CHAPTER XIV.
PRAIRIE FROM CHICAGO TO OMAHA—PLAINS FROM NORTH PLATTE TO THE MOUNTAINS—OMAHA, THE INTERSECTION OF THE PACIFIC RAILWAY AND THE MISSOURI—TEMPORARY BRIDGE OVER THE MISSOURI—INDIFFERENCE TO RISKS AFFECTING LIFE—A PRAIRIE FIRE—THE FOREST ON THE MOUNTAINS ON FIRE—FIRE THE CAUSE OF THE TREELESSNESS OF THE PRAIRIES—FIRST-FOUND ANIMAL LIFE ABOUNDING IN THE VALLEY OF THE PLATTE—‘THE HARDEST PLACE, SIR, ON THIS CONTINENT’—ITS PREDECESSOR—HOW IT IS POSSIBLE TO ESTABLISH LYNCH LAW AT SHYENNE—MY FIRST NIGHT IN SHYENNE—A SECOND NIGHT AT SHYENNE—NECESSITY AND ADVANTAGES OF LYNCH LAW—‘THE USE OF THE PISTOL’—A MAN SHOT BECAUSE ‘HE MIGHT HAVE DONE SOME MISCHIEF’—NEWNESS OF ASPECTS BOTH OF SOCIETY AND OF NATURE.
PRAIRIE FROM CHICAGO TO OMAHA—PLAINS FROM NORTH PLATTE TO THE MOUNTAINS—OMAHA, THE INTERSECTION OF THE PACIFIC RAILWAY AND THE MISSOURI—TEMPORARY BRIDGE OVER THE MISSOURI—INDIFFERENCE TO RISKS AFFECTING LIFE—A PRAIRIE FIRE—THE FOREST ON THE MOUNTAINS ON FIRE—FIRE THE CAUSE OF THE TREELESSNESS OF THE PRAIRIES—FIRST-FOUND ANIMAL LIFE ABOUNDING IN THE VALLEY OF THE PLATTE—‘THE HARDEST PLACE, SIR, ON THIS CONTINENT’—ITS PREDECESSOR—HOW IT IS POSSIBLE TO ESTABLISH LYNCH LAW AT SHYENNE—MY FIRST NIGHT IN SHYENNE—A SECOND NIGHT AT SHYENNE—NECESSITY AND ADVANTAGES OF LYNCH LAW—‘THE USE OF THE PISTOL’—A MAN SHOT BECAUSE ‘HE MIGHT HAVE DONE SOME MISCHIEF’—NEWNESS OF ASPECTS BOTH OF SOCIETY AND OF NATURE.
I left Chicago for the Rocky Mountains at 3P. M.Twice the day wore out, and twice the night came down on the prairie, and twice the sun rose from the level horizon as it were out of the sea; and the third night was closing in upon us, before the iron horse, that never tires, could bring us to the farther side of the land-ocean, here 1,000 miles wide. And such is the scale of all alike, of plains and valleys, of rivers, forests, lakes and mountains, in the United States.
In this journey we crossed the Mississippi at Fulton, by a covered wooden bridge a mile in length, the Missouri at Omaha, and the north fork of the Platte, at a place called North Platte, by a bridge that appeared to be about half a mile long.
The Prairie to Omaha.
As far as Omaha—that is, for the first 500 miles—andthen again for some distance beyond Omaha, the prairie is generally of a deep black soil, capable of producing most abundant crops of anything. The first 300 miles is all settled. The remainder is taken up and partially settled, of course more closely in the neighbourhood of Omaha, and none of it can now be had in lots contiguous to the railway at less than thirty dollars an acre. This will give some conception of the inexhaustible agricultural wealth of the United States.
As the Platte is approached, you enter on the dry prairie, where there is not sufficient rain to admit of cultivation. There is, however, abundance of the finest grass for sheep and cattle, and this continues for 300 miles more to the foot of the mountains. This dry region is called ‘The Plains.’
Of all the astonishing sights in this land of surprises, none takes one more by surprise than the town of Omaha. At home we have been taught to regard Chicago as the extremity of civilisation, and therefore as one of the wonders of the world. But when you have turned your back on Chicago, and been borne away into the western prairie by the locomotive for 500 miles, you find that you have reached a thriving town, of brick buildings and large hotels, containing now 16,000 inhabitants, and which is destined to become—probably in a very few years—a second Chicago. For, being on the Pacific Railway, the grandest of all railways, as well as on that grandest of all arterial lines of water-communication, the Missouri, which is navigable for a thousand miles beyond the town for the same steamer that might have ascended the stream from NewOrleans, it must soon become the depôt for the two greatest lines of American traffic—that between the East and the West, and that between the North and the South, which will cross here. It does not appear possible that anything can arise to prevent its expanding, with a rapidity unexampled even in America, into one of the great commercial centres of this vast and rich continent.
During the summer the Missouri had been crossed by a steam-ferry. But to save a little time in the transit, and the trouble of keeping a passage for the ferry free from ice during the winter, the railway had been carried across the river, as soon as the frost became severe, on two rows of piles, which rose only a few inches above the surface of the ice. This was merely intended for the three or four months during which it would be buttressed and strengthened by the ice. As soon as that should begin to break up, it would be swept away. In going westward, the train I was in was made to traverse it at a snail’s pace, for fear of shaking it to pieces, but even with this caution it wavered and groaned alarmingly. On returning some weeks afterwards, when the ice was hourly expected to break up, the train I recrossed it in was the last that used it. Again we traversed it, at a snail’s pace, feeling our way as we went; again we heard the creaking, and saw the bending and swaying of the rickety fabric, many fearing that this last journey would be the one too many, and that it would not be swept away by the ice, but shaken to pieces by use. In no other country would so reckless a disregard of risks, imperilling life, be tolerated. But here neither the public, nor the contrivers of these risks, nor thepossible or actual sufferers by them, appear to give these matters a thought; or, if they do, they probably regard them from the commercial point of view—that it would be hard to interfere with anyone who was endeavouring to make money, and that the public ought to be left to decide for themselves whether it is, or is not, worth their while to run the risks to which they are invited. The day after I left Cincinnati, the ‘Magnolia’ steamer blew up, and more than eighty lives were lost. About the same time some terrific railway accidents occurred; but, as far as I could judge, no one seemed to think that on these occasions blame could attach to anyone.
Prairie Fires.
At a distance of about sixty miles from Omaha, on the second night of my journeying through the prairie, I saw it on fire. It was on the right-hand side to one going westward, and did not reach up to the rails within a mile or two. The front of the fire, as we passed along it, was a line of five or six miles. The flames had not an uniform appearance. In slight depressions, where moisture hung longer, and therefore the grass and prairie plants were thick and high, the flames rose about fifteen feet; but where the blazing had subsided, the smouldering remains of plants that had more substance than the rest, appeared like rows of stars. There was smoke visible only where there was much flame, and the lazy masses of smoke were illuminated by the glare of the flames beneath. As in one place there was something burning above the general level, we supposed that it was the dwelling-house of some prairie settler that was being destroyed.
I also, during four days, saw the pine and poplarforest, on the mountain above the town of Boulder, on fire. I was not so near to this as I had been to the prairie fire; but it did not strike me, judging however from a distance, that its effects were grander. There seemed a great deal more smoke than flame, which streamed off down the wind like large bodies of cloud. I heard, however, that sometimes the appearance of the forest burning on the mountains was very grand. I observed, wherever I penetrated into the Rocky Mountains, that a great part of the wood had been destroyed in this way. The fire generally occurs through the carelessness of persons who are camping out. The waste of valuable timber is thus enormous.
As one passes over the prairie, the conviction becomes irresistible that fire is the sole cause of the absence of trees. The prairie was once covered with trees, because when fire is kept off by cultivation, and the earth loosened by the plough, so as to admit light and air to a greater depth than before, young trees at once appear. Of course the parent trees must, at some time or other, have grown on the spot. All the seeds that were sufficiently near the undisturbed surface to germinate had germinated, and the young plants that issued from them had been destroyed by fire. Those seeds which chance had buried more deeply waited for the aid of man to give proof of their presence in the soil.
Animal Life on the Plains.
Again, both forest and fruit trees, when planted by the hand of man, thrive well in the prairie, if only fire be kept from them. And wherever in the prairie, as on the rocky faces of bluffs, or the banks of streams, fire cannot reach, on account of the absence of sufficientgrass and undergrowth to convey it, trees—as pines, oaks, willows, and poplars—abound. The great accumulations of black vegetable mould are to be accounted for in the same way; they are formed out of the burnt and half-burnt vegetable matter left by the annual fires of no one can tell how long a period. In the valley of the Platte, this vegetable mould appears to have been carried away by the stream, which has ever been shifting its channel from side to side, between the bluffs which bound the valley—in so doing floating off the lighter portions of the soil, and leaving sand and gravel only in its deserted beds.
On the dry prairie between Omaha and the mountains I saw, for the first time, some of theferæ naturæof America in abundance. Hitherto I had frequently observed that there was almost a total absence of animal life from the roadside. I could count up the rare occasions on which I had seen either bird or beast. I had twice seen colonies of a social crow resembling our rook. In Georgia I had seen two birds, one about the size of a thrush, and the other rather smaller than a sparrow. In Alabama I had seen some wild deer and wild ducks. In a journey of several thousand miles I had seen no other wild four-footed or feathered creature. I had attributed the deficiency of the latter partly to the severity of American winters, which had taught them migratory habits, and partly to the sparseness of the population in the Southern States; for though it is true that the presence of civilised man is incompatible with the existence of some species, yet there are other species to which man, by his cultivation of the ground, and as it were by the crumbs that fall from his table, becomesthe chief purveyor, and whose numbers therefore increase almost in proportion to the degree in which a country becomes settled. But here, on this arid plain, and in mid-winter, neither naturalist nor sportsman could have had anything to complain of. Animal life was in abundance. In the course of one day I saw from the windows of the car three herds of antelopes (in one of which I counted thirty-eight), two wolves, prairie-fowl in great numbers, plenty of a species of bird resembling our English lark, several hawks, and innumerable colonies of prairie-dogs. As their villages are frequently at a distance from water, these agile and amusing little animals are supposed to be capable of living without drinking. I saw nothing of the owls and rattlesnakes who have been admitted by the prairie-dogs to a joint tenancy of their subterranean homes. Doubtless, if one were to examine on foot the banks of the river, and the rocky bluffs that bound the valley, my small list might easily be made a large one. The valley was strewed for hundreds of miles with the bones of the buffalo, and marked with the still unobliterated basins which showed the spot in which he had rolled himself in the dry sandy soil on coming up out of the water of the Platte. Experience corrects the common error that animal life in any district will be found in proportion to the vigour of its vegetable life. Nowhere is vegetation more vigorous than in the mighty forests of South America and Western Africa, but they are very far from abounding in animal life. On the contrary, vegetable life is poor and scanty in Southern Africa, and nowhere in the world is there so great a number of species and of individuals of thelarger quadrupeds. Something similar is observable in the dry valley of the Platte, the obvious requirement being not abundance of vegetation, but enough of that kind of vegetation the animals require, and either that kind of covert, or such an absence of covert, as shall most conduce to their security.
‘Hardest Place, Sir, on this Continent.’
Frequently, when I had mentioned my intention of going to the Rocky Mountains by way of Omaha and Denver, I had been cautioned against Shyenne city—‘Sir, it is the hardest place on this continent;’ by which was meant that it contained a choicer collection of hardened villains, and a larger proportion of them to its population, than any other place, and that, in consequence, it was harder there than anywhere else to keep out of a scrape. It is called Shyenne, because nine months before I was there, at which time it had three thousand inhabitants, the Chien or Dog Indians had scalped a white man on what was then the open prairie, but is now the site of the city. Nine months had sufficed for building and peopling the city. City on the Plains may mean a single house. At a place called ‘La Park,’ where there was but one wooden shanty, I heard a gentleman ask its proprietor ‘if anyone was then talking about building a second house in that city?’ Shyenne city is built entirely of wood. There is no company that will insure any goods or houses in the place. What so suddenly called it into existence was the opening of the Pacific Railway to this point. Here, then, everyone coming from the Pacific and Ultramontane States takes the rail for the East, and everyone leaving the rail for one of those States takes his place in one of Wells and Fargo’s coaches. There are therefore people alwaysarriving from both directions, with plenty of money. It is also the natural rendezvous (as there is nothing behind it for five hundred miles back to Omaha) for all those who are employed beyond it in the construction of the railway through the mountains, to spend their money at, and for many too of the gold-washers and gold-miners from the mountains. All these are the birds of passage of the place; but they it is who attract the two classes of permanent inhabitants, if such a word is suitable to any residents in a town only nine months old. Of these two classes one is respectable, the other not. The respectable class is that of the tradesmen; the one that is not consists of the rowdies, gamblers, and desperadoes, who have always formed the scum and dirt on the top of the foremost wave of advancing civilisation in America, and which that wave has now borne on to this place, and thrown them into it all together.
The same causes, in the winter of 1866-67, made a place called Julesburg, about one hundred and fifty miles back from Shyenne, the point at which for the time extreme rowdyism, but of a lower class and on a smaller scale, was concentrated. Being then the extreme point of the Pacific Railway, the teamsters, freighters, and their hangers-on, and those from the neighbourhood who join such gatherings, were all here collected together. A town of waggon corals and wooden houses was soon formed in this way, containing about one thousand inhabitants—almost all men, and almost all reckless and violent characters. I asked a man who was himself connected with the freighting business, and had been part of last winter at Julesburg, how things had gone on at the place, and how order had been maintained? He said thatat first no attempt at all was made to have things right, but that when it began to be known as a hell upon earth—almost every day two or three men being murdered or killed in rows—a few policemen were sent. They did not, however, prove of the slightest use, for they were quite unable to arrest anybody, or to hinder anything. If they had made the attempt, they would have been shot as readily as anyone else. When I was at the spot in February 1868, not a trace of the Julesburg of the previous year remained. Everything, both houses and men, had moved on to Shyenne. A prairie station on the railway alone marked the place where the town had been.
The difference between last year’s and this year’s headquarters of rowdyism arises out of the better chance Shyenne has, as it is situated at the foot of the mountains, of maintaining a permanent existence, and if so of rapidly becoming a flourishing place of business. This has attracted to it a large number of storekeepers, who of course set up, as soon as they were strong enough to do so, the reign of vigilance committees and lynch law. In such places these are the means universally adopted for enforcing honesty and order.
I reached Shyenne a little after dark. Having been fully warned of the character of the place, I had taken the precaution of enquiring what were the names of the two least rowdy hotels. The moment the train reached the station, I was off, bag in hand, for the first chance of a bed-room. On my asking, at the larger of the two, for a room I might occupy alone, I was told they had no such accommodation. I then went on to the other, where the same answer was given to the same enquiry. I was determined not totake the chances of a night with a Shyenne desperado, so I again sallied forth in search of a lodging—this time, however, not knowing where to turn. At last my from-house-to-house investigation brought me to a wooden structure, on which were painted the words ‘The Wyoming House.’ It was far from having an inviting look: in fact it had more the appearance of a drinking-booth than of a place where one could find a bed-room. But as it was the only house I had seen (hotels are here all called houses), I thought the best thing I could do would be to go to some tradesman, and take my chance of his telling me whether it was, or was not, a safe place. A chemist, it appeared to me, would be as little likely as any to be dependent on the rowdies; so I entered the first shop of that kind I could see, to make the enquiry. If I had looked in through the window, I should certainly not have opened the door; for the first object that met my eyes was a rough, lying on the ground in front of the stove. His hair and beard appeared not to have been combed for months, and by his side was lying a gigantic mastiff. But, as it was too late to recede, I turned to the chemist—a youth apparently of less than twenty years of age, who was seated on the counter—and put my enquiry to him. ‘Wall, stranger,’ he said, taking his cigar from his mouth, and speaking very deliberately, ‘if it is a night when they have got no dance—for they give a dance twice a-week to the ladies and gentlemen of the city—I calculate you may get through; but if it is a dancing night, I calculate you will do better outside.’ On looking in, and finding that it was not a dancing night, I applied for and was shown to abed-room. On entering, however, I observed that the lock of the door had been lately forced, for it was hanging loose by a single nail. In a house that admitted of such proceedings, I declined to take a room the door of which could not be locked. After making some difficulties, the attendant showed me to another room. On entering it I turned the key, and as it appeared to act properly, I told him it would do, and took possession. But on attempting to get the bolt of the lock into the doorpost, I found that things were not so square as that it could be done in a moment, some violence having been used against this door also. While I was ‘fixing’ this matter, which I eventually succeeded in doing, I fancied I heard men and women gambling in the next room a great deal too distinctly; and on looking in that quarter I saw a considerable hole in the wall, which admitted of anyone observing from the next room what I was about. This I stopped up with a Chicago newspaper I happened to have with me. My last thought was to ascertain whether the window which opened at the head of my bed had any fastening, and whether one could escape through it in case of a fire—a matter that must always be attended to in these wooden towns. I found that it opened into a back courtyard; that it had no fastening of any kind; and that one might open it from the outside with a single finger. I did not like this, nor anything that I had seen in the house; but as Judge Lynch had hung up two men in the main street of the town only a few nights before, I thought that all the good effect had probably not yet evaporated, and so was soon asleep. The next morning, when I offered payment, the landlorddemurred accepting it immediately, and beckoning to one of his men, sent him off to see if all was right. On the man’s returning, and giving him a nod, he took my money. I asked what was the meaning of this. ‘Oh,’ he replied, ‘it is not the custom to settle accounts here till you are sure that none of your blankets have been made away with in the night through the window.’ Blankets here are hard to get, and of some value for camping out.
I passed part of another night at Shyenne, on my return from the mountains. The coach reached the chief hotel of the place at three o’clock in the morning. I had expected at that hour to find things tolerably quiet; but on entering, I had to pass, first some people in a state of riotous drunkenness at the bar; then about twenty men sitting or sleeping round the stove; and, lastly, a parcel of people playing and rowing at two billiard-tables. Beyond all these was the clerk’s counter. On entering my name, and asking whether I could have a room to myself, I was assured that I could.
‘Give me a receipt, then,’ I said, ‘for my bag and rug, and let me be shown to my room.’
‘Is there any other passenger on board the coach?’ the clerk enquired.
I told him there was one. He asked me to wait till he had come in, and then the boy—the new name for manservant—would only have to make one journey in showing us to our rooms. I assented. At last the other passenger came in, and the clerk gave his instructions to the boy. In doing this I observed that he only gave him one key, from which I instantly inferred that I was done, and was only tohave, after all, a part of a room; but I decided to submit, for there were only three hours to be passed in bed, and my fellow-passenger was a highly respectable storekeeper of Denver; and if I had gone out of the hotel, at that hour of the morning, with my luggage in my hand, all the rowdies about the billiard-tables, the stove, and the bar, would have known that I was going in search of a lodging, and some might perhaps have followed me out. But on the boy’s opening the door, and setting down the lamp, while he said, ‘Gentlemen, here is your apartment,’ I was no longer equal to the occasion; for now I saw—the possibility of which had never before crossed my mind—that I was expected to occupy the same bed with another man; and I gave vent to my indignation by observing, ‘that it was really too bad to be billeted off to half a bed, when I had been promised a room to myself.’ ‘As to the room to yourself,’ replied the boy, ‘I know nothing about that, and the thing is passed; but it is very unreasonable in you to complain about having half a bed, when it is a bed that is intended to hold three people.’
I asked my fellow-passenger not to regard it as anything personal that I was unable to occupy the same bed as himself, telling him that I would lie down in my clothes. Our first care, however, was to arrange what we should do in case of fire, for part of the house we were in had been in flames only a few nights before. In such a place sleep was impossible. Our room was exactly over the kitchen, and the floor having been made originally of unseasoned wood, the heat had shrunk it, so that there were gaps everywhere. Through these came up all night from thekitchen the effluvium of beefsteaks and onions, which were being cooked incessantly for the gamblers, who would themselves have kept anyone awake with the noise they made, the chief part of it consisting of the most ingenious and horrible oaths one ever heard, or will ever hear, as swearing is everywhere else becoming obsolete. On coming down, a little after six, for the seven-o’clock train, I found a few persons still drunk about the bar; and all the rest of those I had seen three hours before were now asleep on the floor, on chairs, or on the billiard-tables. These are persons who do not care for beds, or who would rather spend the price of them in drinking and gambling.
Lynch Law and the Pistol.
I mentioned that in my first night at Shyenne, I calculated on the effect two recent lynch-law executions would have in keeping things quiet for a season. About that time I heard of five other executions of the same kind in that neighbourhood. There are people who denounce this method of maintaining order, but they do so without understanding the circumstances. At all events, a man has been known to exclaim loudly against it in New England, and before he had been in the West a month, to join a vigilance committee. The fact is that the ordinary method of administering law is quite impracticable in a place where you can get no policemen, no constables, no lawyers, no juries, no jails, no judges; and where, if it were possible to get the apparatus of justice, it would be next to impossible to work it. Some one or other would be bribed, or some flaw would be established in the evidence, and there would be time and opportunity enough, in one way or another, for the escape of the prisoner. Instead of this, here is asystem which has no officers or jails, which costs nothing, and is very terrifying to evildoers by the rapidity and certainty with which it acts, and the mystery with which it is involved. It would be a very unnecessary and evil system in a settled community, but where none of the ordinary appliances of law are possible, and where at the same time all the scum of the great world behind is concentrated, it is a necessity, and a highly beneficial one. It does really what Napoleon III. claims to have done for France: it saves society, which without it would cease to exist, for it would be overwhelmed by these reckless and desperate characters. Everyone in America knows how completely in California it got rid of all the disorderly and dangerous elements which were collected there in such force, that it would have been quite hopeless to have attempted to deal with them in any other way. Just so, again, it was at Denver, a town on this side the mountains, of eight thousand inhabitants, now as orderly and well-disposed as any other eight thousand persons anywhere to be found. Four or five years ago Denver was what Shyenne is now. But lynch law has purified it, and in a way in which ordinary law has never purified any community in the world. All the rogues and violent fellows have been hanged, and all the suspected have been made to clear out. There are now no other such eight thousand souls in any part of the Old States. A man who knows both would rather leave his baggage out all night in the street at Denver than in any city of New England. This is the state into which a community has been brought when lynch law hands it over to ordinary law.
But lynch law is only half the system. It is always accompanied by something else, which I have heard described as ‘the use of the pistol.’ This has, from the first, been maintained in America long after Judge Lynch has retired from the scene. It is still not unknown in Washington and New York. But in the ever-advancing frontier of civilisation, it has all along been in active operation. Every man in the West goes always armed. And it is one of the most imperative of the laws of Western society, that, if a man insults you in any way, you are bound then and there to shoot him dead. Society requires you to do it, and if you do not, you will be shot yourself; for the man who has insulted you, supposing that you can only be waiting for an opportunity, will think it better to be beforehand with you. This is their substitute for the old European law of duelling, which required that if a man insulted you, you should give him a chance of shooting you also. The Western plan is that you should shoot him. It is enforced too by the same kind of social considerations, and attended by the same immunities, and its object is the same—to oblige men, at the peril of their lives, to behave themselves discreetly and politely.
‘He might have done some Mischief.’
The following incident was told me by a thoroughly credible eyewitness: it will show how cheaply society holds, in this part of the world, the lives of its troublesome members. A dozen or more men were seated, drinking and smoking and yarning, in front of the bar of a Shyenne hotel. One of the troublesome class, in whom whisky was just then overcoming discretion, took out his revolver, and, flourishing it about, announced that everyone present had toacknowledge that he was the finest fellow in the world. Just as he said this two gentlemen came in, and, not knowing what was passing, walked up to the bar, close to where the swaggerer was seated. This took off his attention from the rest of the company, for he now turned to the newcomers, and pointing his pistol at the one nearest to him, told him to make the acknowledgment. The gentleman, finding himself taken at a disadvantage, and thinking it most likely that, if he put his hand behind him for his pistol, he should, while doing so, be shot by the tipsy desperado, began to do as he was required. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you are a monstrous fine fellow; I had no idea there were such fine fellows out here.’ While he was saying this, his companion took his own pistol from its sling behind him, put it to the swaggerer’s head, and blew out his brains. As the man fell to the ground, and he deliberately replaced his pistol, he said, by way not so much of explanation as of comment, ‘That chap might have done some mischief.’ Not another remark was made or word spoken on the occasion. Those who were in favour of order said nothing, as they approved of what had been done; while those who belonged to the troublesome class were also silent, because they thought it wiser not to show their colours. When it suited the manager’s convenience, he sent one of the boys of the hotel to dig a hole in the prairie for the corpse; and with that the matter ended.
Armament of a German Herdmaster.
Having breakfasted at six, I was out at the first dawn, and again, as I frequently did afterwards, saw the sun rise on the prairie. Till he was above the horizon, and it was full day, it was impossible todistinguish the prairie from the sea. The same effect is also at times during the day observable. In the morning I even saw something like rippling waves on the surface, resulting, I suppose, from the way in which the level rays struck upon the little inequalities of the foot or two of haze that rested on the ground. At a distance of forty or fifty miles the snowy range was already tinted with light, while the lower intervening ranges were still black masses. The aspects of human society, as well as of outward nature, are here so unlike anything with which the English traveller is familiar at home, that he is ever feeling conscious that new pictures are being added to the furniture of his mind.