Our march, no longer enlivened by merry stories or exciting narratives, had become wearisome in the extreme. The heavy fogs of the night and the great mist which arose at sunset prevented all possibility of tracing the path, which often required the greatest skill to detect, so that we were obliged to travel during the sultriest hours of the day, without a particle of shade, our feet scorched by the hot sands, and our heads constantly exposed to the risk of sunstroke. Water, too, became each day more difficult to obtain; the signs by which our guides discovered its vicinity seemed, to to me, at least, little short of miraculous; and yet if by any chance they made a mistake, the anger of the party rose so near to mutiny that nothing short of Halkett's own authority could restore order. Save in these altercations, without which rarely a day passed over, little was spoken; each trudged along either lost in vacuity or buried in his own thoughts. CHAPTER XXIII. THE PLACER As for myself, my dreamy temperament aided me greatly. I could build castles forever; and certainly there was no lack of ground here for the foundation. Sometimes I fancied myself suddenly become the possessor of immense riches, with which I should found a new colony in the very remotest regions of the West. I pictured to myself the village of my workmen, surrounded with its patches of cultivation in the midst of universal barrenness; the smiling aspect of civilized life in the very centre of barbarism; the smelting furnaces, the mills, the great refining factories, of which I had heard so much, all rose to my imagination, and my own princely abode looking down upon these evidences of my wealth. Then, I fancied the influences of education diffusing themselves among the young, who grew up with tastes and habits so different from those of their fathers. How pursuits of refinement by degrees mingled themselves with daily requirements, till at last the silent forests would echo with the exciting strains of music, or the murmuring rivulet at nightfall would be accompanied by the recited verses of poetry. The primitive simplicity of such a life as I then pictured was a perfect fascination; and when wearied with thinking of it by day, as I dropped asleep at night the thoughts would haunt my dreams unceasingly.