* * * * * Yesterday, it was cowboy and mines in San Antonio. To-day, it is polo and tourist; and the transition is a natural growth. One would hate to think of the risks of the Long Trail, for miners from Old Mexico to Fort Leavenworth, for cowboys from Fort Worth to Wyoming and St. Louis, and not see the risks rewarded in fortunes to these trail makers. The cowboy and miner of the olden days--the cowboy and miner who survived, that is--are the capitalists taking their pleasure in San Antonio to-day. It was natural that the cow pony bred to keeping its feet in mid-air, or on earth, should develop into the finest type of polo pony ever known. For years, the polo clubs of the North, Lenox, Long Island, Milbrook, have made a regular business of scouring Texas for polo ponies. Horses giving promise of good points would be picked up at $80, $100, $150. They would then be rounded on a ranch and trained. San Antonio is situated almost 700 feet up on a high, clear plateau rimmed by blue ridges in the distance. Recently, a polo ground of 3,200 acres has been laid out; and the polo clubs of the North are to be invited to San Antonio for the winter fiestas. As Fort Sam Houston boasts one of the best polo clubs of the South, competition is likely to attract the sportsmen from far and near. You know how it is in all these new Western cities. They are feverish with a mania of progress. They have grown so fast they cannot keep track of their own hobble-de-hoy, sprawling limbs. They are drunk with prosperity. In real estate alone, fortunes have come, as it were, overnight. All this San Antonio has not escaped. They will tell you with pardonable pride how this little cow town, where land wasn't worth two cents an acre outside the Mission walls, has jumped to be a metropolitan city of over 100,000; how it is the center of the great truck and irrigation farm district. Fort Sam Houston always has 700 or 800 soldiers in garrison, and sometimes has as many as 4,000; and when army maneuvers take place, there is an immense reservation outside the city where as many as 20,000 men can practice mimic war. The day of two cents or even $20 an acre land round San Antonio is forever past. Land under the ditch is too valuable for the rating of twenty acres to one steer. All this and more you will see of modern San Antonio; but still if at sundown you set out on a vagrant and solitary tour of the old Missions, I think you will feel as I felt that it was the dauntless spirit of the old regime that fired the blood of the moderns for the new day that is dawning. I don't know why it is, but anything in life that is worth having seems to demand service and sacrifice and, oftener than not, the martyrdom of heroic and terrible defeat. Then, when you think that the flag of the cause is trampled in a mire of bloodshed, phoenix-like the cause rises on eagles' wings to new height, new daring, new victory. It was so in Texas.