place they have
made a lake by damming up the stream; in another their works have
created an island, and they have made several falls. Their
storehouses, of course, are carefully concealed. By this time they are
about full for the winter. We saw quantities of young cotton-wood and
aspen trees, with stems about as thick as my arm, lying where these
industrious creatures have felled them ready for their use. They
always work at night and in concert. Their long, sharp teeth are used
for gnawing down the trees, but their mason-work is done entirely with
their flat, trowel-like tails. In its natural state the fur is very
durable, and is as full of long black hairs as that of the sable, but
as sold, all these hairs have been plucked out of it.

The canyon was glorious, ah! glorious beyond any other, but it was a
dismal and depressing ride. The dead past buried its dead.

Not an allusion was made to the conversation previously. "Jim's"
manner was courteous, but freezing, and when I left home on my return
he said he hardly thought he should be back from the Snowy Range before
I left. Essentially an actor, was he, I wonder, posing on the previous
day in the attitude of desperate remorse, to impose on my credulity or
frighten me; or was it a genuine and unpremeditated outburst of
passionate regret for the life which he had thrown away? I cannot
tell, but I think it was the last. As I cautiously rode back, the
sunset glories were reddening the mountain tops, and the park lay in
violet gloom. It was wonderfully magnificent, but oh, so solemn, so
lonely! I rode a very large, well-bred mare, with three shoes loose
and one off, and she fell with me twice and was very clumsy in crossing
the Thompson, which was partly ice and partly a deep ford, but when we
reached comparatively level grassy ground I had a gallop of nearly two
miles which I enjoyed thoroughly, her great swinging stride being so
easy and exhilarating after Birdie's short action.

Friday.

This is a piteous day, quite black, freezing hard, and with a fierce
north-east wind. The absence of sunshine here, where it is nearly
perpetual, has a very depressing effect, and all the scenery appears in
its grimness of black and gray. We have lost three horses, including
Birdie, and have nothing to entice them with, and not an animal to go
and drive them in with. I put my great mare in the corral myself, and
Mr. Kavan put his in afterwards and secured the bars