On a Texas Prairie in 1897

      It was in one of the long journeys across Texas that the train stopping at a water-tank was boarded by a half dozen children of the village that had grown up about the station, children to whom the train came like a herald and messenger from the great outside world. I sat at the end of the observation car, looking out over the wide prairie whose ineffable green under an immense arch of dazzling blue sky billowed away into the low horizon. The gentlemen had stepped down to look at some curiosity near by, and being mistress of the occasion I allowed the children the liberty of the car, which they enjoyed to the utmost. "I thought I would give you fifty dollars, if you would let me ride in this car," said one adventurous and bare-footed little damsel, who had never seen fifty cents in the world, although her father was rich in lands and herds.

      "Why did you want to ride in this car?" I asked.

      'Oh, I thought it would be such happiness!" she cried. "But I reckon I would like the burro best."

      Her dream of happiness! To ride in the car. And mine so opposite to be out of it. And then the porter came in his august plenitude of power and shooed the children off, and the gentlemen returned from their call upon the people who summered and wintered a dozen years in their tent, and we presently went our way again. As we rolled on through the marvelous landscape, its great dells and dingles of live oak, its streams outlined by ribbons of white lilies, where the duck rose and skimmed away, its blazes of scarlet phlox, its coverts where the deer started at our coming, and its stretches where the wild horses galloped ; there suddenly rose in the distance the vision of a river blue as blue crystal, mirroring trees hung with long wreaths of swaying moss, a herd of cattle coming down to drink there, and behind it the dim but gilded domes and spires of a city shone, the whole bathed in a soft atmosphere like that light which never was on sea or shore.

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