As often happens in the discipline of human life, the thorn in the flesh was withdrawn as soon as we had learned the lesson of bearing it resignedly. At the last crossing of the Sacramento, we learned from the ferryman that a providential wagoner was just ahead of us, going certainly to Dog Creek, and presumably, if we made it an object, all the way to Strawberry Valley, at the foot of Shasta. The one whose turn it was not to carry the color-box galloped ahead, and detained the wagoner until the heavy dragoon had time to come up. With a deep sigh of relief, we stowed our box in the "prairie-schooner,"--made a contract to have it packed on mule-back from Dog Creek to Shasta, in consideration of one among a gross of cheap watches which we had brought for trade with Indians and Trappers,--and, relieving our horses by the first canter they had enjoyed that day, sped away with the deep conviction that the man who first called chrome and white-lead _light_ colors must have been indulging the subtile irony of a diseased mind. The seven miles of our journey from the last Sacramento crossing to Dog Creek were even grander in their scenery than our morning stage. The road was a dug-way from one to seven hundred feet above the base of a winding castellated cliff, here and there cut in rugged sandstone, but often both walled and buttressed with steep slopes of virgin turf kept emerald by innumerable trickling springs, ice-cold and crystal-clear, while here and there it passed through woods as dark as twilight. The slope on which we travelled formed one side of a valley, green at its bottom as a New-England meadow, and watered by a picturesque affluent of the Sacramento. About dark we came to the Dog-Creek Ranch, where we had such a delicious supper of trout, cooked in the good old Green-Mountain fashion with an Indian-meal night-gown on, as made us "forget the steps already trod," followed by a really nice _pair_ of beds, wherein we took long and ample preparation to "onward urge our way" upon the morrow.