You pass on--perhaps ejaculating thanks that your lot has been differently cast, and thinking you have seen the last of them. But a few hundred yards further, and you hear the tinkling of a bell; two or three lean cows--with calves about the age of the baby--come straggling by. You look for the driver, and see a tall girl with a very young face--the eldest of the family, though not exceeding twelve or thirteen years in age. You feel quite sure, that, besides her sun-bonnet and well-worn shoes, she wears but one article of apparel--and that a loose dress of linsey, rather narrow in the skirt, of a dirty brown color, with a tinge of red. It hangs straight down about her limbs, as if it were wet, and with every step--for she walks stoutly--it flaps and flies about her ankles, as if shotted in the lower hem. She presents, altogether, rather a slatternly figure, and her face is freckled and sunburnt. But you must not judge her too rashly; for her eye is keen and expressive, and her mouth is quite pretty--especially when she smiles. A few years hence--if you have the _entree_--you may meet her in the best and highest circles of the country. Perhaps, while you are dancing attendance upon some new administration, asking for a "place," and asking, probably, in vain, she may come to Washington, a beautiful and accomplished woman--the wife of some member of Congress, whose constituency is numbered by the hundred thousand! You may pass on, now, and forget her; but, if you stop to talk five minutes, she will not forget _you_--at least, if you say anything striking or sensible. And when you meet her again, perhaps in a gilded saloon, among the brightest and highest in the land--if you seek an introduction, as you probably will--she will remind you of the meeting, and to your astonishment, will laughingly describe the scene, to some of her obsequious friends who stand around. And then she will perhaps introduce you, as an old friend, to one of those flax-haired boys, who peeped out of the wagon over his mother's shoulder, as you passed them in the wilderness: and you recognise one of the members from California, or from Oregon, whose influence in the house, though he is as yet a very young man, is already quite considerable. If you are successful in your application for a "place," it may be that the casual meeting in the forest or on the prairie was the seed which, germinating through long years of obscurity, finally sprung up _thus_, and bore a crop of high official honors! The next time you meet a family of emigrants on the frontier, you will probably observe them a little more closely.