And the men who are at the head of affairs, who rose out of the six thousand in a week, and who have kept at the head ever since, if they had exerted the same energy, and showed the same executive ability and the same cleverness in a real city, would be real mayors, real merchants, and real “prominent citizens.” They are now as men playing with children’s toys or building houses of cards. Every now and then a Roger Q. Mills or a Henry W. Grady comes out of the South and West, and among these politicians and first citizens of Oklahoma City are men who only need a broader canvas and a greater opportunity to show what they can do. There are as many of these as there are uncouth “Sockless” Simpsons, or noisy Ingallses, and it is pathetic and exasperating to see men who would excel in a great metropolis, and who could live where they could educate their children and themselves, and be in touch with the world moving about them, even though they were not of it, wasting their energies in a desert of wooden houses in the middle of an ocean of prairie, where their point of view is bounded by the railroad tank and a barb-wire fence. It depends altogether on the man. There are men who are just big enough to be leading citizens of a town of six thousand inhabitants, who are meant for nothing else, and it is just as well they should be satisfied with the unsettled existence around them; but it would be better for these others to be small men in a big city than big men on a prairie, where the organ in the front room is their art gallery, book-store, theatre, church, and school, and where the rustling grass of the prairie greets them in the morning and goes to bed with them at night. V RANCH LIFE IN TEXAS V RANCH LIFE IN TEXAS THE inhabited part of a ranch, the part of it on which the people who own it live, bears about the same proportion to the rest of the ranch as a light-house does to the ocean around it. And to an Eastern man it appears almost as lonely. Some light-houses are isolated in the ocean, some stand in bays, and some in harbors; and in the same proportion the ranches in Texas differ in size, from principalities to farms no larger than those around Jersey City. The simile is not altogether exact, as there are small bodies of men constantly leaving the “ranch-house” and wandering about over the range, sleeping wherever night catches them, and in this way different parts of the ranch are inhabited as well as the house itself. It is as if the light-housekeeper sent out a great number of row-boats to look after the floating buoys or to catch fish, and the men in those boats anchored whenever it grew dark, and returned to the light-house variously as best suited their convenience or their previous orders.