om a successful hunt after mountain sheep. he thermometer was 26° below zero, and e had had no food for twelve hours. I got imbed, and before I was aware of it had ozen my face, one foot, both knees, and one nd. Luckily, I reached the ranch before sepus damage was done. About once every six seven years we have a season when these prms follow one another almost without inrval throughout the winter months, and then e loss among the stock is frightful. One such inter occurred in 1880-81. This was when ere were very few ranchmen in the country. he next severe winter was that of 1886-87, hen the rush of incoming herds had overocked the ranges, and the loss was in conquence fairly appalling. f The snow-fall was unprecedented, both for s depth and for the way it lasted; and it was is, and not the cold, that caused the loss. bout the middle of November the storms egan. Day after day the snow came down, awing and then freezing and piling itself igher and higher. By January the drifts had lled the ravines and coulées almost level. The now lay in great masses on the plateaus and ever bottoms; and this lasted until the end February. The preceding summer we had een visited by a prolonged drought, so that he short, scanty grass was already well cropped own; the snow covered what pasturage there evas to the depth of several feet, and the cat le could not get at it at all, and could hardly nove round. It was all but impossible to ravel on horseback, except on a few welleaten trails. It was dangerous to attempt to penetrate the Bad Lands, whose shape had Deen completely altered by the great white nounds and drifts. The starving cattle died by scores of thousands before their helpless owners' eyes. The bulls, the cows who were sucking calves, or who were heavy with calf, the weak cattle that had just been driven up on the trail, and the late calves suffered most; the old range animals did better, and the steers best of all; but the best was bad enough. Even many of the horses died. An outfit near me lost half its saddle-band, the animals having been worked so hard that they were very thin when fall came. In the thick brush the stock got some shelter and sustenance. They gnawed every twig and bough they could get at. They browsed the bitter sage brush down to where the branches were the thickness of a man's finger. When near a ranch they crowded into the out-houses and sheds to die, and fences had to be built around the windows to keep the wild-eyed, desperate beasts from thrusting their heads through the glass panes. In most cases it was impossible either to drive them to the haystacks or to haul the hay out to them. The deer even were so weak as to be easily run down; and on one or two of the plateaus where there were bands of antelope, these wary creatures grew so numbed and feeble that they could have been slaughtered like rabbits. But the hunters could hardly get out, and could bring home neither hide nor meat, so the game went unharmed. The way in which the cattle got through the winter depended largely on the different localities in which the bands were caught when the first heavy snows came. A group of animals in a bare valley, without underbrush and with steepish sides, would all die, weak and strong alike; they could get no food and no shelter, and so there would not be a hoof left. On the other hand, hundreds wintered on the great thickly wooded bottoms near my ranch house with little more than ordinary loss, though a skinny sorry-looking crew by the time the snow melted. In intermediate places the strong survived and the weak perished. It would be impossible to imagine any sight more dreary and melancholy than that offered by the ranges when the snow went off in March. The land was a mere barren waste; not a green thing to be seen; the dead grass eaten off till the country looked as if it had been shaved with a razor. Occasionally among the desolate hills a rider would come across a band of gaunt, hollow-flanked cattle feebly cropping the sparse, dry pasturage, too listless to move out of the way; and the blackened carcasses lay in the sheltered spots, some stretched out, others in as natural a position as if the animals had merely lain down to rest. It was small wonder that cheerful stockmen were rare objects that spring. Our only comfort was that we did not, as usual, suffer a heavy loss from weak cattle getting mired down in the springs and mud-holes when the ice broke up for all the weak animals were dead already. The truth is, ours is a primitive industry, and we suffer the reverses as well as enjoy the successes only known to primitive peoples. A hard winter is to us in the north what a dry summer is to Texas or Australia-what seasons of famine once were to all peoples. We still live in an iron age that the old civilized world has long passed by. The men of the border reckon upon stern and unending struggles with their iron-bound surroundings; against the grim harshness of their existence they set the strength and the abounding vitality that come with it. They run risks to life and limb that are unknown to the dwellers in cities; and what the men freely brave, the beasts that they own must also sometimes suffer. Theodore Roosevelt. F there be a writer of our ers would certainly each have had a turn at language, at the present him. The easels and benches would have. moment, who has the ef- bristled, the circle would have been close, and fect of making us forget quick, from the canvas to the sitter, the rising the extinction of the pleas- and falling of heads. It has happened to all ant fashion of the literary of us to have gone into a studio, a studio of portrait, it is certainly the pupils, and seen the thick cluster of bent bright particular genius backs and the conscious model in the midst. hose name is written at the head of these. It has happened to us to be struck, or not to marks. Mr. Stevenson fairly challenges por- be struck, with the beauty or the symmetry of aiture, as we pass him on the highway of this personage, and to have made some reterature (if that be the road, rather than some mark which, whether expressing admiration andering, sun-checkered by-lane that he may or disappointment, has elicited from one e said to follow), just as the possible model, of the attentive workers the exclamation, local attire, challenges the painter who wan- "Character - character is what he has!" ers through the streets of a foreign town look- These words may be applied to Mr. Robert ig for subjects. He gives us new ground to Louis Stevenson: in the language of that art onder why the effort to fix a face and figure, which depends most on observation, charac› seize a literary character and transfer it to ter -character is what he has. He is essenhe canvas of the critic, should have fallen into tially a model, in the sense of a sitter; I do not ich discredit among us and have given way mean, of course, in the sense of a pattern or a > the mere multiplication of little private judg- guiding light. And if the figures who have a ent-seats, where the scales and the judicial life in literature may also be divided into two rig, both of them considerably awry and not great classes, we may add that he is conspicendered more august by the company of a uously one of the draped; he would never, if icious-looking switch, have taken the place, I may be allowed the expression, pose for the s the symbols of office, of the kindly, disin- nude. There are writers who present themerested palette and brush. It has become the selves before the critic with just the amount shion to be effective at the expense of the of drapery that is necessary for decency, but itter, to make some little point, or inflict some Mr. Stevenson is not one of these; he makes ittle dig, with a heated party air, rather than his appearance in an amplitude of costume. o catch a talent in the fact, follow its line, His costume is part of the character of which nd put a finger on its essence; so that the ex- I just now spoke; it never occurs to us to ask quisite art of criticism, smothered in grossness, how he would look without it. Before all inds itself turned into a question of "sides." things he is a writer with a style — a model The critic industriously keeps his score, but it with a complexity of curious and picturesque s seldom to be hoped that the author, crimi- garments. It is by the cut and the color of al though he may be, will be apprehended this rich and becoming frippery-I use the by justice through the handbills given out in term endearingly, as a painter might that the case; for it is of the essence of a happy he arrests the eye and solicits the brush. description that it shall have been preceded by a happy observation and a free curiosity; and desuetude, as we say, has overtaken these amiable, uninvidious faculties, which have not the advantage of organs and chairs. I hasten to add that it is not the purpose of these few pages to restore their luster, or to bring back the more penetrating vision of which we lament the disappearance. No individual can bring it back, for the light that we look at things by is, after all, made by all of us. It is sufficient to note, in passing, that if Mr. Stevenson had presented himself in an age or in a country of portraiture, the paint VOL. XXXV.-118. That is, frankly, half the charm he has for us, that he wears a dress and wears it with courage, with a certain cock of the hat and tinkle of the supererogatory sword; or, in other words, that he is curious of expression, and regards the literary form not simply as a code of signals, but as the keyboard of a piano and as so much plastic material. He has that vice deplored by Mr. Herbert Spencer, a mannera manner for a manner's sake, it may sometimes doubtless be said. He is as different as possible from the sort of writer who regards words as numbers and a page as the mere addition of them; much more, to carry out our image, |