Sonora, or in the savage deserts of Arizona, masters only of the good steeds beneath us, and trusting only to the mercy of God and the good weapons in our hands and at our saddle-bows for the safety of our lives.
After supper we sat beneath the trees around the hospitable casa of our friend, and rehearsed the adventures and scenes of old times with a relish the stranger to wild frontier life can never know. Harry Linden is my senior by some years, and in the ordinary course of nature and civilized life should have lost his early penchant for Robinson Crusoe-like adventure; but such is the fascination of border life that I believe that at this very hour he would exchange all the comforts of the most elegant home in San Francisco or New York, and the best spring mattress ever made, for a seat by the camp-fire in Apache land, and a blanket and the warm sand of the desert for a bed,—and I am just boy enough to do the same at a moment's notice, did opportunity offer and duty permit. Sitting here under the trees in the valley of San Andreas, surrounded by appreciative friends and the enjoyments of refined society, he tells us of a long-planned expedition to the least known of the island groups of the Pacific, how one of these days he means to have his vessel rigged, manned, and provisioned for the trip; and laugh as we may at the idea of his going on such a voyage at his age, nothing will shake his earnestness in the project, or make him admit for an instant a doubt of his ultimately carrying it out successfully. This charm of danger needlessly in-
