anticipations which he had been rudely cheated out of. To escape such associations he took an electric car to the Bluffs, those rock-bound islands in the prairie sea which lie a couple of miles to the east of the town. There was only one other passenger besides himself, a man with a gun, who softly whistled a popular air, very much out of tune. Peckham came perilously near kicking the offender, but, happily, the fellow got off just in time, and went strolling across the open with the gun over his shoulder. Once he stooped to pick a flower which he stuck in his buttonhole. Queer, thought Peckham, that a man should go picking flowers and whistling out of tune! There were the mountains, too. Some people made a great deal of them—great, stupid masses of dumb earth! He remembered he had thought them fine himself the other day when there were shadows on them. But to-day! How the sun glared on their ugly reddish sides! And what was it that had gone wrong anyhow? He could not seem to remember, and on the whole he did not wish to.
Now Lewis Peckham was neither losing his mind, nor had he been drowning his sorrows in the conventional dram. The simple fact of the matter was that he had not slept fifteen
