On a busy street of a certain Western city there appeared, not long ago, a figure whose peculiarities attracted the curious attention of the throng through which he passed. It was a man, tall, thin, bronzed, wide-hatted, long-haired, clad in the garb of a day gone by. How he came to the city, whence he came, or why, it boots little to ask. There he was, one of the old-time “long-haired men” of the West. His face, furrowed with the winds of the high plains and of the mountains, and bearing still the lines of boldness and confidence, had in these new surroundings taken on a shade of timorous anxiety. His eye was disturbed. At his temples the hair was gray, and the long locks that dropped to his shoulders were thin and pitiful. A man of another day, of a bygone country, he babbled of scoutings, of warfare with savages, of the chase of the buffalo. None knew what he spoke. He babbled, grieved, and vanished. Into the same city there wandered, from a somewhat more recent West, another man grown swiftly old. Ten years earlier this figure might have been seen over all the farming-lands of the West, most numerous near the boom towns and the land-offices. He was here transplanted, set down in the greatest boom town of them all, but, alas! too old and too alien to take root. He wore the same long-tailed coat, the same white hat that marked him years ago—tall-crowned, not wide-rimmed; the hat that swept across the Missouri River in the early eighties. His beard was now grown gray, his eye watery, his expression subdued, and no longer buoyantly and irresistibly hopeful. His pencil, as ready as ever to explain the price of lots or land, had lost its erstwhile convincing logic. From his soul had departed that strange, irrational, adorable belief, birthright of the American that was, by which he was once sure that the opportunities of the land that bore him were perennial and inexhaustible. This man sought now no greatness and no glory. He wanted only the chance to make a living. And, think you, he came of a time when a man might be a carpenter at dawn, merchant at noon, lawyer by night, and yet be respected every hour of the day, if he deserved it as a man. It was exceeding sweet to be a savage. It is pleasant to dwell upon the independent character of Western life, and to go back to the glories of that land and day when a man who had a rifle and a saddle-blanket was sure of a living, and need ask neither advice nor permission of any living soul. Those days, vivid, adventurous, heroic, will have no counterpart on the earth again. Those early Americans, who raged and roared across the West, how unspeakably swift was the play in which they had their part! There, surely, was a drama done under the strictest law of the unities, under the sun of a single day.