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ing the gregarious instinct, and the desire of another of the potentate's cigars, strong upon me, I followed in, to find the rest of the party in anxious debate over a big map, as to the route to be taken from Sioux City onwards. The struggler was all for a rush across the continent to Salt Lake City, and "Frisco," "for one really ought to see those Mormon fellows, you know, before they're stamped out, and-and-I've more than half promised my sister to bring her Brigham's autograph for her collection." The optimist "had quite made up his mind about Mormonism, and didn't think it would do to spend a precious week in going to see it;" while the Illinois Central authorities were ready to order the "Champaign" to any part of the continent, so long as we all had a 'good time.' But before any decision had been come to, the question was happily shelved by our arrival at

Newell.

"Not a timber here last spring," the Vice reminded me, as we stepped ashore. Truly the reminder was needed; for all about the depôt clustered the buildings of a village that looked long out of babydom. A restaurant, a meat market, and a billiard-hall stood conspicuous by their placards amongst the yellow framehouses. Curiosity took us into the billiard-hall. What kind of human beings could have taste and time for billiards in Newell? Just inside his door, the proprietor, a shrewd Cornishman, was sitting at his spirit-bar, with a calm, confident air that seemed to say he, at any rate, felt no fear of lacking customers; and, sure enough, in the rough shed dignified by the name 'hall,' two strapping young fellows, in butternut suits and long cow-hide boots, were idly knocking balls about on a decrepit table. We were hardly out of the door again, when the struggler burst out

"Isn't that a pitiful sight, now? barely ten o'clock, too. Why, I don't believe the idlest men in town would ever dream of going to the club billiardroom at this time of the morning."

"They'd be just waking out of

dream-land about now, perhaps," said the potentate, drily. "But, fact is, there is always more or less of this kind of thing in new settlements. They're a bit feverish at first, but it sloughs off, mostly, it sloughs off."

And away he went with the Vice to look after the points, signals, watertanks, and such like paraphernalia of the depôt, while the rest of us strolled curiously through the village. Plenty of life and stir already. There, astride on his own gable, sat a sturdy, helpful settler, putting the finishing shingles to his roof; and, across the road, two pair of stout hands were unloading a waggonful of pine lumber on to a vacant building lot. Not much to see, may be, but plenty to think about in a place like Newell.

As I was lingering on the depôt platform, idly waiting for the usual summons aboard, a tall, gaunt stranger ranged up alongside, and abruptly fired a volley of questions into me. Going on these cars?"

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"Yes."

"Officer o' the line?"
"No."

"One of the Englishmen ?"
"Yes."

"What part of England?"
"Worcestershire."

"Ever been in our country before?"
"No."

"How d'you like our country?

This last interrogatory I had found by experience to be almost a figure of speech in the States, hardly requiring or expecting a reply. Your ordinary citizen seems to throw it in, by way of starting conversation, as naturally as we resort to the weather. "Mr. Vagabond, sir; happy to meet you, sir. How do you

like our country?" was the stereotyped formula that I had grown to consider as much a part of an introduction as the conventional bow and hat movement. But till this morning at Newell I had never realized in the flesh that stock hero of anecdotes, the inquisitive Yankee. It is a prevalent belief on our side of the water, I take it, that talkativeness, curiosity, and

humour are more or less characteristic of every American citizen. How far those Americans who assert their nationality most loudly at the Langham, the Louvre, and the Beau Rivage, warrant this character, I need not stay to argue. It is pretty generally admitted that the Englishman abroad is a very different being from the Englishman at home. But I am prepared to maintain, as the outcome of my own roving experiences, that, in his own hemisphere and among his own countrymen, the average American citizen is one of the most reserved, taciturn, and matter-of-fact of mortals. Your neighbour in a railroad- or horsecar will answer you civilly enough if you address him, particularly if he sees you are a foreigner; but you may travel a couple of hundred miles together before he will open his lips merely to strike up a conversation with you. Go into any big hotel at some meal-time-almost any hour between 7 A.M. and 10 P.M. will do --and you will find the capacious saloon dotted with silent solitary feeders, every one of whom seems to have posted himself as far away as possible from everybody else, as if on purpose to escape speaking or being spoken to. The only chatterboxes a stranger comes across are the darkey haircutters and shavers, who, with your hair or nose between their fingers, pour out a stream of amusing gossip that Truefitt's young men would give all their scissors to attain to.

Five miles flat running, and the "Champaign" drew up again at Stormy Lake, another town of the future, and we all turned out to stretch our legs, and make observations.

"About the likeliest location on this track," began the President, with a contented smile. "Wherever you see this tough, stringy weed growing thick, you may bet you're on a strong corn-soil; and that pond yonder-it's brimful of pickerel and such-will come in handy by and by."

"Pond! Why, it's as big as the Sea of Galilee, isn't it?"

"About five miles by two; but we don't reckon much of that. There's a regular string of them between this and

the Red River, up Minnesota way. Halloa, what on earth's our friend so tickled with?"

The optimist had loitered behind among the houses, and now came up laughing with a printed poster in his hand.

"Carried this off from the post-office,"

he said. "It's an announcement that the Honourable Elijah Noakes, ex-M.C. and candidate for this Congressional district of the sovereign state of Iowa, proposes addressing the free and enlightened citizen electors of Stormy Lake next month. I've seen some clever boroughnursing in the old country in my time; but this creeping up a constituency's sleeve before it's even out of long clothes fairly beats me. Why, I do believe there are as many potential streets marked out here as there are actual voters living in them at present, eh, potentate?

"The Honourable Elijah isn't due for six weeks. Guess our cars will have run him out an audience between whiles. Only come back next fall, and we'll show you a school-house, an elevator or two, and perhaps a beet sugar-mill between our depôt and the lake there, and you shall read the latest European telegrams in a Stormy Lake Daily Advertiser. We settle up fast in these parts."

'We settle up fast.' Pondering over the potentate's confident words as we rolled easily along the new-built tract, I could not help agreeing to them. The thatch is hardly brown on the shanties of the pioneer settlers, whose sole but unchallenged title to their holdings is that of the first-comer, and already, out here, fourteen hundred miles away from the Atlantic coast, the competition for land is brisk enough, I find, to have brought its average price to ten dollars the acre. The would-be settler, whose pluck and sinews are his only capital, must cross the Missouri and plod on many a mile west through Nebraska or Dakota, before he can hope to halt his bullock-team on soil where no white man the poor reds he'll never cast a thought to-will dispute his owner

ship. They can't even let the Great Sandy Desert (as my school atlas called it) alone, but must needs go turning the Platte over it, and converting it into one huge farm. Well, there's room enough and to spare for all comers yet awhile, thank God, and I only wish more of our crowded-out ones at home were shown the way to help fill it. And then? How long will the pulse of a

common nationality be strong enough to throb right through this great continent from ocean to ocean? No present signs of a break-up at any rate, and as for the future

"You go no further to-day," said the Vice, coming in from the other car. "Here we are at Sioux City. Come and have a first look at the Missouri from the front platform."

THOS. HUGHES.

"COME."

COME to me when the earth is fair
With all the freshness of the spring,
When life fills all the liquid air,
And when the woods with music ring;
When all the wakening flowers rejoice,
And birds remind me of your voice.

Come to me when the summer's heat
Is strong the breeze of spring to kill;
When gardens with perfume are sweet,
And when the languid noon is still;
Come when the opened buds disclose
The glory of the full-blown rose.

Come to me when the summer fades,
When all the rose's sweets are dead,
When autumn robes the saddening glades,
When purple heather turns to red;
Come to me when the wrinkled leaf
Falls like the tear of constant grief.

Come chiefly when all warmth is lost,
When autumn to stern winter yields;
Come when the bitter edge of frost
Shrouds all the verdure of the fields;
Come when all else is dark and drear,
Thy presence then is doubly dear.

WALTER HERRIES POLLOCK.

MACMILLAN'S MAGAZINE.

JANUARY, 1872.

THE STRANGE ADVENTURES OF A PHAETON.

BY WILLIAM BLACK, AUTHOR OF

CHAPTER I.

OUR BELL.

"Oh, the oak, and the ash, and the bonny ivy

tree,

They grow so green in the North Countrie!"

Ir was all settled one evening in the deep winter time. Outside, a sharp east wind was whistling round the solitudes of Box Hill; the Mole, at the foot of our garden, as it stole stealthily through the darkness, crackled the flakes of ice that lay along its level banks; and away on Mickleham Downs -and on the further uplands that lay towards the sea-the cold stars were shining down on a thin coating of snow.

Indoors there was another story to tell; for the mistress of the house Queen Titania, as we call her a small person, with a calm, handsome, pale face, an abundance of dark hair, big eyes that are somewhat cold and critical in look, and a certain magnificence of manner which makes you fancy her rather a tall and stately woman—has a trick of so filling her drawing-room with dexterous traceries of grass and ferns, with plentiful flowers of her own rearing, and with a crowded glare of light, that, amid the general warmth No. 147.-VOL. XXV.

A DAUGHTER OF HETH," ETC.

and glow and perfume, and variety of brilliant colours, you would almost forget that the winter is chill and desolate and dark.

Then Bell, our guest and companion for many a year, lends herself to the deception; for the young woman, though there were a dozen inches of snow on the meadows, would come down to dinner in a dress of blue, with touches of white gossamer and fur about the tight waist and neck-with a white rose and a bunch of forget-me-nots, as blue as her eyes, twisted into the soft masses of her light-brown hair, and with a certain gay and careless demeanour, meant to let us know that she, having been born and bred a farmer's daughter in the North Country, has a splendid contempt for the mild rigours of our southern winter.

But, on this particular evening, Bell -our Bell, our Bonny Bell, our Lady Bell, as she is variously called, when she provokes people into giving her pet names-had been sitting for a long time with an open book on her knee; and as this volume was all about the English lakes, and gave pictures of them, and placed here and there little tail-pieces of ferns and blossoms, she may have been driven to

M

contrast the visions thus conjured up with the realities suggested by the fierce gusts of wind that were blowing coldly through the box-trees outside. All at once she placed the volume gently on the white hearth-rug, and said, with a strange wistfulness shining in the deeps of her blue eyes,—

"Tita, why don't you make us talk about the summer, and drown the noise of that dreadful wind? Why don't we conspire to cheat the winter, and make believe it is summer again? Doesn't it seem to be years and years ago since we had the long, light evenings; the walks between the hedge-rows, the waiting for the moon, up on the crest of the hill, and then the quiet stroll downward into the valley and home again, with the wild roses, and the meadow sweet, and the evening campions filling the warm, sweet night air. Come, let us sit close together, and make it summer! See, Tita !—it is a bright forenoon-you can nearly catch a glimpse of the Downs above Brighton -and we are going to shut up the house, and go away anywhere for a whole month. Round comes that dear old mail-phaeton, and my pair of bonny bays are whinnying for a bit of sugar. Papa is sulky

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"As usual," remarks my Lady Tita, without lifting her eyes from the carpet.

"for though an improvised imperial has been slung on, there is scarcely enough room for the heaps of our luggage, and, like every man, he has a selfish hatred of bonnet-boxes. Then you take your seat, my dear, looking like an empress in a grey travelling dress; and papa-after pretending to have inspected all the harness- -takes the reins; I pop in behind, for the hood, when it is turned down, makes such a pleasant cushion for your arms, and you can stick your sketchbook into it, and a row of apples and anything else; and Sandy touches his forelock, and Kate bobs a curtsy, and away, and away we go! How sweet and fresh the air is, Tita! and don't you smell the honeysuckle in the hedge? Why, here we are at Dorking! Papa

pulls up to grumble about the last beer that was sent; and then Castor and Pollux toss up their heads again, and on we go to Guildford, and to Reading, and to Oxford. And all through England we go, using sometimes the old coaching-roads, and sometimes the byroads, stopping at the curious little inns, and chatting to the old country folks and singing ballads of an evening as we sit upon the hill-sides, and watch the partridges dusting themselves below us in the road; and then on and on again. Is that the sea, Tita ?—look at the long stretch of Morecambe Bay and the yellow sands, and the steamers at the horizon! But all at once we dive into the hills again, and we come to the old familiar places by Applethwaite and Ambleside, and then some evening-some evening, Tita-we come in sight of Grasmere, and then-and then

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Why, Bell-Bell !-what is the matter with you!" cries the other, and the next minute her arms are round the light-brown head, crushing its white rose and its blue forget-me-nots.

"If you two young fools," it is remarked, "would seriously settle where we are to go next summer, you would be better employed than in rubbing your heads together like a couple of young calves."

"Settle!" says Lady Titania, with the least touch of insolence in her tone, "we know who is allowed to settle things in this house. If we were to settle anything, some wonderful discovery would be made about the horses' feet, or the wheels of that valuable phaeton, which is about as old as the owner of it

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