full who to-day traverses these vast and wondrous wilds in a railway coach, or gazes upon them from a Pullman car.
"Captain Ranger," said Sally O'Dowd one evening, "do you notice that Jean is growing strikingly beautiful?"
They were halting for the night after a day's hard drive; and the jaded oxen, weak and sick from the combined effects of hard labor, cruel whippings, and an insufficiefit supply of grass and water, were necessarily the chief objects of his attention and solicitude. A broken wagon-tongtie added to his perplexities, as good timber for repairs was not available; and the mileage of the day's travel had been much shortened by the necessity of stopping to mend the break, or, as the Little Doctor not inaptly said, "to reduce the compound fracture of a most important part of the wagon's anatomy."
"All my girls are handsome," said the Captain, as he tested the strength of a splice on the broken tongue by jumping upon it with both feet.
"But Jean has been transformed, Captain. The change has been growing upon her daily since the date of that Green River episode. The child is hopelessly infatuated with that young Englishman."
"Much good it'll do her," he exclaimed, mopping his brow with a soiled bandanna. "It is painfully evident that three of my girls will soon be women. If their mother were here, it wouldn't be so hard to manage them. No, Sally, I've noticed no particular change in Jean."
"Because you are too busy for observation, sir. She hasn't been a particle like herself of late."
The Captain hurried away to his work, muttering, "Nonsense!"
Jean had seated herself on the most distant wagontongue, her battered, ink-bespattered journal in her lap, her pen in one hand, her inkstand in the other, her
