Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885

Excerpt

I.

There are words which have careers as well as men, or, perhaps it may be more happily said, as well as women. Mere words breathed on by Fancy, and sent forth not so much to serve man's ordinary colloquial uses, apparently, as to fascinate his mind, have their débuts. their season, their vogue, and finally a period in which it is really too bad if they have not the consolation of reflecting upon their conquests; for conquests they certainly have. The great captivators—the Cleopatras of the vocabulary—one easily recognizes; but besides these there is a host of small flirts and every-day coquettes, whom one hardly suspects till they have a little carried him away. Almost every one remembers how in this light company he first came across the little word ranch. It had in its youth distinctly the cachet of the verbal flying squadron, the "nameless something," the oenanthic whiff which flies to the head. There are signs that its best days as a word are now over, and in contemplating it at present one has a vision of a passée brunette, in the costume of Fifine at the Fair, solacing herself with thoughts of early triumphs. "Would a farm have served?" she murmurs. "Would a plantation, an orange-grove, have satisfied the desperate young man? No, no; he must have his ranch! There was no charm could soothe his melancholy, and wring for him the public bosom, save mine."

I made this reflection during a period of incarceration in a sleeping-car,—a form of confinement which, like any other, throws the prisoner considerably on his fancy; and a vision somewhat like the above smoothed for a moment the pillow of an "upper berth," and pleased better than the negro porter. Half a dozen of those days of too many paper novels, of too much tobacco, of too little else, followed each other with the sameness of so many raw oysters. Then there came a chill night of wide moonlit vacuity passed on the prairie by the side of the driver of a "jumper,"—a driver who slumbered, happy man!—and at peep of dawn I found myself standing, stiff and shivering, in a certain little Texas town. A much-soiled, white little street, a bit of greenish-yellow, treeless plain soft in the morning mist, a rosy fringe at the edge of the sky,—it was of these things, together with a disagreeable sense of imponderability of body from the cold and sleepless ride, that I was vaguely aware as the jumper—rigorous vehicle!—disappeared round a corner. Frontier towns are not lovely, and the death-like peace which seemed properly to accompany the chalky pallor of the buildings was somewhat uncanny; but it proved to be only what sleep can do for a village with railroad influences one hundred miles away. We entered boldly the adobe before which we had been dropped, and found a genial landlord in an impromptu costume justified by the hour, an inn-album of quite cosmopolitan range of inscriptions, and a breakfast for which a week of traveller's fare had amply fortified the spirit.

The village was the chief, indeed, wellnigh the only, town of a great west-by-north county, in which Rhode Island would be lost and Massachusetts find elbow-room....