trolley track all under one transfer system?  Who built the courthouse and the red brick schoolhouse, with nine school-teachers fresh from Connecticut?  Who planned the new depot?  Who got a new leather lounge for the managin’ editor of our daily newspaper?  Who built the three new smelters?  Who filled our busy streets each evenin’ with throngs of happy-faced laborers pacin’ home at night after four hours’ pleasant work each day in our elegantly upholstered quartz mines?  Was it you, Curly, who made these different and several pasears in progress?  Was it you, Doc, you benighted stray from the short-grass Kansas plains, where they can’t raise Kafir corn?  Was it you, McKinney, you sour-dispositioned consumer of canned peas?  Nay, nay.  It was myself and my learned brother.  You ought to send us both to Congress.”

We gazed up the long, silent street of Heart’s Desire, asleep in the all-satisfying sun, and it almost seemed to us that we could indeed see all these things that he had named.  The spell was broken by a renewal of the thin, high voice of this mysterious Thing in Tom Osby’s house.

“And now,” resumed Dan Anderson, “as I remarked, havin’ turned our hands to the stable things of life, and havin’ builded well the structure of an endurin’, permanent society, there remained for us no need save for the softenin’ and refinin’ touch of a higher culture.  We lacked nothing but Art.  Now, here she is!

“What you’re listenin’ to, my countrymen, is music.  It ain’t a baby, Curly.  Music, heavenly maid, is young in Heart’s Desire, but it ain’t any baby that you’re listenin’ to.  I told Tom Osby myself to look into the phonograph business some time if he got a chance.  Gentlemen, I now bid you follow me, to greet Art upon its arrival in our midst.  I must confess that Tom Osby is actin’ like a blamed swine over this thing, tryin’ to keep it all to himself.”

The phonograph inside the adobe switched from one tune to another.  “Don’t that sound like the Plaza Major in old Chihuahua by moonlight?” cried McKinney, as a swinging band march came squealing out through the door.  “That’s a piece by a Mexican band.  Can’t you hear the choo-choo, and the wee-wee, and the bum-bum?  They’re all there, sure’s you’re born!”

“If she plays ‘La Paloma,’ or that ‘Golondrina’ thing, I’m goin’ to shoot,” threatened Curly.  “I’ve done danced to them things at more’n a thousand bailes here and in Texas, and if this is Art, she’s got to do different.”

“Gentlemen,” Dan Anderson suggested, “let us go in and watch Tom Osby gettin’ his savage breast soothed.”

Tom Osby started as he saw shadows on the floor; but it was too late.  He was discovered sitting on the bed, in rapt attention to the machine industriously grinding away upon the table.  Dan Anderson, with great gravity, took up a collection of four pins from each of the newcomers and handed them to Tom.  “No bent ones,” said he.  “It’s a good show; but, tell us, what are you doin’?  This is worse than croquet.  And we asked you in on our game, too.  Ain’t you playin’ it just a little bit lonesome this way?”