Father, excited as a boy, came along on the train which reached Bismark the morning following our arrival and we at once took him into the Pullman car and forced him to share some of the comforts of travel. We ate breakfast in the dining car at what seemed to him a wildly extravagant price but I insisted on his being a guest. "Just sit here and look out of the window and think of the Erie Canal Boats in which you came west, or remember your ox-team in fifty-eight." "All right," he said with a quizzical smile. "If you can stand the expense, I can." A little later he said, "What a change my life has witnessed. I helped to grade the first railway in the State of Maine, and now here I am whirling along through 'the Great American Desert' eating a steak and drinking my coffee in a flying hotel. I wish your mother could be here with us." This was the only shadow at our feast and we put it aside, taking comfort in the thought that she was happy in a tree-embowered home, surrounded by the abundance of a prolific garden. "Her days of travel are over," I said, and turned to the task of making my father's outing a shining success. For ten days we camped with him in Yellowstone Park, moving from place to place, in our own wagon and tent, and when we came out and he started on his homeward way, he expressed complete satisfaction. "It has been up to the bills," he conceded, and I could see that he was eager to get back to Johnson's drug store, where he could discuss with Stevens and McEldowney the action of geysers and the habits of grizzly bears, on terms of equal information. If he was satisfied, I was not. Insisting on showing Zulime the Cascade Range and the Pacific Ocean, I kept on to the West. Together we viewed Tacoma and Seattle, and from the boat on Puget Sound discovered the Olympic Mountains springing superbly from the sea. For us Rainier disclosed his dome above the clouds, and Lake McDonald offered its most gorgeous sunset. One of the points which I had found of most interest in '97 was the Blackfoot Agency, and as we sat in our tent on the Northern shore of Lake McDonald I gained Zulime's consent to go in there for a few days. "The train lands us there late at night," I said, "and there is no hotel at the station or the Agency, but we can set up our tent in a few moments and be comfortable till morning." To this she agreed--or perhaps I should say to this she submitted, and at eleven o'clock the following night we found ourselves unloaded on the platform of a lonely little station on the plain. It was a starlit night, fortunately, and dragging our tent and bedding out on the crisp, dry sod, we set to work. In ten minutes we had a house and bed in which we slept comfortably till a freight train thundered by along about dawn. Truly my artist wife was being schooled in the tactics of the trail!