existence. One person at least I saw upon the plains who seemed in
every way superior to her lot. This was a woman who boarded us at
a way station, selling milk. She was largely formed; her features
were more than comely; she had that great rarity - a fine
complexion which became her; and her eyes were kind, dark, and
steady. She sold milk with patriarchal grace. There was not a
line in her countenance, not a note in her soft and sleepy voice,
but spoke of an entire contentment with her life. It would have
been fatuous arrogance to pity such a woman. Yet the place where
she lived was to me almost ghastly. Less than a dozen wooden
houses, all of a shape and all nearly of a size, stood planted
along the railway lines. Each stood apart in its own lot. Each
opened direct off the billiard-board, as if it were a billiard-
board indeed, and these only models that had been set down upon it
ready made. Her own, into which I looked, was clean but very
empty, and showed nothing homelike but the burning fire. This
extreme newness, above all in so naked and flat a country, gives a
strong impression of artificiality. With none of the litter and
discoloration of human life; with the paths unworn, and the houses
still sweating from the axe, such a settlement as this seems purely
scenic. The mind is loth to accept it for a piece of reality; and
it seems incredible that life can go on with so few properties, or
the great child, man, find entertainment in so bare a playroom.

And truly it is as yet an incomplete society in some points; or at
least it contained, as I passed through, one person incompletely
civilised. At North Platte, where we supped that evening, one man
asked another to pass the milk-jug. This other was well-dressed
and of what we should call a respectable appearance; a darkish man,
high spoken, eating as though he had some usage of society; but he