I was raised in the Far West. My life had been spent among the green mountains of the Pacific Coast, and I knew but little of the land beyond the Rockies. When ambition came, as it comes to youth everywhere, I dreamed of other lands where that ambition might find its full fruition. I left the mountain home, and set out to conquer the world of my dreams. My journey ended at the little town of Excello, in Northern Missouri. I was moneyless, and, as I soon ascertained, friendless. Disappointment glared at me from every door. Every vocation in life seemed filled, and all the avenues leading thereto were crowded with men eager to push the possessor of a job from his place and occupy it in his stead. I tried every possible chance for work, but without avail. Not even a country district school, with all its manifold possibilities of poverty, was open to the stranger. Not far from Excello, the Kansas and Texas Coal company have opened up extensive mines at Ardmore. At last, desperate and in absolute despair, I turned to the coal mines that wait with black, widespread maws to suck in such flotsam of humanity as I was then. I set out from Excello on foot in the bleak dawn of a March morning, for the only Mecca left open to me. A donkey-engine drawing a train of coal-cars soon overtook me, and the engineer stopped his train and took me on. It was but a trivial act of kindness to a stranger, but it stands out so distinct and vivid by reason of its rarity that I must speak of it here. Motives of the most sordid meanness so completely actuate the principles of those people that the simple act of one of them giving a tramp a ride glows from out the grime of greed like a gem. The little engine grumbled and rattled its way down the banks of a dirty yellow stream, dignified by being called a river, until it halted beside the head-house of one of the mines, and I was permitted to take my first view of Ardmore, one of the worlds that I had come so far to conquer. Ah, the irony of it all! What a contrast to the mental picture that the boy had painted upon the canvas of fancy not so many weeks before!