phorescent
sea smitten by the ship's paddles. While the mind is t]ius burnished by the rolling of the ship, I have felt every throe of sea-sickness to be like the birth of a new thought, and followed by mental exaltation and ecstasy.
Whether on sea or land there were the sky and horizon, and the level-round planet floor, and the stal- wart men passing over it with their wives and little ones, and all their belongings, carrying them to new lands, as .^Eneas carried to new lands the national gods of Troy and the sacred fire of Vesta. At Green river I have seen upon a background of smoky blue, light- ening-streaked cloud-walls, glowing in their anger like a heated furnace, while from the sandy sky above the rain poured down in dusky streaks.
It might be a summer holiday or it might be misery and death. For among the wayfarers were women gaunt and ghastly, and men shrivelled and haggard and wan, the human in them devoured by hunger, leaving only the reasonless and grotesque.
Give drink to the alkaline sage-plains of Nevada, and a garden is their smile of thankfulness ; give these men gold to drink, their thirsty heart's desire, and they will rear before the world a new civilization. And this gold should be theirs ; they would achieve it; what others have done they can do; and so for the time must rest satisfied. This thirst for gold, to their deluded vision was like snow seen through the pellucid air from the sun-scorched plain, lying on the seemingly so near 3^et distant hills.
Over the treeless and birdless plains, the blistered passionless plains; over the waves of soapy ground, round the sunburnt hills, and along benches of rotten rock, then down where the tall grass borders putrid pools, and the rivers are woe-begone, discouraged and lifeless, they come at leno:th to the frownino; side of the Sierra, which they bravely assail, and reach the snowy summits mottled with green ; then dropping gently down the seaward side they find at the f
