every bone aching, and every inch of flesh sore, and with the romance of stage-coaching gone from us forever. Now, if a man's body were made of india-rubber, or his arms and legs were telescopic, so as to lengthen out and shorten up, perhaps such continuous travelling would not be so bad. But, as it is, I confess, it was a great weariness to the flesh, and looking back on it now, with the Pacific Railroad completed--its express trains and palace-cars in motion--I don't really see how poor human nature managed to endure it. Conversation is a good thing _per se_, but most men converse themselves out in a day or two. So, a good joke or a popular song helps to fill the hiatus somewhat, and accordingly we buried "John Brown," and "Rallied round the flag," and "Marched through Georgia," day after day, until they got to be a "bore," even to the most severely patriotic among us. Our only constant and unfailing friends were our briar-wood pipes, and what a _corps de reserve_ they were! Possibly smoking has its evils--I don't deny it--but no man has thoroughly tested the heights and depths of life, or shall I say its altitudes and profundities, its joys and its sorrows, its mysteries and miseries--especially stage-coaching--who has not bowed at the shrine of Killykinnick, and puffed and whiffed as it pleased him. There is such comfort, and solace, and philosophy in it, when sojourning on the Plains, or camped down among the Mountains, or cast away in a stage-coach, that all the King Jameses and Dr. Trasks in the universe, I suspect, will never be able to overcome or abolish it. Our horses were usually steady-going enough, the splendid teams of the Plains; but one night, just before reaching Fort Bridger, we had a team of fiery California mustangs, never geared up but once before, and, of course, they ran away. The road was slightly descending, but pretty smooth, and for the time our heavy, lumbering mountain mud-wagon went booming along, like a ship under full sail. Presently, too, the lead-bars broke, and as they came rattling down on the heels of the leaders, we had every prospect for awhile of a general over-turn and smash-up. But our driver, a courageous skillful Jehu, "put down the brakes," and at length succeeded in halting his runaways, just as we approached a rocky precipice, over which to have gone would have been an ugly piece of business. We expected an upset every minute, with all its attending infelicities; but luckily escaped.