the highway, from which it was finally extricated backwards by the combined efforts of twelve horses borrowed from the other coaches.  Misery makes strange bedfellows, and the ingredients of a Christmas pudding are not more thoroughly shaken together or more inextricably mingled than stage-coach passengers in America are apt to be.  The difficulties of the roads have developed the skill, courage, and readiness of the stage-coach men to an extraordinary degree, and I have never seen bolder or more dexterous driving than when California Bill or Colorado Jack rushed his team of four young horses down the breakneck slopes of these terrible highways.  After one particularly hair-raising descent the driver condescended to explain that he was afraid to come down more slowly, lest the hind wheels should skid on the smooth rocky outcrop in the road and swing the vehicle sideways into the abyss.  In coming out of the Yosemite, owing to some disturbance of the ordinary traffic arrangements our coach met the incoming stage at a part of the road so narrow that it seemed absolutely impossible for the two to pass each other.  On the one side was a yawning precipice, on the other the mountain rose steeply from the roadside.  The off-wheels of the incoming coach were tilted up on the hillside as far as they could be without an upset.  In vain; our hubs still locked.  We were then allowed to dismount.  Our coach was backed down for fifty yards or so.  Small heaps of stones were piled opposite the hubs of the stationary coach.  Our driver whipped his horses to a gallop, ran his near-wheels over these stones so that their hubs were raised above those of the near-wheels of the other coach, and successfully made the dare-devil passage, in which he had not more than a couple of inches’ margin to save him from precipitation into eternity.  I hardly knew which to admire most—­the ingenuity which thus made good in altitude what it lacked in latitude, or the phlegm with which the occupants of the other coach retained their seats throughout the entire episode.

The Englishman arriving in Boston, say in the middle of the lovely autumnal weather of November, will be surprised to find a host of workmen in the Common and Public Garden busily engaged in laying down miles of portable “plank paths” or “board walks,” elevated three or four inches above the level of the ground.  A little later, when the snowy season has well set in, he will discover the usefulness of these apparently superfluous planks; and he will hardly be astonished to learn that the whole of the Northern States are covered in winter with a network of similar paths.  These gangways are made in sections and numbered, so that when they are withdrawn from their summer seclusion they can be laid down with great precision and expedition.  No statistician, so far as I know, has calculated the total length of the plank paths of an American winter; but I have not the least doubt that they would reach from the earth to the moon, if not to one of the planets.