He will get his first wrong impression of the West through reading the head-lines of some of the papers, and from the class of books offered for sale on the cars and in the hotels and book-stores from St. Louis to Corpus Christi. These head-lines shock even a hardened newspaper man. But they do not represent the feeling of their readers, and in that they give a wrong and unfortunate impression to the visiting stranger. They told while I was in St. Louis of a sleighing party of twenty, of whom nine were instantly killed by a locomotive, and told it as flippantly as though it were a picnic; but the accident itself was the one and serious comment of the day, and the horror of it seemed to have reached every class of citizen. It is rather more difficult to explain away the books. They are too obvious and too much in evidence to be accidental. To judge from them, one would imagine that Boccaccio, Rabelais, Zola, and such things as _Velvet Vice_ and _Old Sleuth_, are all that is known to the South-west of literature. It may be that the booksellers only keep them for their own perusal, but they might have something better for their customers. The ideas which the stay-at-home Eastern man obtains of the extreme borderland of Texas are gathered from various sources, principally from those who, as will all travellers, make as much of what they have seen as is possible, this much being generally to show the differences which exist between the places they have visited and their own home. Of the similarities they say nothing. Or he has read of the bandits and outlaws of the Garza revolution, and he has seen the Wild West show of the Hon. William F. Cody. The latter, no doubt, surprised and delighted him very much. A mild West show, which would be equally accurate, would surprise him even more; at least, if it was organized in the wildest part of Texas between San Antonio and Corpus Christi. When he leaves this first city and touches at the border of Mexico, at Laredo, and starts forth again across the prairie of cactus and chaparral towards “Corpus,” he feels assured that at last he is done with parlor-cars and civilization; that he is about to see the picturesque and lawless side of the Texan existence, and that he has taken his life in his hands. He will be the more readily convinced of this when the young man with the broad shoulders and sun-browned face and wide sombrero in the seat in front raises the car-window, and begins to shoot splinters out of the passing telegraph poles with the melancholy and listless air of one who is performing a casual divertisement. But he will be better informed when the Chicago drummer has risen hurriedly, with a pale face, and has reported what is going on to the conductor, and he hears that dignitary say, complacently: “Sho! that’s only ‘Will’ Scheeley practisin’! He’s a dep’ty sheriff.”