room three respectable-looking men. I told
them my story. One said to the others, 'He is always the same old
fellow!' I stared at him in amazement. He held out one hand and moved
the other as if fiddling. Monotonous creaking sounds followed, and I
gradually awoke. The same sounds continued, but they were caused by the
grasshoppers and tree-toads, who pipe monotonously all night long in
America."

Nothing ever came of the dream, but it all occurred _exactly_ as I
describe it. I have had several quite as strange. Immediately after I
had finished my narration, some one, alluding to our party, asked if
there was any one present who could sing "Hans Breitmann's Barty," and I
astonished them not a little by proclaiming that I was the author, and by
singing it.

We went on to Leavenworth, where we had a dinner at the hotel which was
worthy of Paris. We had, for example, prairie pullets or half-grown
grouse, wild turkeys and tender venison. Thence to Fort Riley, and so on
in waggons to the last surveyor's camp. I forget where it was on the
route that we stopped over-night at a fort, where I found some old
friends and made new ones. A young officer--Lieutenant Brown, I
think--gave me a bed in his cabin. His ceiling was made of canvas. For
weeks he had heard a great rattlesnake moving about on it. One day he
had made a hole in the ceiling and put into it a great fierce tom-cat.
The cat "went for" the snake and there was an awful row. After a time
the cat came out looking like a devil with every hair on end, made
straight for the prairie, and was never heard of again. Neither was the
snake. They had finished one another. On another occasion, when sitting
in a similar cabin, my gentle hostess, an officer's wife, whom I had
known a few years before as a beauty in society, remarked that she had
two large rattlesnakes in her ceiling, and that if we would be silent we
might hear them crawling about. They could not be taken out without
rebuilding the roof.

Captain Colton had just recovered from a very bad attack of fever and
ague, and, being young, had the enormous appetite which follows weeks of
quinine. I saw him this day eat a full meal of beefsteaks, and then
immediately after devour another, at Brown's, of buffalo-meat. The air
of the Plains causes incredible hunger. We all played a good knife and
fork.

About twilight-tide there came in a very gentlemanly Catholic priest. I
was told that he was a rovi