What a delight in the long ago, upon the burnt, barren plains, where Presbyterianism thrived like a green bay tree in Purgatory, were the early books of Loti: _Pécheur d’Island_, _Pasquala Ivanovich_, _Madame Chrysanthème_, _Fleurs d’Ennui_, and an earlier one about an adventure in the South Seas, the name of which I can not recall. It was Loti’s first published book. I was always vexed that Presbyterianism thrived upon sand. It was connected, in my mind, with unloveliness, both of matter and spirit. There was never a surface that refracted so bitterly the light, as the white front of that church. It had three sharp points, in a row, that stuck up ready and willing to impale sinners. The priests of Presbyterianism are stormy and iron hearted. Once Lily Langtry came here, to the plains, in a private car, with Frederick Gebhardt. They remained a number of days, to go hunting in the Indian Territory. I used to follow her around upon the street, for the joy of looking up at her face. I lived in the desert you know! Her face looked, in those days, like blue-eyed flowers that grow upon the fields of England, where rain falls without stress, and mists come. Salvini, the younger, came likewise to go hunting. I was overjoyed to meet him. He was hero of _Les Trois Mousquetaires_, come to life. Brown, supple, gay, and young! Nothing ever came again after that, except the wind, sand.... But hope grew astonishingly. The less soil there is, the better hope grows. Hope is what you might call the indestructible mushroom of the soul. If I were a poet, instead of faultfinder, it might impel me to an ode to courage. But here’s the rub! I might find difficulty in distinguishing between courage and folly. Everyone was a prospective millionaire, in good old days of wind and sand. The strangest thing was that the entire state was drunk. What was it drunk upon? You see Kansas was like the Isle of Champagne, in the story by that name, where each individual was intoxicated. Only here they were drunk on air instead of champagne. Air came cheap and did not have to be bottled. Champagne cost money, and a bottle. The State was drunk on glittering, mirage-making air. It enfolded the minds with rosy glamour just as it enfolded the landscape. Prohibiting fact lost power. The penniless wanderer in his prairie schooner, felt magic of it, as readily as the dweller in the village. It inflamed the brain through the eye. It wrapped the mind in rosy vision. Just beyond the next land-fold, lay prosperity, the culmination of dreams. That is the reason Kansas grew wild political fads, long-haired and long-legged, soap-box orators. It was upon air like this, upon which oratory could thrive. No one could see realities. Corn, cabbages, and cranks grew to monstrous size. Being poor today did not matter, because tomorrow we were going to tickle Caesar under the chin.