“Hank” Monk is gone. This king of overland stage-drivers sleeps in Carson City; and beside sleeps his Concord coach of split hickory. Concord has ceased to make such coaches. They mark our passage as a race of men, Earth will not see such coaches again. From Hell Gate now to Golden Gate there are only miles, and any machine makes a mere holiday of the trip. A young acquaintance of mine has just made the coast-to-coast run, driving her own car. She said to me on arriving here that “it was an awful monotonous journey.” Didn’t anything happen? I asked with considerable surprise. No, nothing happened. Didn’t she see anything of interest? Wasn’t there any excitement? Didn’t she have any adventures? No, she didn’t see anything; she didn’t get a bit of excitement out of it; there wasn’t any adventure; just one blinkety-blank mile after another! “Incredible!” I cried. “Oh, yes,” she said, her eyes brightening, something like a thrill in her voice, “I did have three punctures!” All the way from Golden Gate to Hell Gate with three punctures to break the cushioned tenor of her way. This is what life has come to. Then she said: “There were two things on the trip that did greatly interest me. But I don’t exactly know why; and I am afraid to tell you about them for fear you will think me such a big fool.” “No,” I answered, “I won’t think you any bigger fool than I do now, so what were the two interesting things?” “Well,” she began (and I wish the reader would note the strictly American touch in this description), “one of them was Luther Burbank’s spineless cactus.” (Notice, I say, the spineless quality of this cactus.) The girl read my face and exclaimed, much hurt: “There! I knew you would poke fun at me.” “But tell what the other thing was,” I begged. “Let’s get the sordid story over as fast as we can.” “I don’t know even yet what it all meant,” she went on, “but, as I was crossing the Arizona desert, I saw a long petition being circulated by the native Arizonians, praying the National Congress to preserve for them and for posterity a portion of their original desert.” My poor niece! Moses saw the giants pass away; Thoreau saw the frontier pass away; Masefield sees the clipper ship pass away; but it remains for my niece and her day to see the Great American Desert wiped out by the irrigation ditch, and the gila monster with the desert, and the need of a shovel on the trip across the sands! Have we eaten the cassaba melon and gone mad? Is it all of life to make the desert blossom as the rose? To bring forth cassaba melons, and alligator pears, and spineless cacti for cow feed? Ploughing the desert; turning the giant cactus into ensilage, as if to live were a silo--for fear of this the native Arizonians are asking Congress that a portion of their original desert and of Life’s adventure and romance be saved to them and to their children.