One there was in our company who, like Phil Robinson, of travel fame, remembered the principal places along the road by the game he had shot there. Here he had dropped a mallard or a red-head; there, upon that hillside he had made havoc among a covey of rock-partridge, in that grove secured the wild turkey, or, on the banks of that stream, he had brought down a deer, and on that plain had ridden down a buffalo. A good way this, no doubt, to remember the leading features, and special places through which our journey lay; but, unlike my fellow traveller, I recall now all the good spots for bathing. O, what joy it was, after a half, or full day's experience of dust and toil to plunge into the cooling, cleansing waters of spring or stream. O, the Platte! But I must not omit my pleasure in other waters. Now I see the waves of the Elkhorn, now those of the Big and the Little Laramie; and, now, through a fringe of long-leaved arrow-wood, the cold, deep waters of Horse Shoe Creek. One day as I bathed, Spotted Tail, the famous Sioux Chieftain, and his band of five hundred braves, passed along the banks of the Platte. Open mouth I stared at the wild cavalcade, and while wading ashore, I struck my foot against, as it proved to be upon examination, a great stone battleaxe. Perhaps it once belonged, at some remote period of time, to another great chief in that famed and haughty warrior's ancestry. "A Gathering Storm"--the unbroken prairies! We are brought by this subject to grand phenomena. Heavens what piles of cloud, what solemn loneliness! The clouds--no wonder that the Indian of the plain has many a legend about them! "Gloomy and dark art thou, O chief of the mighty Omahas; Gloomy and dark as the driving cloud whose name thou hast taken." "Billowy bays of grasses ever rolling in shadow and sunshine." Magnificent! But this imperfect little sketch cannot reveal the truth, can only suggest. Nowhere are the clouds more wonderful than when over, never is solitude more impressive than in the open prairies. The clouds, the clouds! Yes, through many a twilight hour, I watched, lying upon the tufted prairie as the camp-fires died away, the clouds. Weird was the hectic flushing, the glow of the sheet lightning among the July and August cumuli. But these clouds in the sketch are filled with portent. Not only is the prairie darkened with the approach of night, but with the coming storm.