m Fort Laramie, thirty out of the forty-six mules
on which it was packed perishing on the way.

Thus the long and dreary winter commenced in the camp of the army of
Utah. It mattered not that the rations were abridged, that communication
with the States was interrupted, and that every species of duty at such
a season, in such a region, was uncommonly severe. Confidence and even
gayety were restored to the camp, by the consciousness that it was
commanded by an officer whose intelligence was adequate to the
difficulties of his position. Every additional hardship was cheerfully
endured. As the animals failed, all the wood used in camp was obliged to
be drawn a distance of from three to six miles by hand, but there were
few gayer spectacles than the long strings of soldiers hurrying the
wagons over the crunching snow. They built great pavilions, decorated
them with colors and stacks of arms, and danced as merrily on Christmas
and New Year's Eves to the music of the regimental bands, as if they had
been in cozy cantonments, instead of in a camp of fluttering canvas,
more than seven thousand feet above the level of the sea. In the
pavilion of the Fifth Infantry, there drooped over the company the flags
which that regiment had carried, ten years before, up the sunny slopes
of Chapultepec, and which were torn in a hundred places by the storm of
bullets at Molinos del Rey.

Meanwhile, how hearts were beating in the States with anxious
apprehension for the safety of kindred and friends, those who felt that
anxiety, and not those who were the objects of it, best know.

Perhaps the disposition of the camp would have been more in harmony
with the scenery and the season, if the army had dreamed that the
administration, which had launched it so recklessly into circumstances
of such privation and danger, was about to turn its labors and
sufferings into a farce, and to claim the approval of the country for
an act of mistaken clemency, which was, in reality, a grave political
error.

[To be continued.]

* * * * *

THE MINISTER'S WOOING.

[Continued.]

CHAPTER VIII.

WHICH TREATS OF ROMANCE.

There is no word in the English language more unceremoniously and
indefinitely kicked and cuffed about, by what are called sensible
people, than the word _romance_. When Mr. Smith or Mr. Stubbs has
brought every wheel of life into such range and order that it is one
steady, daily grind,--when they th