We were full inside, and two of the outside places were occupied. The party was composed of eight gentlemen and three ladies. First came a good-humoured jovial colonel, the only colonel I met in the United States, where I must have made the acquaintance of not far short of fifty generals. He had long been on the Indian frontier, and had conducted many an expedition against them. His professional warfare being now over, he had taken to gold-mining and trading in the mountains. As he lived somewhere up on the Laramie plains, he laid his account with having a few more brushes with his old dusky friends before the time came, not now far distant, when their name would only stand for what once had been. He was still in the prime of life, as everybody is in the West. He had one child—nobody has more in the United States. There was nothing characteristic in these particulars; nor, perhaps, was there in his practice of carrying with him in his journeys a wickered magnum, and two kegs of whisky. Their contents were of different degrees of proof, and of different qualities, adapted to the varying circumstances and different hours of the day. Strength was the special merit of the magnum, which was intended for after-dinner use. It was regarded as a liqueur, or stomachic. The qualities of one keg made it suitable for the early part of the day; the qualities of the other fitted it for the evening. But it did not appear that the Colonel carried about the magnum and two kegs for his own especial benefit; for whenever we stopped for a meal, and sometimes only when horses were changed, if the interval seemed a long one, the keg with the black hoops, or the keg with the green hoops, or the magnum was taken from the boot, and everybody near was invited to ‘take a drink.’ Even the man who was changing the horses was not omitted. Could it be that the Colonel was one of the proprietors of the coach, and therefore desirous of making things as pleasant as possible to the passengers? This could not be the case, for the names of Wells and Fargo, the great American coaching firm, were on the panels. The true explanation, I believe, was that on the surface—that the Colonel had a heart as large as his head was strong, and that heaven itself would be no heaven to him if he could not share it with his friends—his friends being all those with whom at the moment he happened to be in contact. There was another point, besides that of being content with the rank of Colonel, in which he was unlike his countrymen, and that was his English aversion to the inside of a coach. [Sidenote: _In a Coach on the Plains._] The Colonel’s wife acted as cicerone of the country to the inside passengers. She knew the names of all the conspicuous mountains, and how far off they were; what accidents had ever happened on the route, and where there had been Indian fights, down to the one of last summer.