iliarity with
extortion from the Company's officials to have paid very quietly a bill
of fifty dollars for the same service, and then dismissed the trifling
matter from our minds. But indignation at swindles is sometimes
cumulative.

At the town of Shasta we left the main wagon-road,--finding that it
passed a long way from the most important point on our itinerary, the
base of Shasta Peak. By striking across the country six miles to the
small settlement of Buckeye, we intersected a route little travelled,
but far more picturesque, and leading directly to the great object of
our longings. On the way to Buckeye we again encountered the Sacramento,
here dwindled to a narrow mountain-stream, with bold precipitous banks
and a rock bottom, a smooth and deep, but rapid current, and full of
trout and salmon. We crossed it on a rope-ferry, and climbed the steeps
on the other side, but did not leave it. Thenceforward to Shasta Peak
we were never out of its neighborhood.

By this _detour_ of ours we came into a country better wooded and
watered than any through which we had been travelling. When the sun left
us, we found the moonlight so seductive that we pushed on late into the
evening,--making our all-night halt at a ranch-man's whose name had been
given us by some passing native, who praised his accommodations
unboundedly, but proved much more of a friend to him than to ourselves.
It is a duty to visit the afflicted. It is a misfortune, not a crime, to
have a wife and six children, the latter all under twelve years of age.
It is a still greater and no less irresponsible calamity to have them
all prostrated by chills-and-fever, yet forbidden to yield to its
depressing influence by the stimulus of several million healthy fleas.
Ignorance, not wilfulness, may be at the causal bottom of a batch of
bread which is half saleratus, and a stew of venerable hens which is
one-third feathers. Nor can we regard it as other than a beneficent
arrangement in the grand scheme of Nature's laws, that a pack of noble
hounds should pass the hours of slumber around our humble casement in
the free indulgence of a liberty distinctly authorized by the sacred
Watts as follows,--

"_Let_ dogs delight to bark," etc.

Still, I think public opinion will sustain me in the view that the much
afflicted family were not agreeable to pass the night with.

This is the place for a useful financial statement. Everything on our
present trip cost a dollar. B