first sensation of life was that of moving rapidly over vast arid spaces, through cattle ranges and along canons.  The effect of quick and easy locomotion on character may have been noted before, but it seems that here is the production of a new sort of man, the direct product of our railway era.  It is not simply that this boy is mature, but he must be a different and a nobler sort of boy than one born, say, at home or on a canal-boat; for, whether he was born on the rail or not, he belongs to the railway system of civilization.  Before he gets into trousers he is old in experience, and he has discounted many of the novelties that usually break gradually on the pilgrim in this world.  He belongs to the new expansive race that must live in motion, whose proper home is the Pullman (which will probably be improved in time into a dustless, sweet-smelling, well-aired bedroom), and whose domestic life will be on the wing, so to speak.  The Inter-State Commerce Bill will pass him along without friction from end to end of the Union, and perhaps a uniform divorce law will enable him to change his marital relations at any place where he happens to dine.  This promising lad is only a faint intimation of what we are all coming to when we fully acquire the freedom of the continent, and come into that expansiveness of feeling and of language which characterizes the Great West.  It is a burst of joyous exuberance that comes from the sense of an illimitable horizon.  It shows itself in the tender words of a local newspaper at Bowie, Arizona, on the death of a beloved citizen:  “‘Death loves a shining mark,’ and she hit a dandy when she turned loose on Jim.”  And also in the closing words of a New Mexico obituary, which the Kansas Magazine quotes:  “Her tired spirit was released from the pain-racking body and soared aloft to eternal glory at 4.30 Denver time.”  We die, as it were, in motion, as we sleep, and there is nowhere any boundary to our expansion.  Perhaps we shall never again know any rest as we now understand the term—­rest being only change of motion—­and we shall not be able to sleep except on the cars, and whether we die by Denver time or by the 90th meridian, we shall only change our time.  Blessed be this slip of a boy who is a man before he is an infant, and teaches us what rapid transit can do for our race!  The only thing that can possibly hinder us in our progress will be second childhood; we have abolished first.

THE ELECTRIC WAY

We are quite in the electric way.  We boast that we have made electricity our slave, but the slave whom we do not understand is our master.  And before we know him we shall be transformed.  Mr. Edison proposes to send us over the country at the rate of one hundred miles an hour.  This pleases us, because we fancy we shall save time, and because we are taught that the chief object in life is to “get there” quickly.  We really have an idea that it is a gain to annihilate distance, forgetting