[Footnote 1:  The “Brigade” to which the distinguished humorist here refers was a company of fourteen camp-followers of the Governor of Nevada, who boarded at the same house as Mark, that of Mrs. O’Flannigan.  They had joined the Governor’s retinue “by their own election at New York and San Francisco, and came along, feeling that in the scuffle for little territorial crumbs and offices they could not make their condition more precarious than it was, and might reasonably expect to make it better.  They were popularly known as the ‘Irish Brigade,’ though there were only four or five Irishmen among them.”]

...  After supper as the darkness closed down and the stars came out and spangled the great mirror with jewels, we smoked meditatively in the solemn hush and forgot our troubles and our pains.  In due time we spread our blankets in the warm sand between two large bowlders and soon fell asleep....  The wind rose just as we were losing consciousness, and we were lulled to sleep by the beating of the surf upon the shore.

It is always very cold on that Lake shore in the night, but we had plenty of blankets and were warm enough.  We never moved a muscle all night, but waked at early dawn in the original positions, and got up at once thoroughly refreshed, free from soreness, and brim full of friskiness.  There is no end of wholesome medicine in such an experience.  That morning we could have whipped ten such people as we were the day before—­sick ones at any rate.  But the world is slow, and people will go to “water cures” and “movement cures” and to foreign lands for health. to Three months of camp life on Lake Tahoe would restore an Egyptian mummy to his pristine vigor, and give him an appetite like an alligator.  I do not mean the oldest and driest mummies, of course, but the fresher ones.  The air up there in the clouds is very pure and fine, bracing and delicious.  And why shouldn’t it be?—­It is the same the angels breathe.  I think that hardly any amount of fatigue can be gathered together that a man cannot sleep off in one night on the sand by its side.  Not under a roof, but under the sky; it seldom or never rains there in the summer time.

...  Next morning while smoking the pipe of peace after breakfast we watched the sentinel peaks put on the glory of the sun, and followed the conquering light as it swept down among the shadows, and set the captive crags and forests free.  We watched the tinted pictures grow and brighten upon the water till every little detail of forest, precipice, and pinnacle was wrought in and finished, and the miracle of the enchanter complete.  Then to “business.”

That is, drifting around in the boat.  We were on the north shore.  There, the rocks on the bottom are sometimes gray, sometimes white.  This gives the marvelous transparency of the water a fuller advantage than it has elsewhere on the Lake.  We usually pushed out a hundred yards or so from