favorable for the prolific production of certain forms of insect life I
ever was in, and I spend the liveliest night here I ever spent anywhere.
These people professed to give me a bed to myself, but no sooner have I
laid my head on the pillow than I recognize the ghastly joke they are
playing on me. The bed is already densely populated with guests, who
naturally object to being ousted or overcrowded. They seem quite a
kittenish and playful lot, rather inclined to accomplish their ends by
playing wild pranks than by resorting to more austere measures. Watching
till I have closed my eyes in an attempt to doze off, they slip up and
playfully tickle me under the chin, or scramble around in my ear, and
anon they wildly chase each other up and down my back, and play leap-frog
and hide-and-go-seek all over my sensitive form, so that I arise in the
morning anything but refreshed from my experience.

Still following the shores of the lake, for several miles, my road now
leads over the northern spur of the Promontory Mountains. On these hills
I find a few miles of hard gravel that affords the best riding I have
experienced in Utah, and I speed along as rapidly as possible, for dark,
threatening clouds are gathering overhead. But ere I reach the summit
of the ridge a violent thunder-storm breaks over the hills, and I seem
to be verily hobnobbing with the thunder and lightning, that appears to
be round about me, rather than overhead. A troop of wild bronchos,
startled and stampeded by the vivid lightning and sharp peals of thunder,
come wildly charging down the mountain trail, threatening to run quite
over me in their mad career. Pulling my six-shooter, I fire a couple of
shots in the air to attract their attention, when they rapidly swerve
to the left, and go tearing frantically over the rolling hills on their
wild flight to the plains below.

Most of the rain falls on the plain and in the lake, and when I arrive