At last, after a great deal of scrambling and climbing, my shins barked, my clothes nearly torn off my back, and my eyes half scratched out by the bushes, completely blown, and suffocated with the heat, I arrived at a place where I considered that I had got over the worst of it, as the ascent seemed to become a little more practicable. I was dying of thirst, and would have given a very long price for a drink of water; but the nearest water I expected to find was at a spring about five miles off, which I had passed in the morning. I could not help thinking what a delightful thing a quart pot of Bass’s pale ale would be, with a lump of ice in it; then I thought I would prefer a sherry cobbler, but I could not drink that fast enough; and then it seemed that a quart pot of ale would not be enough, that I would like to drink it out of a bucket. I quaffed in imagination gigantic goblets, one after another, of all sorts of delicious fluids, but none of them did me any good; and so I concluded that I had better think of something else till I reached the spring. The rest of the mountain was not very hard traveling, and when once on the top of the range, I struck off in a direction which I thought would hit my old trail. I very soon got on to it, and after half an hour’s walking, I found the spring, where, as the Missourians say, “you may just bet _your_ life,” I did drink. It was about three o’clock, and I thought my safest plan was to return to the house I had started from in the morning, about six miles off, where, on my arrival, I learned that I had been misled by an Indian trail, and had traveled far out of the right direction. It was too late to make a fresh start that day, so I was doomed to pass another night here, and in the evening amused myself by sketching a train of pack-mules which had camped near the house.