Roughing It

as nearly nineteen hundred miles, and the trip was often made in fifteen days (the cars do it in four and a half, now), but the time specified in the mail contracts, and require

ood for men and beasts, and distributed these things among his stage stations, from time to time, according to his judgment of what each station needed. He erected station buildings and dug wells. He attended to the paying of the station-keepers, hostlers, drivers and blacksmiths, and discharged them whenever he chose.

r, and (when necessary) rode that fearful distance, night and day, without other rest or sleep than what he could get perched thus on top of the flying vehicle. Think

should be a gentleman, and occasionally he wasn't. But he was always a general in administrative ability, and a bull-dog in courage and determination-otherwise the chieftainship over the lawless underlings of the overland service would never in any instance

e been above being familiar with such rubbish as passengers, anyhow, as a general thing. Still, we were always eager to get a sight of each and every new driver as soon as the watch changed, for each and every day we were either anxious to get rid of an unpleasant one, or loath to part with a driver we had learned to like and had come to be sociable and friendly with. And so the first question we asked the conductor whenever we got to where we were to exchange drivers, was always, "Which is him?" The grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go into a book some day. As long as everything went smoothly, the overland driver was well enough situated, but if a fellow driver got sick suddenly it m

outlaws-fugitives from justice, criminals whose best security was a section of country which was without law and without even the pretence of it. When the "division- agent" issued an or

ould have taught him with a club if his circumstances and surroundings had been different. But they were snappy, able men, tho

of Mr. Ben Holliday. All the western half of the business was in his hands. This reminds me of an incident of Palestine tra

g New York boy by the name of Jack, who traveled with our small party of pilgrims in the Holy Land (and who had traveled to California in Mr. Holliday's overland coaches three years before, and had by no means forgotten it or lost his gushing admiration of Mr. H.) Aged nineteen. Jack was a good boy-a good-hearted and always wel

e was our encyclopedia, and we were never tired of listening to his speeches, nor he of making them. He never passed a celebrated locality, from Ba

tains of Moab-renowned in Scripture history! We are actually standing face to face with those illustrious crags and peaks-and for all we know" [dropp

" (falling

hes a fearful desert three hundred miles in extent-and across that desert that wonderful man brought the children of Israel!-guiding them with unfailing sagacity for forty years over the sandy desolation and among the obstructing r

s? Humph! Ben Holliday would have fet

r irreverent. And so no one scolded him or felt offended with him-and nobody coul

g," alias "Overland City," four hundred and seventy miles from St. Joseph-the strangest, quaint