days—when we whites were savages, hopping around hollering hye-ee yah, hye-ee yah, and calling on the ladies, dressed in a streak of red paint. I don't know about that, though. No child in this world can be as mournful enjoying himself as a cow-puncher with all night before him and seven hundred verses to get through; there's puncher songs would make a strong man curl up and die.

Now, says Saxton, what makes children and savages, who have a clear field to amuse themselves as they see fit, pick, with deliberate choice, such melancholy tunes? And he said it was because nature always hit on that; wind in rigging, wind in trees, waterfalls, the far-off hum of the city, all sad, sad.

I asked him, if it was natural, where did we get the idea it was sad? It struck me that if a thing was natural, it was natural, not sad, nor nothin' else.

He said, because nature was sad. Mary said, no such a thing; nature wasn't sad—there were the flowers and green fields, also natural, and pleasant and cheerful to the eye; there was more blue sky than gray, and as for the savage being sad, why, that might be, but it wasn't sad to think that men were working out of savagery into civilization.

So then Saxton gave civilization one for its Ma, and talk brisked up. Civilization stood for Dutchmen that ran orchestras to Saxton, and he didn't spare her feelings none. I was glad Civvy, old girl, was no friend of mine. According to him, of all the mistakes so foolish that to think of bettering it was like building a hole with no rim around it, civilization stood first and foremost.

Mary got red in the face and her eyes shone. They had it up one side and down the other, forgetting me entirely. Finally Saxton told her she wasn't talking honestly, that she hated civilization worse than he did, and it was plumb hypocrisy for her to set up in its defense; whereupon she replied that she hadn't wasted her time and talents, anyhow; that she wasn't throwing things up the first little obstacle that came in the way. Which didn't seem to be just the answer one might expect to the charge, but finished Saxton plenty.

He drew himself up proud. "If every topic had to turn to personalities—" said he.

"I didn't begin the personalities," said Mary. "You called me a fraud."

"I never did!" cries Saxton. "I said you were defending a cause you didn't believe in!"

"And that isn't a 

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