rangement, on the ground that these buttresses could have no necessary office in sustaining the domes, and are therefore false. I am not going to introduce any discussion of this subject into these pages. They are too limited to hold one of the widest quarrels of modern times. I can only say that the effect of breaking up the domes by these obviously unnecessary buttresslike projections was very beautiful. Together the domes were somewhat higher than the lower structure, and made a total altitude of about seven hundred feet.

I have been thus minute, because in no other way could I convey to my readers the effect produced by this wonderful structure. It is not intended, I hardly need say, to convey the impression that a man with a microscope would discover the absolute mathematical lines of a structure such as I have described, should he attempt to verify me by passing his face over the entire surface of the Church Buttes. What I assert is that at the distance of from fifty to a hundred yards, the effect of such a structure is produced, with very little assistance from imagination.

Coming upon the formation in the wild heart of the Continent, no human society near you save nomads like yourself, your irresistible feeling (if any feeling you have for either nature or art) must be one of silent, awe-struck wonder. The imitation of man's work by nature always arouses such a feeling. Before reaching here, you will have felt it, roving the green bottoms of the Republican, and suddenly coming upon lovely parks whose floor of fresh turf seem newly dismissed from the lawn-shears of the gardener; whose stately elms, pecans, and cotton-woods were disposed in such graceful groups and leaf-arched avenues that but for their age Downing himself might

have set them; whose well defined paths, entirely free from undergrowth, so symmetrical and so convenient in their direction and arrangement, you can hardly credit to the water-seeking elk and buffalo. At every step of your way among the Colorado foothills, the same feeling will be awakened in you by natural ruins, statues, castles, temples, monuments; it will follow you through the grim defiles and up the snow-crowned ridges of the Rocky Mountain system, excited by the ruins of Titanic cities scattered over areas of many grassless, soilless leagues. It never lost its freshness with me; it was always a source of child-like terror and delight; to this day I cannot analyze it, unless on the principle of its affording a certain momentary argument for the supernatural, which, ere you can recover your cold literalism and modernity, your logical balance, and your grasp of philosophical explorations, sets you back in your childhood's or your ancestors' marvel-world- shows you how the baby feels, how the ancients felt. It is as if the kobold, the elf, the cyclops, and the afrite had suddenly confronted you, barring the way through some awful fastness of a scarcely trodden world, and, catching you all alone there in the gloom, said to you,

"You have abjured us; you laugh at us; you deny us. Look at our proofs: there are the sculptures we carved, the cities we built!"

About nightfall we reached Fort Bridger. This, like every military post in the mountains, is a plain stockade work, incapable of resisting civilized siege, but quite sufficient for the protection of its inmates against any force which could be brought against it by its only enemies, the Indians. The inclosure con

tains several barrack-buildings and a dépôt for government supplies as well as a large store furnishing all the necessary equipments for a settler's outfit. We found the fort garrisoned by detachments from several Nebraska, Kansas, and Colorado regiments, whose officers extended very cordial invitations to our party to lie over for a few days, enjoy the fine hunting and scenery in the neighborhood, and become better acquainted with a mess whose courtesy gave us assurance of a very agreeable time, had we not felt it necessary to reach California as soon as possible.

Here, too, we found one of the most noted of Overland characters, Slade, formerly one of the roadagents of the line we were now travelling, on his way to Virginia City in Idaho. I had an interesting talk with him, and asked him for an account of his celebrated fights with Old Jule, as well as the terrible vengeance which he wreaked upon him. Our time being limited, of his own accord he promised to write me what I asked, and forward it to me for use in this or any future work I might write, introducing characters or scenes from the Plains and the Mountains. Without any appearance of self-conceit, he still seemed pleased when I told him what was very true, that his adventures in the wilds would afford materials for an intensely interesting romance of adventure. Poor fellow! The next time I heard of him was in conversation with an Idaho man who had been present at his death. During the reign of terror, which is one of the invariable stages of a new mining settlement, and may be called its "teething" period, Slade was an efficient member of the Virginia City vigilance committee, and took part

in the execution of many terrible desperadoes. But bloody revolutions, like France's earliest and typical one, generally "return to plague the inventor;" and Slade, becoming a terror to his compeers, was in April, 1864, himself put to death without even being granted the privilege of a parting farewell to his wife. When the news reached her, she had no tears to shed, but "spotted" the members of the committee, and registered a fearful oath, that before she died her hus band should be avenged on them to the full. I should hate to be one of that committee; for not only is Mrs. Slade one of the finest pistol-shots in the West (without any allowance for her sex), but a woman of long memory, and in reckless courage the perfect match and compeer of her late husband. She is a magnificent woman in appearance, and I thought Slade himself a model of manly beauty.

Much as we regretted missing an Indian powwow that was to have taken place the day after, and would have supplied much valuable genre material to pencil and pen, we bade good-by to our kind would-be entertainers, with a promise to stop with them if we returned from California overland.

Black's Fork of the Green River is a small stream affording good water privileges to the Fort, and puzzles the traveller by running north from the spot where he now crosses it, until his map shows him its remarkable sinuosity. Having crossed this and Muddy Fork, about twelve miles further on, he is out of the Green River basin, and almost immediately enters a tract tributary to that of the Great Salt Lake. A series of tremendously heavy grades lead him into the Wahsatch, the last and westernmost range of the Rocky Mountains.

Immediately about Fort Bridger a small surface had been put under cultivation for the partial supply of residents at the Post, and in some directions evergreen wood was plenty; but on entering the Wahsatch, we again came into a region of gray round hills having no vegetation but the artemisia and grease wood. The night was a magnificent one. The full moon was in a cloudless sky; the air was perfectly still, and although abundantly cold, to show us that we were still at a mountainous altitude, not to compare in this respect with that of the ridges we had hitherto passed at night. I had by this time acquired the habit of going without sleep (one much easier than that of sleeping bent into an ampersand); so I abandoned the inside to companions accomplished in that performance, and, having lost at some stagechanging station the guy-rope apparatus by which I had lashed myself to the wagon-top in former times of miserable sleepiness, at once selected the one practicable method of entertaining myself, and got into conversation with the driver. The only scenery was that congeries of ashen-hued hills I have mentioned, whose formation could be accounted for by a lively imagination on the hypothesis that when this part of the world was in a liquid, or, more strictly, in a lathery condition, some Titan school-boy had put his pipe-bowl into the basin, and blown the contents up into a mass of contiguous bubbles. If these bubbles had been iridescent like those of our childhood, the reflection of that gorgeous full moon on them to-night would have been worth seeing; but their gray monotone and constantly repeated figure made this landscape the drowsiest on our journey.

The sun was well up when we reached Bear River