In the meantime they sent him up the gulch to find some "float." He had wandered away from camp thirty miles before he remembered that he didn't know what float looked like. Then he thought he would go back and inquire. He got lost while in a dark brown study and drifted into the bosom of the unknowable. He didn't miss the trail until a perpendicular wall of the Rocky Mountains, about 900 feet high, rose up and hit him athwart the nose. [Illustration: 0327] He communed with nature and the coyotes one night and had a pretty tough time of it. He froze his nose partially off, and the coyotes came and gnawed his little dimpled toes. He passed a wretched night and was greatly annoyed by the cold, which at that elevation sends the mercury toward zero all through the summer nights. Of course he pulled the zodiac partially over him, and tried to button his alapaca duster a little closer, but his sleep was troubled by the sociability of the coyotes and the midnight twitter of the mountain lion. He ate moss agates rare and spruce gum for breakfast. When he got to the camp he looked like a forty-day starvationist hunting for a job. They asked him if he found any float, and he said he didn't find a blamed drop of water, say nothing about float, and then they all laughed a merry laugh, and said that if he showed up at daylight the next morning within the limits of the park, the orders were to burn him at the stake. The next morning neither he nor the best bay mule on the Troublesome was to be seen with naked eye. After that we heard of him in the San Juan country. He had lacerated the finer feelings of the miners down there, and had violated the etiquette of San Juan, so they kicked a flour barrel out from under him one day when he was looking the other way, and being a poor tightrope performer, he got tangled up with a piece of inch rope in such a way that he died of his injuries. THE AMATEUR CARPENTER. In my opinion every professional man should keep a chest of carpenters' tools in his barn or shop, and busy himself at odd hours with them in constructing the varied articles that are always needed about the house. There is a great deal of pleasure in feeling your own independence of other trades, and more especially of the carpenter. Every now and then your wife will want a bracket put up in some corner or other, and with your new, bright saw and glittering hammer you can put up one upon which she can hang a cast-iron horse-blanket lambrequin, with inflexible water lilies sewed in it. A man will, if he tries, readily learn to do a great many such little things and his wife will brag on him to other ladies, and they will make invidious comparisons between their husbands who can't do anything of that kind whatever, and you who are "so handy."