If I could travel over the West for three years, I might write of it with authority; but when my time is limited to three months, I can only give impressions from a car-window point of view, and cannot dare to draw conclusions. I know that this is an evident and cowardly attempt to “hedge” at the very setting forth. But it is well to understand what is to follow. All that I may hope to do is to tell what impressed an Eastern man in a hurried trip through the Western States. I will try to describe what I saw in such a way that those who read may see as much as I saw with the eyes of one who had lived in the cities of the Eastern States, but the moral they draw must be their own, and can differ from mine as widely as they please. An Eastern man is apt to cross the continent for the first time with mixed sensations of pride at the size of his country, and shame at his ignorance concerning it. He remembers guiltily how he has told that story of the Englishman who asks the American in London, on hearing he is from New York, if he knows his brother in Omaha, Nebraska. And as the Eastern man finds from the map of his own country that the letters of introduction he has accepted from intelligent friends are addressed to places one and two thousand miles apart, he determines to drop that story about the Englishman, and tell it hereafter at the expense of himself and others nearer home. His first practical surprise perhaps will be when he discovers the speed and ease with which numerous States are passing under him, and that smooth road-beds and parlor-cars remain with him to the very borders of the West. The change of time will trouble him at first, until he gets nearer to Mexico, when he will have his choice of three separate standards, at which point he will cease winding his watch altogether, and devote his “twenty minutes for refreshments” to watching the conductor. But this minor and merely nominal change will not distress him half so seriously as will the sudden and actual disarrangement of his dinner hour from seven at night to two in the afternoon, though even this will become possible after he finds people in south-western Texas eating duck for breakfast. He will take his first lesson in the politics of Texas and of the rest of the West when he first offers a ten-dollar bill for a dollar’s worth of something, and is given nine large round silver dollars in change. When he has twenty or more of these on his person, and finds that his protests are met with polite surprise, he understands that silver is a large and vital issue, and that the West is ready to suffer its minor disadvantages for the possible good to come.