The fear of thirst is to them the greatest of all terrors.
Our young hunters felt but little of this fear.

It is true they had, all of them, heard or read of the sufferings that prairie travellers sometimes endure from want of water.

But people who live snugly at home, surrounded by springs, and wells, and streams, with cisterns, and reservoirs, and pipes, and hydrants, and jets, and fountains, playing at all times around them, are prone to underrate these sufferings; in fact, too prone, might I not say, to discredit everything that does not come under the sphere of their own observation?
They will readily believe that their cat can open a door-latch, and their pig can be taught to play cards, and that their dog can do wonderful things, savouring of something more than instinct.

But these same people will shake their heads incredulously, when I tell them that the opossum saves herself from an enemy by hanging suspended to the tree-branch by her tail, or that the big-horn will leap from a precipice lighting upon his horns, or that the red monkeys can bridge a stream by joining themselves to one another by their tails.
"Oh! nonsense!" they exclaim; "these things are too strange to be true." And yet, when compared with the _tricks_ their cat and dog can play, and even the little canary that flits about the drawing-room, do they seem either strange or improbable?
The absent and distant are always regarded with wonder and incredulity; while familiar facts, in themselves far more wonderful, neither excite curiosity nor challenge credulity.

Who now regards the startling phenomenon of the electric wire otherwise than as a simple truth easily comprehended?
And yet there was a time--ah! there was a time--when to have proclaimed this truth would have rendered you or me ridiculous.