l meet
with water there, I suppose; take notice, however,--we'll have to
_journey all day before reaching it_; and we may consider ourselves
fortunate if we get there before night-fall."

Lucien's prudence was not too great. On the contrary, it was not even
sufficient for the occasion. This arose from his want of experience on
the prairies. If either he or his brothers had had a little more of
this, they would have hesitated before striking out so boldly, and
leaving the water behind them. They would have known that, to make a
long journey, without the certainty of finding water at the end of it,
is a risk that even the old hunters themselves will seldom undertake.
These, from experience, well know the danger of being without water on
the prairies. They dread it more than grizzly bears, or panthers, or
wolverines, or even hostile Indians. The fear of thirst is to them the
greatest of all terrors.

Our young hunters felt but little of this fear. It is true they had,
all of them, heard or read of the sufferings that prairie travellers
sometimes endure from want of water. But people who live snugly at
home, surrounded by springs, and wells, and streams, with cisterns, and
reservoirs, and pipes, and hydrants, and jets, and fountains, playing at
all times around them, are prone to underrate these sufferings; in fact,
too prone, might I not say, to discredit everything that does not come
under the sphere of their own observation? They will readily believe
that their cat can open a door-latch, and their pig can be taught to
play cards, and that their dog can do wonderful things, savouring of
something more than instinct. But these same people will shake their
heads incredulously, when I tell them that the opossum saves herself
from an enemy by hanging suspended to the tree-branch by her tail, or
that the big-horn will leap from a precipice lighting upon his horns, or
that the red monkeys can bridge a stream by joining themselves to one
another by their tails.

"Oh! nonsense!" they exclaim; "these things are too strange to be true."
And yet, when compared with the _tricks_ their cat and dog can play,
and even the little canary that flits about the drawing-room, do they
seem either strange or improbable? The absent and distant are always
regarded with wonder and incredulity; while familiar facts, in
themselves far more wonderful, neither excite curiosity nor challenge
credulity. Who now regards the startling pheno