Pete Nelson, Sheriff of my former visit and now State Game Warden, called for me at the hotel and together we strolled down the old main street to the river. We had dubbed it "The-Street-That-is-Called-Straight." Just why I fail to remember, but probably some of us wanted to show his biblical learning. Riley, the Keeley-ed catcher, confessed it never had looked straight to him, and there were times--especially late on the nights we had won games--that I had doubts on that score myself. But if there had been crooks in or upon it in the old days, time had ironed them out. I especially called Nelson's attention to the Northern Pacific station at one end of the vista, the nodding cottonwoods at the other, and the glaring new concrete pavement, stretching straight as a white ribbon, connecting them up. Pete Nelson sadly called my attention to the manner in which all the gay old palaces of carousal had been converted, and said he reckoned that perhaps every one that had patronized them had undergone the same change. I was also sad, but less optimistic than Pete respecting the increasing purpose of the ages. As we leaned on the rail of the river bridge and gazed at the swift green current I tried to recall those lines of Stevenson's which began: "Sing me a song of a boy that is gone-- Ah, could that lad be I!" and which conclude: "All that was good, all that was fair, All that was me is gone." I couldn't remember the part that I craved, and so fell back on: "Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, Tears from the depths of some divine despair Rise in the heart and gather to the eyes, In looking on the happy Autumn-fields, And thinking of the days that are no more." That didn't quite do, either, for Tennyson was gazing on fading fields and thinking of Autumn, and I was gazing on budding cottonwoods and thinking of Spring--Spring! And yet it was a Spring that was gone. "Pete," I said moodily, turning a gloomy eye to the seaward-rushing flood, "there's a lot of water gone under this bridge never to return, since you and I stood here last." The ex-Sheriff nodded in dreary acquiescence. "And, boy," he remarked with the weariness of the ages in his voice as he rubbed a finger up and down the bridge of a blue, cold nose that I remembered as having once glowed with all the hues of a sunset over the colour-splashed gorge of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone; "boy, water ain't the only thing that's gone never to return."