Below the nose was a voice coming from no visible opening, and the voice uttered a jumble of German and English, most perplexing. The room, dirty, shabby, squalid, was hung round with portraits of the old Emperor Wilhelm, Fritz the Crown Prince, Bismarck—rude representations of German triumphs, ending in the surrender of his sword by the Emperor Napoleon. At the back was a door, opening for company’s sake into a shop next door, kept by another old German, a gunsmith by trade, as dirty and snuffy as his mate. When the two old gaffers found that we could speak to them in their mother tongue, how pleased they were! Immediately their tongues began to go like mill-clacks, telling us of the old days when they came out as pioneers, and drove a roaring trade with the Indians. The old gunsmith assured us that he might have retired upon a comfortable fortune long ago, but he had stuck to Westport like a limpet to its rock. He had become used to the rough outpost life, in which he had grown old, so he set up his son in trade, and rubbed on as before in the days when the young out-growth of Kansas City “noch nicht anzudenken war.” Presently the two old fellows grew more confidential and let out what was probably their true reason for remaining here, belief in the existence of a hidden treasure somewhere hard by, a treasure all in gold buried by the early traders, Mexicans and borderers, under terror of attack from the Indians. Happy the man who should light upon that treasure! For him there would be no more living by the sweat of his brow under the curse of the first sin, but a restoration to a garden of Eden with trees bearing sausages for fruit, streams flowing with Lager Bier, the air laden with the perfume of never-extinguished canaster. There is to me something infinitely touching in the memory of these two old cronies, wrapped in one another, hugging their friendship, their dirt and their superstitious belief in the hidden gold. They had well passed the allotted span of life when I saw them—they must have been long since gathered to their fathers. Which went first? How fared it with the other?