Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: more gracious could those who loved her ask than that in the untouched fulness of beautiful life and in the domestic heaven of her home she should close her eyes in this world suddenly and forever? "My sprightly neighbor, gone before To that unknown and silent shore, Shall we not meet as heretofore, Some summer morning? "When from thy cheerful eyes a ray Hath struck a bliss upon the day,— A bliss that would not go away,— A sweet forewarning." GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. West New Brighton, Staten Island, New Yokk. March 27, 1889. chapter{Section 4EIGHT HUNDRED MILES IN AN AMBULANCE. The United States is the only country in the world that has its frontier in the middle. The Great American Desert, stretching from the Canadas to the Gulf in a belt nearly a thousand miles in breadth, is now the true divide between the East and the West; and as if that were not enough, it is backed by the long ranges of the Rockies, which, though they flatten out and break down here and there, have yet quite enough of " sassy country" to make a very respectable barrier. A century ago the Alle- ghanies were the boundaries,—now, we look upon them as molehills; then the vast prairies lay in the way, like an endless sea; then the Mississippi, like Jordan, rolled between. But all this is now as nothing. We have jumped the old claim of the Alleghanies, we have crossed the prairies, we have spanned the Mississippi with a dozen splendid bridges, and now the great lines of railroad make but a mouthful of the desert, and digest the Rockies as easily as an ostrich his pebbles and tenpennies. The old fables of magic cars, in which magicians could annihilate space and time, are now dull and tame. Like a dream the desert glides by while a sunrise, a sunset, lights up the measureless waste; we...