ut surpassed in beauty every
tradition of their genus. Their vast gnarled branches followed as
exquisite curves as belong to any elm on a New-England meadow, and wept
at the extremities like those of that else matchless tree,--possessing,
moreover, a sumptuous affluence of leafage, an arboreal _embonpoint_,
unknown to their graceful sister of our lowlands. Be sure that we
lingered long among their shadows with book and pencil, and look for a
desirable acquaintance with new Dryads when they grow into the life of
color from our artists' hands.

At Princeton, a thriving suburb of Mariposa, we completed our cavalcade
of pack-animals, transferred our wagon-load to their backs, (the average
mule-pack weighs from two hundred and fifty to three hundred pounds,)
roped it there in the most approved _muletero_-fashion, and started into
the wilderness.

Let us call the roll. Beside Bierstadt and the two other gentlemen who
with myself had formed the original overland-party, we numbered two
young artists of great merit now sojourning for a short time in
California, Williams, an old Roman, and Perry, an ancient Duesseldorf
friend,--also a highly scientific metallurgist and physicist generally,
Dr. John Hewston of San Francisco.

To serve the party we secured a man and a boy. Regarding the former,
perhaps the more truthful assertion would be that he secured us; for, as
will shortly appear, though we bought his services, he sold us in
return. We picked him up in a San-Francisco employment-office, after
looking all over the city for a respectable groom and camp-cook, and
finding that in a scarce-labor country like California even fifty gold
dollars per month, with keep and expenses, were no sufficient bait for
the catch we wanted. He was a meagre, wiry fellow, with sandy hair,
serviceable-looking hands, and no end to self-recommendations; but then
it was impossible to ask after him at his "last place," that having been
General Johnston's camp during Buchanan's forcible-feeble occupation of
Utah. As he said he had been a teamster, and knew that soup-meat went
into cold water, we rushed blindly into an engagement with him,
marriage-service fashion, and took him for better or worse. The thing
which I think finally "fired our Northern hearts" and clinched the
matter was his assertion of nephewship to the Secession Governor Vance,
whose name he bore, combined with unswerving personal loyalty. Lest by
some future D'Israeli this be written