I bought a horse and started, in company with Mr.Ballou and a gentleman named Ollendorff, a Prussian--not the party who has inflicted so much suffering on the world with his wretched foreign grammars, with their interminable repetitions of questions which never have occurred and are never likely to occur in any conversation among human beings.

We rode through a snow-storm for two or three days, and arrived at "Honey Lake Smith's," a sort of isolated inn on the Carson river.

It was a two-story log house situated on a small knoll in the midst of the vast basin or desert through which the sickly Carson winds its melancholy way.

Close to the house were the Overland stage stables, built of sun-dried bricks.

There was not another building within several leagues of the place.