fect them in the least. They seemed to
have an open road too, while we were plunging through deep snowdrifts,
my feet already dragging along their tops.

When the first carriage load came up I saw it was only a desert
juniper. The boreal gale sweeping through its shivering branches made
converse in the music of the wild, Jenny and I being the only
seat-holders in that grand opera. Soon another caravan of belated
folks drove up; but it was only a load of hay that had been
over-tipped. Others came, but they were only bushes or some inanimate
object. There was little life out on that perishing night.

After hours of fearsome and benumbing travel, Jenny stumbled with me
into the little home town. A good feed of oats and a warm shelter
doubtless ended the story happily for her. But for me--the ghost of
the desert and the wraith of the blizzard had become real. They spoke
to me that night and I understood.

THE GREAT NORTHWEST

God had sifted three kingdoms to find the wheat for this
planting.--_Longfellow_.

Westward the course of empire takes its way.--_Berkeley_.

In the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the
desert. And the parched ground shall become a pool, and the
thirsty land springs of water.--_Isaiah_.

THE GREAT NORTHWEST

Possibly there are those who find themselves thinking that Western
tales are travelers' tales and must be taken with "a grain of salt."
Some also say that the man who crosses the Missouri never is able to
tell the truth again; this is crude, I know, and in some cases true,
but they who are so afflicted were just the same before they ever saw
the Missouri.

Our waterless areas were considered by Captain Bonneville (as told by
Washington Irving) utterly barren and forever hopeless wastes. In
Astoria--chapter thirty-four--these words are used:

"In this dreary desert of sand and gravel of the Snake here and there
is a thin and scanty herbage, insufficient for the horse or the
buffalo. Indeed, these treeless wastes between the Rocky Mountains and
the Pacific are even more desolate and barren than the naked, upper
prairies on the Atlantic side; they present vast desert tracts that
must ever defy cultivation, and interpose dreary and thirsty wilds
between the habitations of man, in traversing which the wanderer will
often be in danger of perishing."

So thought Captain Bonneville; so wrote the matchless American
_litterateur_, Washington Irving, of "Sun