I trust that my readers may all live to have a camp-fire experience. Permit me to tell you of one great camp-fire, near the summit of the Sierras, which lives in the memory after nearly fifty years of busy life. Our pack-train had been toiling up the mountain, hoping for a resting-place, when our scouts came and reported. Following them along winding paths which grizzlies and Indians had made, around the rugged rocks, we reached a beautiful little valley covered with luxuriant grass. We picketed our tired animals in the meadow, built a great fire of cedar logs against a marble wall straight up for a thousand feet, sang songs, sounded the bugle, and listened to the scores of echoes from the mountain peaks. But we were young and ready to enjoy nature's grand scenes.--Nowhere are they grander than in our own Western mountains. But our heroic snow-bound travelers were burdened with far too much anxiety to enjoy nature in her magnificent winter adornment. Their eyes were not upon the lofty mountain peaks, but far along unknown trails towards the nation's capital. After they had succeeded in passing the well-nigh impassable mountains, they struck a more level country with sheltered valleys having a bountiful supply of wood and good water. I have often asked myself, when pondering over these events, was it a simple accident that the old scouts reached Fort Hall that October night and turned Whitman and Lovejoy a thousand miles off their direct route? That year the snow lay unusually deep all over the great plains. Had they started and been able to have crossed the Rockies, they would have met snow-covered, treeless plains, and for weeks at a time would have had to go without fires, having to depend upon the _Bois de vache_ for fuel, which, covered deep with the snow, would have been impossible to find. This, with the lack of grass for the animals, would have made the route, not only impracticable, but nearly impossible. The scout and the old map seemed insignificant events, but yet how often they and their kind loom up in grand proportions. They may be marked by the thoughtless as mere happenings, but it is not a tax upon reason to believe that the soul attuned to listen and receive ever has a guidance higher than the wisdom of men.