cably.

In eighteen months one hundred thousand people went to the scene.
Thousands left their skeletons with the red brother, and other thousands
left theirs on the Isthmus of Panama or on the cruel desert. Many
married men went who had been looking a long time for some good place to
go to. Leaving their wives with ill-concealed relief, they started away
through a country filled with death, to reach a country they knew not
of. Some died _en route_, others were hanged, and still others became
the heads of new families. Some came back and carried water for their
wives to wash clothing for their neighbors.

[Illustration: SOME CAME BACK AND CARRIED WATER FOR THEIR WIVES TO WASH
CLOTHING.]

It was a long hard trip then across the plains. One of the author's
friends at the age of thirteen years drove a little band of cows from
the State of Indiana to Sacramento. He says he would not do it again for
anything. He is now a man, and owns a large prune-orchard in California,
and people tell him he is getting too stout, and that he ought to
exercise more, and that he ought to walk every day several miles; but he
shakes his head, and says, "No, I will not walk any to-day, and possibly
not to-morrow or the day following. Do not come to me and refer to
taking a walk: I have tried that. Possibly you take me for a dromedary;
but you are wrong. I am a fat man, and may die suddenly some day while
lacing up my shoes, but when I go anywhere I ride."

When he got to Sacramento, where gold was said to be so plentiful, he
was glad to wash dishes for his board, and he went and hired himself out
to a citizen of that country, and he sent him into the fields for to
feed swine, and he would fain have filled his system with the California
peaches which the swine did eat, and he began to be in want, and no man
gave unto him, and if he had spent his substance in riotous living, he
said, it would have been different.

About thirty years after that he arose and went unto his father, and
carried his dinner with him, also a government bond and a new suit of
raiment for the old gentleman.

I do not know what we should learn from this.

CHAPTER XXIII.

THE WEBSTERS.

Daniel Webster, together with Mr. Clay, had much to do with the
Compromise measures of 1850. These consisted in the admission of
California as a free State, the organizing of the Territories of Utah
and New Mexico without any provision regarding slavery pro or con, the
pay