and happiness are none the less real, none the less eternal By day and by night, waking or sleeping, gorgeous pictures toward the west were spread out before these pilgrims-by day, phantasmagoria, aërial plays of fancy as manifested in these terraqueous metamorphoses due to variations from ordinary refractions of luminous rays in their passage through atinospheric strata of different densities, thus pluralizing reflections, bringing objects nearer, transporting them to a distance, lifting them up from below the horizon, investing and deforming them-by night, pictures of the past and the future, the unwelcome present for the moment wrapped in oblivion; pictures of home, of opulence, of merry-makings, and heart-gladdenings.

Here, high above the ocean, between the two great uplifted ranges, where hills and desert flats rise well nigh into the clouds, is the native land of the mirage, distinct in its unreality, magnificent, though built of air and sand. Now it is a lonely valley, bearing in its bosom a glassy lake, girdled with waving groves and parted by rushing streams; and now the gilded spires of a mighty city pierce the dull, desiccated heavens, massive masonry pillars the firmament, while long drawn shadows cross and re-cross the marble domes and crenelled turrets of a thousand palaces embalmed in pleasant gardens like a Babylon, or gleaming from settings of silver as where the lion of Saint Mark keeps guard over the bride of the Adriatic; at times, again, their own images would loom out distorted in figure or position, like the ghost of Brocken, through the gloomy sultry air palpable with sand. As when, blear-eyed from long contentions with the sand and sun, exhausted by toilsome travel and fainting with thirst, Fancy strips the earth of its pallid covering and fills the rent with the vaulted firmament, sets up images motionless in the air and sends aërial animals of divers sorts in hot chase one after another, inundates sandy plains by the beating of the upshooting sun upon the surface, and places before them

transparent pools and isle-dotted lakes, reflecting cool groves and grassy resting places, only to be borne off by the wind, and cruelly snatched from their grasp on nearer approach; so to the ardent longings of their inflamed brains, fickle fortune, incarnated, becomes a true prophetess, and beckons them on with pleasing illusions to their destruction. Alas! that it should be so; that fortune, fame, and happiness, and life itself, should be so like the mirage to which these foot-sore desert-walkers so often anchored their hopes!

At the beginning of the journey, with fresh cattle, a plentiful store of food, and a road that lay through grassy prairies and well-watered valleys, with bright, cheerful warmth by day and restoring sleep at night, each dropping into place, and all attending to their several duties, driving their teams, seeking water, preparing resting-places for the night, unyoking oxen, picketing horses, unpacking the wagons, pitching tents, gathering wood and cooking the supper, mending broken wagons, telling stories by the camp-fires, watching their grazing cattle, or scouring the adjacent plain for the strayed or such as had been stolen, chasing buffalo, shooting antelope, parleying with the natives in the first flush of sanguine hope, with expectation bright before them, this sort of life was not so bad. When a caravan camped at night, the men made a circle of their wagons, at once a bulwark and a corral for their cattle. About this they pitched their tents, and surrounded all with a guard of blazing camp-fires, which threw their glare far into the surrounding darkness, and illuminated the groups that cooked or smoked or slept beside them. Goldenwinged Eros sometimes dropped in among them, fluttered about the wagons, and a clergyman or squire must be hunted up among the trains to terminate his sad doings by a marriage. Once in a while they killed a buffalo, and then they munched and munched, till marrow, and fat, and fullness made their worn, wan faces to shine in the red fire-light like the satyrs.

The scenery at times is fascinating in its very wildness and sterility, and in the strange and fantastic shapes it often assumes. There are the weird buttes, and a Chimney rock, at once the monument and remnant of an ancient bluff, beaten upon and worn away by the winds and waters of ages, yet lifting still into the face of heaven its long, fixed finger of hope or warning, as you choose to regard it. Scott bluffs spread for miles their sandstone towers and sand-cliffs, grand as the hills of Bashan and the giant cities; but one by one, through the long ages, their wandering, terrible foe, heralded by cloudy column and pillar of fire, girdles their ramparts, and the crash of a Jericho is heard again through the horn-blasts of the tempest, and the roar of the beleaguering elements. Then the grass becomes scarce as the emigrant passes on, and in many places is all consumed, and new and untrodden routes must be sought, and cattle begin to faint for food, and women and children to sicken and die, and men, ill-fed and poorly clad, keeping the saddle from daylight till dark, and exposed to alternate blasts of heat and cold, begin to fail. Wagons must be lightened of their load or emptied. Meanwhile the poor dumb brutes thus slowly dying, sacrificed to their owners' greed, gasping, and insensible to the goad, open-mouthed, with lolling tongue and slobbering jaws and dull sunken eyes, drag along their two or twenty miles a day, or with limbs swollen and trembling fall dead from thirst and hunger.

Better their masters, brutes scarcely more reasonable, should thus have died; and so they did, poor fellows, many of them, and mingled their bodies with the carcasses of their beasts. All the way from the valley of the Mississippi westward, long, tortuous tracks were marked by the broken wagons, demolished tents, cast-off clothing, stale provisions, and household effects that lined the roadside; all along the several routes by which these pilgrims marched were scattered bones, and the rotting carcasses of cattle intermingled

with the ill covered graves of men and women, ghastly skeletons of golden hopes. Some were overtaken by the snow, and losing their way, perished; some were shot by savages; some fell by disease. In the words of a pilgrim, "the last part of the emigration resembled the rout of an army, with its distressed multitudes of helpless sufferers, rather than the voluntary movement of a free people." On reaching the Truckee, their weary spirits grew buoyant again; for now the trail was good, water and grass abundant, and the first tall trees which they had seen for eight hundred miles, appear. So on the survivors come, sometimes worn out by famine and fatigue, over sterile hills and scorching Saharas, through the valleys of death and from the plains of desolation, heedless if not heartless, up by the pathway through the cloven granite, through the mountain pass, then zig-zag down the steep slopes, and beneath the shadowy pines of the Sierra, emptying all that is left of them and their belongings into the valley of the Sacramento, or into the garden of Los Angeles, ready after their toilsome march to reap and riot with the best of them.

Fortunate indeed are they if their last flour be not cooked, and the last morsel of rancid bacon be not devoured, before reaching their journey's end. Once among the settlers, however, and they are sure of the means of appeasing their hunger; for there yet remains something of that substantial hospitality which the poorest western emigrant would think it shame to refuse another.

Now they may revel in the realms of golden dreams. Here, indeed, is the promised land; and these dirtcolored, skin-cracked, blinded, and footsore travellers, whose stomach linings are worn and wasted from carrying foul food and fetid water-let them enjoy it. Stripping off their ragged and gritty clothes, the newly-arrived may bathe in the inviting streams, drinking in the cool, refreshing water at every pore; they may put on fresh apparel, and fill themselves

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with good bread and beef; then mounting their horses, they may wade them through tracts of wild oats that top both horse and rider, and they may tread down the yellow bloom of countless autumnal flowers. They may see herds of antelopes passing along the plain like wind-waves over the grass, and droves of wild horses tossing their heads in the air as their broad nostrils catch the taint of the intruders, and great, antlered elk, some as big as Mexican mules, grazing about the groves and under the scattered trees. Now they may rest, and now the more fortunate may hope to enjoy the luxury of house, and bed with clean sheets and soft pillows. Yet at first, to him who has long slept in the open air, these are no luxuries. Often those accustomed to every comfort at home, neat and fastidious in all their tastes, on resuming their former mode of living after sleeping a few months in the open air, have been obliged to leave a comfortable bed and spread their blankets under the trees if they would have sleep. The house and its trappings stifle them. So hates the savage civilization.

The relative dangers of the overland and ocean journeys have sometimes been discussed. I should say that in danger, and in the romance which danger brings, the journey across the plains eclipsed the steamer voyage, in which there was more vexation of spirit than actual peril. Even the long and stormy passage of Cape Horn had fewer terrors than the belated passage of the snowy Sierra. The traveller who takes ship for a far-off land incurs risk, it is true; but if he reaches his destination at all, it is without effort on his part. He throws himself upon the mercy of the elements, and once having done this he can do no more. But there is much that is strengthening, ennobling, in the battlings and uncertainties of overland travel. I have, indeed, often thought that man is never more ingloriously placed, that his pettiness and feebleness are never more ignobly patent,