terest somewhere on such voids, had retired out of sight into the ravines of the bluff. Behind me, a hundred steps to the north, crept the Platte River, here apparently confined to a single channel about three hundred yards wide. It sneaks along between low banks, like an assassin river going to drown somebody. It does not woo or cajole; it is a murderer who has lived past the arts of fascination; a cruel courtesan, old, wrinkled, hateful, too life-weary to think of pleasing, yet loving to kill. And it has killed. It has proffered fords, and given quicksands; it has engulfed in its treacherous bottom horse, rider, wagon, herd, all that was trusted to it. Fascinated by its ugliness and the story of its crimes, I come close to its edge. The oozy paste of loam which banks it curves glibly away from under my feet, and I am in the water before I know it. It is well I have not slipped off in a dark night, or how the greasy mud and the dribbling sand would toy with my fingers, and let me slip easily away! I scramble up the bank by main force with a shudder. I was longing for a bath-had meant to try the Platte, though the ranchmen had informed me that it was only kneedeep, save in holes; but I gave up the idea on looking at that water-fiend, a Lorelei, with all her treachery remaining, and all her graces gone.

There is another reason why I should not go in. Across the desert waste from the southerly bluffs a torrid wind is blowing ten knots an hour. It is like a hot blast of the Cyclops' furnace escaping above ground. It comes so freighted with microscopic sandgrains that it is not as much the old school definition of wind-"air," as it is earth "in motion." I have been out five minutes, and there is not a pore of my

body which it has not stopped. I feel dry and caustic, a sort of mineral deposit rather than a fleshly man. If I went into the Platte, I should be stuccoed like a cheap country seat before I could use a towel. The river, too, is as bad as the air. It is a saturated solution of sand; a gray sirup of silex, which drops dust on your hand wherever you stop a ripple. The Platte is never entirely dry in the usual sense; but what river can be rationally drier than this, which is composed, one particle in ten, of the driest thing on the globe?

Let me take stock of this pathless waste before me. When they are right under my feet, I can see the cork-screw curls of the gray gramma. I walk a little further, and begin to make distinctions. Everything is gray, but not all of it is gramma. A little furzy plant, the undersides of its leaves covered with a dry down that rubs to powder between the fingers, of name unknown, but resembling the artemisias; a true artemisia, from six to eighteen inches high, also woolly; a single spot of orange color as large as a half-dime, seeming to be a poor relation of the marigolds; a stinted sunflower; a few sickly cactuses; this is the vegetable inventory. The beautiful groundpoppy, and all other flowers which might enliven a landscape, had entirely disappeared.

Despite the nakedness of the land, it swarmed with ants, whose industry was manifest in cones a foot high, though it was impossible to see any practical application for it in the shape of food asking storage. The same famine supported myriads of cheery grasshoppers, with red wings and legs, which made them, when they flew, the only bright objects in the landscape. A reddish-brown species of cricket also

abounded, its size averaging a little larger than our black insect of the States. Here is the animal inventory. I looked for lizards, and found none, though they may only have retired to private apartments in a temporary fit of disgust at their situation, since it seems almost inconceivable that some member of the family should not exist in so congenial a habitat. I was disappointed more especially not to find the horned toad, so called. A friend of mine in a Western expedition had discovered it on the Plains of the North Platte, considerably east of Fort Laramie; but we saw none in our present journey until within a day's ride of the Rocky Mountain Watershed, though repeatedly passing over tracts where they might reasonably be looked for.

That night the wind blew more violently, if possi ble, than it had at Willow Island. The ranch-house rocked under it, and such tempests of sand came flying with it, that every crevice of the walls streamed with little jets, and every object that lay untouched for an hour was powdered half an inch deep. The air was intensely dry and irritating. At sundown it began to thunder and lighten. The flash and roar soon became almost continuous, and remained so till after midnight. With all this commotion came not a single drop of rain. In the States the water would have fallen half a foot deep. Here, though the sky was black as iron, it was equally hard and pitiless. The people told me that for years at a time the storms were equally severe and rainless with this one. I could think of nothing, when I looked at the heavens, but the agony of a baffled yet unrepentant soul.

Through the tempest of wind and sand, an eastgoing stage struggled about tea-time, bearing half

a dozen miserable passengers, every one of whom looked like a cast of himself in silex, unflattered in expression. They had come all the way from California; and I shuddered to think whether I should have grown as reckless as they by the time I was equally near my end of the journey. Some of them seemed merely hanging on to life by the neck of a pocketflask. Solitary confinement, with a Chinese gong beaten at fifteen-minute intervals, day and night, for six months, near one's bunk-head, could not have reduced victims to a more deplorable state of despair and defacultization. One passenger, who, being now only four hundred miles or so from home, felt as if he were beginning to catch sight of familiar chimneypots, sold his blankets to the station-keeper, under an impression that he would have no further use for them. They were of the best California variety, a handsome blue, little worn, and could not have been purchased originally for less than ten dollars in gold. As I soon after bought them of the station-keeper for two dollars and a half in greenbacks,- and nobody ever does anything out there except at a tremendous profit, -I am led to conclude that the passenger must have lost much of his hold on life. I felt sorry for him whenever I wrapped myself up in his handsome spoils, though they proved an invaluable addition to my own during the bitter nights we afterwards spent next the snow-peaks.

Beyond Spring Hill, the South Platte makes the nearest approach to beauty which you find in it till you see it issuing from its lofty cañon back of Denver. All the way that we skirted it during the remainder of the afternoon, it was studded with picturesque islands, green as emerald. When the

sun declined so that its level rays overlooked, instead of pointing out the arid plains, and the carrion carcasses of dead cattle which pollute them, the view became quite fascinating. It was like fairy-land when the sun disappeared entirely, and the whole west became glorious with gold and purple, green and salmon, reflected in the slow-creeping water between the islands. Whatever else may be lacking on the Plains, the sunsets are magnificent. To be sure, the natives cannot be held responsible for that; if they could get at them, they would fry them. As it is, Nature triumphs over all; and the two hours I used to sit on the stage-box worshipping her sunset divinity, were compensation enough for a whole day of discomfort.

For twenty-five miles beyond Spring Hill, we rode through a solitude broken only by one station-house, a few antelope, and innumerable jackass - rabbits. The latter came tamely out to bathe their immense ears in twilight, squatting among patches of gramma and artemisia, or leaping across the road so close to us that if we had had time to stop and cook them, we might easily have shot a dozen as we toiled by them through the deep sand.

About day-break we drew up at Beaver Creek Station, five hundred and thirty-three miles from Atchison, and a hundred and twenty from Denver. The station consisted, as usual, of a single house with the company's stables and corral attached, and is situated about three miles east of the Beaver Creek laid down

on the maps. The light was vague when we first stopped, but sufficient to reveal a picturesqueness in the immediate landscape which set my heart bounding, after the experience of the past two days. Nature,