ew-York Central,
when an undaunted herdsman, returning Westward, flushed with the sale of
beeves, accosted me with the question,--"Friend, yeou've travelled
consid'able, and believe in the religion of Natur', don't ye?" "Why so?"
I responded. "_Them boots_," replied my new acquaintance, pointing at a
pair with high knee-caps, like those our party wore to the Yo-Semite.
Otherwise, we took the oldest clothes we had,--and it is not difficult
to find that variety in the trunk of a recent overland stager. We were
armed with Ballard rifles, shot-guns, and Colt's revolvers which had
come with us across the continent; our ammunition we got in San
Francisco, together with all such commissariat-luxuries as were worth
transportation: our necessaries we left to be purchased at that
jumping-off place of civilization, Mariposa, whence we were to start our
pack-mules into the wilderness. Let me recommend tourists like
ourselves to include in the former catalogue plenty of canned fruits,
sardines, and apple-butter,--in the latter, a jug of sirup for the
inevitable camp slapjacks. No woodsman, as will presently appear in our
narrative, can tell when a slapjack may be the last plank between him
and starvation; and to this plank how powerfully sirup enables him to
stick!

The only portion of our outfit which would have pleased an exquisite
(and he must be rather of the Count-Devereux than the Foppington-Flutter
school) was our horseflesh. That greatest of luxuries, a really good
saddle-animal, is readily and reasonably attainable in California.
Everybody rides there; if you wish to create a sensation with your
horsemanship in the streets of San Francisco, you must ride ill, not
well: everybody does this last. Even since the horse-railroad has begun
to clutter Montgomery Street (the San-Franciscan Boulevards) with its
cars, it is a daily matter to see capitalists and statesmen charging
through that thoroughfare on a gallop, which, if repeated in Broadway by
Henry G. Stebbins, would cost him his reputation on 'Change and his seat
in the next Congress. The nation of beggars-on-horseback which first
colonized California has left behind it many traditions unworthy of
conservation, and multitudinous fleas not at all traditional, but even
less keepworthy; but all honor be to the Spaniards, Greasers, and
Mixed-Breeds for having rooted the noble idea of horsemanship so firmly
in the country that even street-railroads cannot uproot it, and that
Am