PRAIRIE FROM CHICAGO TO OMAHA—PLAINS FROM NORTH PLATTE TO THE
MOUNTAINS—OMAHA, THE INTERSECTION OF THE PACIFIC RAILWAY AND THE
MISSOURI—TEMPORARY BRIDGE OVER THE MISSOURI—INDIFFERENCE TO RISKS
AFFECTING LIFE—A PRAIRIE FIRE—THE FOREST ON THE MOUNTAINS ON FIRE—FIRE
THE CAUSE OF THE TREELESSNESS OF THE PRAIRIES—FIRST-FOUND ANIMAL
LIFE ABOUNDING IN THE VALLEY OF THE PLATTE—‘THE HARDEST PLACE, SIR,
ON THIS CONTINENT’—ITS PREDECESSOR—HOW IT IS POSSIBLE TO ESTABLISH
LYNCH LAW AT SHYENNE—MY FIRST NIGHT IN SHYENNE—A SECOND NIGHT AT
SHYENNE—NECESSITY AND ADVANTAGES OF LYNCH LAW—‘THE USE OF THE
PISTOL’—A MAN SHOT BECAUSE ‘HE MIGHT HAVE DONE SOME MISCHIEF’—NEWNESS
OF ASPECTS BOTH OF SOCIETY AND OF NATURE.
I left Chicago for the Rocky Mountains at 3 P. M. Twice the day wore
out, and twice the night came down on the prairie, and twice the sun
rose from the level horizon as it were out of the sea; and the third
night was closing in upon us, before the iron horse, that never tires,
could bring us to the farther side of the land-ocean, here 1,000 miles
wide. And such is the scale of all alike, of plains and valleys, of
rivers, forests, lakes and mountains, in the United States.
In this journey we crossed the Mississippi at Fulton, by a covered
wooden bridge a mile in length, the Missouri at Omaha, and the north
fork of the Platte, at a place called North Platte, by a bridge that
appeared to be about half a mile long.
[Sidenote: _The Prairie to Omaha._]
As far as Omaha—that is, for the first 500 miles—and then again for
some distance beyond Omaha, the prairie is generally of a deep black
soil, capable of producing most abundant crops of anything. The first
300 miles is all settled. The remainder is taken up and partially
settled, of course more closely in the neighbourhood of Omaha, and
none of it can now be had in lots contiguous to the railway at less
than thirty dollars an acre. This will give some conception of the
inexhaustible agricultural wealth of the United States.
As the Platte is approached, you enter on the dry prairie, where there
is not sufficient rain to admit of cultivation. There is, however,
abundance of the finest grass for sheep and cattle, and this continues
for 300 miles more to the foot of the mountains. This dry region is
called ‘The Plains.’
Of all the astonishing sights in this land of surprises, none takes one
more by surprise than the town of Omaha. At home we have been taught
to regard Chicago as the extremity of civilisation, and therefore
as one of the wonders of the world. But when you have turned your
back on Chicago, and been borne away into the western prairie by the
locomotive for 500 miles, you find that you have reached a thriving
town, of brick buildings and large hotels, containing now 16,000
inhabitants, and which is destined to become—probably in a very few
years—a second Chicago. For, being on the Pacific Railway, the grandest
of all railways, as well as on that grandest of all arterial lines of
water-communication, the Missouri, which is navigable for a thousand
miles beyond the town for the same steamer that might have ascended
the stream from New Orleans, it must soon become the depôt for the
two greatest lines of American traffic—that between the East and the
West, and that between the North and the South, which will cross here.
It does not appear possible that anything can arise to prevent its
expanding, with a rapidity unexampled even in America, into one of the
great commercial centres of this vast and rich continent.
During the summer the Missouri had been crossed by a steam-ferry. But
to save a little time in the transit, and the trouble of keeping a
passage for the ferry free from ice during the winter, the railway had
been carried across the river, as soon as the frost became severe, on
two rows of piles, which rose only a few inches above the surface of
the ice. This was merely intended for the three or four months during
which it would be buttressed and strengthened by the ice. As soon
as that should begin to break up, it would be swept away. In going
westward, the train I was in was made to traverse it at a snail’s
pace, for fear of shaking it to pieces, but even with this caution it
wavered and groaned alarmingly. On returning some weeks afterwards,
when the ice was hourly expected to break up, the train I recrossed
it in was the last that used it. Again we traversed it, at a snail’s
pace, feeling our way as we went; again we heard the creaking, and
saw the bending and swaying of the rickety fabric, many fearing that
this last journey would be the one too many, and that it would not
be swept away by the ice, but shaken to pieces by use. In no other
country would so reckless a disregard of risks, imperilling life, be
tolerated. But here neither the public, nor the contrivers of these
risks, nor the possible or actual sufferers by them, appear to give
these matters a thought; or, if they do, they probably regard them from
the commercial point of view—that it would be hard to interfere with
anyone who was endeavouring to make money, and that the public ought
to be left to decide for themselves whether it is, or is not, worth
their while to run the risks to which they are invited. The day after I
left Cincinnati, the ‘Magnolia’ steamer blew up, and more than eighty
lives were lost. About the same time some terrific railway accidents
occurred; but, as far as I could judge, no one seemed to think that on
these occasions blame could attach to anyone.
[Sidenote: _Prairie Fires._]
At a distance of about sixty miles from Omaha, on the second night
of my journeying through the prairie, I saw it on fire. It was on
the right-hand side to one going westward, and did not reach up to
the rails within a mile or two. The front of the fire, as we passed
along it, was a line of five or six miles. The flames had not an
uniform appearance. In slight depressions, where moisture hung longer,
and therefore the grass and prairie plants were thick and high, the
flames rose about fifteen feet; but where the blazing had subsided,
the smouldering remains of plants that had more substance than the
rest, appeared like rows of stars. There was smoke visible only where
there was much flame, and the lazy masses of smoke were illuminated
by the glare of the flames beneath. As in one place there was
something burning above the general level, we supposed that it was the
dwelling-house of some prairie settler that was being destroyed.
I also, during four days, saw the pine and poplar forest, on the
mountain above the town of Boulder, on fire. I was not so near to this
as I had been to the prairie fire; but it did not strike me, judging
however from a distance, that its effects were grander. There seemed a
great deal more smoke than flame, which streamed off down the wind like
large bodies of cloud. I heard, however, that sometimes the appearance
of the forest burning on the mountains was very grand. I observed,
wherever I penetrated into the Rocky Mountains, that a great part of
the wood had been destroyed in this way. The fire generally occurs
through the carelessness of persons who are camping out. The waste of
valuable timber is thus enormous.
As one passes over the prairie, the conviction becomes irresistible
that fire is the sole cause of the absence of trees. The prairie was
once covered with trees, because when fire is kept off by cultivation,
and the earth loosened by the plough, so as to admit light and air to
a greater depth than before, young trees at once appear. Of course
the parent trees must, at some time or other, have grown on the spot.
All the seeds that were sufficiently near the undisturbed surface to
germinate had germinated, and the young plants that issued from them
had been destroyed by fire. Those seeds which chance had buried more
deeply waited for the aid of man to give proof of their presence in the
soil.
[Sidenote: _Animal Life on the Plains._]
Again, both forest and fruit trees, when planted by the hand of man,
thrive well in the prairie, if only fire be kept from them. And
wherever in the prairie, as on the rocky faces of bluffs, or the banks
of streams, fire cannot reach, on account of the absence of sufficient
grass and undergrowth to convey it, trees—as pines, oaks, willows, and
poplars—abound. The great accumulations of black vegetable mould are to
be accounted for in the same way; they are formed out of the burnt and
half-burnt vegetable matter left by the annual fires of no one can tell
how long a period. In the valley of the Platte, this vegetable mould
appears to have been carried away by the stream, which has ever been
shifting its channel from side to side, between the bluffs which bound
the valley—in so doing floating off the lighter portions of the soil,
and leaving sand and gravel only in its deserted beds.
On the dry prairie between Omaha and the mountains I saw, for the first
time, some of the _feræ naturæ_ of America in abundance. Hitherto
I had frequently observed that there was almost a total absence of
animal life from the roadside. I could count up the rare occasions on
which I had seen either bird or beast. I had twice seen colonies of
a social crow resembling our rook. In Georgia I had seen two birds,
one about the size of a thrush, and the other rather smaller than a
sparrow. In Alabama I had seen some wild deer and wild ducks. In a
journey of several thousand miles I had seen no other wild four-footed
or feathered creature. I had attributed the deficiency of the latter
partly to the severity of American winters, which had taught them
migratory habits, and partly to the sparseness of the population
in the Southern States; for though it is true that the presence of
civilised man is incompatible with the existence of some species,
yet there are other species to which man, by his cultivation of the
ground, and as it were by the crumbs that fall from his table, becomes
the chief purveyor, and whose numbers therefore increase almost in
proportion to the degree in which a country becomes settled. But
here, on this arid plain, and in mid-winter, neither naturalist nor
sportsman could have had anything to complain of. Animal life was in
abundance. In the course of one day I saw from the windows of the car
three herds of antelopes (in one of which I counted thirty-eight), two
wolves, prairie-fowl in great numbers, plenty of a species of bird
resembling our English lark, several hawks, and innumerable colonies
of prairie-dogs. As their villages are frequently at a distance from
water, these agile and amusing little animals are supposed to be
capable of living without drinking. I saw nothing of the owls and
rattlesnakes who have been admitted by the prairie-dogs to a joint
tenancy of their subterranean homes. Doubtless, if one were to examine
on foot the banks of the river, and the rocky bluffs that bound the
valley, my small list might easily be made a large one. The valley was
strewed for hundreds of miles with the bones of the buffalo, and marked
with the still unobliterated basins which showed the spot in which he
had rolled himself in the dry sandy soil on coming up out of the water
of the Platte. Experience corrects the common error that animal life in
any district will be found in proportion to the vigour of its vegetable
life. Nowhere is vegetation more vigorous than in the mighty forests of
South America and Western Africa, but they are very far from abounding
in animal life. On the contrary, vegetable life is poor and scanty in
Southern Africa, and nowhere in the world is there so great a number
of species and of individuals of the larger quadrupeds. Something
similar is observable in the dry valley of the Platte, the obvious
requirement being not abundance of vegetation, but enough of that kind
of vegetation the animals require, and either that kind of covert, or
such an absence of covert, as shall most conduce to their security.
[Sidenote: _‘Hardest Place, Sir, on this Continent.’_]
Frequently, when I had mentioned my intention of going to the Rocky
Mountains by way of Omaha and Denver, I had been cautioned against
Shyenne city—‘Sir, it is the hardest place on this continent;’ by
which was meant that it contained a choicer collection of hardened
villains, and a larger proportion of them to its population, than
any other place, and that, in consequence, it was harder there than
anywhere else to keep out of a scrape. It is called Shyenne, because
nine months before I was there, at which time it had three thousand
inhabitants, the Chien or Dog Indians had scalped a white man on what
was then the open prairie, but is now the site of the city. Nine months
had sufficed for building and peopling the city. City on the Plains may
mean a single house. At a place called ‘La Park,’ where there was but
one wooden shanty, I heard a gentleman ask its proprietor ‘if anyone
was then talking about building a second house in that city?’ Shyenne
city is built entirely of wood. There is no company that will insure
any goods or houses in the place. What so suddenly called it into
existence was the opening of the Pacific Railway to this point. Here,
then, everyone coming from the Pacific and Ultramontane States takes
the rail for the East, and everyone leaving the rail for one of those
States takes his place in one of Wells and Fargo’s coaches. There are
therefore people always arriving from both directions, with plenty of
money. It is also the natural rendezvous (as there is nothing behind it
for five hundred miles back to Omaha) for all those who are employed
beyond it in the construction of the railway through the mountains,
to spend their money at, and for many too of the gold-washers and
gold-miners from the mountains. All these are the birds of passage of
the place; but they it is who attract the two classes of permanent
inhabitants, if such a word is suitable to any residents in a town only
nine months old. Of these two classes one is respectable, the other
not. The respectable class is that of the tradesmen; the one that is
not consists of the rowdies, gamblers, and desperadoes, who have always
formed the scum and dirt on the top of the foremost wave of advancing
civilisation in America, and which that wave has now borne on to this
place, and thrown them into it all together.
[Sidenote: _‘Hardest Place, Sir, on this Continent.’_]
The same causes, in the winter of 1866-67, made a place called
Julesburg, about one hundred and fifty miles back from Shyenne, the
point at which for the time extreme rowdyism, but of a lower class
and on a smaller scale, was concentrated. Being then the extreme
point of the Pacific Railway, the teamsters, freighters, and their
hangers-on, and those from the neighbourhood who join such gatherings,
were all here collected together. A town of waggon corals and wooden
houses was soon formed in this way, containing about one thousand
inhabitants—almost all men, and almost all reckless and violent
characters. I asked a man who was himself connected with the freighting
business, and had been part of last winter at Julesburg, how things had
gone on at the place, and how order had been maintained? He said that
at first no attempt at all was made to have things right, but that
when it began to be known as a hell upon earth—almost every day two or
three men being murdered or killed in rows—a few policemen were sent.
They did not, however, prove of the slightest use, for they were quite
unable to arrest anybody, or to hinder anything. If they had made the
attempt, they would have been shot as readily as anyone else. When I
was at the spot in February 1868, not a trace of the Julesburg of the
previous year remained. Everything, both houses and men, had moved on
to Shyenne. A prairie station on the railway alone marked the place
where the town had been.
The difference between last year’s and this year’s headquarters of
rowdyism arises out of the better chance Shyenne has, as it is situated
at the foot of the mountains, of maintaining a permanent existence,
and if so of rapidly becoming a flourishing place of business. This
has attracted to it a large number of storekeepers, who of course
set up, as soon as they were strong enough to do so, the reign of
vigilance committees and lynch law. In such places these are the means
universally adopted for enforcing honesty and order.
[Sidenote: _‘Hardest Place, Sir, on this Continent.’_]
I reached Shyenne a little after dark. Having been fully warned of the
character of the place, I had taken the precaution of enquiring what
were the names of the two least rowdy hotels. The moment the train
reached the station, I was off, bag in hand, for the first chance of a
bed-room. On my asking, at the larger of the two, for a room I might
occupy alone, I was told they had no such accommodation. I then went
on to the other, where the same answer was given to the same enquiry.
I was determined not to take the chances of a night with a Shyenne
desperado, so I again sallied forth in search of a lodging—this time,
however, not knowing where to turn. At last my from-house-to-house
investigation brought me to a wooden structure, on which were painted
the words ‘The Wyoming House.’ It was far from having an inviting look:
in fact it had more the appearance of a drinking-booth than of a place
where one could find a bed-room. But as it was the only house I had
seen (hotels are here all called houses), I thought the best thing I
could do would be to go to some tradesman, and take my chance of his
telling me whether it was, or was not, a safe place. A chemist, it
appeared to me, would be as little likely as any to be dependent on the
rowdies; so I entered the first shop of that kind I could see, to make
the enquiry. If I had looked in through the window, I should certainly
not have opened the door; for the first object that met my eyes was a
rough, lying on the ground in front of the stove. His hair and beard
appeared not to have been combed for months, and by his side was lying
a gigantic mastiff. But, as it was too late to recede, I turned to the
chemist—a youth apparently of less than twenty years of age, who was
seated on the counter—and put my enquiry to him. ‘Wall, stranger,’ he
said, taking his cigar from his mouth, and speaking very deliberately,
‘if it is a night when they have got no dance—for they give a dance
twice a-week to the ladies and gentlemen of the city—I calculate you
may get through; but if it is a dancing night, I calculate you will
do better outside.’ On looking in, and finding that it was not a
dancing night, I applied for and was shown to a bed-room. On entering,
however, I observed that the lock of the door had been lately forced,
for it was hanging loose by a single nail. In a house that admitted of
such proceedings, I declined to take a room the door of which could
not be locked. After making some difficulties, the attendant showed me
to another room. On entering it I turned the key, and as it appeared
to act properly, I told him it would do, and took possession. But on
attempting to get the bolt of the lock into the doorpost, I found that
things were not so square as that it could be done in a moment, some
violence having been used against this door also. While I was ‘fixing’
this matter, which I eventually succeeded in doing, I fancied I heard
men and women gambling in the next room a great deal too distinctly;
and on looking in that quarter I saw a considerable hole in the wall,
which admitted of anyone observing from the next room what I was about.
This I stopped up with a Chicago newspaper I happened to have with me.
My last thought was to ascertain whether the window which opened at the
head of my bed had any fastening, and whether one could escape through
it in case of a fire—a matter that must always be attended to in these
wooden towns. I found that it opened into a back courtyard; that it had
no fastening of any kind; and that one might open it from the outside
with a single finger. I did not like this, nor anything that I had seen
in the house; but as Judge Lynch had hung up two men in the main street
of the town only a few nights before, I thought that all the good
effect had probably not yet evaporated, and so was soon asleep. The
next morning, when I offered payment, the landlord demurred accepting
it immediately, and beckoning to one of his men, sent him off to see if
all was right. On the man’s returning, and giving him a nod, he took
my money. I asked what was the meaning of this. ‘Oh,’ he replied, ‘it
is not the custom to settle accounts here till you are sure that none
of your blankets have been made away with in the night through the
window.’ Blankets here are hard to get, and of some value for camping
out.
I passed part of another night at Shyenne, on my return from the
mountains. The coach reached the chief hotel of the place at three
o’clock in the morning. I had expected at that hour to find things
tolerably quiet; but on entering, I had to pass, first some people in a
state of riotous drunkenness at the bar; then about twenty men sitting
or sleeping round the stove; and, lastly, a parcel of people playing
and rowing at two billiard-tables. Beyond all these was the clerk’s
counter. On entering my name, and asking whether I could have a room to
myself, I was assured that I could.
‘Give me a receipt, then,’ I said, ‘for my bag and rug, and let me be
shown to my room.’
‘Is there any other passenger on board the coach?’ the clerk enquired.
[Sidenote: _‘Hardest Place, Sir, on this Continent.’_]
I told him there was one. He asked me to wait till he had come in,
and then the boy—the new name for manservant—would only have to make
one journey in showing us to our rooms. I assented. At last the other
passenger came in, and the clerk gave his instructions to the boy.
In doing this I observed that he only gave him one key, from which
I instantly inferred that I was done, and was only to have, after
all, a part of a room; but I decided to submit, for there were only
three hours to be passed in bed, and my fellow-passenger was a highly
respectable storekeeper of Denver; and if I had gone out of the hotel,
at that hour of the morning, with my luggage in my hand, all the
rowdies about the billiard-tables, the stove, and the bar, would have
known that I was going in search of a lodging, and some might perhaps
have followed me out. But on the boy’s opening the door, and setting
down the lamp, while he said, ‘Gentlemen, here is your apartment,’ I
was no longer equal to the occasion; for now I saw—the possibility of
which had never before crossed my mind—that I was expected to occupy
the same bed with another man; and I gave vent to my indignation by
observing, ‘that it was really too bad to be billeted off to half a
bed, when I had been promised a room to myself.’ ‘As to the room to
yourself,’ replied the boy, ‘I know nothing about that, and the thing
is passed; but it is very unreasonable in you to complain about having
half a bed, when it is a bed that is intended to hold three people.’
I asked my fellow-passenger not to regard it as anything personal that
I was unable to occupy the same bed as himself, telling him that I
would lie down in my clothes. Our first care, however, was to arrange
what we should do in case of fire, for part of the house we were in
had been in flames only a few nights before. In such a place sleep was
impossible. Our room was exactly over the kitchen, and the floor having
been made originally of unseasoned wood, the heat had shrunk it, so
that there were gaps everywhere. Through these came up all night from
the kitchen the effluvium of beefsteaks and onions, which were being
cooked incessantly for the gamblers, who would themselves have kept
anyone awake with the noise they made, the chief part of it consisting
of the most ingenious and horrible oaths one ever heard, or will ever
hear, as swearing is everywhere else becoming obsolete. On coming
down, a little after six, for the seven-o’clock train, I found a few
persons still drunk about the bar; and all the rest of those I had seen
three hours before were now asleep on the floor, on chairs, or on the
billiard-tables. These are persons who do not care for beds, or who
would rather spend the price of them in drinking and gambling.
[Sidenote: _Lynch Law and the Pistol._]
I mentioned that in my first night at Shyenne, I calculated on the
effect two recent lynch-law executions would have in keeping things
quiet for a season. About that time I heard of five other executions of
the same kind in that neighbourhood. There are people who denounce this
method of maintaining order, but they do so without understanding the
circumstances. At all events, a man has been known to exclaim loudly
against it in New England, and before he had been in the West a month,
to join a vigilance committee. The fact is that the ordinary method
of administering law is quite impracticable in a place where you can
get no policemen, no constables, no lawyers, no juries, no jails, no
judges; and where, if it were possible to get the apparatus of justice,
it would be next to impossible to work it. Some one or other would be
bribed, or some flaw would be established in the evidence, and there
would be time and opportunity enough, in one way or another, for the
escape of the prisoner. Instead of this, here is a system which has
no officers or jails, which costs nothing, and is very terrifying to
evildoers by the rapidity and certainty with which it acts, and the
mystery with which it is involved. It would be a very unnecessary and
evil system in a settled community, but where none of the ordinary
appliances of law are possible, and where at the same time all the
scum of the great world behind is concentrated, it is a necessity, and
a highly beneficial one. It does really what Napoleon III. claims to
have done for France: it saves society, which without it would cease
to exist, for it would be overwhelmed by these reckless and desperate
characters. Everyone in America knows how completely in California
it got rid of all the disorderly and dangerous elements which were
collected there in such force, that it would have been quite hopeless
to have attempted to deal with them in any other way. Just so, again,
it was at Denver, a town on this side the mountains, of eight thousand
inhabitants, now as orderly and well-disposed as any other eight
thousand persons anywhere to be found. Four or five years ago Denver
was what Shyenne is now. But lynch law has purified it, and in a way in
which ordinary law has never purified any community in the world. All
the rogues and violent fellows have been hanged, and all the suspected
have been made to clear out. There are now no other such eight thousand
souls in any part of the Old States. A man who knows both would rather
leave his baggage out all night in the street at Denver than in any
city of New England. This is the state into which a community has been
brought when lynch law hands it over to ordinary law.
But lynch law is only half the system. It is always accompanied by
something else, which I have heard described as ‘the use of the
pistol.’ This has, from the first, been maintained in America long
after Judge Lynch has retired from the scene. It is still not unknown
in Washington and New York. But in the ever-advancing frontier of
civilisation, it has all along been in active operation. Every man in
the West goes always armed. And it is one of the most imperative of
the laws of Western society, that, if a man insults you in any way,
you are bound then and there to shoot him dead. Society requires you
to do it, and if you do not, you will be shot yourself; for the man
who has insulted you, supposing that you can only be waiting for an
opportunity, will think it better to be beforehand with you. This is
their substitute for the old European law of duelling, which required
that if a man insulted you, you should give him a chance of shooting
you also. The Western plan is that you should shoot him. It is enforced
too by the same kind of social considerations, and attended by the same
immunities, and its object is the same—to oblige men, at the peril of
their lives, to behave themselves discreetly and politely.
[Sidenote: _‘He might have done some Mischief.’_]
The following incident was told me by a thoroughly credible eyewitness:
it will show how cheaply society holds, in this part of the world, the
lives of its troublesome members. A dozen or more men were seated,
drinking and smoking and yarning, in front of the bar of a Shyenne
hotel. One of the troublesome class, in whom whisky was just then
overcoming discretion, took out his revolver, and, flourishing it
about, announced that everyone present had to acknowledge that he was
the finest fellow in the world. Just as he said this two gentlemen
came in, and, not knowing what was passing, walked up to the bar,
close to where the swaggerer was seated. This took off his attention
from the rest of the company, for he now turned to the newcomers, and
pointing his pistol at the one nearest to him, told him to make the
acknowledgment. The gentleman, finding himself taken at a disadvantage,
and thinking it most likely that, if he put his hand behind him for
his pistol, he should, while doing so, be shot by the tipsy desperado,
began to do as he was required. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you are a monstrous
fine fellow; I had no idea there were such fine fellows out here.’
While he was saying this, his companion took his own pistol from its
sling behind him, put it to the swaggerer’s head, and blew out his
brains. As the man fell to the ground, and he deliberately replaced
his pistol, he said, by way not so much of explanation as of comment,
‘That chap might have done some mischief.’ Not another remark was
made or word spoken on the occasion. Those who were in favour of
order said nothing, as they approved of what had been done; while
those who belonged to the troublesome class were also silent, because
they thought it wiser not to show their colours. When it suited the
manager’s convenience, he sent one of the boys of the hotel to dig a
hole in the prairie for the corpse; and with that the matter ended.
Having breakfasted at six, I was out at the first dawn, and again, as
I frequently did afterwards, saw the sun rise on the prairie. Till
he was above the horizon, and it was full day, it was impossible to
distinguish the prairie from the sea. The same effect is also at times
during the day observable. In the morning I even saw something like
rippling waves on the surface, resulting, I suppose, from the way in
which the level rays struck upon the little inequalities of the foot
or two of haze that rested on the ground. At a distance of forty or
fifty miles the snowy range was already tinted with light, while the
lower intervening ranges were still black masses. The aspects of human
society, as well as of outward nature, are here so unlike anything
with which the English traveller is familiar at home, that he is ever
feeling conscious that new pictures are being added to the furniture of
his mind.