s, he had in his veins no few drops of Irish blood, and
could not forget the sacrifice Gabriel had made of the whisky. "Such
stuff!" he would exclaim, "the best that ever came into this land of
abomination, to be thrown in the face of dirty buffaloes! the devil take
them! Eh! Monsheer Owato Wanisha,--queer outlandish name, by the
bye,--please to pass me another slice of the varmint (meaning the
buffalo-calf). Bless my soul, if I did not think, at one time, it was
after the liquor the brutes were running!"

Upon the morning of the third day, we resumed our journey, following the
stream down for a few miles, over thousands of dead animals, which the
now foaming torrent could not wash away. We struck the winding path
which the "estampedados" had taken; and as it had been worked by the
millions of fugitives into a gentle ascent, we found ourselves, long
before noon, once more upon the level of the prairie. What a spectacle
of gloom and death! As far as the eye could reach, the earth was naked
and blackened. Not a stem of grass, not a bush, had escaped the awful
conflagration; and thousands of half-burnt bodies of deer, buffaloes,
and mustangs covered the prairie in every direction.

The horizon before us was concealed by a high and rugged ridge of the
rolling prairie, towards which we proceeded but slowly, so completely
was the track made by the buffaloes choked by burnt bodies of all
descriptions of animals. At last we reached the summit of the swell,
and perceived that we were upon one of the head branches of the Trinity
River, forming a kind of oblong lake, a mile broad, but exceedingly
shallow; the bottom was of a hard white sandy formation, and as we
crossed this beautiful sheet of clear water, the bottom appeared to be
studded with grains of gold and crystals.

This brought round the characteristic elasticity of temper belonging to
the Americans, and caused the doctor to give way to his mental
speculations:--He would not go to Edinburgh; it was nonsense; here was a
fortune made. He would form a company in New York, capital one million
of dollars--the Gold, Emerald, Topaz, Sapphire, and Amethyst
Association, in ten thousand shares, one hundred dollars a-piece. In
five years he would be the richest man in the world; he would build ten
cities on the Mississippi, and would give powder and lead to the
Comanches for nothing, so that they could at once clear the world of
Texians and buffaloes. He had scarcely f