to regard the box as an ornamental appendage which we were good-natured
enough to let each other enjoy by turns. Pitt River, the last fork of
the Upper Sacramento, came glancing into our landscape, the very
perfection of fluent freedom and gladness. Every rod of the journey
along its west bank disclosed a new picture. The misty blue mountains of
the range toward Shasta Peak formed the abiding background of every
view. Steep, fir-battlemented banks of one generic form, but endless
variety in the beauty of the tree forms and groups which rose from their
_glacis_, mile after mile, framed in some new loveliness of
light-and-shadow-flecked bend, deep sepia-dark pool, singing shallow, or
brawling rapid of the clear stream. Eagles were sailing, like a placid
thought in a large heart, far over our heads in the intimacy of a
spotless sky; the great ground-squirrel flashed like a gray gleam over
the gnarled mossy roots at the side of our narrow dug-way; and in
brilliant blots or darting shafts of Magenta fire, we recognized among
the tree-tops that loveliest bird of the North-American forest, the
great crested woodpecker. Here and there, to introduce a human element,
came cleared spaces by the river's brink, where pointed wands stood
impaling flakes of red salmon-flesh,--the open-air curing-house and
out-door store-room of the Pitt-River Indians. Once in the course of the
day we lighted on a picturesque ragged hut, where the purveyors of this
meat were soaking themselves in full side-hill sunlight,--where little
savages of every degree of gauntness in their limbs, ochriness on their
cheeks, shockiness in their heads, and protuberance in their
abdomens, were gorging themselves to still more hideous ventral
_embonpoint_,--where white men, lower than the lowest Diggers they
herded with, had forgotten the little they ever knew of civilization,
and stood glaring at us like half-sated Satyrs as we passed. Other bits
of _genre_ hourly came into the picture with pappoose-carrying squaws
who hunted yew-berries along the road-side fringe of woods, youngsters
wearing no attire but a party-colored acorn-basket of deft finger-work,
which they carried loaded on their shoulders, or listlessly trailed
empty at their sides. Dr. Prichard has some hideous pictures of Papuans
and Australians; but if Ethnology were a match-game, we could give him
those two points, and beat him easily by playing a few of the Digger
women whom we saw that day. They reac