Our fire scene was evidently no novelty to the Mexicans, whose lives had been spent in camping out, and who, with one cheap blanket each, for mattress and covering, slept soundly under the wagons. Across their dark, expressionless faces the flames threw fitful gleams of light, which were as unheeded as the flashes with which the Nineteenth Century endeavors to penetrate the gloom which shrouds them as a nation. While the world moves on, the degenerate descendants of Montezuma sleep. In the valley bordering our little skirt of trees we could hear the horses cropping the short, juicy buffalo grass, and trailing their lariat ropes around a circle, of which the pin was the center. Semi-Colon lay on the grass close to his father, who occupied a cracker-box seat in this tableau, the amiable son at little intervals raising his head to indorse, in his peculiar dissyllabic way, what the positive parent said. Looking at the group around me, and thinking of our evening turkey hunt, memory carried me back to the last time I had been among the trees after dark, with gun in hand, which was at the South, away down in Mississippi, just after the war. It was a lazy time, those November days. Large flocks of swans filled the air above, with their flute-like notes, and thousands of sand-hill cranes circled far up toward the sun, their bodies looking like distant bees, as from dizzy heights they croaked their approbation of the rich crops beneath them. Ducks passed like charges of grape shot, sending back shrill whistles from their wings, as they dived down into the standing corn. As night came on, the moon went up in a great rush of light, like the reflector of a railroad train mounting the sky. Soon every shadow is driven from the woods, and then the horns are tooted, the dogs howl, and away go gangs of woolly heads, old and young, in pursuit of Messrs. 'Possum and 'Coon. In vain the sly tree-fox doubles around stumps, and leaving tempting persimmon and oaks full of plumpest acorns, at the warning noise, seeks refuge among huge cypresses. On go the hunters--big dogs, little dogs, bear-teasers, and deer-hounds, sprinkled with darkeys--crashing through cane and underbrush, the human portion of the party laughing and yelling as if a tempest had stolen them ages ago from Babel, and just discharged them in pursuit of that particular 'coon. The voice of the Professor suddenly called me back to the present, and I found myself chilled by the wet grass, as if my body had been wandering with the mind in that land of cotton, and was unprepared for the northern air.