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I fell in with Lieutenant Fabius Stanley, United States Navy, and we rode into Yerba Buena together about an hour before sundown, there being nothing but a path from the Mission into the town, deep and heavy with drift-sand. My horse could hardly drag one foot after the other when we reached the old Hudson Bay Company's house, which was then the store of Howard and Mellus.
Between China in the south and Eastern Siberia on the north, stretches the immense region of inner Asia which is called Mongolia. The Chinese call it the "grass country," but very large parts of it are waterless desert, where drift-sand is piled up into dunes, and caravan routes and wells are far apart.
I fell in with Lieutenant Fabius Stanley, United States Navy, and we rode into Yerba Buena together about an hour before sundown, there being nothing but a path from the Mission into the town, deep and heavy with drift-sand. My horse could hardly drag one foot after the other when we reached the old Hudson Bay Company's house, which was then the store of Howard and Mellus.
Such formations of drift-sand are common upon the shores of the Mexican Gulf, as well as on European coasts, and there their existence is easily explained; but here, in the very heart of a continent, it cannot be regarded as less than a singular phenomenon.
In some places were high, steep banks, in others drift-sand fields, where the sand lay heaped in banks and hills. Fishing hamlets stood all along the coast, with long rows of low, uniform brick houses, with a lighthouse at the edge of the breakwater, and brown fishing nets hanging in the drying yard. "Now look down! Look well! This is how it looks along the coasts in foreign lands."
At the New-year time, feeling unusually well, he returns to Clifton. His plans, of course, were ever fluctuating; his movements were swift and uncertain. Alas, his whole life, especially his winter-life, had to be built as if on wavering drift-sand; nothing certain in it, except if possible the "two or three hours of work" snatched from the general whirlpool of the dubious four-and-twenty! To Dr.
I fell in with Lieutenant Fabius Stanley, United States Navy, and we rode into Yerba Buena together about an hour before sundown, there being nothing but a path from the Mission into the town, deep and heavy with drift-sand. My horse could hardly drag one foot after the other when we reached the old Hudson Bay Company's house, which was then the store of Howard and Mellus.
Thus it will be seen that in the far eastern portion of the Colony the ridges of drift-sand extend over a greater length of country than in the centre; and consequently our return journey was accomplished with greater difficulties before us, and with an almost total lack of feed for our stock less even than on the first trip but to balance these drawbacks we had cool nights, lighter equipment, and the advantage of previous experience and the incentive of knowing that our rations would not last out unless we made all speed.
STUCCO. A stucco for walls, &c. may be formed of the grout or putty, made of good stone-lime, or the lime of cockle-shells, which is better, properly tempered and sufficiently beat, mixed with sharp grit-sand, in a proportion which depends on the strength of the lime: drift-sand is best for this purpose, and it will derive advantage from being dried on an iron plate or kiln, so as not to burn; for thus the mortar would be discoloured.
It is a wild and desolate neighbourhood, hardly anything more than a single blade of grass shooting up here and there from the bottomless drift-sand; and instead of the garden that generally ornaments a baronial residence, the bare walls are approached on the landward side by a thin forest of firs, that with their never-changing vesture of gloom despise the bright garniture of Spring, and where, instead of the joyous carolling of little birds awakened anew to gladness, nothing is heard but the ominous croak of the raven and the whirring scream of the storm-boding sea-gull.
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