ays, when he sees the same feller coming over a ridge with
the same sheep: '_Look at that crazy blankety-blank with his woolies!_'
That's fact. You mind what I say, or you'll get spurred."

I don't quite agree with Joe, however. Once, lying in my tent across
the river, I looked out over the breaks through that strange purple
moonlight, such as I had always believed to exist only in the staging of
a melodrama, and saw four thousand sheep descending to the ferry.

Like lava from a crater they poured over the slope above me; and above
them, seeming prodigiously big against the weird sky, went the sheepman
with his staff in his hand and a war-bag over his arm, while at his
heels a wise collie followed. It was a picture done by chance very much
as Millet could have done it. And somehow Joe's _mot_ couldn't stand
before that picture.

There is indeed a big Pindaric sort of poetry about a plunging mass of
cattle. And just as truly there is a sort of Theocritus poetry about
sheep. Only in the latter case, the poetical vanishing point is farther
away for me than is the case with cattle. I think I couldn't write very
good verses about a flock of sheep, unless I were at least five hundred
yards away from them. I haven't figured the exact distance as yet. But
when you have a large flock of sheep camping about you all night, making
you eat fine sand and driving you mad with that most idiotic of all
noises (which happened once to me), you don't get up in the morning
quoting Theocritus. You remember Joe's _mot_!

* * * * *

We found a convenient gravel bar on the farther side of the river, where
we established our navy-yard. There we proceeded to set up the keel of
the _Atom I_--a twenty-foot canoe with forty-inch beam, lightly ribbed
with oak and planked with quarter-inch cypress.

No sooner had we screwed up the bolts in the keel, than our ship-yard
became a sort of free information bureau. Every evening the cable ferry
brought over a contingent of well-wishers, who were ardent in their
desire to encourage us in our undertaking, which was no less than that
of making a toboggan slide down the roof of the continent.

The salient weakness of the _genus homo_, it has always seemed to me, is
an overwhelming desire to give advice. Through several weeks of toil, we
were treated to a most liberal education on marine matters. It appeared
that we had been laboring under a fatal misunderstanding regarding t