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way turned out as for a circus and watched it pass in awed silence. It was one of Lincoln's big, historic moments when the four-horse team with its precious cargo came swinging into town through lanes of people in a sort of Roman triumph and backed up at the McSween door.

Lincoln took its pioneer piano to its heart. The instrument was a civic achievement that shed a certain metropolitan lustre on the community. The village swelled out its chest and boasted of its superiority over neighbouring villages. Las Cruces, Seven Rivers, Fort Sumner were good towns, in a manner of speaking, but—Lincoln shrugged a complacent shoulder—they had no piano. And to give colour to Lincoln's proprietary interest in the piano, the whole town shared in enjoyment of its melodies. When Mrs. McSween let her fingers wander among its keys, the music could be heard in almost every house in the village, from Murphy's store at one end to Juan Patron's at the other. Mexican urchins in the street danced to it; labourers in the hay vegas along the Bonito swung their scythes to its rhythm; it set the entire village humming, singing, whistling. Lincoln came to date its lesser affairs from the red-letter day in the calendar that marked the piano's arrival. If a housewife remarked with a severe wag of her head that her dominick rooster was hatched two days after the McSween piano landed in Lincoln, that settled all arguments about that chicken's age.

For the frontier, McSween was a quaintly impossible character. A man of cultured intellect and an able lawyer, he was a visionary dwelling among ideals and dreams. He was instinctively and sincerely religious. Among the gambling, swearing, fighting men of the border, he was an island of Christian virtue entirely surrounded by tumultuous wickedness.