as large as an
egg,--"Glory hallelujah!"

It is like searching for gold and silver,--very exciting, and far more
pleasurable than fishing or hunting. A friend here has about sixty
pounds of agates, for which he was offered by a lapidary in New York
five dollars a pound. A handsome stone for a ring or pin is worth, when
cut into shape, from three to five dollars. The lapidary cuts them with
a steel wheel, about eight inches in diameter, using oil and
diamond-dust in cutting and polishing.

A YOUNG BRAVE.

At Chug Station I met a frontiersman named Phillips, of long
experience, who told me in his new adobe house of an old chief who had
lost five sons, and when the first was slain he cut off a piece of his
thumb, next of his forefinger, and so on, till five told of his boys
killed. The last was a brave, and supposed no ball could hit him,
wearing, he supposed, "a charmed life." He came to the "Chug" and dared
them to shoot. As he and three or four more had killed a white man and
wounded others, the people all turned out, and Phillips shot the bold
young fellow, and wounded the rest of the party so that they died. The
body of the young Indian lay by the roadside for several weeks, till
the wolves and ravens had picked his bones, and I picked up his skull,
pierced through with several balls, to bring back and present to the
post-surgeon.

This grinning skull was lying on the grass which covered the roadside,
and almost beneath towering monuments or bluffs of sandstone, which jut
out at several points on the road, running along for great distances,
and towering up several hundred feet high. We passed soon after several
of these projections, which look like fortifications and baronial
castles of some knights of the olden time. "Chimney Rock" is well known
to travelers as a series of fluted columns, and standing solitary, as
sentinels in the desert, they look solemn, lonely, and sublime. Old
George, the stage-driver, has passed them twice a week for many years,
and the wonder is he has not lost his scalp.

Sometimes the chiefs and old Indians will cut slits in their cheeks and
rub ashes in them, sitting over the fire and bemoaning the loss of
their dead children. They present a horrid appearance to one who looks
at their pagan mode of bewailing the departed.

Arrived at Fort Laramie on the third day, we were courteously welcomed
by Colonel F. F. Flint, of the 4th Infantry, commandant of the post.
Delicacy dictat