ing and matchless
"Gallop of Three" to the Luggernel Spring, to quote from which would be
to spoil it. It must be read entire.

In the "Canoe and Saddle" is recorded Winthrop's long ride across the
continent. Setting out in a canoe, from Port Townsend, in Vancouver's
Island, he journeyed, without company of other white men, to the Salt
Lake City and thence to "the States,"--a tedious and barbarous
experience, heightened, in this account of it, by the traveller's cheery
spirits, his ardent love of Nature, and capacity to describe the grand
natural scenery, of the effect of which upon himself he says, at the
end,--

"And in all that period, while I was so near to Nature, the great
lessons of the wilderness deepened into my heart day by day, the hedges
of conventionalism withered away from my horizon, and all the pedantries
of scholastic thought perished out of my mind forever."

He bore hardships with the courage and imperturbable good-nature of a
born gentleman. It is when men are starving, when the plating of romance
is worn off by the chafe of severe and continued suffering,--it is then
that "blood tells." Winthrop had evidently that keen relish for rough
life which the gently nurtured and highly cultivated man has oftener
than his rude neighbor, partly because, in his case, contrast lends a
zest to the experience. Thus, when he camps with a gang of
"road-makers," in the farthest Western wilderness,--a part of Captain
McClellan's Pacific Railroad Expedition,--how thoroughly he enjoys the
rough hospitality and rude wit of these pioneers!

"In such a Platonic republic as this a man found his place according to
his powers. The cooks were no base scullions; they were brethren, whom
conscious ability, sustained by universal suffrage, had endowed with the
frying-pan."

"My hosts were a stalwart gang.... Their talk was as muscular as their
arms. When these laughed, as only men fresh and hearty and in the open
air can laugh, the world became mainly grotesque: it seemed at once a
comic thing to live,--a subject for chuckling, that we were bipeds, with
noses,--a thing to roar at, that we had all met there from the wide
world, to hobnob by a frolicsome fire with tin pots of coffee, and
partake of crisped bacon and toasted dough-boys in ridiculous abundance.
Easy laughter infected the atmosphere. Echoes ceased to be pensive, and
became jocose. A rattling humor pervaded the forest, and Green River
rippled with noise of fantas