But other sites appear to me perfection. Take Marshall for instance, or Jefferson. Which is the more beautiful of the two? Some of the "commercial" settlements, just beginning life with a railway-station, six drug stores, and seven saloons, have situations that ought to have been reserved for honeymoon Edens. They are "hard" places. Law as yet there is none except revolver law, and that is pitiless and sudden and wicked. For Texas, the beautiful flower state, blessed with turf and blessed with pines, has still the stern commencements of American life before it--that rapid, fierce process of civilization which begins with cards and whisky and murder, which finds its first protection in the "Vigilantes" who hold their grim tribunals under the roadside trees, but which suddenly one day wrenches itself, as it were, from its bad, lawless past, and takes its first firm step on the high road to order and prosperity and the world's respect. For every intelligent traveller these ragged, half-savage, settlements should have a great significance and interest. Before he dies they may be Chicagos or San Franciscos. And these men, with their mouths full of oaths and revolvers on their hips, are the fathers of those future cities. They will have no immortality though in the gratitude of posterity. For they will shoot each other of in those saloons, or the Rangers will shoot them down on the flower prairies beyond the forests. But they will have done their work nevertheless. Nature in every part of her scheme proceeds on the same system of building foundations upon ruins. Whole nations have to be killed off when they have prepared and preserved the ground as it were for those that are to follow. Whether they are nations of men, or of beasts, or of plants, she uses them in exactly the same way. Everything must subserve the ultimate end. But I did not intend to moralize. The negress waiter at Longview (where we dine very badly) reminds me how practical life should be. She never stops to moralize. On the contrary, she just stands by the window, swallowing all the peaches and fragments of pudding that the travellers leave on their plates. Two he negroes wait upon us. But it looks as if they were there to feed the negress rather than to feed us. For they keep rushing in with full dishes to us and rushing off with the half empty ones to her. And there she stands omnivorous, insatiable, black. Everything that is brought to her of a sweet kind she swallows. Not as if she enjoyed it, but as if she must. It was like throwing things into a sink. She never filled up.