the miner and myself would have revolver practice at the skeletons and telegraph-posts when sage fowl failed us, and rattlesnakes grew scarce. After all, it is easy to speak of the eccentricities of dress and manner displayed by Western men, but Eastern men and Europeans upon the plateau are not the prim creatures of Fifth Avenue or Pall Mall. From San Francisco I sent home an excellent photograph of myself in the clothes in which I had crossed the plateau, those being the only ones I had to wear till my baggage came round from Panama. The result was, that my oldest friends failed to recognize the portrait. At the foot I had written “A Border Ruffian:” they believed not the likeness, but the legend. The difficulties of dress upon these mountain ranges are great indeed. To sit one night exposed to keen frost and biting wind, and the next day to toil for hours up a mountain-side, beneath a blazing sun, are very opposite conditions. I found my dress no bad one. At night I wore a Canadian fox-fur cap, Mormon ’coon-skin gloves, two coats, and the whole of my light silk shirts. By day I took off the coats, the gloves, and cap, and walked in my shirts, adding but a Panama hat to my “fit-out.” As we began the ascent of the Pond River Range, we caught up a bullock-train, which there was not room to pass. The miner and myself turned out from the jerky, and for hours climbed alongside the wagons. I was struck by the freemasonry of this mountain travel: Bryant, the miner, had come to the end of his “solace,” as the most famed chewing tobacco in these parts is called. Going up to the nearest teamster, he asked for some, and was at once presented with a huge cake--enough, I should have thought, to have lasted a Channel pilot for ten years. The climb was long enough to give me deep insight into the inner mysteries of bullock-driving. Each of the great two-storied Californian wagons was drawn by twelve stout oxen; still, the pace was not a mile an hour, accomplished, as it seemed to me, not so much by the aid as in spite of tremendous flogging. Each teamster carried a short-handled whip with a twelve-foot leathern lash, which was wielded with two hands, and, after many a whirl, brought down along the whole length of the back of each bullock of the team in turn, the stroke being accompanied by a shout of the bullock‘s name, and followed, as it was preceded, by a string of the most explosive oaths. The favorite names for bullocks were those of noted public characters and of Mormon elders, and cries were frequent of “Ho, Brígham!” “Ho, Jóseph!” “Ho, Gránt!”--the blow falling with the accented syllable. The London Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals would find at Pond River ranch an excellent opening for a mission. The appointed officer should be supplied with two Deringers and a well-filled whisky-barrel.