and seemed at times to come down heads foremost!  There was a spur of the cliff that sloped down to within less than a hundred yards of the place where we sat.  It ended in an abrupt precipice, of some sixty or seventy feet in height above the plain.  The animals, on reaching the level of this spur, ran along it until they had arrived at its end.  Seeing the precipice, they suddenly stopped, as if to reconnoitre it; and we had now a full view of them, as they stood outlined against the sky, with their graceful limbs and great curved horns, almost as large as their bodies.  We thought, of course, they could get no farther for the precipice, and I was calculating whether my rifle, which I had laid hold of, would reach them at that distance.  All at once, to our astonishment, the foremost sprang out from the cliff, and whirling through the air, lit upon his head on the hard plain below!  We could see that he came down upon his horns, and rebounding up again to the height of several feet, he turned a second somersault, and then dropped upon his legs, and stood still!  Nothing daunted, the rest followed, one after the other, in quick succession, like so many street-tumblers; and, like them, after the feat had been performed, the animals stood for a moment, as if waiting for applause!’ These were the argali, or wild sheep, popularly termed bighorns, and resembling an immense yellow goat or deer furnished with a pair of ram’s horns.

Such are the anecdotes which the reader will find thickly scattered throughout this volume; but perhaps the most interesting are a series of conflicts witnessed by the father and one of the sons, and in the course of which they are themselves exposed to some danger.  They had gone out to gather from the live oaks a kind of moss, which they found to be quite equal to curled hair for stuffing mattresses; and while perched upon one of the trees, the drama opened by the violent scolding of a pair of orioles, or Baltimore birds—­so called from their colour, a mixture of black and orange, being the same as that in the coat-of-arms of Lord Baltimore.  The cause of the disturbance appeared to be a nondescript animal close to the edge of the thicket, with a variety of little legs, tails, heads, ears, and eyes stuck over its body.  ’All at once the numerous heads seemed to separate from the main body, becoming little bodies of themselves, with long tails upon them, and looking just like a squad of white rats!  The large body to which they had all been attached we now saw was an old female opossum, and evidently the mother of the whole troop.  She was about the size of a cat, and covered with woolly hair of a light gray colour....  The little ’possums were exact pictures of their mother—­all having the same sharp snouts and long naked tails.  We counted no less than thirteen of them, playing and tumbling about among the leaves.’  The old ’possum looked wistfully up at the nest of the orioles, hanging like a distended stocking from