But Heaven forbid that this should smack of "boosting"! (There, by the way, you have the most-used, and best-abused, word in all the West.) It is not so intended, for the literature of professional optimism is legion, and needs no reinforcement. The Oregon country is no more wedded to success than many another, nor is it a land where woman can wrestle with man's problems more happily than elsewhere. The incidents of these pages mean simply that beneath the dull surface may be found, ever and anon, a glow of something stirring; prick the dust, and blood may run. The West, which is viewed here chiefly as a playland, is a mighty interesting workaday land, too, and numberless are the modern tragedies and comedies of its varied peoples at their varied tasks. Rules and precedents are few and far between; it is each for himself in his own way. The blond Scandinavian to his logged-off lands, the Basque to his sheep herding; the man from Iowa dairies, and the Carolinian, who never before saw alfalfa, sets about raising it; the Connecticut Yankee, with an unconscionable instinct for wooden nutmegs, sells real estate; the college man with poor eyes or a damaged liver, as the case may be, becomes an orchardist at Hood River or Medford. Somehow, some place, there is room for each and every one, and the big Westland smiles and receives them all, the strong to prosper and the weak to fail, according to the inexorable way of life. Some come for wealth and some for health--a vast army for the latter, were the truth always known. The highness and the dryness of the hinterland draw many to it in their battle against the White Plague, and while victory often comes, there comes, too, defeat. An empty shack I know could tell such a tale--the tragedy of a good fight lost. They were consumptives, both of them, and they lived in a lowland city, west of the mountains. The Doctor gave the old, old edict: the only chance was to get away from the damp, to live out of doors in a higher, sunnier climate. The boy--he was scarcely more than that--bade farewell to his sweetheart and came over the mountains, where he found land and built the shack that was to be their home and their haven--where they were to become sun-browned and robust. The self-evident conclusion outruns the tale, I fear. The girl, who smilingly sent her lover eastward, dreaming of the happiness so nearly theirs, was distanced in her race for the sunny goal by Death. To-day the shack stands vacant. [Illustration: A valley of Washington. "The big Westland smiles and receives them all" From a photograph by Frank Palmer, Spokane, Wash.] A friend, who knew the girl and the story, and loves the land she hoped to see, wrote this to hearten her when the doctors realized that the home upon whose threshold she wavered was far, far distant from the one her lover fashioned "over the eastern mountains": Over the eastern mountains Into a valley I know, Into the air of uplands, Into the sun, you go.