the very
remotest regions of the West. I pictured to myself the village of my
workmen, surrounded with its patches of cultivation in the midst of
universal barrenness; the smiling aspect of civilized life in the
very centre of barbarism; the smelting furnaces, the mills, the great
refining factories, of which I had heard so much, all rose to my
imagination, and my own princely abode looking down upon these evidences
of my wealth.

Then, I fancied the influences of education diffusing themselves among
the young, who grew up with tastes and habits so different from those of
their fathers. How pursuits of refinement by degrees mingled themselves
with daily requirements, till at last the silent forests would echo with
the exciting strains of music, or the murmuring rivulet at nightfall
would be accompanied by the recited verses of poetry.

The primitive simplicity of such a life as I then pictured was a perfect
fascination; and when wearied with thinking of it by day, as I dropped
asleep at night the thoughts would haunt my dreams unceasingly.

This castle-building temperament--which is, after all, nothing but
hope engaged practically--may, when pushed too far, make a man dreamy,
speculative, and visionary, but if restrained within any reasonable
limits, cannot fail to support the courage in many an hour of trial, and
nerve the heart against many a sore infliction. I know how it kept me up
when others of very different thews and sinews were falling around me.
Independently of this advantage, another and a greater one accompanied
it. These self-created visions, however they may represent a man in
a situation of greatness or power, always do so to exhibit him
dispensing--what he imagines at least to be--the virtues of such a
station! No one, I trust, ever fancied himself a monarch for the sake
of all the cruelties he might inflict, and all the tyrannies he might
practise; so that, in reality, this "sparring against Fortune with the
gloves on" is admirable practice, if it be nothing else.

It was on the seventeenth day of our wanderings that the guide announced
that we had struck into the Chihuahua "trail"; and although to our eyes
nothing unusual or strange presented itself, Hermose exhibited signs
of unmistakable pride and self-esteem. As I looked around me on the
unvarying aspect of earth and sky, I could not help remembering my
disappointment on a former occasion, when I heard of the "Banks of
Newfoundland," and fanci