Leaving to our north a snowy range--nameless here, but marked on European maps as the East Humboldt--we reached the foot of the Ruby Valley Mountains on the Sunday afternoon in glowing sunshine, and crossed them in a snow-storm. In the night we journeyed up and down the Diamond or Quartz Range, and morning found us at the foot of the Pond Chain. At the ranch--where, in the absence of elk, we ate “bacon,” and dreamt we breakfasted--I chatted with an agent of the Mail Company on the position of the ranchmen, divisible, as he told me, into “cooks and hostlers.” The cooks, my experience had taught me, were the aptest scholars, the greatest politicians; the hostlers, men of war and completest masters of the art of Western swearing. The cooks had a New England cut; the hostlers, like Southerners, wore their hair all down their backs. I begged an explanation of the reason for the marked distinction. “They are picked,” he said, “from different classes. When a boy comes to me and asks for something to do, I give him a look, and see what kind of stuff he‘s made of. If he‘s a gay duck out for a six-weeks’ spree, I send him down here, or to Bitter Wells; but if he‘s a clerk or a poet, or any such sorter fool as that, why then I set him cooking; and plaguy good cooks they make, as you must find.” The drivers on this portion of the route are as odd fellows as are the ranchmen. Wearing huge jack-boots, flannel shirts tucked into their trowsers, but no coat or vest, and hats with enormous brims, they have their hair long, and their beards untrimmed. Their oaths, I need hardly say, are fearful. At night they wrap themselves in an enormous cloak, drink as much whisky as their passengers can spare them, crack their whips, and yell strange yells. They are quarrelsome and overbearing, honest probably, but eccentric in their ways of showing it. They belong chiefly to the mixed Irish and German race, and have all been in Australia during the gold rush, and in California before deep sinking replaced the surface diggings. They will tell you how they often washed out and gambled away a thousand ounces in a month, living like Roman emperors, then started in digging-life again upon the charity of their wealthier friends. They hate men dressed in “biled shirts,” or in “store clothes,” and show their aversion in strange ways. I had no objection myself to build fires and fetch wood; but I drew the line at going into the sage-brush to catch the mules, that not being a business which I felt competent to undertake. The season was advanced, the snows had not yet reached the valleys, which were parched by the drought of all the summer, feed for the mules was scarce, and they wandered a long way. Time after time we would drive into a station, the driver saying, with strange oaths, “Guess them mules is clared out from this here ranch; guess they is into this sage-brush;” and it would be an hour before the mules would be discovered feeding in some forgotten valley. Meanwhile