FOOTPATHS 221 
details as trivial as Mr. Pickwick’s tomato sauce. 
They repeated it over and over to each other, 
till ten square miles of loons must have heard 
the news, and all laughed together ; never was 
there such an audience; they could not get 
over it, and two hours after, when we had 
rowed over to the camp and dinner had been 
served, this irreverent and invisible chorus kept 
bursting out, at all points of the compass, with 
scattered chuckles of delight over this extraor- 
dinary bill of fare. Justice compels me to add 
that the dumplings were made of Indian meal, 
upon a recipe devised by our artist ; the guests 
preferred the venison, but the host showed a 
fidelity to his invention that proved him to be 
indeed a dweller in an ideal world. 
Another path that comes back to memory is 
the bare trail that we followed over the prairies 
of Nebraska, in 1856, when the Missouri River 
was held by roving bands from the Slave States, 
and Freedom had to seek an overland route into 
Kansas. All day and all night we rode between 
distant prairie fires, pillars of evening light and 
of morning cloud, while sometimes the low grass 
would burn to the very edge of the trail, so that 
we had to hold our breath as we galloped through. 
Parties of armed Missourians were sometimes 
seen over the prairie swells, so that we had to 
mount guard at nightfall; free-state emigrants, 
