My journey next took me to Walla-Walla, largest and handsomest of all the East Washington towns. Doubtless the name of Walla-Walla brings no suggestion to the minds of most readers in the far-away East, save of a rude frontier settlement. Yet the place luxuriates in verdure and bloom, and many of its shady streets, bordered by pretty houses, with their lawns, orchards and gardens, would be admired in a New England village, while the business streets would do no discredit to an Ohio town of half a century's growth. In the homes of well-to-do citizens one finds the magazines and new books and newspapers from New York, Boston and Philadelphia, and discovers that they manage to keep abreast of the ideas of the time quite as well as intelligent people on the Atlantic slope. The town has five thousand inhabitants, but in its importance as a center of trade and social influences it represents an Eastern town of many times its size. There is barely a trace of the frontier in the manners of the people, and none at all in their comfortable way of living; yet they are thousands of miles from New York by the only route of steam travel. A fairer or more fertile country than that which stretches south and east of Walla-Walla to the base of the Blue Mountains one might travel more than five thousand miles to find. In June it is all one immense rolling field of wheat and barley dotted at long intervals--for the farms are large--with neat houses, each in its orchard of apple and peach trees. The mountains rise in gentle slopes to snow-flecked summits. Over the wide plain move tall, tawny cloud-like columns of dust, in size and shape like water-spouts at sea. From the foot-hills scores of these singular formations may be seen on any warm day, though the air seems still. THE GREAT SOUTHWEST BY RAY STANNARD BAKER No part of the United States is less generally known than the Southwest, and none is better worth knowing. Of no other part of the United States is so large a proportion of the unpleasant and unattractive features known so well, and so small a proportion of the beauties, wonders and utilities known so little. To the Eastern and Northern mind the Southwest raises a dim picture of hot desert, bare mountain, and monotonous plain sparsely grown up to cactus, sage, greasewood, or bunch-grass, and sown with the white bones of animals which have perished from hunger and thirst; a land of wild Indians, of lazy Mexicans, of rough cow-boys, of roving, half-wild cattle, of desperate mining ventures, of frequent train-robberies. This impression is based in part on the stray paragraphs from this unknown land that occasionally creep into the metropolitan newspapers, but it is chiefly founded upon the hasty observations and reports of dusty transcontinental travelers, car-weary for three or four days, the edge of their interest quite blunted with longing for the green wonders and soft sunshine of California.