It puzzled me. What did she mean? Was she referring to the fact that we were on a special train composed of private cars, or what? The truth did not at first occur to me--that she was referring to railway travelling as a whole, it being the first time that she had ever been on or seen a train. Explanations followed. She had been brought by her parents, soon after the close of the Civil War, when two or three years old, across the plains in a prairie schooner (the high-topped waggon in which the pioneers used to make their westward pilgrimage), taking some four months for the trip from the old home in, I think, Kentucky. At all events she was a Southerner. Since then during her whole life she had known no surroundings but those of the little mining settlement huddled in among the mountains, her longest trips from home having been for a distance of thirty or forty miles on horseback or on a buckboard. She had lived all her life in log cabins and never known what it meant to have a servant. She read French and Italian, but could not take any interest in German. She sketched and painted, and was incomparably better informed on matters of art than I, though she knew the Masters only, of course, through the medium of prints and engravings. What she most dearly longed to do in all the world was to see a theatre--Irving for choice--and to hear some one of the Italian operas, with the libretti of which, as well as the music, so far as her piano would interpret for her, she was already familiar. Now at last the railway had come and she was, from that day forward, within some six days' travelling of New York; and her husband had faithfully promised that they should go East together for at least three or four weeks that winter. And as she sat and talked in her soft Southern voice, there in the heart of the wilds which had been all the world to her, she might, so far as a mere man's eyes could judge, have been dropped down in any country house in England to be a conspicuously charming member of any charming house-party.