lands
on its shores and stored up a quantity of provisions in their
camp. We strapped a couple of blankets on our shoulders
and took an ax apiece and started--for we intended to
take up a wood ranch or so ourselves and become wealthy. We
were on foot. The reader will find it advantageous to go on
horseback. We were told that the distance was eleven miles.
We tramped a long time on level ground, and then toiled
laboriously up a mountain about a thousand miles high and
looked over. No lake there. We descended on the other side,
crossed the valley and toiled up another mountain three or
four thousand miles high, apparently, and looked over again.
No lake yet. We sat down tired and perspiring, and hired a
couple of Chinamen to curse those people who had beguiled us.
Thus refreshed, we presently resumed the march with renewed
vigor and determination. We plodded on, two or three hours
longer, and at last the Lake burst upon us--a noble sheet of
blue water lifted six thousand three hundred feet above the
level of the sea, and walled in by a rim of snowclad mountain
peaks that towered aloft full three thousand feet higher
still! It was a vast oval, and one would have to use up eighty
or a hundred good miles in traveling around it. As it
lay there with the shadows of the mountains brilliantly
photographed upon its still surface I thought it must surely
be the fairest picture the whole earth affords.

[Footnote 1: The "Brigade" to which the distinguished humorist here
refers was a company of fourteen camp-followers of the Governor
of Nevada, who boarded at the same house as Mark, that of Mrs.
O'Flannigan. They had joined the Governor's retinue "by their own
election at New York and San Francisco, and came along, feeling that
in the scuffle for little territorial crumbs and offices they could
not make their condition more precarious than it was, and might
reasonably expect to make it better. They were popularly known as the
'Irish Brigade,' though there were only four or five Irishmen among
them."]

... After supper as the darkness closed down and the stars
came out and spangled the great mirror with jewels, we smoked
meditatively in the solemn hush and forgot our troubles and
our pains. In due time we spread our blankets in the warm sand
between two large bowlders and soon fell asleep.... The wind
rose jus