s lips
we finally brought him to a languid consciousness. Then we fed him a
little, and by and by he seemed to comprehend the situation and a
grateful light softened his eye. We made his mail-sack bed as
comfortable as possible, and constructed a pillow for him with our coats.
He seemed very thankful. Then he looked up in our faces, and said in a
feeble voice that had a tremble of honest emotion in it:

"Gentlemen, I know not who you are, but you have saved my life; and
although I can never be able to repay you for it, I feel that I can at
least make one hour of your long journey lighter. I take it you are
strangers to this great thorough fare, but I am entirely familiar with
it. In this connection I can tell you a most laughable thing indeed, if
you would like to listen to it. Horace Greeley----"

I said, impressively:

"Suffering stranger, proceed at your peril. You see in me the melancholy
wreck of a once stalwart and magnificent manhood. What has brought me to
this? That thing which you are about to tell. Gradually but surely,
that tiresome old anecdote has sapped my strength, undermined my
constitution, withered my life. Pity my helplessness. Spare me only
just this once, and tell me about young George Washington and his little
hatchet for a change."

We were saved. But not so the invalid. In trying to retain the anecdote
in his system he strained himself and died in our arms.

I am aware, now, that I ought not to have asked of the sturdiest citizen
of all that region, what I asked of that mere shadow of a man; for, after
seven years' residence on the Pacific coast, I know that no passenger or
driver on the Overland ever corked that anecdote in, when a stranger was
by, and survived. Within a period of six years I crossed and recrossed
the Sierras between Nevada and California thirteen times by stage and
listened to that deathless incident four hundred and eighty-one or
eighty-two times. I have the list somewhere. Drivers always told it,
conductors told it, landlords told it, chance passengers told it, the
very Chinamen and vagrant Indians recounted it. I have had the same
driver tell it to me two or three times in the same afternoon. It has
come to me in all the multitude of tongues that Babel bequeathed to
earth, and flavored with whiskey, brandy, beer, cologne, sozodont,
tobacco, garlic, onions, grasshoppers--everything that has a fragrance to
it through all the long list of things that ar