nk not--you must sit up all night by your little fire under
the stars and think and think. Oh, I have seen you, Merne! I have seen
you sitting there when you should have been sleeping. Do you call that
leadership, Captain Lewis? The men are under you, and if the leader is
not fit, the men are not. Now, a human body will stand only so
much--or a human mind, either, Merne. There is a limit to effort and
endurance."

His friend turned to him seriously.

"You are right, Will," said he. "I owe duty to many besides myself."

"You take things too hard, Merne. You cannot carry the whole world on
your shoulders. Look now, I have not been so blind as not to see that
something is going wrong with you. Merne, you are ill, or will be.
Something is wrong!"

His companion made no reply. They marched on to their own part of the
encampment, and seated themselves at the little fire which had been
left burning for them.[4]

[Footnote 4: The original journals of these two astonishing young
men--one of them just thirty years old, the other thirty-four--should
rank among the epic literature of the world. Battered about,
scattered, separated, lost, hawked from hand to hand, handed down as
unvalued heritages, "edited" first by this and then by that little
man, sometimes to the extent of actual mutilation or alteration of
their text--the journals of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark hold
their ineffacable clarity in spite of all. Their most curious quality
is the strange blending of two large souls which they show. It was
only by studying closely the individual differences of handwriting,
style, and spelling, that it could be determined what was the work of
Lewis, which that done by Clark.

And what a labor! After long days of toil and danger, under unvarying
hardships, in conditions of extremest discomfort and inconvenience for
such work, the two young leaders set down with unflagging faithfulness
countless thousands of details, all in such fashion as showed the
keenest and most exact powers of observation. Botanists, naturalists,
geographers, map-makers, builders, engineers, hunters, journalists,
they brought back in their notebooks a mass of information never
equaled by the records of any other party of explorers.

We cannot overestimate the sum of labor which all this meant, day
after day, month after month; nor should we underestimate the
qualities of mind and education demanded of them, nor the varied
experience of life in primi