o that I could not guide myself by the sun; my only mode was
to retrace the track my horse had made in coming, though this I would
often lose sight of, where the ground was covered with parched herbage.

To one unaccustomed to it, there is something inexpressibly lonely in
the solitude of a prairie. The loneliness of a forest seems nothing to
it. There the view is shut in by trees, and the imagination is left free
to picture some livelier scene beyond. But here we have an immense
extent of landscape without a sign of human existence. We have the
consciousness of being far, far beyond the bounds of human habitation;
we feel as if moving in the midst of a desert world. As my horse lagged
slowly back over the scenes of our late scamper, and the delirium of the
chase had passed away, I was peculiarly sensible to these circumstances.
The silence of the waste was now and then broken by the cry of a distant
flock of pelicans, stalking like spectres about a shallow pool;
sometimes by the sinister croaking of a raven in the air, while
occasionally a scoundrel wolf would scour off from before me, and,
having attained a safe distance, would sit down and howl and whine with
tones that gave a dreariness to the surrounding solitude.

After pursuing my way for some time, I descried a horseman on the edge
of a distant hill, and soon recognized him to be the count. He had been
equally unsuccessful with myself; we were shortly afterwards rejoined by
our worthy comrade, the Virtuoso, who, with spectacles on nose, had made
two or three ineffectual shots from horseback.

We determined not to seek the camp until we had made one more effort.
Casting our eyes about the surrounding waste, we descried a herd of
buffalo about two miles distant, scattered apart, and quietly grazing
near a small strip of trees and bushes. It required but little stretch
of fancy to picture them as so many cattle grazing on the edge of a
common, and that the grove might shelter some lowly farm-house.

We now formed our plan to circumvent the herd, and by getting on the
other side of them, to hunt them in the direction where we knew our
camp to be situated; otherwise, the pursuit might take us to such a
distance as to render it impossible for us to find our way back before
night-fall. Taking a wide circuit, therefore, we moved slowly and
cautiously, pausing occasionally when we saw any of the herd desist from
grazing. The wind fortunately set from them, otherwise th