We had had a consuming desire, from the beginning, to see a pony-rider, but somehow or other all that had passed us and all that met us managed to streak by in the night, and so we heard only a whiz and a hail, and the swift phantom of the desert was gone before we could get our heads out of the windows. But now we were expecting one along every moment, and we would see him in broad daylight. Presently the driver exclaims: "Here he comes!" Every neck is stretched further, and every eye strained wider. Away across the endless dead level of the prairie a black speck appears against the sky, and it is plain that it moves. Well, I should think so! In a second or two it becomes a horse and rider, rising and falling, rising and falling--sweeping toward us nearer and nearer--growing more and more distinct, more and more sharply defined--nearer and still nearer, and the flutter of the hoofs comes faintly to the ear--another instant a whoop and a hurrah from our upper deck, a wave of the rider's hand, but no reply, and man and horse burst past our excited faces, and go winging away like a belated fragment of a storm. The steamboat race and the explosion in chapter four of _The Gilded Age_ have few equals in any language for mere picturing power. He deals largely with the out-of-doors. His canvases are bounded only by the horizon: the Mississippi, the great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, Mono Lake, the Alkali Deserts, and the Sierras--he has handled a continent. Only Joaquin Miller and John Muir have used canvases as vast. Huckleberry Finn's floating journey down the river on his raft has in it something of the spirit of _The Odyssey_ and _Pilgrim's Progress_ and _Don Quixote_. Had Mark Twain's constructive skill and his ability to trace the growth of a human soul been equal to his picturing power, his Defoe-like command of detail and situation, and his mastery of phrase and of narrative, he might have said the last word in American fiction. He was a product of his section and of his education. College and university would have made of him an artist like Holmes, brilliant, refined, and messageless. It would have robbed him of the very fountain-head of his power. It was his to work not from books but from life itself, to teach truth and genuineness of life, to turn the eyes of America from the romance of Europe to her own romantic past. VI