pounds of bacon, flour, beans, blasting-powder, picks and shovels in it; we bought two sorry-looking Mexican “plugs,” with the hair turned the wrong way and more corners on their bodies than there are on the mosque of Omar; we hitched up and started.  It was a dreadful trip.  But Oliver did not complain.  The horses dragged the wagon two miles from town and then gave out.  Then we three pushed the wagon seven miles, and Oliver moved ahead and pulled the horses after him by the bits.  We complained, but Oliver did not.  The ground was frozen, and it froze our backs while we slept; the wind swept across our faces and froze our noses.  Oliver did not complain.  Five days of pushing the wagon by day and freezing by night brought us to the bad part of the journey—­the Forty Mile Desert, or the Great American Desert, if you please.  Still, this mildest-mannered man that ever was, had not complained.  We started across at eight in the morning, pushing through sand that had no bottom; toiling all day long by the wrecks of a thousand wagons, the skeletons of ten thousand oxen; by wagon-tires enough to hoop the Washington Monument to the top, and ox-chains enough to girdle Long Island; by human graves; with our throats parched always, with thirst; lips bleeding from the alkali dust; hungry, perspiring, and very, very weary—­so weary that when we dropped in the sand every fifty yards to rest the horses, we could hardly keep from going to sleep—­no complaints from Oliver:  none the next morning at three o’clock, when we got across, tired to death.

Awakened two or three nights afterward at midnight, in a narrow canon, by the snow falling on our faces, and appalled at the imminent danger of being “snowed in,” we harnessed up and pushed on till eight in the morning, passed the “Divide” and knew we were saved.  No complaints.  Fifteen days of hardship and fatigue brought us to the end of the two hundred miles, and the Judge had not complained.  We wondered if any thing could exasperate him.  We built a Humboldt house.  It is done in this way.  You dig a square in the steep base of the mountain, and set up two uprights and top them with two joists.  Then you stretch a great sheet of “cotton domestic” from the point where the joists join the hill-side down over the joists to the ground; this makes the roof and the front of the mansion; the sides and back are the dirt walls your digging has left.  A chimney is easily made by turning up one corner of the roof.  Oliver was sitting alone in this dismal den, one night, by a sage-brush fire, writing poetry; he was very fond of digging poetry out of himself —­or blasting it out when it came hard.  He heard an animal’s footsteps close to the roof; a stone or two and some dirt came through and fell by him.  He grew uneasy and said “Hi!—­clear out from there, can’t you!” —­from time to time.  But by and by he fell asleep where he sat, and pretty soon a mule fell down the chimney!  The fire flew