s foot.

Poor thing, they are making fun of his hat; and the cut of his New York
coat; and his conscientiousness about his grammar; and his feeble
profanity; and his consumingly ludicrous ignorance of ores, shafts,
tunnels, and other things which he never saw before, and never felt
enough interest in to read about. And all the time that he is thinking
what a sad fate it is to be exiled to that far country, that lonely land,
the citizens around him are looking down on him with a blighting
compassion because he is an "emigrant" instead of that proudest and
blessedest creature that exists on all the earth, a "FORTY-NINER."

The accustomed coach life began again, now, and by midnight it almost
seemed as if we never had been out of our snuggery among the mail sacks
at all. We had made one alteration, however. We had provided enough
bread, boiled ham and hard boiled eggs to last double the six hundred
miles of staging we had still to do.

And it was comfort in those succeeding days to sit up and contemplate the
majestic panorama of mountains and valleys spread out below us and eat
ham and hard boiled eggs while our spiritual natures revelled alternately
in rainbows, thunderstorms, and peerless sunsets. Nothing helps scenery
like ham and eggs. Ham and eggs, and after these a pipe--an old, rank,
delicious pipe--ham and eggs and scenery, a "down grade," a flying coach,
a fragrant pipe and a contented heart--these make happiness. It is what
all the ages have struggled for.

CHAPTER XVIII.

At eight in the morning we reached the remnant and ruin of what had been
the important military station of "Camp Floyd," some forty-five or fifty
miles from Salt Lake City. At four P.M. we had doubled our distance and
were ninety or a hundred miles from Salt Lake. And now we entered upon
one of that species of deserts whose concentrated hideousness shames the
diffused and diluted horrors of Sahara--an "alkali" desert. For
sixty-eight miles there was but one break in it. I do not remember that
this was really a break; indeed it seems to me that it was nothing but a
watering depot in the midst of the stretch of sixty-eight miles. If my
memory serves me, there was no well or spring at this place, but the
water was hauled there by mule and ox teams from the further side of the
desert. There was a stage station there. It was forty-five miles from
the beginning of the desert, and twenty-three from the end of it.

We plowed a