CHAPTER XV.
ANOTHER DAY The morning after the first official ball in Ellisville dawned upon another world.
The occupants of the wagons which trailed off across the prairies, the horsemen who followed them, the citizens who adjourned and went as usual to the Cottage--all these departed with the more or less recognised feeling that there had happened a vague something which had given Ellisville a new dignity, which had attached to her a new significance.

Really this was Magna Charta.

All those who, tired and sleepy, yet cheerful with the vitality of beef and air, were going home upon the morning following the ball, knew in their souls that something had been done.

Each might have told you in his way that a new web of human interests and human antagonisms was now laid out upon the loom.
Rapid enough was to be the weaving, and Ellisville was early enough to become acquainted with the joys and sorrows, the strivings and the failures, the happinesses and bitternesses of organized humanity.
There are those who sneer at the communities of the West, and who classify all things rural as crude and unworthy, entitled only to tolerance, if they be spared contempt.

They are but provincials themselves who are guilty of such attitude, and they proclaim only an ignorance which itself is not entitled to the dignity of being called intolerance.