in those thirty minutes of the military feel- ing in regard to poor Lo. " No good Indian but a dead one," is the whole case in a nutshell. From Commander-in-Chief Sherman to his youngest drum- mer-boy their voice is all for war, and that a war of extermination. It is plain that there is no other solu- tion than that of force for the present crisis ; but this is a poor substitute for a substantial settling of diffi- culties. There never was and never will be a greater muddle, than our Government have made over the Indian question. These men were bright, brave- looking fellows, young and full of spirit, armed to the ON THE WING. 31 teeth, with a dash and abandon that would suit a dime novel hero. A girdle of cartridges in a wide belt around the waist, a villainous double-bladed knife almost as broad as a trowel, a Colt's army revolver, a short musket or rifle — I am not yet well up in mili- tary tactics — and a clanging sabre; these were the accoutrements. Add if you please a suit of army blue, a broad slouched hat and a ferocious moustache, a glorious swagger and an erect carriage, and there is your soldier complete. They evidently make light of their errand, and think that a glimpse of a uniform 5s enough any day to cause a stampede among the Apaches. The pretty girl — pardon, one of the pretty girls — of the party held a converzazione with a young corporal which would have passed for a flirtation any- where else in the* world; I don't know the proper name here on the plains. We gave them a rousing Eastern cheer, to which the big boy and a few others added a Harvard " 'rah." And then we sank again into the easy-chairs, and tired, dirty, but happy, turned our faces toward "The Garden of the Gods." CHAPTER IV. THE GARDEX OF THE GODS. I DO not wonder that the Indians, with the fine poetic appreciation which makes so many of their names eloquent, should have called this place after the great, mysterious, unknown God whom they worshiped — Manitou. The sentimental civilized blunderer, who afterwards modified this by describing it as a garden, made one of the grand mistakes of a lifetime. The impression is of something mighty, unreal and supernatural. Of the gods surely — but the gods of the Norse Walhalla in some of their strange outbursts of wild rage or uncouth playfulness. The beauty-loving divinities of Greece and Rome could have nothing in common with such sublime awkwardness. Jove's ambrosial curls must shake in another Olympia than this. Weird and grotesque, but solemn and awful at the same time, as if one stood on the confines of another world, and soon the veil would be rent which divided them. Words are worse than useless to attempt such a picture. Per- haps if one could live in the shadow of its savage grandeur for months, until his soul were permeated, language would begin to find itself flowing in proper channels, but in the first stupor of astonishment one must only hold his breath. The garden itself, the 34 ON THE WING. holy of holies as most fancy, is not so overpowering' to me as the vast outlying wildness. To pass in between massive portals of rock, of brilliant terra cotta red, and enter on a plain miles in extent, covered in all directions with magnificent isolated masses of the same striking color, each lifting itself against the wonderful blue of a Colorado sky with a sharpness of outline that would shame the fine cutting of an etch- ing ; to find the ground under your feet over the whole immense surface carpeted with the same rich tint, underlying arabesques of green and gray, where grass and mosses have crept; to come upon masses of pale velvety gray gypsum set now and again as if to make more effective by contrast the deep red which strikes the dominant chord of the picture; and always as you look through or above to catch the stormy billows of the giant mountain range tossed against the sky, with the regal snow-crowned massiveness of Pike's Peak rising over all, is something once seen never to be forgotten. Strange, grotesque shapes, mammoth caricatures of animals, clamber, or crouch, or spring from vantage points hundreds of feet in air. Here a battlemented wall is pierced by a round window ; there a cluster of slender spires lift themselves; beyond a leaning tower slants through the blue air, or a cube as large as a dwelling-house is balanced on a pivot-like point at the base, as if a child's strength could upset it. " But nothin' short of a' earthquake could fetch it," says the "Doc," our driver, a fine specimen of the Western type, keen, cool and ruddy. Imagine all this scintil- ON THE \VIN(;. 35 lant with color, set under a dazzling sapphire dome, with the silver stems and delicate frondage of young cottonwoods in one space, a strong young hemlock lifting green symmetrical arms from some high rocky cleft in another, or a miniature forest of dwarfed ever- greens climbing half way up some craggy pile. This can be told ; but the massiveness of sky-piled masonr}', the almost infernal mixture of grandeur and gro- tesqueness, are beyond expression. After the first few moments of wild exclamation points one sinks into an awed silence. By and by, emerging through another colossal gate- way, and following a narrow road built over some abandoned Indian trail, one enters upon the confines of the most romantic, the most unique of all human abiding places, — Glen Eyrie. Fancy this wonderland we have been desecrating by trying to describe, as a vestibule ; then an avenue, winding for a mile under trees, with a new vista opening at each instant. At the entrance you pass a little lodge or schoolhouse — a sonnet in architecture, if one may so express it — the small but perfect rendering of a harmonious thought; you cross and recross a rushing, tumbling mountain brook over a dozen different bridges, some rustic, some of masonry, but each a gem in design and fitness ; then at last, after the mind is properly tuned, as it were, to perfect accord, the full symphony bursts upon you. In the shadow of the eternal rock, with the wonderful background of mountain, sur- rounded by all that art can lend nature, is this delicious anachronism of a Queen Anne house, in 36 ON THE WING. sage-green and deep-dull red, with arched balconies under pointed gables, and carved projections over mullioned windows, and trellised porches, and stained glass loopholes, and an avalanche of roofs. It is bewildering, it is out of place: it is naughty, but it's so nice. As one of our young men aptly remarked, *' It would be paradise with the right girl." For a single bit of rugged grandeur the Ute Pass is facile princeps. Government has widened and built up the old Indian trail, and now a narrow wagon-road clings like a thread half way up the precipitous moun- tain side, a jagged perpendicular wall below, with a rapid mouxitain torrent foaming and fretting at its foot, a jagged perpendicular w^all above, with pointed splintered edges climbing skyward in one bold sweep. A castle is perched on one airy height ; Gog and Magog look at each other from two prominent opposite points ; profiles and grotesque outhnes are piled upon each climbing spur until imagination grows palsied with the strain. Obliged to follow the broken line of the mountain, the path curves so as at times almost to turn upon itself, and looking back as your horse winds slowly up the zigzag passage, you are lost in wonder and dismay at the temerity which brought you here. It was up this trail that the Utes, the original "big injuns" of the country, used to pass to and from their reservations beyond the mountain and their happy hunting-grounds in the plains below. It needs little fancy to see them laden with spoils of the chase or painted for the war-path, passing in single file through the sombre ravine which seems theirs by right. At ON THE WING. 3^ different points mineral springs of iron, of sulphur, or of magnesia, bubble up as if forced from a siphon, each impregnated with carbonic acid until it effervesces like soda-water. They are the pleasantest mineral waters I ever tasted ; the usual flavor of " warm flatirons" being very well masked by the sharpness of the chemical salts ; and you will never know what lemonade means, until you have tried it sparkling with this natural champagne. At last and entirely, you realize now that you have reached a border country. The old Pike's Peak and later Leadville roads, pass in front of the hotel, and at any moment of the day a cavalcade strange to Eastern eyes may be seen passing by. It is Buffalo Bill and his train of Indian scouts, picturesque in broad sombrero and fringed buckskin leggins ; or a train of emigrant wagons, household utensils piled in one, stove-pipes fastened to the sides, women and children gathered in the others, and a couple of spare horses, or sometimes a cow, bringing up the rear. A moment ago a long line of pack mules with jingling bells trotted past, a wild-looking muleteer in a high Mexican saddle, on the last, snapping his long whip with a crack like the report of a rifle ; and just now a dashing young rider on a beautiful gray mare, with spurs on the heels of his long boots, and saddle- bags flapping at each side of his gallant steed, has flashed up the broad mountain road like a winged arrow. The people ride magnificently, with great daring and unconsciousness, with a pose as if they were part and parcel of the animal they bestride. 38 ON THE WING. Even young girls fly past with an abandon that takes one's breath away, slim, erect, with small jockey hats and plain, well-fitting habits. A pretty girl, I believe, is never so pretty as when on horseback ; but I never knew before how much her dress had to do with her lovehness. The long, sweeping train, cover- ing the flanks of the flying steed with its graceful, pennon-like curve, throws the rounded bust and shapely neck and head into good relief by forming an admirable pendant, and hides the ungracious bend of the knee bent over the pommel. Some of our own pretty maids rode boldly and well, but the awkward- ness of the short travelhng-dress was too much for even their native grace to conquer, and I was glad to see them dismount. The horses are all splendid animals ; the men would be, if they took as much care of themselves as of their beasts. The village blacksmith is a real study : he walks down the long, red road, his broad trousers tucked into immense cowhides, a wide belt around his massive waist, a flapping brim slouched over his brow, and that swinging, Indian gait, in which all motion seems to spring from the hips. There is an air of jaunty elegance about the straight, stalwart form that is more in keeping with the place than any- thins: else we have seen. We took two days for a trip to Denver, and from it to Black Hawk and Central City. The view of the mountain range which one gets on this route is en- chantingly beautiful. Toward the end the road crosses at such an angle that you see a long line of peaks ON THE WIN(;. 39 reaching nearly a hundred miles across the gray plain, and lifting snow-capped summits to the sky till they melt in the far distance. Denver itself is laid out on a most opulent scale, and must be of immense interest to business men. It boasts in its new Opera Mouse, one of the finest theatres in the United States; a little gorgeous in tone, in accordance with Western ideas, but really beautiful and of fine finish. When you see in the windows of the large stores the latest fashion in plush embroideries and Paris fineries : when you ride for two mortal hours behind a pair of swift horses and only pass over one small part of its large territory ; when you hear statistics of wealth in banks, mines, smelting works and manufactures that quite upset your slow New England notions, you will begin to realize what this wonderful West is. "East, you talks of things, but here, we does them," said our driver, with the naive pride of a man who knew which was the better part. The number of men who had made their pile, gone into stocks, got cleaned out, tried again and struck it rich, come back and built a palace, or a church, or a bank, or a block in Denver, was enough to make one's hair stand on end. And this in a place where twenty years ago the redskin and mountain coyote had it all to themselves. Think of having to come to this city of the plains to find the first waiter who ever was known to refuse a tip ! I will not return good for evil by telling where he is. In a place which boasts thirty or forty hotels, some of them with 270 sleeping-rooms, you may take your choice and find him out. But the rara avis belongs in Denver, with its other natural curiosities. 40 ON THE WING. I am tired of saying that this is a wonderful country, yet nothing else relieves one's over-charged feelings. A few miles outside the city, going toward the northwest, is the entrance to Clear Creek Canon, in which for fifteen or twenty miles the train follows the bed of a mountain brook, through a narrow wind- ing opening not much broader than the width of the rail, at the foot of precipices from 900 to 1,200 feet high. Each spur overlaps the other so desperately, that the track actually writhes in convulsions around the twisted corners. In the entire fifteen miles there are not two hundred feet of straight line, and often, sitting in the central compartment of a train of three cars, we could see the two sturdy puffing little engines in front and the rear car at the same time. As if this were not enough to set one's ideas topsy-turvy, there are a succession of awful tableaux, where nature seems inspired to her grandest efforts, and where a frenzied tumult of wild grandeur forces one to an almost painful climax of attention. The formation of rock, which tends, all through the parts of Colorada we have yet seen, toward an appearance of buttresses and castled crags, runs into a luxuriance of wild and picturesque forms along the entire route. Meantime, you are climbing vmconsciously at a rate which brings you three thousand feet higher at the Elack Hawk station than where 3'ou started four hours before, and you finish by an immense Z up the last mountain-side, which leaves you in Central City quite over the heads of the whole lower world. Anything so wildlv trvine to the nerves as this last sudden rise ON THE WING. 41 I never felt before. Mt. Washington was dreadful as anything could be, but this was a thousand times worse ; for here there was not even a grooved wheel to cling to. It was a plain, bare, every-day track, and a plain, bare, every-day engine, without cogs or cranks, or any other unusual attachment, to brace up a poor lone, lorn woman's faith. When we finally stopped at the little station, it was wnth a sense of relief which culminated in one deep-concerted sigh. I would not have crone down that incline aagatelle. The ON THE WING. 57 future hides what the Vo Semite holds in store ; but it is no use to tell us it will ever bring forth anything comparable to that last night in Colorado. There were some obvious and striking advantages about this riding on the cow-catcher : you escaped dust and smoke, while the open air did away with any unusual sound. There was very little jarring motion ; much less than even in the sacred seclusion of the Pullman. Inside the cab it was not so pleasant : a pandemonium of shrieks and groans, as the dif- ferent levers regulated steam or motion ; an odious smell of badly-cooked grease ; a sensation of being blinded by red-hot sparks and cinders, or roasted to death by the almost infernal heat; an insecure seat on a high wooden stool, with your modest draperies twisted about you, and a jerky, broken motion like the trotting of a badly-trained horse, — these combine against it; but even here the novelty and dehght of the situation easily overcomes them all. Perhaps it was the mental exhaustion consequent on such a strain, that made us, like Silas Wegg, "drop into poetry" that night, at sight of a charming face among the waiter-girls at the station-hotel, where we stopped for supper. She was a bright little crea- ture, and, I trust, will forgive the doggerel, since it sings the praise of — The Pretty Maiu ok Antonito. 'Twas in the supper-room at night, Wliile waitinj:; for a chance to eat O! We saw the vision of delight, Tlie pretty maid of Antonito ! 58 ON THE WING. Her eyes were dark and very bright, As if she came from Spain or Quito, — Her pearly teeth were small and white, This bonny maid of Antonito. Her hair was parted at the side, Her step was light as a mosquito, She had a pretty air of pride, This charming maid of Antonito. We do not know her rightful name, Perhaps 'twas Jane, perhaps Pepito — But still we love her just the same, The witching maid of Antonito. If we could pack her in a tin. Or roll her in a small paquito, O wouldn't we just scoop her in, And take her far from Antonito ! She looked so fresh, so pure, so gay, So red her lips, her smile so sweet O, We could not tear ourselves away From that fair maid of Antonito. But where she goes, or what her state, If married she or senorita, — Adois! treat her kindly, Fate! The pretty maid of Antonito. We came back through the Vcta Pass in the darkest midnight ever formed ; and just as we were crawling at a snail's pace up to the highest point, the coui^ling between the cars broke. We have grown so used to terrible risks now, that nothing trivial upsets one •, yet I must confess this spoiled my repose for the night. To wake at some sudden shock and find that you are nine thousand three hundred and thirty-five feet above the sea level and the little house at ON THE WING. 59 home, and that something connected with the ma- chinery of your vehicle has gone to pieces, is not particularly reassuring. When you are conscious that your inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness depend upon the welding of a bit of iron, or the strength of a piece of wood, to hear the crack of doom in either of them is inex- pressibly chilling, especially when you are up in the air instead of being on terra firma. The system of automatic brakes is brought to such perfection, how- ever, that the train can be stopped, even on the steepest grade, within a distance of twenty-eight feet ; and every atom of apparatus connected with cars or engine is subjected to such anxious and constant watchfulness that an accident is very seldom heard of. Everywhere, except when we struck the mountains, the same barren gray plains, with only cactus and sage-brush, or sparse bunches of buffalo grass and moss, to relieve their monotony. The tiny houses are built either of unpainted logs or adobe, neither of which possess any distinctive coloring. Only the resplendent sky and rich sunshine take the dreariness away. But whenever, far off, the dim blue heights were climbing the horizon, or better still, the snowy peaks shone radiant in the eye of day, there was joy enough to fill the present and lay up fair store for the future. Before climbing the Raton Pass, which separates Colorado from New Mexico, next morning, we stopped at Trinidad. On the mountain just in front of the station, a castle, so perfect as to be astonishing 6o ON THE WING. even in this country of astonishing rock fantasies, rears its battlemented walls and round towers as fairly as if planned by the hand of an architect. A peculiar effect is produced by a tree growing at one point just within the massive portal, which has precisely the shape of a flag raised on a long staff. It looks like a banner flung to the breeze to show that the royal family are at home. Within the last two days we have passed through and over, five of the grandest and wildest passes in America. I find that the guide-books speak of that of La Veta as overlooking the most beautiful valley ; Tbut, to us, the Grand Canon was supremest, because of the snow-clad peaks in sight. Those radiant heights, lifting themselves in the far, serene distance, have spoiled us for everything else. We found in the gorges some lovely flowers, like white Christmas roses, with bunches of mountain larkspur, and a pretty blossom, half blue, half pink, that ought to be a pet with French milliners. Along the plains were spikes of pale cream-color, like a sweet pea in shape, and golden coreopsis with deep brown hearts ; while at Las Vegas the hillsides were covered with English daisies, or something so like the " wee, modest, crimson-tippet flower," that it would pass for it with any one but a botanist. We have grown really attached to Colorado : it is fascinating in spite of its barrenness, and progressive in the face of its slowness; for it is awfully slow. Even its crack city of Denver is behind the right Boston time by two good hours. CHAPTER VI. * THE BORDER LANDS OF ROMANCE. COMING across tlie mountains into Raton this morning, we entered the border land of modern romance. In those great plains, through which we have been riding all day, and among the beautiful mountains lying beyond, the fabulous pfifts of the blind ^roddess Fortune have been showered at a rate which has often changed common men, in a few short years, to princes. A kind friend has just brought in a story, like Aladdin's lamp, of how riches poured upon one group of men, poor, unknown, and in no way gifted beyond the clear-headed Eastern foresight which grasps possibilities and makes cer- tainties of them. They bought, almost for nothing, a whole tract of country here, with which to open a colonization scheme, and in the course of develop- ment found gold mines, silver mines, coal mines, asphalt, platinum, and heaven knows what of mineral treasure. The land behind and beside these includes millions of acres for stock-raising, river valleys for farming, and — hold your breath while you think of it! — one of the snowy ranges that have snared our hearts forever. Think of the more than imperial magnificence of owning one of these connecting links with heaven ! The president, who is now in Europe 62 ON THE WING. elaborating his plans, lives royally, not far from the line of road we travelled to-day, in old Spanish fashion, with forty horses in his stables; with separate buildings gathered around inclosed court-yards for the different uses of his household and guests ; with the wealth of the Incas, and a gorgeous hospitality like that of the brilliant but unfortunate Ralston. And a few years ago this Prince Fortunatus was cutting grass or herding cattle on the plains, with re- volvers in his belt to hold at bay marauding Indians, earning with the sweat of his brow his laborer's pay of a couple of dollars a day. Was there ever a more fanciful fairy story, only that this is real life ! Immense flocks of sheep are coming into range along the railway line now for the first time, so nume- rous that it seems in the distance as if the great plains had been piled in spots with thousands on thousands of round gray rocks. They are most com- monplace and uninteresting animals it is possible to conceive, awkward, dust-colored and stupid. Where do Schreyer and V^erboeckhoven get their models ? Wliat different breeds must pose for those soft-eyed, soft-fleeced mothers, those tender snowy lambs, those proud-horned patriarchs of the groups they delight in ! They are watched by shepherds ; but neither are they, by any means, the ideal creatures. Bearded like the pard, mounted like Australian bushwackers, riding like daredevils, u^ly, and I am sorry to say dirty, they as little resemble the idylic creations of the French and Italian school as a potato does an apricot. A certain amount of slovenliness is secretly dear to ON THE WING. 63 the artistic temperament ; even rags and tatters can be so well " set " as to produce an effect which good broadcloth could never inspire ; but the brutal, greasy, honest frowziness of these sheep-herders, has no more to do with the picturesque, than the sheep they tend. If such "shepherds watched their flocks by night," I wonder if the angel of the Lord would ever have appeared to them. Now adobe houses come thick and fast; indeed, they are the only habitations to be seen, except when now and again some small town boasts a few un- painted, one-roomed cottages, as saloons or hotel buildings. The perfect level of the plains begins to be broken by undulations and low, scrubby hills, covered with something very like the savins of New England. One bit of ground near Galisteo, for five miles or so, might be put bodily down by the Old Colony Railroad at Braintree, and the oldest inhabitant would never know a change had been made. Even the mountains look like Franconia and the Notch ; but still the patches of red earth cropping up here and there are like a continuation of Colorado. By the doors of wayside cabins, swarth groups of Mexicans, darker than mulattoes, the women and children with long, straight, black hair, lounge. We have gotten out of the work-a-day world into one of leisure. Every one looks lazy; there would be bustle enough in one street of the sleepiest Massachusetts village to drive this whole nation frantic. And here is Las Vegas — you see how the very names begin to grow soft and liquid — with its pretty 64 ON THE WING. hotel, the Montezuma, a cross between the Pemberton and Nantasket. It is finished inside, with an eye for the ccsthetic that is keener than any we have met since leaving the Hub. The carpets are as nice a bit of color as one need crave ; and, from the patterns of the Kensington embroidered tidies, to the shape of the cups and saucers, all is as it should be. So is the service at table, and particularly grateful after the plate-hurlers of Manitou. There was a piano in the west parlor; a new baby Steinway, one of the love- liest instruments ever touched, and there we had one golden morning. When a violin has breathed into it, by some witchcraft of soul, such tenderness and weirdness and sweetness as draw one's spirit out with every tone that comes from it, and when a piano not only sustains but inspires it, what better gift of the gods can the world give us than to sit in the sunshine and listen. If you want to know the real luxury of a good wash, travel three thousand miles across the Conti- nent, be steeped in dust and smoke and ashes, live in a trunk and a sleeping-car, let your highest ambition be to keep your face and hands only decently dirtv, and then get into one of the warm sulphur-baths at Las Vegas, wath a neat handmaid to shampoo your tired head and make you clean, and neat, and whole- some. It is the most absolute revel in the world. You will understand, then, why Greek and Roman built baths of rare and costly marbles, and spent hours each day indulging in gentle dalliance with per- fumed waters. The popular belief in the country ON THE WING. 65 round about, is that the baths will cure everything but consumption, and the atmosphere will cure that, so there is no chance of dying here, except by accident. We passed to-day in the Apache Canon, the scene of a celebrated battle between Mexicans and Con- federates during the late war, and the ruins of the earliest church even in this early colony; for we are now in an old, instead of a new, country. It knew a more ancient settlement than ours of the east. Here, nearly a hundred years before the Pilgrim Fathers stepped upon Plymouth rock, the stately Spanish cavaher, Alvar Nunez, led his company of knightly adventurers and Castilian soldiers through the sun- baked pla'ins in search of hidden treasure. And here long before, a nation of brave, gentle people lived and loved, leaving traces in tradition of laws, customs, and works which sometimes shame the boasted civilization of the present. Just as the sun was setting behind a dim line of distant mountains, we turned across the plain leading to Santa Fe, and saw the shining dome of the Jesuit's college, which is the most prominent building in the place, reflecting the long, level rays. Soon we were whirling through the wildest maze of tortuous unpaved streets, lost in whirlwinds of dust, crossing a shallow ford of running water in the middle of the highway, and enveloped from head to foot in a mysterious feel- ing that we have been mixed up with somebody else and are cases of mistaken identity. On the warm air, the Angclus is ringing from the church towers; dark- eyed, sad-looking women are gliding like shadows 66 ON THE WING. under the long, white archways which line the street on each side ; dogs are barking in wild chorus ; soldiers lounging in the green plaza; a world of flat- roofed, blank-walled adobe houses, around and before us ; supper is waiting in the dining-room of the Palace Hotel, and we are in the city of the Holy Faith, with a feeling as if we w^ere cats in a strange garret. It is Sunday; in front of my window, a garden of perhaps three acres, surrounded by high walls of adobe, is divided into checker-like squares by raised banks of earth about two feet high, in order to keep the scarce, precious water on the beds when they are sprinkled. Faint little lines of green show themselves regularly through the baked-looking earth, where the very late early vegetables have started, but they are so faint that they scarcely disturb the deep, brown color. In one place a small patch of currant bushes are in full but rather thriftless condition. Along the side of the wide, dusty road, flat-roofed, one-story houses, all of adobe, still show straight, almost blank walls, only a heavy gate-like door here and there, or the closed wooden shutters of a window, breaking the monotony. These would seem to be the dreariest cf mortal dwelling-places, until you notice through one of the doors, which by chance has been left open, that the little houses are each built around an open square, with a court-yard in the centre, at least in the better class ; this is planted with trees, shrubbery or flowers, so that the inner life is better than the outer. A broad piazza is always in front, enclosed under heavy arches, ON THE WING. 67 or supported by wooden posts, tlirovving the sidewalk into shadow, and making grateful protection from the sun. Up this covered sidewalk has just trotted a little donkey with two Mexicans on his back, their feet almost touching the uneven ground. Down the centre of the dusty road comes a sound of music, and three men with fiddles, playing an opera air, appear at the head of a sad little procession, bringing a dead baby to the grave. Four little dark-eyed bovs hold the bier on which rests, in a small open box lined with pink and covered with white lace and flowers, the tiny little waxen figure, while a man walking at the side, carries under his arm the ornamented pink cover which is soon to be fastened down forever. Behind comes a motley group : most of the women in black skirts, with the long, graceful, scarf-like shawl thrown over the head, which seems to be the national costume. One with a gay bonnet and American umbrella looks as out of place as the others would in a Boston street. Grotesque, almost ludicrous, some of our people find it, but, to me, unutterably toucliin^^^; for it seems as if the yearning hearts even in the first dismal pangs of grief are trying to express outwardly their firm trust that it is not cause for mourning, but joy, since "all is well with the child." Indeed, this is the belief which their Catholic church teaches, and it is beautiful as Faith and Hope can make it. Heaven grant the peace and consolation which conviction brings with it, to the weeping eyes following so longingly the little pink casket ! Now a couple of Pueblo Indians mounted on mus- 68 ON THE WING. tangs dash down the place the h"ttle funeral procession has just left. Their rather gaudy rags and gewgaws float behind them; a couple of muskets swing loosely at the side; something is gleaming at each belt; they are talking rapidly with each other as they disap- pear in a cloud of dust around the nearest corner. Leaning against the adobe walls, groups of swarthy, dark-eyed men lounge or lie in the sun, smoking pipes or cigarettes; at one of the small square windows opening above their heads, a woman's face, with the sad, questioning look which belongs to the people, is. looking down. In the street, the shawl about the head is drawn forward and held with the left hand so as to cover the mouth entirely, leaving only the eyes visible. This alone is enough to give an oriental air to the place ; a long ruffled skirt of either some bright muslin, or black, like the shawl, completes the cos- tume. There is nothing distinctive about the men's dress, except the broad-brimmed, light-colored hat, which is universal. Just beyond the drowsy street, the gothic walls of the new cathedral, which is slowly being built about the half-ruined, centuries old, adobe building of the early missions, shows its buttresses and arched windows. Here and there, always between high clay walls, patches of verdure show a care- fully-tended bit of ground, while one large, shady spot, well covered with trees, marks the outline of Archbishop Almy's celebrated garden. In this, he has demonstrated, by the careful experimenting of many years, that almost every variety of vegetation, from the fruits and flowers of the North to the ON THE WING. 69 tropical luxuriance of the South, can be grown in. Santa Fe, if irrigation is attended to properly. A soft .summer haze i.s over ever}thing; even the dogs are silent, and only the church bells break the stillness. Far away the faint, blue mountains rise mistily, piled like clouds, along the horizon; and all between, save for the few prominent cross-crowned church buildings, long, low walls of gray-brown or white adobe, make the flat earth look flatter, until it melts into the baked plains beyond. Every motion that meets the eye, except the two dashing Indians, is lazy and languid, as if hurry had gone out of the world. Pictures of that indolent dolce far niente, loafers couched in perfect bliss, are all about, but they do not look like the seedy beats of our Northern experience; they appear to have a certain right to be lazy. Even the team of twelve oxen crossing the Plaza looks like a bit of still life. It seems out of place to be talking and thinking in English. The soft, musical Spanish, with its graceful gesture and liquid flow, is more in keeping with the earth we are in now ; American nasals require too much exertion. One evening, before leaving the city, we were taken, through the kindness of one of the American resi- dents, to see a Mexican dance. The walk through the dark, crooked streets, stumbling, in utter silence, over still darker sidev/alks under the deep arches, was so wierd and ghost-like, that it made odd preparation, for a festival scene. The primitive ball, which was a weekly occurrence, w^as held in the one long, low room of an adobe house, which was entered through. 70 ON THE WING. the chamber of the master and mistress. A single board around the room for seats, a table in the centre of one side, upon which sat three dark-skinned, wrinkled fiddlers, some tallow candles in tin fasten- ings high on the walls, and a small counter at one end, made up the furnishing of the place. On one side the men, on the other the women, sat motionless and voiceless. We, from fear of infringing on the etiquette of the place, were profoundly silent also, so that a gathering of deaf mutes could not be quieter. At last a short, svvarth man, rising, crossed the room, offered his arm to a partner, and still without a word, took his place upon the floor ; three others followed his example, so that a set was formed almost in the position of our quadrilles ; the fiddlers struck up an odd but well-timed waltz, and the dancers began a graceful rythmic movement, with so much ease and such just conception of tlie swaying measure, as was surprising. When we remembered the distorted steps we had often seen danced to the much-abused waltz; at home, it was refreshing to see all the performers moving with such delicious languor in slow circles, as if the very spirit of the music were pulsing through them. There were many pretty figures, always timed to the same swaying step, and always performed with the same gentle gravity. The women, except for their lovely, dark Spanish eyes, were decidedly homel)', the men little better ; but one beautiful Madonna-faced creature showed what the type could be when it reached perfection. Tlie dances all resembled each other, and, in the intervals, refreshments, in the shape ON THE WINC;. 71 of soda and sarsaparilla- waters, with glass dishes of bright-colored bonbons, were handed around. We were treated with great kindness, and were much im- pressed with the quiet dignity and grace of the people, which seemed so unlike the noisy hilarity of a similar meeting at home. It was in keeping with the slow, quiet, grave world around us. We had at Wallace, three hours after leaving Santa Fe, our first real introduction to the Indians. They crowded the hotel and railroad platforms, offering small lots of very poor turquoise and native pottery for sale. They always asked three times as much as they intended to take, and would sell the tin bracelets on their very dirty arms, or the silver rings in their very dirty ears, for one or two of the " bits " they coveted so much. I am not sure that they would not have sold themselves and their children if the price was high enough. They were a sharp blow to any preconceived idea of Indian nobility, the features, without being particularly bad, were so wanting in any sort of animation ; the petty pride in a paint- streaked face or a gaudy necklace so apparent ; the dirt so hideous, both of themselves and their filthy, faded blankets, that one involuntarily- shrank from contact. But they had good eyes, good teeth, figures erect as a young sapling, and, where they followed the traditional costume of their race, a certain pic- turesqueness not yet quite destroyed. You could conceive that there might be among them some young chief worthy to be the friend of Deer Slayer. But as soon as they attempted Christian habiliments and dis- 72 ON THE WING. guised themselves in shop-made coats and trousers, the repulsiveness of their dirty personnel was so exaggerated, that it overcame everything else. You were disgusted, and nothing more. Their chief was a much superior specimen to most of his tribe. We were in a very perturbed state of mind all that night, from some accounts we had heard of danger from the Navajos farther on, and of the dread of the people of Wallace even of these Pueblos. Their mild stolidity might be only a cloak for some fiendish plot ; and when you are in the midst of a country which is credited with being in a state of uprising, vour nerves toward evening are just in a condition to be worked ; so, though common sense in the still .small voice of conscience declared the whole thing impossible, we persisted in imagining a war-whoop in every steam-whistle, a night attack in every sudden stop, and instant annihilation lurking in every shadow. But we woke with our scalps on. El Paso, looked from the cars like another Santa Fe, only more caked and baked, if possible, with mountains like dirt-heaps in the distance. We were all somewhat out of sorts after the sleepless night and dreadfully hot morning which followed it, and the clouds of flying dust and lifeless adobe houses made us still more hippish. But the ride across into old Mexico, in spite of dust, in spite of heat, in spite of bad temper, was one of the most interesting of our lives. Once you had gotten across the rope ferry over the Rio Grande, 3'ou were in a bit of Moorish Spain. Before and around you constantly, are narrow^ ON THE WING. 73 dusty streets, bordered by low adobe walls, with an occasional heavy door opening into an inner court- yard, bright with tall, blossoming oleanders, rising from amid green shrubbery around a tinkling foun- tain. Brown-skinned, bare-armed and bare -legged figures, in short turic and drawers of white linen, work among the vines in vine}"ards surrounded by high, hot walls; a train of Mexican supply wagons, blue-bodied and white-capped, shining in the brilliant sunshine, each drawn by twelve burros, with bells on their bridles, driven four abreast by a cloud of broad- hatted, broad-sashed muleteers, comes up some narrow lane. We drove along a shady road, arched with cottonwoods and blossoming locusts ; a swift-flowing canal ran at one side ; on the other, a hedge of tall- spiked cactus, each prickly rod tipped with one flaming blossom of glowing scarlet, like Joseph's rod, which blossomed at the top. Fields of purple alfalfa, bearded barley, swaying wheat, acre after acre of vineyard, stretched on either hand, divided by hedges of osage orange, or adobe walls surmounted by the flat prairie cactus we had seen before. A brown, WTinkled hag, kneeling on the red earth under a mesquite bush by the side of a small pool, polished a bright brass kettle, w^hich glowed like some sacred vessel in the service of the Sun God. A train of small burros came winding down one of the crooked streets be-tween high walls of adobe, each with two tiny, half-naked, black imps on its shaggy back. Aross a field came a shapely young woman, her bright, dark eyes intensified by a white scarf thrown over the brow, balancing on her head a 74 ON THE WING. great earthern jar of water, while two little boys at her side trotted contentedly on, each bearing two pails hanging from a primitive yoke resting on the shoulders. Behind the wooden bars of a grated window a group of bronzed baby faces looked gravely out ; under an archway the glowing white walls of a court-yard showed itself, a hand's-breadth of blue sky shining above. Once a young girl, with a bril- liant, dark face, held up a glorious bunch of deep-red roses as we drove past, and, running after the car- riage, shyly placed them in my hands, and ran laughing back to the shelter of the placita. So it was endlessly : it was the novelty of Santa Fe intensified tenfold, with a greater compliment of beauty than Santa Fe ever possessed. One wanted to go in and stay for awhile with the grave, courteous, brown people in the drowsy shade of the arches lead- ing into some quiet placita, with the Angelus bells coming in pulsing waves of soft sound through the sultry air. It seemed as if here, at least, care should sleep, and the bristling, bustling tumult of life lose itself in the dolce far niente of summer restfulness. Fade far away, dreams of ambition ! Melt into thin, blue air, like the smoke curling slenderly from yon adobe chimney; what has perplexity, or longing, or vain desire, or vainer effort, to do with this Land of the Lotus ? What is life but the calm of passionless content, and the culmination — the apotheosis — of laziness ! And what are we but disembodied spirits, floating in a languid atmosphere of luxurious content, at peace with ourselves and the world ! ON FHE WING. 75 There was an irresistible fascination over every- thing. The Scriptural-looking flat roofs, surrounded by a low parapet, as if the inhabitants were in the habit of using them for summer bed-rooms, did more than any one other feature to give an absolutely foreign air. Men plowing in high-v/alled fields, used a plow made of a pointed piece of wood, fitted v/ith handles, and drove their oxen by a long thong of hide fastened to the horns. Existence here was under the most primitive conditions. Perhaps if one could stay longer, so as to know them w^ell, this small, slight people might develop an activity Vv^hich would change our first impression ; but, so far, the almond-e^-ed Chinese, coming in felt shoes and blue pjahma down, the long arcade on the sunny side of the street, looks the embodiment of purpose and business, compared with the Mexicans before and after him. Business, if it is not a mistake to speak of business in connec- tion with affairs here, is conducted in the easiest way ; the ferry crossing the Rio Grande is a flat-boat, with two ropes at the sides, fastened to pulleys, which run over a cable stretched from bank to bank. The tremendously swift current swings it across ; a couple of men v/ith a windlass guide it ; it moves somewhat cumbrously and very slowl)^ while those on the bank stand fretting and fuming, waiting their turn. A bridge across the narrow stream w^ould do ten times the work, or a boat with proper machinery, but this is probably why it is n't in use. It would be the entering wedge toward hurrying up, and your true Mexican never hurries. Indeed, he has pretty fairly inoculated 76 ON THE WING. his American fellow-citizen : they have never quite become satisfied with the railroad. I wonder liow many of our young people would like to go housekeeping in one of those adobe houses. There is one incalculable blessing, — no stairs. If you want to climb on top of the flat roof over the single story, you must take a ladder. Through the door, in the blank clay wall which fronts the street, a narrow, dark passage, usually whitewashed, leads to the placita, or square central court-yard, on which all the rooms open. The parlor has a print or two on the walls, probably, and a rug or two on the bare, clean, scrubbed floor; possibly, a table with a few books, a couple of wicker-chairs, and a white muslin curtain at the little window. There may be a bowl of Pueblo pottery or a brilliantly-dyed Indian blanket, or a sewing-machine in a corner, but this is unusual and superfluous luxury. The dining-room has its round table and a few simple chairs; the kitchen, its fire- place and mesa ; the bedrooms, dark and cool, their small, single, white beds, and nothing else. It is not overwhelming, but it is enough ; and their house- keepers do not die of nervous prostration. The system of irrigation is very simple, but exten- sive. Earthen ditches conduct the water from tlie river, from mountain springs, or from artificial reser- voirs, through the fields, crossing the roads by means of small wooden conduits, which make abrupt, jerky elevations every few hundred feet. By damming the flow of water at one point, it can be turned into any desired channel, so that every field, no matter how ox THE V/INC. yy larp^e, is comi^letely under control. They pretend that it is a much safer plan than that of depending on natural means ; but, for myself, I believe tlie rain is the better watering-pot. This was all on the Mexican side, in El Paso del Norte, where the three-barred Mexican flag which should have floated on its tall staff, but did not, pro- claimed that we were indeed and truth in a strange land. Of El Paso itself, the Texan city, we have the most unpleasant memories of the trip thus far. The day was insufferably hot; we were not prepared for it; the streets were a foot deep in powdery dust, which choked unmercifully ; we were still lurkingly and secretly afraid of the Indians and cowboys, about whom dreadful people were constantly dropping hints and innuendoes ; we were half sick and wholly tired from the unwonted temperature ; iced lemonade was twenty-five cents a glass and oranges four for a dollar, so the bitter cup v/as full. There is no. balm in the Gilead of travelling which vv'ill heal so many ills at once. But that bit of Mexico, that oasis which only the rushing, shining river separated from the dust desert of Texas, with its green groves of locust and cotton- wood, its hedges of cactus and mesquite, its bushes of wild roses, its wavy, delicate greenery ! It v/as all Morocco. It was only necessary to replace the broad sombrero with the Moslem fez, and pile the contents of the wagons on the backs of a caravan cf camels. All sorts of Scriptural and oriental pictures came to one's mind: the bits of blue sky glowing between ^8 ON THE WING. naked white or brown walls ; the bare-armed laborers in loose, white jacket and short trousers ; the long, jingling lines of mules and donkeys creeping lazily up narrow, sleepy lanes ; even tlie lustrous eyes and teeth, and the frequent bit of bright or white drapery, kept up the illusion. The children were the hand- somest race 1 ever saw in my life, and the straight, lithe riders, doffing hats as they passed in token of salutation, had a graceful deference which even their haughty brothers of the East could not surpass. The odds for effectiveness and picturesquencss would of course be in favor of the Bedouin, with his flowing mantle and Arab steed ; but somehow or other, though there is nothing in life less dignified than a mule, a Mexican can manage to preserve the illusion of dignity even with this long- eared animal as his accessory. The soft-flowing Spanish names of this part of the world are another source of novelty to our English ears, grating yet with the harsh usage they received in Kansas and the middle West. How can Alamosa, Antonita, Fra Cristobal, San Diego and \^alverde be anything but lovely? Is a backyard any longer a backyard when it is a placita.'' isn't a vulgar shop removed from all suspicion of vulgarity when it is changed to la tienda ? and ought not all tables to be made of ormolu or buhl when they become mesas .'' But in spite of even this fine bit of sentiment, we were all heartily glad to start again on our journey, and see fade behind us into the grey desert from which it had risen the wall of the house in El Paso, with its twenty- ON THE WING. 79 five bullet marks, where four desperadoes had emptied their revolvers at the sheriff trying to capture them; and the more sinister marks on the door-post across the street where the sheriff in turn had killed three of the men while trying to seize a fourth. Such are the legends that hang like clouds yet, around the rising star of the West. CHAPTER VII. THE CITY OF THE ANGELS. THE best specimen we have seen yet of the traditional Westerner, the man whom Bret Harte created and the world has taken as a type, fearless, dashing, yet gentle, was the sheriff of Santa Fe, who travelled with us for a short time on his way to Missouri to pick up -some criminals. He had killed in the course of his different terms of ser- vice, and purely as a matter of business, ten men, and was reported to be as absolutely unconcerned in the face of danger as Billy the Kid, a desperado who, before he was shot at the age of twenty, had killed twenty-eight men. Tony carried in his belt a revolver belonging to this same Billy, and took a modest pride in showing it and giving its bloody record. He was a handsome fellow, tall, straight, with fine teeth and large dark eyes, and a shy, awkward smile, which made him look more hke an innocent countryman out on a holiday, than the reckless, cool, dare-devil he was. He showered a handful of garnets on one of the young people, as if they were common stones, just as an emperor flings diamonds at Patti, and car- ried a httle package of pretty things to an only sister he was to see on his way, as tenderly as any kind, common-place brother might. He spoke of the In- 82 ON THE WING. dians in terms of sucli absolute and undisguised contempt, that we gave the remnants of our fears to the winds, and were honestly sorry when the big, brave, gentle barbarian took his leave at Albuquerque. Nothing can be more desolately dreadful than the alkali plains of Arizona, unless it be those of Cah- fornia farther on. The poor, sparse vegetation is cov- ered with the same gray dust, so that it looks like the ghastly form of hfe with the spirit departed, as one imagines the pallid trees and shadowy shrubs of Dante's inferno. It is a world that might be inhabited by disembodied spirits, whose hopeless eyes wandered aimlessly amid the ghosts of remembered things. The saddest of all sad places ! Even the mountains, instead of the titanic spurs and slopes which make New Mexico and Colorado beautiful, were only giant dust heaps, tumbled in inextricable confusion, lovely still, though, with a vague, undefined outline, far-off against the sky. The air had begun to grow more hazy ; the sky was a paler blue ; the enormous cacti, which look always as if they belonged to some past age of the world, and should have gone out forever with the ichthyosaurus and megetharium, lifted their uncouth ugliness into painful prominence. It is the most unlovely vegetable creation on earth : fleshly, prickly, horrible in its stolid, brutal obstinacy; even its gorgeous flowers do not lessen its repulsiveness. You are filled with wonder to see so fair a blossom on so foul a stem ; but that is all : you do not love the stinging monster that bears it any the more. Covered with the shining dust of the plains, so that they seem ON THE WING. 83 to spring like abortions of the earth itself, they are more than ever repulsive. I hate the cactus : it looks like the reptile of the vegetable world. At times one comes upon a perfectly level plain like a white sea, absolutely unrelieved by anything beyond billows of sand stretching to the dim mountains on either hand. At other times, masses of the most wonderful flowers, great ox-eyed daisies, golden core- opsis, fine purple verbena, and a lily-shaped, velvety flower of deep, solid yellow, grew in clusters that would make a city forester wild with envy. We filled the car with stacks of these at each stopping-place, only too glad of some relief from the dreadful, gray monotony outside. In the very midst of all this, on what is called the Sulphur Plains, the most beautiful mirage came and lasted for hours. From a blue sea the mountains rose, their purple peaks reflected to perfection in the clear water; while isolated masses, brown and yellow, full of chrome and umber shadows like the rocks at Nantasket, lifted themselves between. I never dreamed before of such an illusion. One could wonder no longer after this at the hallucination which tempts caravans and wayworn travellers miles out of their way, luring them to death and destruc- tion, to reach the shining waters gleaming so placidly beyond. At Fort Yuma we met another tribe of Indians, better made, physically, than the Pueblos, taller of stature, more symmetrical, and, except for the hair, a shade less dirty. One fellow, with a leonine mane, massive head, and finely marked features, had a 84 ON THE WING. grotesque resemblance to Rubenstein, especially when striding across the platform at the depot to offer a wicker-basket full of live quail for sale, he tossed back his long locks with a fine fling of the head. The people seemed aware of their natural advantages and inclined to display them as much as possible ; so that while the Pueblo women covered even the ankles with close wrappings, and held their greasy blankets high around the neck, the matrons of Yuma folded one long piece of brilliant calico straightly around the body, and that was all. It was usually passed under the arms, but sometimes covered one shoulder. Most of the braves, wore one striped garment like an under- vest, and disdained to fret their proud limbs by any other unnecessary muffling. Some of our people looked askance at Hrst, and one dear old lady, tugging at my dress, exclaimed, " Why can V they make those awful creatures put on more clothes?" But they •decided at last that this severe simplicity of attire was one of the monstrous productions of the country, like the cactus and the sand-plains, and so must be tolerated. The current of the Colorado, like that of most rivers we had passed lately, was exceedingly swift, and the water, probably on that account, muddy. Still the effect, except when looking directly down, was blue and brilliant, full of dancing lights and pretty, sparkling eddies, which foamed at the foot of the tall cliffs bounding the sides. Almost immediately after leaving Yuma, we plunged into the desert again. Inexpressibly dreary ; the dead ON THE WING. 85 plain, the tufted pine-apple plants, the gray cactus, the iikeleton bushes ; and always the dim outline of the mountains on either hand, like giant thunder-clouds, adding their wrathful, brooding silence to the sullen scene. It might be Sahara instead of California; yon far-away moving speck a train of dromedaries, with caftaned, slow-pacing Musselmans by their sides ; that tufted palm the edge of an oasis. And here, praised ba the Fates ! 1 y the brink cf a muddy water-course, his humped back elevated in a broken arch against the sky, his patient neck bowed abjectly as he lifts it to look at the passing train, is a camel: a real, truly, dust-colored camel! When our picturesque 3-oung man, with a bright-colored turban wound around his dusty locks, a Navajo scarf girdling his somewhat slender waist, opens the door and shouts, "Algiers! ten minutes for sherbet and pillauf ! " we all smile absently, as if it might have been, even if it is not. Suddenly, almost without warning, we have left the wastes of sand behind, and are whirling between foot- hills, low and green, almost hemming in the track; the great shadowy mountains, still as grim and dusty as ever, stretch beyond- but between us and them .such lovely, smiling valleys, such fields of waving grain, such yellow sweeps of wild ftiustard, such an infinitely beautiful variation of changeful, harmonious colors ! Now and again a sparkling stream of clear, running water; a pretty, small house, with its kitchen gardens stretching in order around the porch ; the spire of a tiny village church ; a camp of Chinese laborers srathered into a circle of small white tents.. 86 ON THE WING. The change is so instantaneous that you wait, watch- ing for the desert to return again. But no ; the lovely, smiling land only broadens and brightens; vineyards <:ome, and meadows of purple alfalfa ; the dooryards of isolated cottages are glowing with enormous ole- anders and spikes of tall white lilies ; a man walking on the track, with his hands full of branches of snow- ball, tosses them into the car windows as if they were ttie commonest things in life. And this within half an hour, after having passed two long, ghostly days hemmed in by the awful desolation of the gray desert,, with nor sight nor sound of life save at meal-stations and water-tanks ! It is better than the grand trans- formation scene in a Christmas pantomime. It seems quite natural to feast at dinner-time on .spring chickens and fresh peas, with a bouquet of flowers by each plate; it would seem natural if the restaurant-waiters floated out in gauzy skirts to the sound of soft music to attend us. Can this exquisite, perfumed land be the same, by any law of God or nature, as the dark and direful place through which we were journeying before ? Back again come the old landmarks of civilization, the patent plows and harrows, the thrifty, home- like look of neatness about dooryard and well-sweep. In broad fields, husbandmen are already harvesting some of their crops, while others are just beginning to spring into the sunshine. Strange-leaved trees, the deep slaty-blue of the eucalyptus, the generous, large-armed shade of the walnut, the gigantic, deeply- scalloped foliage of the fig, come now and again to ON THE WING. 87 Vciry the landscape. The wayside grass grows tall and thick, headed like bearded barley ; the flowers are larger; climbing roses festoon the entire fronts of the little houses, and tangled white honeysuckles rise like trees into the air. There, a hedge of callas lifts itself statelily six feet above the garden border; here, a one-story cottage is covered to the eaves with trail- in": smilax. We are in constant bewilderment and ecstasy, until, just as the sun is setting behind the old belfry of the ancient mission-church of San Gabriel, and the evening star we have seen so often is rising with the pale silver bow of the newest of all new moons by its side, a breath of fragrance unknown before, an impalpable, fine essence, as of something we have known in dreams, floats across the still air, and we know that at last — at last— we have come into the promised kingdom, and are flying through the orange groves of the Land of Flowers. When we rode out next day from Los Angeles to the Mission, and, after passing miles of spicy avenues, stretching right and left in long diverging lines o£ glossy, dark-leaved trees, white with blossoms on the outer edges, and heavy with red-gold clusters of fruit within, turned into the lane leading to Sierra Madre Villa, it was too utterly beautiful for anything but fairyland. A beauty as different from that of P.Ianitou as can well be imagined ; warm, voluptuous, languish- ing beauty ; air faint with odors of millions of sleepy flowers ; a bewilderment of bloom and brightness ; a veritable, wild garden, with everything from a timid New England pink or English violet to the passionate 88 ON THE WING. depth of a forest of jacqueminots, or the stately, Juno-hke waxiness of. a catalpa. Such a riotous Avealth of bloom and fragrance, as if Nature had gone on a revel, and, tipsy with delight, had spun into odorous masses of color and light every whim that crossed her vagabond fancy ! Century plants had truncated columns tnirty feet high in the centre; Marechal Neils and Gold of Ophir roses, blazing scar- let pomegranate tips, slender Eastern palms with tall, swaying, fan-like leaves, tangled themselves in a labyrinth of beauty at every step; and behind, loom- ing like the shadow of some great veiled fate, the waiting mountains rose, half hidden by the misty blue air. We drove through the most extensive orange groves and vineyards of the region, and were royally treated. I wonder whether oranges ever again will taste so sweet as those great luscious globes ; I know they never will, foi wnile we were eating them there was the wonaertul, half-known world about us, with all its witchery. Even if I had them at home, " I could not bring back the sea and the sky — It sang to the ear; tliey sang to the eye," as Emerson says in one of his loveliest poems. We are lodged in the dearest and quietest little house. You pass from the big, bustling, crowded liotel, through a long corridor into a sunny back street; 30U climb a flight of steep, steep steps set in the face of a wall thirty feet high ; you pass under an arch- way of cypress into a bit cf garden, v.ith heliotrope bushes higher than )our liead, banks cf geraniums, ON THE WING. 89 beds of cactus, hedges of roses and jessamine, and there you find a little atom of a house, with bay- windows jutting into the flower.y wilderness, cool and shady and altogether delightful. A small bit of para- dise ; still you know the serpent entered even there, so it is not out of the way that we should have private grievance. But worlds would not buy me to mention what. After a week of Los Angeles, it resolves itself into a sort of hybrid town, with no absolutely distinct point about it, except the always wonderful flowers. In the Spanish quarter, the old adobe houses lose their in- dividuality by having sloping, instead of fiat, roofs, and the broad streets take entirely away the hot, tropi- cal