630 TRAVEL IN EUROPE AND AMERICA. [1872, 



reached Salt Lake City, tlie Mormon town, before 

 sunset. Here we passed two nights and a day, and 

 enjoyed scenery worth crossing the ocean for, and saw 

 something of the strange life of the district. 



Back to Ogden ; two more nights and days, one long 

 day crossing the Humboldt desert, rendered passable 

 only by the Humboldt River, which, though the 

 ragged mountains all run north and south, yet runs 

 from east to west and marks its course by a narrow 

 line of greenness, and at dusk we saw its end in the 

 Humboldt sink, a lagoon without outlet on the west- 

 ern verge of the basin, against the Sierra, the arid 

 side of which we were ascending all night, to awake 

 among pine forests at sunrise ; to breakfast upon the 

 very summit soon after ; to descend through most 

 striking scenery into the great valley of California, 

 and, traversing that and the Contra Costa range, to 

 see the head of the Bay of San Francisco at dusk ; to 

 cross the bay in a steam-ferry, and reach our hotel in 

 San Francisco at ten P. M., a journey full of interest, 

 not a bit monotonous or dull, from first to last. There 

 were fatigues and small discomforts, of course, but 

 these are all forgotten long ago, and the whole transit 

 dwells in memory as one continual and delightful 

 piece of pleasant, novel, ever-varied, and instructive 

 sight-seeing. Of course the identifying at sight, as 

 we flew by, of flowers new to me in the living state, and 

 the snatching at halts, and the physical features of 

 districts which I had always been interested in, and 

 knew much about but had never seen, all gave me 

 occupation and continual pleasure. But it was much 

 the same with all the party. Even the return jour- 

 ney was hardly less interesting. . . . 



From Dubuque we took steamer up the Mississippi 



