They began to abuse me because I did not make a circus of myself, and thus drive away the despair and misery of the occasion. They had brought me along, it seemed, because I was such an amusing little cuss. It made me a good deal sadder than I would have been otherwise. Here in the midst of a wild and bitter mountain storm, so thick that you couldn't see twenty yards away, with nothing to eat but some marble cake soaked in vinegar, and a piece of cold tongue with a red ant on it, I was expected to make a hippodrome and negro minstrel show of myself. I burst into tears, and tried to sit on my feet as the ladies did. I couldn't do it, so simultaneously and so extemporaneously, as it were, as they could. I had to take them by sections and sit on them. My feet are not large, but at the same time I cannot hover over them both at the same time. Dear reader, did you ever sit amidst the silence and solitude of the mountains and feel the hailstones rolling down your back, melting and soothing you, and filling your heart with great surging thoughts of the sweet bye-and-bye, and death, and the grave, and other mirth-provoking topics? We had now been about two hundred years without food, it seemed to me, and I mildly suggested that I would like something to eat rather than die of starvation in the midst of plenty; but the ladies wouldn't give me so much as a ham handwich to preserve my life. They told me to smoke if I felt that I must have nourishment, and coldly refused to let me sample the pickled spiders and cold-pressed flies. So in the midst of all this prepared food I had to go out into the sagebrush and eat raw grasshoppers and grease-wood. Bye and bye, when we concluded that we had seen about all the mountain storm we needed in our business, and didn't pine for any more hail-stones and dampness, we hitched up again and started home. Then we got lost. The ladies felt indignant, but I was delighted. I never was so lost in all my life. When I was asked where I thought I was, I could cheerfully reply that I didn't know, and that would stop the conversation for as much as two minutes. The beauty of being lost is that you are all the time seeing new objects. There is a charm of novelty about being lost that one does not fully understand until he has been there, so to speak. When I would say that I didn't know where the road led to that we were traveling, one of the party would suggest with mingled bitterness and regret, that we had better turn back. Then I would turn back. I turned back seventeen times at the request of various members of the party for whom I had, and still have, the most unbounded respect. Finally we got so accustomed to the various objects along this line of travel, that we pined for a change. Then we drove ahead a little farther and found the road. It had been there all the time. It is there yet. I never had so much fun in all my life. It don't take much to please me, however. I'm of a cheerful disposition, anyhow.