the stable to
get on, but the young man insisted on bringing the steed down to the hotel
as soon as he had his feed, and in due time he came, a tall fellow, and I
doubted my ability to get my foot up to that stirrup, and somewhat whether
I could boost myself over into the saddle if I did; so I quietly and
gently coaxed him up to the piazza and actually succeeded the first time
trying. How many of the gentlemen, sitting in their Sunday best on the
piazza, smiled, I do not know--I didn't dare to look. I know I sat up ever
so stiff and tried to look just as if I had been a circuit rider for forty
years or so.

I must cross the river to begin with. Now they hadn't given me any whip
and I didn't dare ask the owner of the horse--"Colt, gone four"--he said,
for a whip or even a switch, but I wondered what I would do if the animal
should take it into his head to turn around or do something awkward right
in the middle of the river. I didn't want to get off, for I must get on
again. As good luck would have it there was a kind-eyed man sitting on a
stone by the riverside, and I asked him to get me a stick. He gave me one
he had in his hand and I felt better.

"Does the ford go right straight across?" I asked. "No, you must make a
curve up towards the dam or you will get into deep water, and there are
boulders too, you must avoid, or your horse may fall down."

A curve! Now a straight line, two points being given, can be defined. And
if I could steer for some given point on the opposite bank, I could hit it
if the current did not take me down stream; but a curve is awfully
uncertain, and my mind was in a state of perturbation. However, I got
across with nothing worse than a good spattering.

I wish I could paint the pictures constantly opening on the view as I rode
along. Forest clad mountains rose on every side with huge cliffs peering
grimly out. Sometimes these cliffs overhung the road and occasionally a
great slab of slate projected sufficiently to furnish shelter for a
family. In one place a farmer had taken advantage of this and made his
stable under a rock. A great slab of shaly slate projected so that he had
a roof some fifty feet long and ten or fifteen wide. My mind went back
eighteen hundred years and more to another stable in a rock and the
wonderful scene enacted there. It was not easy to believe that the little
cabins, looking like miniature houses which might be built by boys for
play, were actually homes, occupi