WESTERN CATTLE LANDS. 331 



of riches in Montana, Wyoming or Colorado as they do in Zulu- 

 land. Wives are not ostensibly bought and sold with them, it 

 is true ; but this is probably because young ladies have not 

 arrived in sufficient numbers to allow of a market being 

 formed. 



Matrimony, indeed, is a luxury that, with law and order, 

 white china crockery and the extinction of game, has only 

 recently crept in among the ranchmen of the wildest West. If 

 a man would marry, he must journey towards the rising sun 

 and fetch him a wife. If he is a cattleman he generally refrains 

 from this, until he is perhaps manager of a company and able 

 to share with her the otium cum dignitate of a plank-built 

 house in "town." Otherwise, should his circumstances rise no 

 higher than a subordinate position in a cow-ranche, his wife 

 (though ever treated with the utmost respect and invariably 

 yclept the " lady ") will be expected to cook for the " outfit,'" 

 and will probably enjoy no further comfort or privacy than is 

 ensured by hanging up an old blanket to partition herself and 

 husband from the rest of the apartment wherein the boys and 

 any number of odd visitors may make their beds. The ac- 

 commodation in fact coincides very closely with that provided 

 not so many years ago for the married rank-and-file of her 

 Britannic Majesty's Army. Not that privacy as we of domestic 

 England by habit hold it a necessary part of our very existence 

 ever appears to be considered of any substantial account 

 hereabouts, even where the hallowing presence of fair woman 

 has arrived on the scene. Actual coarseness or indelicacy, 

 either in speech or behaviour, will certainly never be apparent 

 to shock her. The language that meets her ear will be as 

 carefully expunged as the edition of Shakespeare that bores any 

 Brighton schoolgirl and, indeed, instances are not wanting in 

 which an independent "gentleman who has been working for 

 wages " (this being the designation under which he wishes to 

 be known, the said wages being the ordinary tariff of the 

 Territory, to wit, forty dollars a month with board and lodging, 

 and the work often such as a Hampshire labourer might 



