repose upon mother earth, I induced them to move up to the house, promising to go with them and show them the way to the caves.
Just why this brilliant writer of incomparable verse should have chosen that particular time and that particular route to visit a spot which, as yet, had excited no great furore among sightseers, never fully penetrated my comprehension until some years later, when I learned that it was a ruse of J. H. Huffer's, an uncle of Sam's by marriage, to get the author of "Beautiful Willamette" weaned off from a protracted spree that he had been cultivating with disastrous assiduity for many, many years. For it may as well be admitted right here at the beginning of our story, that this exceptional genius was sadly handicapped in his efforts to do something worthy the fame of so rare an intellect, by a master failing that mocks at noble effort, and that trails the highest ambition in the dust. And that good old charitable maxim that tells us we should "say nothing but good of the dead," cannot always be observed with the strictest fidelity. When you say nothing but good of a man, you are apt to get a misfit biography. No man has a right to assume that his worst mistakes will not be remembered and repeated against him as a warning to future generations. It is thus that we get some of our most impressive temperance sermons. The life-failure of such a man as Samuel Leonidas Simpson should be accounted for historically and truthfully, and the cause of it all is summed up in that one word we are forced to use with so much reluctance inebriate. Somebody has already described him in print as "the most drunken poet, and the most poetical drunkard that ever made the Muses smile or weep," and I am not authorized to dispute the arraignment.
But now for the caves. The next day we packed our bedding and commissary stores on the pony and took it afoot over the rough mountain ranges that separated us from the scene of our destination. "Old Grayback," as the principal mountain is fitly called, is no trivial elevation for a man to tackle whose equestrian feats have been mainly restricted to the rid-
