seek signs from. Half a mile from this city of fifty thousand souls
we struck (and this must be taken literally) a plank-road that would
have been a disgrace to an Irish village.

Then six miles of macadamised road showed us that the team could move. A
railway ran between us and the banks of the Willamette, and another
above us through the mountains. All the land was dotted with small
townships, and the roads were full of farmers in their town wagons,
bunches of tow-haired, boggle-eyed urchins sitting in the hay behind.
The men generally looked like loafers, but their women were all well
dressed. Brown hussar-braiding on a tailor-made jacket does not,
however, consort with hay-wagons. Then we struck into the woods along
what California called a "_camina reale_,"--a good road,--and Portland a
"fair track." It wound in and out among fire-blackened stumps, under
pine trees, along the corners of log-fences, through hollows which must
be hopeless marsh in the winter, and up absurd gradients. But nowhere
throughout its length did I see any evidence of road-making. There was a
track,--you couldn't well get off it,--and it was all you could do to
stay on it. The dust lay a foot thick in the blind ruts, and under the
dust we found bits of planking and bundles of brushwood that sent the
wagon bounding into the air. Sometimes we crashed through bracken; anon
where the blackberries grew rankest we found a lonely little cemetery,
the wooden rails all awry, and the pitiful stumpy headstones nodding
drunkenly at the soft green mulleins. Then with oaths and the sound of
rent underwood a yoke of mighty bulls would swing down a "skid" road,
hauling a forty-foot log along a rudely made slide. A valley full of
wheat and cherry trees succeeded, and halting at a house we bought ten
pound weight of luscious black cherries for something less than a rupee
and got a drink of icy-cold water for nothing, while the untended team
browsed sagaciously by the roadside. Once we found a wayside camp of
horse-dealers lounging by a pool, ready for a sale or a swap, and once
two sun-tanned youngsters shot down a hill on Indian ponies, their full
creels banging from the high-pommelled saddles. They had been fishing,
and were our brethren therefore. We shouted aloud in chorus to scare a
wild-cat; we squabbled over the reasons that had led a snake to cross a
road; we heaved bits of bark at a venturesome chipmunk, who was really
the little grey squirrel of India