The men who are of interest in the West, and of whom most curious stories might be told, are the Eastern men and the Englishmen who have sought it with capital, or who have been driven there to make their fortunes. Some one once started a somewhat unprofitable inquiry as to what became of all the lost pins. That is not nearly so curious as what becomes of all the living men who drop suddenly out of our acquaintanceship or our lives, and who are not missed, but who are nevertheless lost. I know now what becomes of them; they all go West. I met some men here whom I was sure I had left walking Fifth Avenue, and who told me, on the contrary, that they had been in the West for the last two years. They had once walked Fifth Avenue, but they dropped out of the procession one day, and no one missed them, and they are out here enjoying varying fortunes. The brakesman on a freight and passenger train in Southern Texas was a lower-class man whom I remembered at Lehigh University as an expert fencer; the conductor on the same train was from the same college town; the part owner of a ranch, whom I supposed I had left looking over the papers in the club, told me he had not been in New York for a year, and that his partner was “Jerry” Black, who, as I trust no one has forgotten, was one of Princeton’s half-backs, and who I should have said, had any one asked me, was still in Pennsylvania. Another man whom I remembered as a “society” reporter on a New York paper, turned up in a white apron as a waiter at a hotel in ----. I was somewhat embarrassed at first as to whether or not he would wish me to recognize him, but he settled my doubts by winking at me over his heavily-loaded tray, as much as to say it was a very good joke, and that he hoped I was appreciating it to its full value. We met later in the street, and he asked me with the most faithful interest of those whose dances and dinners he had once reported, deprecated a notable scandal among people of the Four Hundred which was filling the papers at that time, and said I could hardly appreciate the pity of such a thing occurring among people of his set. Another man, whom I had known very well in New York, turned up in San Antonio with an entirely new name, wife, and fortune, and verified the tradition which exists there that it is best before one grows to know a man too well, to ask him what was his name _before_ he came to Texas. San Antonio seemed particularly rich in histories of those who came there to change their fortunes, and who had changed them most completely. The English gave the most conspicuous examples of these unfortunates--conspicuous in the sense that their position at home had been so good, and their habits of life so widely different.