the railroad routes--or--anything--and was proud of it--I would not
wish for a more desirable boarding-house.

Half a dozen little mountain brooks flow into Mono Lake, but not a stream
of any kind flows out of it. It neither rises nor falls, apparently, and
what it does with its surplus water is a dark and bloody mystery.

There are only two seasons in the region round about Mono Lake--and these
are, the breaking up of one Winter and the beginning of the next. More
than once (in Esmeralda) I have seen a perfectly blistering morning open
up with the thermometer at ninety degrees at eight o'clock, and seen the
snow fall fourteen inches deep and that same identical thermometer go
down to forty-four degrees under shelter, before nine o'clock at night.
Under favorable circumstances it snows at least once in every single
month in the year, in the little town of Mono. So uncertain is the
climate in Summer that a lady who goes out visiting cannot hope to be
prepared for all emergencies unless she takes her fan under one arm and
her snow shoes under the other. When they have a Fourth of July
procession it generally snows on them, and they do say that as a general
thing when a man calls for a brandy toddy there, the bar keeper chops it
off with a hatchet and wraps it up in a paper, like maple sugar. And it
is further reported that the old soakers haven't any teeth--wore them out
eating gin cocktails and brandy punches. I do not endorse that
statement--I simply give it for what it is worth--and it is worth--well,
I should say, millions, to any man who can believe it without straining
himself. But I do endorse the snow on the Fourth of July--because I know
that to be true.

CHAPTER XXXIX.

About seven o'clock one blistering hot morning--for it was now dead
summer time--Higbie and I took the boat and started on a voyage of
discovery to the two islands. We had often longed to do this, but had
been deterred by the fear of storms; for they were frequent, and severe
enough to capsize an ordinary row-boat like ours without great
difficulty--and once capsized, death would ensue in spite of the bravest
swimming, for that venomous water would eat a man's eyes out like fire,
and burn him out inside, too, if he shipped a sea. It was called twelve
miles, straight out to the islands--a long pull and a warm one--but the
morning was so quiet and sunny, and the lake so smooth and glassy and
dead, that we could not resist the temp