Dearly we learned to love the Platte! Dearly we learned to love the wide and shallow stream. Even if the way was dreary at times, we forgot it when passing along the river banks. "Egypt, O Commander of the Faithful, is a compound of black earth and green plants, between a pulverized mountain and a red sand." So wrote Amron, Conqueror of Egypt, to his master, the Khalif Omar. And so might then have been said of the Valley of the Platte. Day after day we trudged along, and day after day the red hills of sandstone looked down upon us, or the prairie, like the desert, stretched out its illimitable distance. The days grew into weeks, the weeks became a month, and still the cattle, freed from the yoke, hastened to slake their thirst at the well-loved stream. During that month, surely, we ate, each one of us, the peck of dirt--if sand may be classed as dirt--which every man is said to eat in his life time. It filled our eyes, too, and our ears, our nostrils. It was in the food; it sprinkled the pan-cakes; it was in the syrup that we poured over them. Half suffocated were we by it, during some night-wind, as we lay beneath our wagons. O, ye sand hills of the Platte--indeed we have cause to remember. To the Overland traveller of today, the Platte is almost unknown. But from the time we first discovered the stream, yellowed by the close of a July day, and overhung by ancient cottonwood trees, until we bade it farewell at Red Rocks, within view of Laramie Peak, it seemed, was, indeed, a friend. As on the edge of the Nile, the verdure on its banks was often the only greenness in all the landscape round. "What possible enjoyment is there in the long and dreary ride over the yellow plains," Rideing, in his "Scenery of the Pacific Railway," asks that question. "The infinite space and air does not redeem the dismal prospect of dried-up seas. The pleasures of the transcontinental journey," he goes on to say, "may be divided into ten parts, five of which consist of anticipation, one of realization, and four of retrospect." With us, at least, it was different. From the railway one is but a beholder of the scenery; but in "The Old Journey" we were partakers therein. We became acquainted with the individualities, as it were, of the way. And then how we crept from one oasis of verdure to another. In the simple scenic combines, too, of the river, rock and trees, what change! But the railway did not follow our devious course.