at night we reached a ranch called the "American,"--and certainly its
title was none too ambitious, for it had the whole horizon to itself,
and to all appearance might have been the only house on the continent.
It was a place unvisited of fresh meat and ignorant of gridirons; but we
were tired enough, after the first day of our return to the saddle, to
sleep soundly in a bed of tea-tray dimensions, and under what appeared
to be a casual selection from a hamper of soiled pocket-handkerchiefs,
when we had despatched the first of that long series of suppers on fried
pork and green-serpentine saleratus-biscuits which stretched between us
and the northern edge of Oregon.

Though the month was September, the heat in the middle of the day upon
the broad rolling plains we now had to traverse was as oppressive as an
Eastern July. During our whole horseback-journey, therefore, we made it
our custom to rise as soon after dawn as possible, breakfast, travel a
stage of fifteen or twenty miles, make a long mid-day halt in some
pleasant nook, and push on twenty miles farther before we unsaddled for
the night. We were just now enabled to make this second stage the most
leisurely and the longest of the two,--for the moon was still in all the
glory of its California brightness and plenitude, and to have travelled
by moonlight between the Sacramento and Mount Shasta is one of the
prominent memories of a lifetime. No patriotic attachment is demanded to
make the Californian say with the Irishman that his country's full-moon
is twice as large and splendid as any other's. Phenomenally, at least,
the bare facts support him.

At noon of the day on which we left the American Ranch, we came up a
rugged hill into the settlement of Shasta. This town is a mining depot
of some importance, chiefly memorable to us for some excellent pie, made
out of the California apple-melon, in wonderful imitation of the Eastern
green-apple tart, and a charge of five dollars and a half in gold made
by the great Californian Express Company for bringing Bierstadt's
color-box (heavy as a small valise) from Red Bluffs, whither we had let
it go on by boat. Why this should have left a memorable impression on
our minds it would be hard to say; for, although the demand was somewhat
more than the stage employed by the Express Company would have charged
to take either one of us the same distance, accompanied by a heavy
trunk, we should by this time have acquired sufficient fam