MORNING ON THE PLAINS. 113 



in lashing its rock-ribbed coasts ; and whenever man's 

 busy industry cleaves asunder the surface, the depths, 

 like those of ocean, give back their monsters and 

 rare shells. Huge saurians, locked for a thousand 

 centuries in their vice-like prison, rise up, not as of 

 old to bask lazily in the sun, but to gape with huge 

 jaws at the demons of lightning and steam rushing 

 past, and to crack the stiff backs of savans with their 

 forty feet of tail. 



To the south of us, and distant several miles, was 

 the line, scarcely visible, of the Smoky Hill, treeless 

 and desolate ; on the north, the upper Saline, equally 

 barren. As difficult to distinguish as two brown 

 threads dividing a brown carpet, they might have 

 been easily overlooked, had we not known the streams 

 were there, and, with the aid of our glasses, sought 

 for their ill-defined banks. 



A curve in the road brought us suddenly and 

 sharply face to face with the sun, just rising in the 

 far-away east, and flashing its ruddy light over the 

 vast plain around us. Its bright red rim first ap- 

 peared, followed almost immediately by its round 

 face, for all the world like a jolly old jack tar, with 

 his broad brim coming above deck. It reminded me 

 on the instant of our brackish friend. Captain Wal- 

 rus ; and in imagination I dreamily pictured, as com- 

 ing after him, with the broadening daylight, a troop 

 of Alaskans, their sleds laden with blubber. 



The air was singularly clear and bracing, produc- 

 ing an effect upon a pair of healthy lungs like that 

 felt on first reaching the sea-beach from a residence 



