The Essential Elinor Glyn Collection. Glyn Elinor

      Your affectionate daughter,

      ELIZABETH.

      _Morning._

      P.S.--These sleeping cars are really wonderful. Such a thing happened last night! But it shows how comfortable the beds are, and how soundly people can sleep. At the station where we stopped after dinner, two couples got in, an uncle and nephew, married to an aunt and niece; only the uncle's wife was the niece, and the nephew's the aunt, a plain elderly person with a fierce commanding glance and a mole on her upper lip, while he was a nice-looking boy with droopy grey eyes. The train was very crowded, and they could only get two single berths--lower ones, but they are quite wide enough for two people to sleep in at a pinch. It appears the husbands went off to smoke while the wives undressed and got into bed, and when they returned the coloured conductor showed them to their places, naturally thinking, as they were the same name, the old ones were a pair and the young ones another. And fancy, Mamma, they never found out till the morning, when the whole car was awakened by the old lady's yells! And the old gentleman flew out like Hopkins and wanted to nearly murder the conductor. But it was not the least his fault, was it? And the nephew, such a nice, generous fellow, gave the poor nigger twenty-five dollars to make up for being roughly handled. The niece still slept on through all this noise, and Tom, who was passing at the time the old gentleman lifted the curtains to climb in there, said she looked the sweetest thing possible with her long eyelashes on her cheek.

      The four had the next table to us at lunch, and they seemed all at sixes and sevens with one another, the elderly lady glaring at her young husband, and the uncle frowning at the niece, while the nephew had just the look of Hurstbridge when Mademoiselle scolds him unjustly. It was dreadful for them, wasn't it, Mamma? and not a soul to blame.

      _Still in the train._

      DEAREST MAMMA,--You can't think what interesting country we are going through. We woke yesterday morning and peeped out about five to see the most perfect desolation one could imagine,--much more grim than the Egyptian desert: vast unending plains of uneven ground, with a rough dried drab grass in splodges, and high scrub. Not a bird or animal in all these hundreds of miles, only desolation; generally perfectly flat, but here and there rising ground and rough hills. The Senator says it is the end of the ranch country, but we have seen no sign of cattle or any beast, and what could they eat? At long intervals we have passed a few board shanties like card houses grouped together near the track; just fancy living there, Mamma! Even with the nicest young man in the world it would be a trial, wouldn't it? And those Mormons crossed it all in waggons! And we are finding it quite long in a train! It is still going on, and now the surface is a little different; low hills are sticking up just like elephants' backs, and the same colour; no ranches are here or any living thing. We get into our drawing-room, all of us, and the Senator tells us stories of his young days, too exciting, they must have been, when he came through here before all the railway was built. No wonder he is so splendid a character now, having had to be so strong and fearless all his life. Every word he says is interesting, and perfectly vivid and true; and his views on every subject that is discussed are common-sense and exact. He has no prejudices, and is not touchy. He can see his own nation's faults as well as ours, and his first thought is to appreciate the good qualities.

      He says there is a very grave danger to the country in the liberty of the press, which has a most debasing influence by printing all the sensational news, and encouraging the interest in these things in the youthful mind. It must bring a paltry taint into the glorious freedom of the true American spirit, but that will right itself. He says: "They are too darned sane to suffer a scourge when once they begin to see its fruits." And while the rest were in the observation car after tea he talked to me of happiness. Happiness, he said, was the main and chief object in life, and yet nine-tenths of the people of the world throw it away for such imitation pleasure; and you can't often catch it again once you have lost it.

      I asked him what the greatest was, and he said perfect happiness was to be close to the woman you loved. If that was impossible there were several substitutes of a secondary sort--your children, ambition, success, and even rest. Then his eyes grew all misty and sad, and he looked out on the desert, and at that moment we were passing a group of a few shanties close to the rails. They were tumbled down and deserted, and nearby lay the skeleton of a horse. "It was in just such a place as that, only a good bit farther west, I first saw my Hearts-ease," he said. "The boys called her 'Hearts-ease' because she was the sweetest English flower, drifted out to the mines with the people who had adopted her." He paused, and I slipped my hand into his, he looked so sad, and then he told me all the story, Mamma, and it has touched me so, I tell it to you.

      He had gone to this small rough camp, about thirty miles short of the Great Eagles, with only ten cents in his pocket, from the ranch where he had been a cowboy. He had ridden for days, and there his horse had died. He crept up half dead, carrying his saddle bags, and these people, "human devils," he called them, who owned Hearts-ease, let him come in and lie in a shed. They kept a sort of a gambling den, all of the most primitive, and the worst rogues of the world congregated there in the evenings.

      Hearts-ease was about sixteen, and they looked upon her as a promising decoy-duck, but she was "just the purest flower of the prairies," he said, and so they beat and starved her in consequence, for not falling in with their views.

      That night when he lay in the straw, she crept out of some corner where she slept, and warned him not to remain, if he had gold in the bags, or they would certainly murder him before morning; and she gave him some water, and half her wretched supper, because he had been too tired to eat when he arrived. Then he told her he was only a poor cowboy, hoping to get on to the Great Eagles Camp and make his fortune; and they stayed there talking till dawn, and she bathed his poor feet, all bleeding from his long tramp, and must have been too sweet and adorable, Mamma. And when the morning came and her adopted parents found he was still there and had only ten cents to pay with, they tried to make him leave, and beat Hearts-ease before his eyes, which made him so mad he got out his gun (that means revolver) and would have shot the man, only Hearts-ease clung to him, and begged him not to. Then they called in some more brutes, who had been drinking and gambling all night in the bar, and overpowered him, and threw him out, and the girl, too, and said he might take her to hell with him, they would shelter her no more. And one of the brutes said he would fight him for her, and they made a ring and the brute tried to get his pistol off first; but it hit another man, and before he could shoot again, the Senator fired and wounded him in the side; and as he fell, and the others, angry at his hitting one of them, all began to quarrel together, the Senator and the girl slipped away, and ran and hid in the scrub. If you could have heard him telling all this, Mamma, in the dying light, his strong face and quiet voice so impressive! I shall never forget it. Well, the girl had brought some bread in a handkerchief, which he had not eaten, and they shared that together, and when it was dark they slept under the stars; and "by then I'd just grown to love her," he said, and "we were quite content to die together if we couldn't push on to the big camp; but we meant to make an almighty try."

      They did get there, finally, and the sheriff married them, and here his voice broke a little and was so low I could hardly hear him. There were no two people ever so happy, he said. He built a little shack of boards not twelve feet long, "way up on the mountain," and she kept it like a new pin, and was dainty and sweet and loving, and when he came in from the mines she would run to meet him "as gentle as a fawn," and he never wanted to go to the saloons or drink like the other men, "though I was always pretty handy with my gun," he said, "and had been through the whole ugly show."

      And presently he began to make a little money and would contrive to give her small things for the house; it gave her more pleasure than anything in the world to make it pretty, so that the little shed was the admiration of all the other miners' wives. And once he was able to buy some flower seeds, and she grew a pansy in a pot because there is no green thing in that barren land, and she tended it and watched it as it came through the earth, and no one was so joyous as she. "It hurts me to look at pansies even now," he said; and I was glad, Mamma, it was getting dark, because I felt the tears coming in my eyes. They were perfectly happy like this for about three years, and then Lola was born and they were happier still; but before that