We had now an easy slope to the summit, and hurried up over rocks and ice, reaching the crest at exactly twelve o’clock. I rang my hammer upon the topmost rock; we grasped hands, and I reverently named the grand peakMount Tyndall.
Toour surprise, upon sweeping the horizon with my level, there appeared two peaks equal in height with us, and two rising even higher. That which looked highest of all was a cleanly cut helmet of granite upon the same ridge with Mount Tyndall, lying about six miles south, and fronting the desert with a bold, square bluff which rises to the crest of the peak, where a white fold of snow trims it gracefully. Mount Whitney, as we afterward called it, in honor of our chief, is probably the highest land within the United States. Its summit looked glorious, but inaccessible.
The general topography overlooked by us may be thus simply outlined. Two parallel chains, enclosing an intermediate trough, face each other. Across this deep, enclosed gulf, from wall to wall, juts the thin but lofty and craggy ridge, or “divide,” before described, which forms an important water-shed, sending those streams which enter the chasm north of it into King’s River, those south forming the most important sources of the Kern, whose straight, rapidly deepening valley stretches south, carved profoundlyin granite, while the King’s, after flowing longitudinally in the opposite course for eight or ten miles, turns abruptly west round the base of Mount Brewer, cuts across the western ridge, opening a gate of its own, and carves a rock channel transversely down the Sierra to the California plain.
Fronting us stood the west chain, a great mural ridge watched over by two dominant heights, Kaweah Peak and Mount Brewer, its wonderful profile defining against the western sky a multitude of peaks and spires. Bold buttresses jut out through fields of ice, and reach down stone arms among snow anddébris. North and south of us the higher, or eastern, summit stretched on in miles and miles of snow peaks, the farthest horizon still crowded with their white points. East the whole range fell in sharp, hurrying abruptness to the desert, where, ten thousand feet below, lay a vast expanse of arid plain intersected by low, parallel ranges, traced from north to south. Upon the one side, a thousand sculptures of stone, hard, sharp, shattered by cold into infiniteness of fractures and rift, springing up, mutely severe, into the dark, austere blue of heaven; scarred and marked, except where snow or ice, spiked down by ragged granite bolts, shields with its pale armor these rough mountain shoulders; storm-tinted at summit, and dark where, swooping down from ragged cliff, the rocks plunge over cañon-walls into blue, silent gulfs.
Upon the other hand, reaching out to horizons faint and remote, lay plains clouded with the ashenhues of death; stark, wind-swept floors of white, and hill-ranges, rigidly formal, monotonously low, all lying under an unfeeling brilliance of light, which, for all its strange, unclouded clearness, has yet a vague half-darkness, a suggestion of black and shade more truly pathetic than fading twilight. No greenness soothes, no shadow cools the glare. Owen’s Lake, an oval of acrid water, lies dense blue upon the brown sage-plain, looking like a plate of hot metal. Traced in ancient beach-lines, here and there upon hill and plain, relics of ancient lake-shore outline the memory of a cooler past—a period of life and verdure when the stony chains were green islands among basins of wide, watery expanse.
The two halves of this view, both in sight at once, express the highest, the most acute, aspects of desolation—inanimate forms out of which something living has gone forever. From the desert have been dried up and blown away its seas. Their shores and white, salt-strewn bottoms lie there in the eloquence of death. Sharp, white light glances from all the mountain-walls, where in marks and polishings has been written the epitaph of glaciers now melted and vanished into air. Vacant cañons lie open to the sun, bare, treeless, half shrouded with snow, cumbered with loads of brokendébris, still as graves, except when flights of rocks rush down some chasm’s throat, startling the mountains with harsh, dry rattle, their fainter echoes from below followed too quickly by dense silence.
The serene sky is grave with nocturnal darkness. The earth blinds you with its light. That fair contrast we love in lower lands, between bright heavens and dark, cool earth, here reverses itself with terrible energy. You look up into an infinite vault, unveiled by clouds, empty and dark, from which no brightness seems to ray, an expanse with no graded perspective, no tremble, no vapory mobility, only the vast yawning of hollow space.
With an aspect of endless remoteness burns the small, white sun, yet its light seems to pass invisibly through the sky, blazing out with intensity upon mountain and plain, flooding rock details with painfully bright reflections, and lighting up the burnt sand and stone of the desert with a strange, blinding glare. There is no sentiment of beauty in the whole scene; no suggestion, however far remote, of sheltered landscape; not even the air of virgin hospitality that greets us explorers in so many uninhabited spots which by their fertility and loveliness of grove or meadow seem to offer man a home, or us nomads a pleasant camp-ground. Silence and desolation are the themes which nature has wrought out under this eternally serious sky.
A faint suggestion of life clings about the middle altitudes of the eastern slope, where black companies of pine, stunted from breathing the hot desert air, group themselves just beneath the bottom of perpetual snow, or grow in patches of cloudy darkness over the moraines, those piles of wreck crowdedfrom their pathway by glaciers long dead. Something there is pathetic in the very emptiness of these old glacier valleys, these imperishable tracks of unseen engines. One’s eye ranges up their broad, open channel to the shrunken white fields surrounding hollow amphitheatres which were once crowded with deep burdens of snow,—the birthplace of rivers of ice now wholly melted; the dry, clear heavens overhead blank of any promise of ever rebuilding them. I have never seen Nature when she seemed so little “Mother Nature” as in this place of rocks and snow, echoes and emptiness. It impresses me as the ruins of some bygone geological period, and no part of the present order, like a specimen of chaos which has defied the finishing hand of Time.
Of course I see its bearings upon climate, and could read a lesson quite glibly as to its usefulness as a condenser, and tell you gravely how much California has for which she may thank these heights, and how little Nevada; but looking from this summit with all desire to see everything, the one overmastering feeling is desolation, desolation!
Next to this, and more pleasing to notice, is the interest and richness of the granite forms; for the whole region, from plain to plain, is built of this dense, solid rock, and is sculptured under chisel of cold in shapes of great variety, yet all having a common spirit, which is purely Gothic.
In the much discussed origin of this order of building I never remember to have seen, though it canhardly have escaped mention, any suggestion of the possibility of the Gothic having been inspired by granite forms. Yet, as I sat on Mount Tyndall, the whole mountains shaped themselves like the ruins of cathedrals,—sharp roof-ridges, pinnacled and statued; buttresses more spired and ornamented than Milan’s; receding doorways with pointed arches carved into black façades of granite, doors never to be opened, innumerable jutting points, with here and there a single cruciform peak, its frozen roof and granite spires so strikingly Gothic I cannot doubt that the Alps furnished the models for early cathedrals of that order.
I thoroughly enjoyed the silence, which, gratefully contrasting with the surrounding tumult of form, conveyed to me a new sentiment. I have lain and listened through the heavy calm of a tropical voyage, hour after hour, longing for a sound; and in desert nights the dead stillness has many a time awakened me from sleep. For moments, too, in my forest life, the groves made absolutely no breath of movement; but there is around these summits the soundlessness of a vacuum. The sea stillness is that of sleep; the desert, of death—this silence is like the waveless calm of space.
All the while I made my instrumental observations the fascination of the view so held me that I felt no surprise at seeing water boiling over our little faggot blaze at a temperature of one hundred and ninety-two degrees F., nor in observing the barometricalcolumn stand at 17.99 inches; and it was not till a week or so after that I realized we had felt none of the conventional sensations of nausea, headache, and I don’t know what all, that people are supposed to suffer at extreme altitudes; but these things go with guides and porters, I believe, and with coming down to one’s hotel at evening there to scold one’s picturesqueaubergistein a French which strikes upon his ear as a foreign tongue; possibly all that will come to us with advancing time, and what is known as “doing America.” They are already shooting our buffaloes; it cannot be long before they will cause themselves to be honorably dragged up and down our Sierras, with perennial yellow gaiter, and ostentation of bath-tub.
Having completed our observations, we packed up the instruments, glanced once again round the whole field of view, and descended to the top of our icicle ladder. Upon looking over, I saw to my consternation that during the day the upper half had broken off. Scars traced down upon the snow-field below it indicated the manner of its fall, and far below, upon the shattereddébris, were strewn its white relics. I saw that nothing but the sudden gift of wings could possibly take us down to the snow-ridge. We held council, and concluded to climb quite round the peak in search of the best mode of descent.
As we crept about the east face, we could look straight down upon Owen’s Valley, and into the vast glacier gorges, and over piles of moraines and flutedrocks, and the frozen lakes of the eastern slope. When we reached the southwest front of the mountain we found that its general form was that of an immense horseshoe, the great eastern ridge forming one side, and the spur which descended to our camp the other, we having climbed up the outer part of the toe. Within the curve of the horseshoe was a gorge, cut almost perpendicularly down two thousand feet, its side rough-hewn walls of rocks and snow, its narrow bottom almost a continuous chain of deep blue lakes with loads of ice anddébrispiles. The stream which flowed through them joined the waters from our home grove, a couple of miles below the camp. If we could reach the level of the lakes, I believed we might easily climb round them and out of the upper end of the horseshoe, and walk upon the Kern plateau round to our bivouac.
It required a couple of hours of very painstaking, deliberate climbing to get down the first descent, which we did, however, without hurting our barometer, and fortunately without the fatiguing use of the lasso; reaching finally the uppermost lake, a granite bowlful of cobalt-blue water, transparent and unrippled. So high and enclosing were the tall walls about us, so narrow and shut in the cañon, so flattened seemed the cover of sky, we felt oppressed after the expanse and freedom of our hours on the summit.
The snow-field we followed, descending farther, was irregularly honeycombed in deep pits, circular or irregular in form, and melted to a greater or lessdepth, holding each a large stone embedded in the bottom. It seems they must have fallen from the overhanging heights with sufficient force to plunge into the snow.
Brilliant light and strong color met our eyes at every glance—the rocks of a deep purple-red tint, the pure alpine lakes of a cheerful sapphire blue, the snow glitteringly white. The walls on either side for half their height were planed and polished by glaciers, and from the smoothly glazed sides the sun was reflected as from a mirror.
Mile after mile we walked cautiously over the snow and climbed round the margins of lakes, and over piles ofdébriswhich marked the ancient terminal moraines. At length we reached the end of the horseshoe, where the walls contracted to a gateway, rising on either side in immense, vertical pillars a thousand feet high. Through this gateway we could look down the valley of the Kern, and beyond to the gentler ridges where a smooth growth of forest darkened the rolling plateau. Passing the last snow, we walked through this gateway and turned westward round the spur toward our camp. The three miles which closed our walk were alternately through groves ofPinus flexilisand upon plains of granite.
The glacier sculpture and planing are here very beautiful, the large crystals of orthoclase with which the granite is studded being cut down to the common level, their rosy tint making with the white base a beautiful, burnished porphyry.
The sun was still an hour high when we reached camp, and with a feeling of relaxation and repose we threw ourselves down to rest by the log, which still continued blazing. We had accomplished our purpose.
During the last hour or two of our tramp Cotter had complained of his shoes, which were rapidly going to pieces. Upon examination we found to our dismay that there was not over half a day’s wear left in them, a calamity which gave to our difficult homeward climb a new element of danger. The last nail had been worn from my own shoes, and the soles were scratched to the quick, but I believed them stout enough to hold together till we should reach the main camp.
We planned a pair of moccasins for Cotter, and then spent a pleasant evening by the camp-fire, rehearsing our climb to the detail, sleep finally overtaking us and holding us fast bound until broad daylight next morning, when we woke with a sense of having slept for a week, quite bright and perfectly refreshed for our homeward journey.
After a frugal breakfast, in which we limited ourselves to a few cubic inches of venison, and a couple of stingy slices of bread, with a single meagre cup of diluted tea, we shouldered our knapsacks, which now sat lightly upon toughened shoulders, and marched out upon the granite plateau.
We had concluded that it was impossible to retrace our former way, knowing well that the precipitousdivide could not be climbed from this side; then, too, we had gained such confidence in our climbing powers, from constant victory, that we concluded to attempt the passage of the great King’s Cañon, mainly because this was the only mode of reaching camp, and since the geological section of the granite it exposed would afford us an exceedingly instructive study.
The broad granite plateau which forms the upper region of the Kern Valley slopes in general inclination up to the great divide. This remarkably pinnacled ridge, where it approaches the Mount Tyndall wall, breaks down into a broad depression where the Kern Valley sweeps northward, until it suddenly breaks off in precipices three thousand feet down into the King’s Cañon.
The morning was wholly consumed in walking up this gently inclined plane of granite, our way leading over the glacier-polished foldings and along graded undulations among labyrinths of alpine garden and wildernesses of erratic bowlders, little lake-basins, and scattered clusters of dwarfed and sombre pine.
About noon we came suddenly upon the brink of a precipice which sank sharply from our feet into the gulf of the King’s Cañon. Directly opposite us rose Mount Brewer, and up out of the depths of those vast sheets of frozen snow swept spiry buttress-ridges, dividing the upper heights into those amphitheatres over which we had struggled on ouroutward journey. Straight across from our point of view was the chamber of rock and ice where we had camped on the first night. The wall at our feet fell sharp and rugged, its lower two-thirds hidden from our view by the projections of a thousand feet of crags. Here and there as we looked down, small patches of ice, held in rough hollows, rested upon the steep surface, but it was too abrupt for any great fields of snow. I dislodged a bowlder upon the edge and watched it bound down the rocky precipice, dash over eaves a thousand feet below us, and disappear, the crash of its fall coming up to us from the unseen depths fainter and fainter, until the air only trembled with confused echoes.
A long look at the pass to the south of Mount Brewer, where we had parted from our friends, animated us with courage to begin the descent, which we did with utmost care, for the rocks, becoming more and more glacier-smoothed, afforded us hardly any firm footholds. When down about eight hundred feet we again rolled rocks ahead of us, and saw them disappear over the eaves, and only heard the sound of their stroke after many seconds, which convinced us that directly below lay a great precipice.
At this juncture the soles came entirely off Cotter’s shoes, and we stopped upon a little cliff of granite to make him moccasins of our provision bags and slips of blanket, tying them on as firmly as we could with the extra straps and buckskin thongs. Climbing with these proved so insecure that I made Cottergo behind me, knowing that under ordinary circumstances I could stop him if he fell.
Here and there in the clefts of the rocks grew stunted pine bushes, their roots twisted so firmly into the crevices that we laid hold of them with the utmost confidence whenever they came within our reach. In this way we descended to within fifty feet of the brink, having as yet no knowledge of the cliffs below, except our general memory of their aspect from the Mount Brewer wall.
The rock was so steep that we descended in a sitting posture, clinging with our hands and heels. I heard Cotter say, “I think I must take off these moccasins and try it barefooted, for I don’t believe I can make it.” These words were instantly followed by a startled cry, and I looked round to see him slide quickly toward me, struggling and clutching at the smooth granite. As he slid by I made a grab for him with my right hand, catching him by the shirt, and, throwing myself as far in the other direction as I could, seized with my left hand a little pine tuft, which held us. I asked Cotter to edge along a little to the left, where he could get a brace with his feet and relieve me of his weight, which he cautiously did. I then threw a couple of turns with the lasso round the roots of the pine bush, and we were safe, though hardly more than twenty feet from the brink. The pressure of curiosity to get a look over that edge was so strong within me that I lengthened out sufficient lasso to reach the end, and slidslowly to the edge, where, leaning over, I looked down, getting a full view of the wall for miles. Directly beneath, a sheer cliff of three or four hundred feet stretched down to a pile ofdébriswhich rose to unequal heights along its face, reaching the very crest not more than a hundred feet south of us. From that point to the bottom of the cañon, broken rocks, ridges rising through vast sweeps ofdébris, tufts of pine and frozen bodies of ice covered the further slope.
I returned to Cotter, and, having loosened ourselves from the pine bush, inch by inch we crept along the granite until we supposed ourselves to be just over the top of thedébrispile, where I found a firm brace for my feet, and lowered Cotter to the edge. He sang out, “All right!” and climbed over on the uppermostdébris, his head only remaining in sight of me; when I lay down upon my back, making knapsack and body do friction duty, and, letting myself move, followed Cotter and reached his side.
From that point the descent required two hours of severe, constant labor, which was monotonous of itself, and would have proved excessively tiresome but for the constant interest of glacial geology beneath us. When at last we reached the bottom and found ourselves upon a velvety green meadow, beneath the shadow of wide-armed pines, we realized the amount of muscular force we had used up, and threw ourselves down for a rest of half an hour,when we rose, not quite renewed, but fresh enough to finish the day’s climb.
In a few minutes we stood upon the rocks just above King’s River,—a broad, white torrent fretting its way along the bottom of an impassable gorge. Looking down the stream, we saw that our right bank was a continued precipice, affording, so far as we could see, no possible descent to the river’s margin, and indeed, had we gotten down, the torrent rushed with such fury that we could not possibly have crossed it. To the south of us, a little way up stream, the river flowed out from a broad, oval lake, three quarters of a mile in length, which occupied the bottom of the granite basin. Unable to cross the torrent, we must either swim the lake or climb round its head. Upon our side the walls of the basin curved to the head of the lake in sharp, smooth precipices, or broken slopes ofdébris, while on the opposite side its margin was a beautiful shore of emerald meadow, edged with a continuous grove of coniferous trees. Once upon this other side, we should have completed the severe part of our journey, crossed the gulf, and have left all danger behind us; for the long slope of granite and ice which rose upon the west side of the cañon and the Mount Brewer wall opposed to us no trials save those of simple fatigue.
Around the head of the lake were crags and precipices in singularly forbidding arrangement. As we turned thither we saw no possible way of overcomingthem. At its head the lake lay in an angle of the vertical wall, sharp and straight like the corner of a room; about three hundred feet in height, and for two hundred and fifty feet of this a pyramidal pile of blue ice rose from the lake, rested against the corner, and reached within forty feet of the top. Looking into the deep blue water of the lake, I concluded that in our exhausted state it was madness to attempt to swim it. The only alternative was to scale that slender pyramid of ice and find some way to climb the forty feet of smooth wall above it; a plan we chose perforce, and started at once to put into execution, determined that if we were unsuccessful we would fire a dead log which lay near, warm ourselves thoroughly, and attempt the swim. At its base the ice mass overhung the lake like a roof, under which the water had melted its way for a distance of not less than a hundred feet, a thin eave overhanging the water. To the very edge of this I cautiously went, and, looking down into the lake, saw through its beryl depths the white granite blocks strewn upon the bottom at least one hundred feet below me. It was exceedingly transparent, and, under ordinary circumstances, would have been a most tempting place for a dive; but at the end of our long fatigue, and with the still unknown tasks ahead, I shrank from a swim in such a chilly temperature.
We found the ice-angle difficultly steep, but made our way successfully along its edge, clambering up the crevices melted between its body and the smoothgranite to a point not far from the top, where the ice had considerably narrowed, and rocks overhanging it encroached so closely that we were obliged to change our course and make our way with cut steps out upon its front. Streams of water, dropping from the overhanging rock-eaves at many points, had worn circular shafts into the ice, three feet in diameter and twenty feet in depth. Their edges offered us our only foothold, and we climbed from one to another, equally careful of slipping upon the slope itself, or falling into the wells. Upon the top of the ice we found a narrow, level platform, upon which we stood together, resting our backs in the granite corner, and looked down the awful pathway of King’s Cañon, until the rest nerved us up enough to turn our eyes upward at the forty feet of smooth granite which lay between us and safety. Here and there were small projections from its surface, little, protruding knobs of feldspar, and crevices riven into its face for a few inches.
As we tied ourselves together, I told Cotter to hold himself in readiness to jump down into one of these in case I fell, and started to climb up the wall, succeeding quite well for about twenty feet. About two feet above my hands was a crack, which, if my arms had been long enough to reach, would probably have led me to the very top; but I judged it beyond my powers, and, with great care, descended to the side of Cotter, who believed that his superior length of arm would enable him to make the reach.
I planted myself against the rock, and he started cautiously up the wall. Looking down the glare front of ice, it was not pleasant to consider at what velocity a slip would send me to the bottom, or at what angle, and to what probable depth, I should be projected into the ice-water. Indeed, the idea of such a sudden bath was so annoying that I lifted my eyes toward my companion. He reached my farthest point without great difficulty, and made a bold spring for the crack, reaching it without an inch to spare, and holding on wholly by his fingers. He thus worked himself slowly along the crack toward the top, at last getting his arms over the brink, and gradually drawing his body up and out of sight. It was the most splendid piece of slow gymnastics I ever witnessed. For a moment he said nothing; but when I asked if he was all right, cheerfully repeated, “All right.”
It was only a moment’s work to send up the two knapsacks and barometer, and receive again my end of the lasso. As I tied it round my breast, Cotter said to me, in an easy, confident tone, “Don’t be afraid to bear your weight.” I made up my mind, however, to make that climb without his aid, and husbanded my strength as I climbed from crack to crack. I got up without difficulty to my former point, rested there a moment, hanging solely by my hands, gathered every pound of strength and atom of will for the reach, then jerked myself upward with a swing, just getting the tips of my fingers into the crack. Inan instant I had grasped it with my right hand also. I felt the sinews of my fingers relax a little, but the picture of the slope of ice and the blue lake affected me so strongly that I redoubled my grip, and climbed slowly along the crack until I reached the angle and got one arm over the edge, as Cotter had done. As I rested my body upon the edge and looked up at Cotter, I saw that, instead of a level top, he was sitting upon a smooth, roof-like slope, where the least pull would have dragged him over the brink. He had no brace for his feet, nor hold for his hands, but had seated himself calmly, with the rope tied around his breast, knowing that my only safety lay in being able to make the climb entirely unaided; certain that the least waver in his tone would have disheartened me, and perhaps made it impossible. The shock I received on seeing this affected me for a moment, but not enough to throw me off my guard, and I climbed quickly over the edge. When we had walked back out of danger we sat down upon the granite for a rest.
In all my experience of mountaineering I have never known an act of such real, profound courage as this of Cotter’s. It is one thing, in a moment of excitement, to make a gallant leap, or hold one’s nerves in the iron grasp of will, but to coolly seat one’s self in the door of death, and silently listen for the fatal summons, and this all for a friend,—for he might easily have cast loose the lasso and saved himself,—requires as sublime a type of courage as I know.
But a few steps back we found a thicket of pine overlooking our lake, by which there flowed a clear rill of snow-water. Here, in the bottom of the great gulf, we made our bivouac; for we were already in the deep evening shadows, although the mountain-tops to the east of us still burned in the reflected light. It was the luxury of repose which kept me awake half an hour or so, in spite of my vain attempts at sleep. To listen for the pulsating sound of waterfalls and arrowy rushing of the brook by our beds was too deep a pleasure to quickly yield up.
Under the later moonlight I rose and went out upon the open rocks, allowing myself to be deeply impressed by the weird Dantesque surroundings—darkness, out of which to the sky towered stern, shaggy bodies of rock; snow, uncertainly moonlit with cold pallor; and at my feet the basin of the lake, still, black, and gemmed with reflected stars, like the void into which Dante looked through the bottomless gulf of Dis. A little way off there appeared upon the brink of a projecting granite cornice two dimly seen forms; pines I knew them to be, yet their motionless figures seemed bent forward, gazing down the cañon; and I allowed myself to name them Mantuan and Florentine, thinking at the same time how grand and spacious the scenery, how powerful their attitude, and how infinitely more profound the mystery of light and shade, than any of those hard, theatrical conceptions with which Doré has sought to shut in our imagination. That artist, as I believe,has reached a conspicuous failure from an overbalancing love of solid, impenetrable darkness. There is in all his Inferno landscape a certain sharp boundary between the real and unreal, and never the infinite suggestiveness of great regions of half-light, in which everything may be seen, nothing recognized. Without waking Cotter, I crept back to my blankets, and to sleep.
The morning of our fifth and last day’s tramp must have dawned cheerfully; at least, so I suppose from its aspect when we first came back to consciousness, surprised to find the sun risen from the eastern mountain-wall, and the whole gorge flooded with its direct light. Rising as good as new from our mattress of pine twigs, we hastened to take breakfast, and started up the long, broken slope of the Mount Brewer wall. To reach the pass where we had parted from our friends required seven hours of slow, laborious climbing, in which we took advantage of every outcropping spine of granite and every level expanse of ice to hasten at the top of our speed. Cotter’s feet were severely cut; his tracks upon the snow were marked by stains of blood, yet he kept on with undiminished spirit, never once complaining. The perfect success of our journey so inspired us with happiness that we forgot danger and fatigue, and chatted in liveliest strain.
It was about two o’clock when we reached the summit, and rested a moment to look back over our new Alps, which were hard and distinct under direct,unpoetic light; yet with all their dense gray and white reality, their long, sculptured ranks, and cold, still summits, we gave them a lingering, farewell look, which was not without its deep fulness of emotion, then turned our backs and hurried down thedébrisslope into the rocky amphitheatre at the foot of Mount Brewer, and by five o’clock had reached our old camp-ground. We found here a note pinned to a tree, informing us that the party had gone down into the lower cañon, five miles below, that they might camp in better pasturage.
The wind had scattered the ashes of our old camp-fire, and banished from it the last sentiment of home. We hurried on, climbing among the rocks which reached down to the crest of the great lateral moraine, and then on in rapid stride along its smooth crest, riveting our eyes upon the valley below, where we knew the party must be camped.
At last, faintly curling above the sea of green tree-tops, a few faint clouds of smoke wafted upward into the air. We saw them with a burst of strong emotion, and ran down the steep flank of the moraine at the top of our speed. Our shouts were instantly answered by the three voices of our friends, who welcomed us to their camp-fire with tremendous hugs.
After we had outlined for them the experience of our days, and as we lay outstretched at our ease, warm in the blaze of the glorious camp-fire, Brewer said to me: “King, you have relieved me of a dreadfultask. For the last three days I have been composing a letter to your family, but somehow I did not get beyond, ‘It becomes my painful duty to inform you.’”
Ourreturn from Mount Tyndall to such civilization as flourishes around the Kaweah outposts was signalized by us chiefly as to ourcuisine, which offered now such bounties as the potato, and once a salad, in which some middle-aged lettuce became the vehicle for a hollow mockery of dressing. Two or three days, during which we dined at brief intervals, served to completely rest us, and put in excellent trim for further campaigning all except Professor Brewer, upon whom a constant toothache wore painfully,—my bullet-mould failing even upon the third trial to extract the unruly member.
It was determined we should ride together to Visalia, seventy miles away, and the farther we went the more impatient became my friend, till we agreed to push ahead through day and night, and reached the village at about sunrise in a state of reeling sleepiness quite indescribably funny.
At evening, when it became time to start back for our mountain-camp, my friend at last yielded consent to my project of climbing the Kern Sierras to attempt Mount Whitney; so I parted from him, and,remaining at Visalia, outfitted myself with a pack-horse, two mounted men, and provisions enough for a two weeks’ trip.
I purposely avoid telling by what route I entered the Sierras, because there lingers in my breast a desire to see once more that lovely region, and failing, as I do, to confide in the people, I fear lest, if the camp I am going to describe should be recognized, I might, upon revisiting the scene, suffer harm, or even come to an untimely end. I refrain, then, from telling by what road I found myself entering the region of the pines one lovely twilight evening, two days after leaving Visalia. Pines, growing closer and closer, from sentinels gathered to groups, then stately groves, and at last, as the evening wore on, assembled in regular forest, through whose open tops the stars shone cheerfully.
I came upon an open meadow, hearing in front the rush of a large brook, and directly reached two camp-fires, where were a number of persons. My two hirelings caught and unloaded the pack-horse, and set about their duties, looking to supper and the animals, while I prospected the two camps. That just below me, on the same side of the brook, I found to be the bivouac of a company of hunters, who, in the ten minutes of my call, made free with me, hospitably offering a jug of whiskey, and then went on in their old, eternal way of making bear-stories out of whole cloth.
I left them with a belief that my protoplasm andtheirs must be different, in spite of Mr. Huxley, and passed across the brook to the other camp. Under noble groups of pines smouldered a generous heap of coals, the ruins of a mighty log. A little way from this lay a confused pile of bedclothes, partly old and half-bald buffalo-robes, but in the main, thick strata of what is known to irony as comforters, upon which, outstretched in wretched awkwardness of position, was a family, all with their feet to the fire, looking as if they had been blown over in one direction, or knocked down by a single bombshell. On the extremities of this common bed, with the air of having gotten as far from each other as possible, the mother and father of the Pike family reclined; between them were two small children—a girl and a boy—and a huge girl, who, next the old man, lay flat upon her back, her mind absorbed in the simple amusement of waving one foot (a cow-hide eleven) slowly across the fire, squinting, with half-shut eye, first at the vast shoe and thence at the fire, alternately hiding bright places and darting the foot quickly in the direction of any new display of heightening flame. The mother was a bony sister, in the yellow, shrunken, of sharp visage, in which were prominent two cold eyes and a positively poisonous mouth; her hair, the color of faded hay, tangled in a jungle around her head. She rocked jerkily to and fro, removing at intervals a clay pipe from her mouth in order to pucker her thin lips up to one side, and spit with precision upon a certain spot in the fire,which she seemed resolved to prevent from attaining beyond a certain faint glow.
I have rarely felt more in difficulty for an overture to conversation, and was long before venturing to propose, “You seem to have a pleasant camp-spot here.”
The old woman sharply, and in almost a tone of affront, answered, “They’s wus, and then again they’s better.”
“Doos well for our hogs,” inserted the old man. “We’ve a band of pork that make out to find feed.”
“Oh! how many have you?” I asked.
“Nigh three thousand.”
“Won’t you set?” asked Madame; then, turning, “You, Susan, can’t you try for to set up, and not spread so? Hain’t you no manners, say?”
At this the massive girl got herself somewhat together, and made room for me, which I declined, however.
“Prospectin’?” inquired Madame.
“I say huntin’,” suggested the man.
“Maybe he’s a cattle-feller,” interrupted the little girl.
“Goin’ somewhere, ain’t yer?” was Susan’s guess.
I gave a brief account of myself, evidently satisfying the social requirements of all but the old woman, who at once classified me as not up to her standard. Susan saw this, so did her father, and it became evident to me in ten minutes’ conversation that they two were always at one, and made it their businessto be in antagonism to the mother. They were then allies of mine from nature, and I felt at once at home. I saw, too, that Susan, having slid back to her horizontal position when I declined to share her rightful ground, was watching with subtle solicitude that fated spot in the fire, opposing sympathy and squints accurately aligned by her shoe to the dull spot in the embers, which slowly went out into blackness before the well-directed fire of her mother’s saliva.
The shouts which I heard proceeding from the direction of my camp were easily translatable into summons for supper. Mr. Newty invited me to return later and be sociable, which I promised to do, and, going to my camp, supped quickly and left the men with orders about picketing the animals for the night, then, strolling slowly down to the camp of my friends, seated myself upon a log by the side of the old gentleman. Feeling that this somewhat formal attitude unfitted me for partaking to the fullest degree of the social ease around me, and knowing that my buckskin trousers were impervious to dirt, I slid down in a reclined posture with my feet to the fire, in absolute parallelism with the family.
The old woman was in the excitingdénouementof a coon-story, directed to her little boy, who sat clinging to her skirt and looking in her face with absorbed curiosity. “And when Johnnie fired,” she said, “the coon fell and busted open.” The little boy had misplaced his sympathies with the raccoon, and having inquired plaintively, “Did it hurt him?”was promptly snubbed with the reply, “Of course it hurt him. What do you suppose coons is made for?” Then turning to me she put what was plainly enough with her a test-question, “I allow you have killed your coon in your day?” I saw at once that I must forever sink beneath the horizon of her standards, but, failing in real experience or accurate knowledge concerning the coon, knew no subterfuges would work with her. Instinct had taught her that I had never killed a coon, and she had asked me thus ostentatiously to place me at once and forever before the family in my true light. “No, ma’am,” I said; “now you speak of it, I realize that I never have killed a coon.” This was something of a staggerer to Susan and her father, yet as the mother’s pleasurable dissatisfaction with me displayed itself by more and more accurate salivary shots at the fire, they rose to the occasion, and began to palliate my past. “Maybe,” ventured Mr. Newty, “that they don’t have coon round the city of York;” and I felt that I needed no self-defence when Susan firmly and defiantly suggested to her mother that perhaps I was in better business.
Driven in upon herself for some time, the old woman smoked in silence, until Susan, seeing that her mother gradually quenched a larger and larger circle upon the fire, got up and stretched herself, and, giving the coals a vigorous poke, swept out of sight the quenched spot, thus readily obliterating the result of her mother’s precise and prolonged expectoration;then, flinging a few dry boughs upon the fire, illumined the family with the ruddy blaze, and sat down again, leaning upon her father’s knee with a faint light of triumph in her eye.
I ventured a few platitudes concerning pigs, not penetrating the depths of that branch of rural science enough to betray my ignorance. Such sentiments as “A little piece of bacon well broiled for breakfast is very good,” and “Nothing better than cold ham for lunch,” were received by Susan and her father in the spirit I meant,—of entire good-will toward pork generically. I now look back in amusement at having fallen into this weakness, for the Mosaic view of pork has been mine from infancy, and campaigning upon government rations has, in truth, no tendency to dim this ancient faith.
By half-past nine the gates of conversation were fairly open, and our part of the circle enjoyed itself socially,—taciturnity and clouds of Virginia plug reigning supreme upon the other. The two little children crept under comforters somewhere near the middle of the bed, and subsided pleasantly to sleep. The old man at last stretched sleepily, finally yawning out, “Susan, I do believe I am too tired out to go and see if them corral bars are down. I guess you’ll have to go. I reckon there ain’t no bears round to-night.”
Susan rose to her feet, stretched herself with her back to the fire, and I realized for the first time her amusing proportions. In the region of six feet, tall,square-shouldered, of firm, iron back and heavy mould of limb, she yet possessed that suppleness which enabled her as she rose to throw herself into nearly all the attitudes of the Niobe children. As her yawn deepened, she waved nearly down to the ground, and then, rising upon tiptoe, stretched up her clinched fists to heaven with a groan of pleasure. Turning to me, she asked, “How would you like to see the hogs?” The old man added, as an extra encouragement, “Pootiest band of hogs in Tulare County! There’s littler of the real scissor-bill nor Mexican racer stock than any band I have ever seen in the State. I driv the original outfit from Pike County to Oregon in ’51 and ’52.” By this time I was actually interested in them, and joining Susan we passed out into the forest.
The full moon, now high in the heavens, looked down over the whole landscape of clustered forest and open meadow with tranquil, silvery light. It whitened measurably the fine, spiry tips of the trees, fell luminous upon broad bosses of granite which here and there rose through the soil, and glanced in trembling reflections from the rushing surface of the brook. Far in the distance moonlit peaks towered in solemn rank against the sky.
We walked silently on four or five minutes through the woods, coming at last upon a fence which margined a wide, circular opening in the wood. The bars, as her father had feared, were down. We stepped over them, quietly entered the enclosure, putthem up behind us, and proceeded to the middle, threading our way among sleeping swine to where a lonely tree rose to the height of about two hundred feet. Against this we placed our backs, and Susan waved her hand in pride over the two acres of tranquil pork. The eye, after accustoming itself to the darkness, took cognizance of a certain ridgyness of surface which came to be recognized as the objects of Susan’s pride.
Quite a pretty effect was caused by the shadow of the forest, which, cast obliquely downward by the moon, divided the corral into halves of light and shade.
The air was filled with heavy breathing, interrupted by here and there a snore, and at times by crescendos of tumult, caused by forty or fifty pigs doing battle for some favorite bed-place.
I was informed that Susan did not wish me to judge of them by dark, but to see them again in the full light of day. She knew each individual pig by its physiognomy, having, as she said, “growed with ’em.”
As we strolled back toward the bars a dusky form disputed our way,—two small, sharp eyes and a wild crest of bristles were visible in the obscure light. “That’s Old Arkansas,” said Susan; “he’s eight year old come next June, and I never could get him to like me.” I felt for my pistol, but Susan struck a vigorous attitude, ejaculating, “S-S-oway, Arkansas!” She made a dash in his direction; a wildscuffle ensued, in which I heard the dull thud of Susan’s shoe, accompanied by, “Take that, dog-on-you!”, a cloud of dust, one shrill squeal, and Arkansas retreated into the darkness at a business-like trot.
When quite near the bars the mighty girl launched herself into the air, alighting with her stomach across the topmost rail, where she hung a brief moment, made a violent muscular contraction, and alighted upon the ground outside, communicating to it a tremor quite perceptible from where I stood. I climbed over after her, and we sauntered under the trees back to camp.
The family had disappeared. A few dry boughs, however, thrown upon the coals, blazed up, and revealed their forms in the corrugated topography of the bed.
I bade Susan good-night, and before I could turn my back she kicked her number eleven shoes into the air, and with masterly rapidity turned in, as Minerva is said to have done, in full panoply.
I fled precipitately to my camp, and sought my blankets, lying awake in a kind of half-reverie, in which Susan and Arkansas, the old woman and her coons, were the prominent figures. Later I fell asleep, and lay motionless until the distant roar of swine awoke me before sunrise next morning.
Seated upon my blankets, I beheld Susan’s mother drag forth the two children, one after another, by the napes of their necks, and, shaking the sleep out of them, propel them spitefully toward the brook;then taking her pipe from her mouth she bent low over the sleeping form of her huge daughter, and in a high, shrill, nasal key, screeched in her ear, “Yew Suse!”
No sign of life on the part of the daughter.
“Susan,areyou a-going to get up?”
Slight muscular contraction of the lower limbs.
“Will you hear me,Susan?”
“Marm,” whispered the girl, in low, sleepy tones.
“Get up and let thehogsout!”
The idea had at length thrilled into Susan’s brain, and with a violent suddenness she sat bolt upright, brushing her green-colored hair out of her eyes, and rubbing those valuable but bleared organs with the ponderous knuckles of her forefingers.
By this time I started for the brook for my morning toilet, and the girl and I met upon opposite banks, stooping to wash our faces in the same pool. As I opened my dressing-case her lower jaw fell, revealing a row of ivory teeth rounded out by two well-developed “wisdoms,” which had all that dazzling grin one sees in the show-windows of certain dental practitioners. It required but a moment to gather up a quart or so of water in her broad palms, and rub it vigorously into a small circle upon the middle of her face, the moisture working outward to a certain high-water mark, which, along her chin and cheeks, defined the limits of former ablution; then, baring her large, red arms to the elbow, she washed her hands, and stood resting them upon her hips,dripping freely, and watching me with intense curiosity.
When I reached the towel process, she herself twisted her body after the manner of the Belvidere torso, bent low her head, gathered up the back breadths of her petticoat, and wiped her face vigorously upon it, which had the effect of tracing concentric streaks irregularly over her countenance.
I parted my hair by the aid of a small dressing-glass, which so fired Susan that she crossed the stream with a mighty jump, and stood in ecstasy by my side. She borrowed the glass, and then my comb, rewashed her face, and fell to work diligently upon her hair.
All this did not so limit my perception as to prevent my watching the general demeanor of the family. The old man lay back at his ease, puffing a cloud of smoke; his wife, also emitting volumes of the vapor of “navy plug,” squatted by the camp-fire, frying certain lumps of pork, and communicating an occasional spiral jerk to the coffee-pot, with the purpose, apparently, of stirring the grounds. The two children had gotten upon the back of a contemplative ass, who stood by the upper side of the bed quietly munching the corner of a comforter.
My friend was in no haste. She squandered much time upon the arrangement of her towy hair, and there was something like a blush of conscious satisfaction when she handed me back my looking-glassand remarked ironically, “Oh, no, I guess not,—no, sir.”
I begged her to accept the comb and glass, which she did with maidenly joy.
This unusual toilet had stimulated with self-respect Susan’s every fibre, and as she sprang back across the brook and approached her mother’s camp-fire I could not fail to admire the magnificent turn of her shoulders and the powerful, queenly poise of her head. Her full, grand form and heavy strength reminded me of the statues of Ceres, yet there was withal a very unpleasant suggestion of fighting trim, a sort of prize-ring manner of swinging the arms, and hitching the shoulders. She suddenly spied the children upon the jackass, and with one wide sweep of her right arm projected them over the creature’s head, and planted her left eleven firmly in the ribs of the donkey, who beat a precipitate retreat in the direction of the hog-pens, leaving her executing a pas seul,—a kind of slow, stately jig, something between the minuet and thejuba, accompanying herself by a low-hummed air and a vigorous beating of time upon her slightly lifted knee.
It required my Pike County friends but ten minutes to swallow their pork and begin the labors of the day.
The mountaineers’ camp was not yet astir. These children of the forest were well chained in slumber; for, unless there is some special programme for the day, it requires the leverage of a high sun to arousetheir faculties, dormant enough by nature, and soothed into deepest quiet by whiskey. About eight o’clock they breakfasted, and by nine had engaged my innocent camp-men in a game of social poker.
I visited my horses, and had them picketed in the best possible feed, and congratulated myself that they were recruiting finely for the difficult ride before me.
Susan, after a second appeal from her mother, ran over to the corral and let out the family capital, which streamed with exultant grunt through the forest, darkening the fair green meadow gardens, and happily passing out of sight.
When I had breakfasted I joined Mr. Newty in his trip to the corral, where we stood together for hours, during which I had mastered the story of his years since, in 1850, he left his old home in Pike of Missouri. It was one of those histories common enough through this wide West, yet never failing to startle me with its horrible lesson of social disintegration, of human retrograde.
That brave spirit of Westward Ho! which has been the pillar of fire and cloud leading on the weary march of progress over stretches of desert, lining the way with graves of strong men; of new-born lives; of sad, patient mothers, whose pathetic longing for the new home died with them; of the thousand old and young whose last agony came to them as they marched with eyes strained on after the sunken sun, and whose shallow barrows scarcely lift over thedrifting dust of the desert; that restless spirit which has dared to uproot the old and plant the new, kindling the grand energy of California, laying foundations for a State to be, that is admirable, is poetic, is to fill an immortal page in the story of America; but when, instead of urging on to wresting from new lands something better than old can give, it degenerates into mere weak-minded restlessness, killing the power of growth, the ideal of home, the faculty of repose, it results in that race of perpetual emigrants who roam as dreary waifs over the West, losing possessions, love of life, love of God, slowly dragging from valley to valley, till they fall by the wayside, happy if some chance stranger performs for them the last rites,—often less fortunate, as blanched bones and fluttering rags upon too many hillsides plainly tell.
The Newtys were of this dreary brotherhood. In 1850, with a small family of that authentic strain of high-bred swine for which Pike County is widely known, as Mr. Newty avers, they bade Missouri and their snug farm good-by, and, having packed their household goods into a wagon, drawn by two spotted oxen, set out with the baby Susan for Oregon, where they came after a year’s march, tired, and cursed with a permanent discontent. There they had taken up a rancho, a quarter-section of public domain, which at the end of two years was “improved” to the extent of the “neatest little worm fence this side of Pike,” a barn, and a smoke-house. “In anotheryear,” said my friend, “I’d have dug for a house, but we tuck ager, and the second baby died.” One day there came a man who “let on that he knowed” land in California much fairer and more worthy tillage than Oregon’s best, so the poor Newtys harnessed up the wagon and turned their backs upon a home nearly ready for comfortable life, and swept south with pigs and plunder. Through all the years this story had repeated itself, new homes gotten to the edge of completion, more babies born, more graves made, more pigs, who replenished as only the Pike County variety may, till it seemed to me the mere multiplication of them must reach a sufficient dead weight to anchor the family; but this was dispelled when Newty remarked, “These yer hogs is awkward about moving, and I’ve pretty much made up my mind to put ’em all into bacon this fall, and sell out and start for Montana.”
Poor fellow! at Montana he will probably find a man from Texas who in half an hour will persuade him that happiness lies there.
As we walked back to their camp, and when Dame Newty hove in sight, my friend ventured to say, “Don’t you mind the old woman and her coons. She’s from Arkansas. She used to say no man could have Susan who couldn’t show coonskins enough of his own killing to make a bed-quilt, but she’s over that mostly.” In spite of this assurance my heart fell a trifle when, the first moment of our return, she turned to her husband and asked, “Doyou mind what a dead-open-and-shut on coons our little Johnnie was when he was ten years old?” I secretly wondered if the dead-open-and-shut had anything to do with his untimely demise at eleven, but kept silence.
Regarding her as a sad product of the disease of chronic emigration, her hard, thin nature, all angles and stings, became to me one of the most depressing and pathetic spectacles, and the more when her fever-and-ague boy, a mass of bilious lymph, came and sat by her, looking up with great, haggard eyes, as if pleading for something, he knew not what, but which I plainly saw only death could bestow.
Noon brought the hour of my departure. Susan and her father talked apart a moment, then the old man said the two would ride along with me for a few miles, as he had to go in that direction to look for new hog-feed.
I despatched my two men with the pack-horse, directing them to follow the trail, then saddled my Kaweah and waited for the Newtys. The old man saddled a shaggy little mountain pony for himself, and for Susan strapped a sheepskin upon the back of a young and fiery mustang colt.
While they were getting ready, I made my horse fast to a stake and stepped over to bid good-by to Mrs. Newty. I said to her, in tones of deference, “I have come to bid you good-by, madam, and when I get back this way I hope you will be kind enough to tell me one or two really first-rate coon-stories. Iam quite ignorant of that animal, having been raised in countries where they are extremely rare, and I would like to know more of what seems to be to you a creature of such interest.” The wet, gray eyes relaxed, as I fancied, a trifle of their asperity; a faint kindle seemed to light them for an instant as she asked, “You never see coons catch frogs in a spring branch?”
“No, madam,” I answered.
“Well, I wonder! Well, take care of yourself, and when you come back this way stop along with us, and we’ll kill a yearlin’, and I’ll tell you about a coon that used to live under grandfather’s barn.” She actually offered me her hand, which I grasped and shook in a friendly manner, chilled to the very bone with its damp coldness.
Mr. Newty mounted, and asked me if I was ready. Susan stood holding her prancing mustang. To put that girl on her horse after the ordinary plan would have required the strength of Samson or the use of a step-ladder, neither of which I possessed; so I waited for events to develop themselves. The girl stepped to the left side of her horse, twisted one hand in the mane, laying the other upon his haunches, and, crouching for a jump, sailed through the air, alighting upon the sheepskin. The horse reared, and Susan, twisting herself round, came right side up with her knee upon the sheepskin, shouting, as she did so, “I guess you don’t get me off, sir!” I jumped upon Kaweah, and our two horses sprangforward together, Susan waving her hand to her father, and crying, “Come along after, old man!” and to her mother, “Take care of yourself!” which is the Pike County forau revoir!Her mustang tugged at the bit, and bounded wildly into the air. We reached a stream-bank at full gallop, the horses clearing it at a bound, sweeping on over the green floor and under the magnificent shadow of the forest. Newty, following us at an humble trot, slopped through the creek, and when I last looked he had nearly reached the edge of the wood.
I could but admire the unconscious excellence of Susan’s riding, her firm, immovable seat, and the perfect coolness with which she held the fiery horse. This quite absorbed me for five minutes, when she at last broke the silence by the laconic inquiry, “Does yourn buck?” To which I added the reply that he had only occasionally been guilty of that indiscretion. She then informed me that the first time she had mounted the colt he had “nearly bucked her to pieces; he had jumped and jounced till she was plum tuckered out” before he had given up.
Gradually reining the horses down and inducing them to walk, we rode side by side through the most magnificent forest of the Sierras, and I determined to probe Susan to see whether there were not, even in the most latent condition, some germs of the appreciation of nature. I looked from base to summit of the magnificent shafts, at the green plumes which traced themselves against the sky, the exquisite fallof purple shadows and golden light upon trunks, at the labyrinth of glowing flowers, at the sparkling whiteness of the mountain brook, and up to the clear, matchless blue that vaulted over us, then turned to Susan’s plain, honest face, and gradually introduced the subject of trees. Ideas of lumber and utilitarian notions of fence-rails were uppermost in her mind; but I briefly penetrated what proved to be only a superficial stratum of the materialistic, and asked her point blank if she did not admire their stately symmetry. A strange, new light gleamed in her eye as I described to her the growth and distribution of forests, and the marvellous change in their character and aspects as they approached the tropics. The palm and the pine, as I worked them up to her, really filled her with delight, and prompted numerous interested and intelligent queries, showing that she thoroughly comprehended my drift. In the pleasant hour of our chat I learned a new lesson of the presence of undeveloped seed in the human mind.
Mr. Newty at last came alongside, and remarked that he must stop about here; “but,” he added, “Susan will go on with you about half a mile, and come back and join me here after I have taken a look at the feed.”
As he rode out into the forest a little way, he called me to him, and I was a little puzzled at what seemed to be the first traces of embarrassment I had seen in his manner.
“You’ll take care of yourself, now, won’t you?” he asked. I tried to convince him that I would.
A slight pause.
“You’ll take care of yourself, won’t you?”
He might rely on it, I was going to say.
He added, “Thet—thet—thet man what gits Susanhas half the hogs!”
Then turning promptly away, he spurred the pony, and his words as he rode into the forest were, “Take good care of yourself!”
Susan and I rode on for half a mile, until we reached the brow of a long descent, which she gave me to understand was her limit.
We shook hands and I bade her good-by, and as I trotted off these words fell sweetly upon my ear, “Say, you’ll take good care of yourself, won’t you, say?”
I took pains not to overtake my camp-men, wishing to be alone; and as I rode for hour after hour the picture of this family stood before me in all its deformity of outline, all its poverty of detail, all its darkness of future, and I believe I thought of it too gravely to enjoy as I might the subtle light of comedy which plays about these hard, repulsive figures.
In conversation I had caught the clew of a better past. Newty’s father was a New-Englander, and he spoke of him as a man of intelligence and, as I should judge, of some education. Mrs. Newty’s father had been an Arkansas judge, not perhapsthe most enlightened of men, but still very far in advance of herself. The conspicuous retrograde seemed to me an example of the most hopeless phase of human life. If, as I suppose, we may all sooner or later give in our adhesion to the Darwinian view of development, does not the same law which permits such splendid scope for the better open up to us also possible gulfs of degradation, and are not these chronic emigrants whose broken-down wagons and weary faces greet you along the dusty highways of the far West melancholy examples of beings who have forever lost the conservatism of home and the power of improvement?