‘I’m sure we shall, Cap’en. Let’s licker:’ so we adjourned to the nearest bar-room and took an ‘eye-opener,’ and so I escaped from the drayman. I drew a deep breath, and felt as if I had got clear from the claws of a grizzly bear—made for the inn as fast as I could, gobbled up a hasty breakfast, packed up my goods, and with my guide started for my camp. Often I turned and gazed anxiously over the plain, expecting I should see the drayman, his daughter Caroline, and a priest in hot pursuit; and there and then, on the Shasta plains, I should be, _nolens volens_, linked to my fair-haired partner, for a life’s cotillon! Such was my first, and such was my last, my only night in Yreka! ‘All’s well that ends well,’ and I trust the fair Caroline has as pleasant a remembrance of the Cap’en as he has of her! I found my camp all right, saddled up, and am off on my perilous journey through the wilds of Oregon. The Shasta plains are vast sandy flats, half prairie, half desert, sparsely covered with withered grass, and not a bush or tree or shrub, as far as the eye could wander, had struggled into life. ’Tis true a stunted artemisia, or wild-sage bush, had fought its way inch by inch in its struggle for existence, and looked so old, dry, and parched, that your idea was, if you laid a finger on it, it would powder up like dried herbs; but whatever had been in shape of grass, or herb, or shrub, was gone, cleared bodily and entirely away by the field-crickets. Never shall I forget this insect array. On getting well upon the plains, I found every inch of ground covered with field-crickets; they were as thick on the ground as ants on a hill; the mules could not tread without stepping on them; not an atom or vestige of vegetation remained, the ground as clear as a planed floor. It was about twenty good long miles to the next water, and straight across the sand-plains, and, for that entire distance, the crickets were as thick as ever. It is impossible to estimate the quantity; but when you suppose a space of ground twenty-seven miles long, and how wide I know not, but at least twice that, covered with crickets as thick as they could be packed, you can roughly imagine what they would have looked like if swept into a heap. It was long after sundown when we reached the water, tired, thirsty, and utterly worn-out; but the stream being wide and swift, the crickets had not crossed it, so our tired animals had a good supper, and we a comfortable camp. I rode off to some farm-enclosures I saw, in search of milk and eggs; and, to my great surprise, I noticed every field had a little tin-fence inside the _snake_ or _rail_ fence, about six or eight inches wide, nailed along on a piece of lumber, placed edgeways in the ground, so that a good wide ledge of tin projected towards the prairie. ‘What,’ I said to the first farmer I met, ‘induces you to put this tin affair round your field?’