was a vast park, thick with cactus and sage-brush, lit up here and there--but especially at the point where the canyon sets free the river on to the plain--by brilliant masses of tinted rocks or clays in level strata overlapping one another in bars of red, silver, pink, yellow and gray. With a certain sense of sadness we took a last look at these snowy summits rising out of their green crowns of pine and fir, and, bidding adieu to the wholesome hills, rode on to the grim alkali plain with the thermometer at 92 deg. And now the days of bad water had come, each spring being the nastiest, and the stuff not consoling when once down, but making new and unquenchable thirst, and leaving a vile and constant taste of magnesia and chalk. And thus, over sombre prairies and across a wicked ford--where, of course, the captain and T. got their baggage wet--and past bones of men on which were piled stones, and the man's breeches thrown over these for a shroud or as a remembrance of the shrivelled thing below being human, we followed the Nez Perces' trail, to camp at four by the broad rattling waters of Clarke. Jack reported Indians near by--indeed saw them: guessed them to be Bannocks, as Crows would have come in to beg. Sentinels were thrown out on the bluffs near us and the stock watched with redoubled care. I think every man who has camped much remembers, with a distinct vividness, the camp-fires. I recall happy hours by them in Maine and Canada and on the north shore of Lake Superior, and know, as every lover of the woods knows, how each wood has its character, its peculiar odors--even a language of its own. The burning pine has one speech, the gum tree another. One friend at least who was with me can recall our camps in Maine, Where fragrant hummed the moist swamp-spruce, And tongues unknown the cedar spoke, While half a century's silent growth Went up in cheery flame and smoke. The cottonwood burns with a rich, ruddy, abundant blaze and a faint pleasant aroma. Not an unpicturesque scene, our camp-fire, with the rough figures stretched out on the grass and the captain marching his solemn round with utterly unfatigable legs, Jack and George Houston good-humoredly chaffing, and now and again a howl responsive to the anguish of a burnt boot. He who has lived a life and never known a camp-fire is--Well, may he have that joy in the Happy Hunting-grounds!