clefts of which are
the only homesteads of the hardy pioneers by whose agency alone one
kind of luxury is kept up to the standard demand for it in the great
cities. It might not be so likely a place to get fancy drinks in as
Broome Street, certainly, we must admit, as we picture to ourselves
some brushy ravine in which the trapper has his irons cunningly set
out for the betrayal of the stone-marten and the glossy-backed
"fisher-cat,"--but the breeze in it is quite as wholesome as a
brandy-smash. The whirr of the sage-hen's wing, as she rises from the
fragrant thicket, brings a flavor with it fresher far than that of the
mint-julep. It is cheaper than the latter compound, too, and much more
conducive to health. Continuing to indulge our fancy in cool images
connected with fur and its finders, we shall see what contrasts will
arise. The blue shadow of a cottonwood-tree stretching over a
mountain-spring. By the edge of the sparkling water sits, embroidering
buckskin, a red-legged squaw, keeper of the wigwam to the ragged
mountain-man who set the traps that caught the martens which furnished
the tails that mark so gracefully the number of skins of which the
rich banker's wife's _fichu-russe_ is composed. Here is a striking
contrast, in which extremes meet,--not the martens' tails, but the two
men's wives, the banker's and the trapper's, brought into antithetical
relation by the simple circumstance of a _fichu-russe_, the material
of which was worn in some ravine of the wilderness, mayhap not a
twelvemonth since, by a creature faster even than a banker's wife.
Great is the hereafter of the marten-cat, whose skin may be looked
upon as the soul by which the animal is destined to attain a sort of
modified immortality in the Elysian abodes of Wealth and Fashion,--the
place where good martens go!

The men through whose intervention eventual felicity is thus secured
to the fur-creature are as much a race in themselves as the Gypsies.
No genuine type of them ever approaches nearer to the confines of
civilization than a frontier settlement beckons him. Old Adams, the
bear-tutor, might have been of this type once, but he is adulterated
with sawdust and gas-light now, with city cookery and spurious
groceries. Many men of French Canadian origin are to be found trading
and trapping in the Far West; although, taken in the aggregate, there
are no people less given to stirring enterprise than these colonial
descendants of the Gaul. The on