ce, at the house of an uncle, Pope's translation of the Iliad, he
was perfectly entranced with it.

"Had it been gold or precious stones," he tells us, "the pleasure would
not have equaled that which I enjoyed."

Nevertheless, he fancied that his ignorance, his country dress and
uncouth manners caused him to be slighted even by his own relations.

"I was badly quizzed," he says, "and greatly mortified; but I worked on
resolutely, said nothing, and was always at the post of duty."

Promotion is sure to come to a lad of that spirit, and accordingly we
soon find him a clerk in a country store earning two hundred dollars a
year and his board, besides being head over ears in love with a
beautiful girl. At first he did not know that he was in love; but, one
day, when he had been taking dinner with her family, and had talked with
the young lady herself after dinner a good while, he came out of the
house, and was amazed to discover that the sun was gone from the sky.

"In a confused manner," he relates, "I inquired of her father what had
become of the sun. He politely replied, 'It has gone down!' I knew then
that I was in love. It was a plain case."

In those good old times marriage did not present the difficulties which
it now does. He was soon married, obtained more lucrative employment,
got into business for himself, failed, studied law, and found himself,
at the age of thirty-six, the father of a family of six children,
twenty-eight thousand dollars in debt, and, though in good practice at
the bar, not able to reduce his indebtedness more than a thousand
dollars a year. So he set his face toward Oregon, then containing only
three or four hundred settlers. He mounted the stump and organized a
wagon-train, the roll of which at the rendezvous contained two hundred
and ninety-three names. With this party, whose effects were drawn by
oxen and mules, he started in May, 1843, for a journey of seventeen
hundred miles across a wilderness most of which had never been trodden
by civilized men.

For six months they pursued their course westward. Six persons died on
the way, five turned back, fifteen went to California, and those who
held their course towards Oregon endured hardships and privations which
tasked their fortitude to the uttermost. Mr. Burnett surveyed the scenes
of the wilderness with the eye of an intelligent and sympathetic
observer. Many of his remarks upon the phenomena of those untrodden
plains are of unusual i