The return voyage across the Pacific was very pleasant. We had as shipmates several very agreeable Americans, among them Governor Lowe, the U. S. Minister at Peking, and Mr. Lothrop, a Boston man, who had been in business in Japan and seemed to have read almost every book that was worth reading. Governor Lowe (he had been Governor of California before entering diplomacy, and retained the title) was one of the best _raconteurs_ that I ever met. One day I asked him why it was that his stories were so incomparably better than anybody else’s. His answer was instructive. “Well, sir! I’m going to tell you. You will notice that I never tell a story about _a man_. Nobody wants to hear anything about that _man_. He isn’t a circumstance. No, sir, when I tell you a story I tell it with a name and a place, and sometimes a date. If I don’t know them I invent them. That gives the anecdote a living interest. That’s my secret, sir, and I make you a present of it.” He kept our small company very much alive for about three weeks, for he had a fine dry wit of his own besides his memory. He was going back now after having held high office to join a bank in ’Frisco. Such is America. He and Lothrop are, alas! both gone. The sister of the latter, when he died, sent me as a remembrance of him a book which he had loved, and there is at this moment, ticking away in my drawing-room, a tiny clock which he gave me when I married. The ticking of that little clock often carries me thousands and thousands of miles away into the cloud-land of memory. I found Forbes at Salt Lake City, and we determined to make a shooting excursion in the Rocky Mountains before going East. We were assured that we should have sport to our hearts’ content and we were told of a hunter and tracker beside whom Fenimore Cooper’s Pathfinder was a mere baby. The intimate secrets of the lair of the grizzly were an open book to him, and as for the lordly wapiti—well, we should see! There was no need to take any meat with us, for game would be plentiful and our larder would be so stocked that we should not know what to do with its contents. Encouraged by these grand assurances we engaged waggons and teams, and set out on our great _shikar_.