that we noticed our pasture; the entrance was
beside us. Shall we go in? was always the question before an inclosure.
We looked over the wall. It was plainly the abode of horses, meek
work-a-day beings, who certainly would not resent our intrusion.
Oak-brush was there in plenty, and that is the chosen home of the
magpie. We hesitated; we started for the gate. It was held in place by a
rope elaborately and securely tied in many knots; but we had learned
something about the gates of this "promised land,"--that between the
posts and the stone wall may usually be found space enough to slip
through without disturbing the fastenings.

In that country no one goes through a gate who can possibly go around
it, and well is it indeed for the stranger and the wayfarer in "Zion"
that such is the custom, for the idiosyncrasies of gates were endless;
they agreed only in never fitting their place and never opening
properly. If the gate was in one piece, it sagged so that it must be
lifted; or it had lost one hinge, and fell over on the rash individual
who loosened the fastenings; or it was about falling to pieces, and must
be handled like a piece of choice bric-a-brac. If it had a latch, it
was rusty or did not fit; and if it had not, it was fastened, either by
a board slipped in to act as a bar and never known to be of proper size,
or in some occult way which would require the skill of "the lady from
Philadelphia" to undo. If it was of the fashion that opens in the
middle, each individual gate had its particular "kink," which must be
learned by the uninitiated before he--or, what is worse, she--could
pass. Many were held together by a hoop or link of iron, dropped over
the two end posts; but whether the gate must be pulled out or pushed in,
and at exactly what angle it would consent to receive the link, was to
be found out only by experience.

But not all gates were so simple even as this: the ingenuity with which
a variety of fastenings,--all to avoid the natural and obvious one of a
hook and staple,--had been evolved in the rural mind was fairly
startling. The energy and thought that had been bestowed upon this
little matter of avoiding a gate-hook would have built a bridge across
Salt Lake, or tunneled the Uintas for an irrigating ditch.

Happily, we too had learned to "slip through," and we passed the gate
with its rope puzzle, and the six or eight horses who pointed inquiring
ears toward their unwonted visitors, and hastened t