the others were equally pretty in their several styles. Not knowing what else to do under the circumstances, I smiled again, still more casually. An equal uncertainty as to alternative set the ladies smiling quite across the row, and then, to my relief, the gentlemen joined them, making it pleasant for us all. A moment later we were engaged in general conversation,—starting from the bold hypothesis, thrown out by one of the gentlemen, that perhaps I was going to Boisé, and proceeding, by a process of elimination, to the accurate knowledge of what I was going to do, if it was n't that. I enjoyed one of the most cheerful bits of social relaxation I had found since crossing the Missouri, and nothing but my duty to my journal prevented me, when my surprise-party left, from accompanying them, by invitation, under the brevet title of Professor, to the house of the popular citizen, who, I was assured, would be glad to see me. I certainly should have been glad to see him, if he was anything like those guests of his who had so ingenuously cultivated me in a far land of strangers, where a man might have been glad to form the acquaintance of his mother-in-law. This is not the way people form acquaintances in New York; but if I had wanted that, why not have stayed there? As a cosmopolite, and on general principles of being, I prefer the Dalles way. I have no doubt I should have found in that circle of spontaneous recognitions quite as many people who stood wear and improved on intimacy as were ever vouchsafed to me by social indorsement from somebody else. We are perpetually blaming our heads of Government Bureaus for their poor knowledge of character,—their subordinates, we say, are never pegs in the right holes. If we understood our civilized system of introductions, we could not rationally expect anything else. The great mass of polite mankind are trained not to know character, but to take somebody else's voucher for it. Their acquaintances, most of their friendships, come to them through a succession of indorsers, none of whom may have known anything of the goodness of the paper. A sensible man, conventionally introduced to his fellow, must always wonder why the latter does not turn him around to look for signatures in chalk down the back of his coat; for he knows that Brown indorsed him over to Jones, and Jones negotiated him with Robinson, through a succession in which perhaps two out of a hundred took pains to know whether he represented metal. You do not find the people of new countries making mistakes in character. Every man is his own guaranty,—and if he has no just cause to suspect himself bogus, there will be true pleasure in a frank opening of himself to the examination and his eyes for the study of others. Not to be accused of intruding radical reform under the guise of belles-lettres, let me say that I have no intention of introducing this innovation at the East.
After a night's rest, Bierstadt spent nearly the entire morning in making studies of Hood from an admirable post of observation at the top of one of the highest foot-hills,—a point several miles southwest of the town, which he reached under guidance of an old Indian interpreter and trapper. His work upon this mountain was in some respects the best he ever accomplished, being done with a loving faithfulness hardly called out by Hood's only rival, the Peak of Shasta. The result of his Hood studies, as seen in the nearly completed painting, has a superiority corresponding to that of the studies themselves, possessing excellences not included even in the well-known "Lander's Peak."
In the afternoon, we were provided, by the courtesy of the Company, with a special train on the portage-railroad connecting Dalles City with a station known as Celilo. This road had but recently come into full operation, and was now doing an immense freight-business between the two river-levels separated by the intervening "Dalles." It seemed somewhat longer than the road around the
