At this point, Dick rolled over upon the grass, and the major was doubled up as with sudden pain. As for myself, I confess I could not restrain my emotions. I had been through the same experience as had fallen to my guest, and I appreciated the sanguine characteristics of his temperament, which prompted him to the investment, and the humor of the situation. I laughed till my eyes flowed with tears, and the stillness of the foot-hills resounded with the unrestrained merriment of the entire camp. The humor of our guest was truly American, the humor of suggestive restraint and exaggeration both. He narrated his experiences, which had resulted in the loss of his fortune and the collapse of his hopes, with a face like a deacon's, and with a quaint and most charming sense of the ludicrousness of the position--a position of which he himself was the cause and central object. He fairly represented that type of men who combine in their composition that which is most practical and imaginative alike; whose energy can subdue a continent, and whose boastfulness would awaken contempt if it were not palliated by the magnitude of their achievements. A humor that is often barbed, but which is most willingly directed against one's self; but, whether directed against the humorist or his neighbor, carries no poison upon its point and leaves no wound to rankle. "My financial condition," said our guest, resuming, "my financial condition at the time I made this final investment contributed to the hopefulness of my mood, and made me feel the excitement of a reckless speculation, for, though my two cows only cost me seventeen dollars and fifty cents each, nevertheless, when the purchase was concluded, and the goods delivered, and I had made a careful inventory of my remaining assets,--a business proceeding which the average Texan found it necessary to go through about once in two weeks, in order that he might know what his financial standing was, or whether he had any standing at all,--when, I say, the purchase was consummated, and an inventory of my remaining assets made, I discovered that the two cows had swallowed up nearly my entire estate, and that a few dollars of farther expenditure would plunge me into bottomless insolvency. I must confess that this disclosure of my financial condition added zest to the undertaking, and filled me with that fine excitement which accompanies a desperate speculation. I have always felt that another cow would have made a financier of me, and that I could have taken my place among my brethren in Wall Street without a tremor of the muscles or the least sense of inferiority.