332 FOX-HOUND, FOREST, AND PRAIRIE. 



perform for twelve shillings a week all told) nature's gentleman 

 will take himself off rather than submit to such an unbearable 

 restriction as " a fellow not feeling as if he could swear when 

 he wanted." But Western Americans are crudely simple in 

 their domestic habits; and their sleeping arrangements espe- 

 cially denote a freedom from the trammels of conventionality 

 that should be refreshing were it not positively distasteful and 

 uncomfortable. A man availing himself of a night's lodging at 

 a ranche will be told off to a share of Sam Snorer's bed. If the 

 traveller's wife be with him, they may be invited to lay out 

 their blankets in a corner of the same room ; .or, at most, the 

 wife may be invited to share the bed of the hostess, while the 

 two husbands cast in their lot together elsewhere. Spare 

 bedding is possibly on hand, but an extra bedstead is seldom 

 forthcoming at a cow-ranche. As the sun rises, so do we all, 

 and a quarter of an hour afterwards are breakfasting together. 

 This primitive simplicity of arrangement apart from the 

 necessities of life in a wild country has, I am inclined to 

 think, its origin in two leading and almost equally indisputable 

 facts ; viz., first, that " to the pure (of heart) all things are pure ; " 

 secondly, that the custom of the country combines so very 

 slight an amount of ablution with the toilet, that no difficulty 

 whatever is held to prevent that little being performed in 

 public. 



The last shall I say the lowest ? type of Western manhood 

 is the Working-Man; and he, alas, like the mosquito of summer 

 and the biting frost of winter, forms an unavoidable evil to be 

 encountered by the newcomer. The latter must have his log- 

 house built, a stable erected, a pasture fenced in, a well dug, 

 corrals made, and a variety of minor " improvements " executed 

 round his newly chosen home, such as, amid the comfortable 

 surroundings of English life, he had hitherto looked upon as the 

 indigenous outcome of the soil, but which here, as he will soon 

 ascertain, represent primitive of their kind though they be 

 a grave outpouring of capital, and, indirectly, a source of 

 grievous uncongenial infliction. The newcomer may have been, 



