I am not prepared to say why the little river was called Purgatory. For the most part the country was good enough--lovely, even; and sometimes grand. One or two days seemed rather purgatorial though, come to think of it. On one occasion we passed through steep, barren hills, strewn all over with little cylindrical pieces of iron, that looked exactly as though they had been melted in that place just below purgatory, and thrown up here to cool. Another day we marched along the bed of a river, over boulders from three to six feet high; if _we_ did not think it purgatory, the horses and mules certainly did. But the worst day of all remained. It broke at last--the dreaded day in which the Raton Pass was to be attempted. The horrors of the Pass, however, must have been less vivid in the eyes of the general than in the minds of the ladies belonging to his command; for, contrary to all hopes and expectations, he allowed none of the married officers to remain with the carriages. It was a "steep" pass, undeniably. To this day I have not forgotten the sound of the grating of the wheels on the bare, unmitigated rock, as the carriage made ascents and descents that were truly miraculous--one wheel pointing heavenward sometimes, while the other three were wedged in below; scraping along a rock wall, bounding from rock to rock, with the pleasant prospect, on the other side, of a launch from a jagged, well-deep precipice, into eternity. The crowning point to our terror, and to the grandeur of the scene, was a fearfully inclined plane of solid rock, with a frowning bank on one side, a gaping drop-off on the other, and a dark, heavy wall rising square in front of us; against which, to all appearances, the mules must dash their brains out, for neither bit nor brake was of the least avail on this road. Just where the crash against the wall seemed inevitable, there was a narrow curve, and the road ran on in spite of the seeming impossibility. True to the saying, that there is but a step from the sublime to the ridiculous, I fell to laughing here, so that Melville turned in surprise to see whether fear and terror had robbed me of my sober senses; but I had seen in passing, painted on that dreadful wall of frowning rock, the cabalistic words and signs: "Old Cabin Bitters; S---- T---- 1860 ---- X----;" and below this, "Brandreth's Vegetable Pills."