Having somehow digressed from clubs to authorship I may perhaps be pardoned for wandering still further from my trail here to mention Andy Adams. A long time ago, ex-Governor Hunt expressed lack of faith in the future of Colorado Springs because, at that time, there was not much water to be found there, and further because the town had "too many writers of original poetry." So far as I could judge, from a brief visit, things have changed. There is plenty of water, and I did not meet a single poet. However, I did meet an author, and he is a real one. Andy Adams' card proclaims him author, but more than this, his books do, also. Himself a former cowboy, he writes cowboy stories which prove that cowboy stories need not be as false, and as maudlinly romantic as most cowboy stories manage to be. You don't have to know the plains to know that Mr. Adams' tales are true, any more than you have to know anatomy to understand that a man can't stand without a backbone. Truth is the backbone of Mr. Adams' writings, and the body of them has that rare kind of beauty which may, perhaps, be likened to the body of some cowboy--some perfect physical specimen from Mr. Adams' own pages. I have not read all his books, and the only reason why I have not is that I have not yet had time. But so far as I have read I have not found one false note in them. I have not come upon a "lone horseman" riding through the gulch at eventide. I have not encountered the daughter of an eastern millionaire who has ridden out to see the sunset. Nor have I stumbled on a romantic meeting or a theatrical rescue. So far as I know, Mr. Adams' book "The Log of a Cowboy," is preëminently the classic of the plains. One of its greatest qualities is that of ceaseless movement. Three thousand head of cattle are driven through those chapters, from the Mexican frontier to the Canada border, and those cattle travel with a flow as irresistible as the unrelenting flow of De Quincey's Tartar tribe. The author is one of those absolutely basic things, a natural story teller, and the fine simplicity of his writing springs not from education ("All the schooling I ever had I picked up at a cross-roads country school house"), not from an academic knowledge of "literature," but from primary qualities in his own nature, and the strong, ingenuous outlook of his own two eyes. Mr. Henry Russell Wray tells of a request from eastern publishers for a brief sketch of Adams' life. He asked Adams to write about two hundred words about himself, as though dealing with another being. The next day he received this: