I suppose, is when he swallows, for I have seen children getting rid of cake with the same sort of spasm. Yet the rapidity with which he shovels in his food is a wonder to me, seeing that he has not got any "pouch" like the monkey or the pelican. Does he keep his miscellaneous food in a "crop" like a pigeon, or a preliminary stomach like the cow, and "chew the cud" afterwards at his leisure? I confess I am beaten by it. The mixture of his food, if it pleases him, does not annoy me, for if a man likes to eat mouthfuls of huckleberries, bacon, apple-pie, pickled mackerel, peas, mutton, gherkins, oysters, radishes, tomatoes, custard, and poached eggs (this is a bona-fide meal copied from my note-book on the spot) in indiscriminate confusion, it has nothing to do with me. But what I want to know is, why the travelling American does not stop to chew his food; or why, as is invariably the case, he will despatch in five minutes a meal for which he has half an hour set specially apart? He falls upon his food as if he were demented with hunger, as if he were a wild thing of prey tearing victims that he hated into pieces; and when the hideous deed is done, he rushes out from the scene of massacre with a handful of toothpicks, and leans idly against the door-post, as if time were without limit or end! The whole thing is a mystery to me. When I first came into the country I used to waste many precious moments in gazing at "the fine confused feeding" of my neighbours at the table, and waiting to see them choke. But I have given that up now. I plod systematically and deliberately through my one dish, content to find myself always the last at the table, with a tumult of empty platters scattered all about me. Nothing can choke the travelling American. In the meantime, I wish that young man of Ogden would exhibit his great eating trick in London. It beats Maskelyne and Cook into fits. From Ogden northwards the road lies past perpetual cottage-farms, separated only by orchards or fields, and clustering at intervals into pleasant villages, where the people are all busy gathering in their lucerne crops. The same profusion of wild-flowers, and exquisite rose-brakes, the same abundance of bird and insect life is conspicuous. But gradually our road bears away westward from the hills, leaving cultivation and cottages to follow the line of irrigation along their lower slopes, and while to our right the narrow-gauge line runs northward up into the Cache Valley, the granary of Utah, we trend away to the left. The northern end of the Salt Lake comes in sight, and the track running for a while close to its side gives me a last look at this sheet of wonderful water.