with only the soul withdrawn. An empty Indian village is the gloomiest place in the world.
We crossed the McCloud, and our course lay through a saddle in the mountains to Pit river; so called from the blind pits dug out like a jug by the Indians in places where their enemies or game are likely to pass. These pits are dangerous traps; they are ten or fifteen feet deep, small at the mouth, but made to diverge in descent, so that it is impossible for anything to escape that once falls into their capacious maws. To add to their horror, at the bottom, elk and deer antlers that have been ground sharp at the points are set up so as to pierce any unfortunate man or beast they may chance to swallow up. They are dug by the squaws, and the earth taken from them is carried in baskets and thrown into the river. They are covered in the most cunning manner; even footprints in an old beaten trail are made above the treacherous pits, and no depression, no broken earth, nothing at all indicates their presence except the talismanic stones or the broken twigs and other signs of a sort of rude freemasonry which only the members of a tribe can understand.
Here we passed groves of most magnificent oak. Their trunks are five and six feet in diameter, and the boughs were then covered with acorns and fairly matted with the mistletoe.
Coming down on to the banks of Pit river, we heard the songs and shouts of Indian gi
