in New Hampshire" could not be more than a day's journey from the ranch.
"When I was a boy over in New Hampshire," he would say, "I got it into my head that if I could only get away to a new place I sh'd get to be something big; and the farther away I got, the bigger I expected to be. Colorado was a territory then, 'n I thought, 'f I could only get out here they'd make me gov'nor's like's not. 'N I do' know but what I'd have looked to be made President of the United States 'f I'd sighted the Pacific Ocean!"
Then the shaggy, keen-eyed mountaineer who made so light of boyish expectations would knock the logs together and take a puff or two at his pipe before coming to the climax of his remarks, which varied according to the lesson he wished to inculcate.
"It took me several years of wrastling with life," he was fond of saying, "to find out that it ain't so much matter whar you be, as what you be. 'N if I was you, Waldy,"—here was the application,—"I'd contrive to learn a little something on my own hook, before I aspired to go consorting with them as knows it all!"
When, however, the time was ripe, and "Waldy," having fulfilled these conditions, was fairly off for college, the ranchman had
