Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: u. REAL DANGERS OF THE OPEN VERSUS POPULAR NOTION—UNDINE'S STORY S already said, Undine had vagrantly answered to the will of many, and permanently toher own. During her nomadic career she had picked up several trades, such as cattle- and sheep-keeping, and at least three accomplishments, swimming, barking like a wolf, and deer-running, the last often much appreciated by the bacon-fed herder with whom she had consented awhile to tarry, taking his orders, doing his work and sharing his food and fire. Undine hated saltpork and "camp sinkers," so if possible she provided her own sustenance—any unlucky field mouse or chipmunk not agile enough to escape her spring. Sheep had always been associated in my mind with great green stretches of rolling park land whereon a handful of these well-kept woolly things fed picturesquely, yielding at uncertain times and in obscure ways, white fleece; so I had small sympathy with the prejudice in the West, encountered universally, against '' sheepmen.'' Why class them among the despised? And the herders as creatures beyond the pale—outcasts ? —Why? We must have food, and mutton is most delectable. We had been travelling about a week, each day gliding by as eventless and delightful as another until I had come to the comfortable belief that in well-regulated "outfits" nothing did happen; when the accumulated bolts of Jove struck among us right busily. On a certain well-remembered day we began to pass through some very extraordinary country, unclean, desolate.The dust was incredible. It covered us like the shower from a volcano. Ninirod was transformed into a disgusted looking Santa Claus, hair, mustache, eyebrows, even eyelashes had disappeared under a reddish coating. Over the road (the Sierra are much more man-claimed than the Rockies, one...