he
old pedestrian emigrants, what was the tedium suffered by the Indians
and trappers of our youth, the imagination trembles to conceive. This is
now Saturday, 23rd, and I have been steadily travelling since I parted
from you at St. Pancras. It is a strange vicissitude from the Savile
Club to this; I sleep with a man from Pennsylvania who has been in the
States Navy, and mess with him and the Missouri bird already alluded to.
We have a tin wash-bowl among four. I wear nothing but a shirt and a
pair of trousers, and never button my shirt. When I land for a meal, I
pass my coat and feel dressed. This life is to last till Friday,
Saturday, or Sunday next. It is a strange affair to be an emigrant, as
I hope you shall see in a future work. I wonder if this will be
legible; my present station on the waggon roof, though airy compared to
the cars, is both dirty and insecure. I can see the track straight
before and straight behind me to either horizon. Peace of mind I enjoy
with extreme serenity; I am doing right; I know no one will think so;
and don't care. My body, however, is all to whistles; I don't eat; but,
man, I can sleep. The car in front of mine is chock full of Chinese.

_Monday._--What it is to be ill in an emigrant train let those declare
who know. I slept none till late in the morning, overcome with laudanum,
of which I had luckily a little bottle. All to-day I have eaten nothing,
and only drunk two cups of tea, for each of which, on the pretext that
the one was breakfast, and the other dinner, I was charged fifty cents.
Our journey is through ghostly deserts, sage brush and alkali, and
rocks, without form or colour, a sad corner of the world. I confess I am
not jolly, but mighty calm, in my distresses. My illness is a subject of
great mirth to some of my fellow-travellers, and I smile rather sickly
at their jests.

We are going along Bitter Creek just now, a place infamous in the
history of emigration, a place I shall remember myself among the
blackest. I hope I may get this posted at Ogden, Utah.

R. L. S.

TO SIDNEY COLVIN

[_Coast Line Mountains, California, September, 1879._]

Here is another curious start in my life. I am living at an Angora
goat-ranche, in the Coast Line Mountains, eighteen miles from Monterey.
I was camping out, but got so sick that the two rancheros took me in and
tended me. One is an old bear-hunter, seventy-two years old, and a
captain from the Mexican war; the o