spaper, offering him a large sum if he would go
over the mountains and down the Yukon to the Klondyke, and write them
letters about conditions there. He brought the telegram to me, laughing
heartily at the absurdity of anybody making him such a proposition.

"Do they think I'm daft," he asked, "like a' the lave o' thae puir
bodies? When I go into that wild it will not be in a crowd like this or
on such a sordid mission. Ah! my old friend, they'll be spoiling our
grand Alaska."

He offered to secure for me the reporter's job tendered to him. I
refused, urging my lack of training for such work and my more important
and responsible position.

"Why, that same paper has a host of reporters on the way to the Klondyke
now," I said. "There is ----" (naming a noted poet and author of the
Coast). "He must be half-way down to Dawson by this time."

"---- doesn't count," replied Muir, "for the patent reason that
everybody knows he can't tell the truth. The poor fellow is not to blame
for it. He was just made that way. Everybody will read with delight his
wonderful tales of the trail, but nobody will believe him. We all know
him too well."

Muir contracted a hard cold the first night out from Seattle. The hot,
close stateroom and a cold blast through the narrow window were the
cause. A distressing cough racked his whole frame. When he refused to go
to a physician who was on the boat I brought the doctor to him. After
the usual examination the physician asked, "What do you generally do for
a cold?"

"Oh," said Muir, "I shiver it away."

"Explain yourself," said the puzzled doctor.

"We-ll," drawled Muir, "two or three years ago I camped by the Muir
Glacier for a week. I had caught just such a cold as this from the same
cause--a stuffy stateroom. So I made me a little sled out of spruce
boughs, put a blanket and some sea biscuit on it and set out up the
glacier. I got into a labyrinth of crevasses and a driving snowstorm,
and had to spend the night on the ice ten miles from land. I sat on the
sled all night or thrashed about it, and had a dickens of a time; I
shivered so hard I shook the sled to pieces. When morning came my cold
was all gone. That is my prescription, Doctor. You are welcome to use it
in your practice."

"Well," laughed the doctor, "if I had such patients as you in such a
country as this I might try your heroic remedy, but I am afraid it would
hardly serve in general practice."

Muir and I made the most of