Roughing It

ed across the continent from St. Joe to Sacramento, carrying letters nineteen hundred miles in eight days! Think of that for per

on duty. He rode fifty miles without stopping, by daylight, moonlight, starlight, or through the blackness of darkness-just as it happened. He rode a splendid horse that was born for a racer and fed and lodged like a gentleman; kept him at his utmost speed for ten miles, and then, as he came crashing up to the station where stood two men holding fast a fresh, impatient steed, the transfer of rider and mail-bag was made in the twinkling of an eye, a

k of a child's primer. They held many and many an important business chapter and newspaper letter, but these were written on paper as airy and thin as gold-leaf, nearly, and thus bulk and weight were economized. The stage- coach traveled about a hundred to a hundred and twenty-five miles a day (twenty-four hours), the pony-rider about two hundre

to streak by in the night, and so we heard only a whiz and a hail, and the swift phantom of the desert was gone before we could get our he

HE C

cross the endless dead level of the prairie a black speck appears aga

more and more sharply defined-nearer and still nearer, and the flutter of the hoofs comes faintly to the ear-another instant a whoop and a hurrah from our

foam left quivering and perishing on a mail-sack after the vision had flashed by and dis

had added it to our list of things which we had seen and some other people had not. In a small way we were the same sort of simpletons as those who climb unnecessarily the perilous peaks of Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn, and derive no pleasure from it except the reflection that it isn't a common experience. But once in a while one of those parties trips and comes darting down the long mountain-crags in a sitting posture, making the crusted snow smoke behind him, flitting from bench to bench, and from terrace to terrace, jarring the earth where he strikes, and still glanc

ask calmly, how does this person feel about it in his cooler moments ne

personally acquainted with a hundred and thirty-three or four people who were wounded during that massacre, and barely escaped with their lives. There was no doubt of the truth of it-I had it from their own lips. One of these parties told me that he kept coming across arrow-heads

ds and knee (for one leg was broken) to a station several miles away. He did it during portions of two nights, lying concealed one day and part of another, and for more than