Albert Pike was a pioneer and a free lance. From school-teaching in old Newburyport he broke away in 1831 to the new Southwest. Successively explorer, editor, and lawyer in New Mexico and Arkansas for some fifteen years, he found time also to gratify a strong literary impulse. On his journey out he sent to the _American Monthly Magazine_ (1831) both prose and verse, and to the same journal five years later his _Letters from Arkansas_. Meantime (1834) he had published in Boston the thin volume from which is taken the following tale. _Hymns to the Gods_ appeared in Blackwood for June, 1839 (volume xlv, page 819; see also volume xlvii, page 354), with a letter dated at Little Rock, August 15, 1838. (The American Cyclopedia puts the original publication of these at Boston, 1831.) After serving against Mexico and in the Confederacy, he gave himself mainly to the practice of the law. But he edited the _Memphis Appeal_, 1867–1868, published volumes of his verse in 1854, 1873, and 1882, and wrote extensively, as an adept, on freemasonry. Though Pike has more narrative directness than Hall, he is usually loose in narrative structure. Plot seems of smaller concern to him than setting. The abundance of vivid detail and some nervous force in the phrase make his sketches permanently convincing as description. THE INROAD OF THE NABAJO [_From “Prose Sketches and Poems written in the Western Country,” Boston, 1834. The preface is dated Arkansas Territory, May, 1833_] It was a keen, cold morning in the latter part of November, when I wound out of the narrow, rocky cañon or valley, in which I had for some time been travelling, and came in sight of the village of San Fernandez, in the valley of Taos. Above, below, and around me, lay the sheeted snow, till, as the eye glanced upward, it was lost among the dark pines which covered the upper part of the mountains, although at the very summit, where the pines were thinnest, it gleamed from among them like a white banner spread between them and heaven. Below me on the left, half open, half frozen, ran the little clear stream, which gave water to the inhabitants of the valley, and along the margin of which I had been travelling. On the right and left the ridges which formed the dark and precipitous sides of the cañon, sweeping apart, formed a spacious amphitheatre. Along their sides extended a belt of deep, dull blue mist, above and below which was to be seen the white snow, and the deep darkness of the pines. On the right, these mountains swelled to a greater and more precipitous height, till their tops gleamed in unsullied whiteness over the plain below. Still farther to the right was a broad opening, where the mountains seemed to sink into the plain; and afar off in front were the tall and stupendous mountains between me and the city of Santa Fé. Directly in front of me, with the dull color of its mud buildings contrasting with the dazzling whiteness