In the next spring the chief ordered another sergeant to found a station on Mount Mitchell, the highest mountain-peak east of the Mississippi.  Professor Mitchell discovered and measured this mountain about twenty years ago.  While taking meteorological observations upon it he was overtaken by a storm, lost his way, and was dashed to pieces over one of its terrible precipices.  Several years after his death the government, suddenly recognizing his right to some acknowledgment from science, ordered his body to be disinterred and buried on the topmost peak of the mountain.  It was a work of weeks, the body in its coffin being carried by the hardy mountaineers up almost impassable heights.  But it reached the top at last, and lies there in the sky above all human life, with the mountain for a monument.  One is startled by such a pathetic whim of poetic justice in a government.  It was to this peak that the sergeant was ordered to carry his instruments and to make an abiding-place for himself.  And here, after two days’ journey from the base, he arrived at night in a storm of snow and hail—­the guides having cleared the way with axes—­set up his instruments, and took observations above the clouds while trees and rocks were sheeted with ice, and there was no shelter for himself or his companions from the furious tempests.  A hut was built after a few days, and here the observer remained with the lonely grave as companion, taking hourly observations during several months.

Another officer was sent to the top of Pike’s Peak, where he lived in a rudely-constructed cabin until his health broke down; he was then replaced by another, who after a year was obliged to yield also.  As soon as one soldier succumbs in these perilous outposts another goes forward.  The rarity of the air at this great altitude (nearly thirteen thousand feet) produces nausea, fever and dizziness:  added to this were the intense cold and exposure to terrific storms.  Sergeant Seyboth records several nights when he with his companions were forced, in a driving tempest, to leave the shelter of their hut and work all night heaping rocks upon its roof to keep it from being blown away; beneath them, many thousand feet, was the rolling sea of clouds.  Again and again these men were lost in the drifted snow of the canons while passing from station to station, and barely escaped with their lives.  So imminent, indeed, was their danger during the winter of 1873 that prayers for their safety were offered continually in the churches below.

Frederick Meyer, another of these signal-service soldiers, was sent on the North Polar expedition with Captain Hall.  No such marvelous tale as that contained in his formal report was ever found in fiction.  Sergeant Meyer made observations every three hours on the voyage north, and hourly when coming south, during a year and two months.  At the end of that time, as is well known to our readers, he, with part of the crew of the Polaris, was deserted by the ship,