They are just as full of gentle trust and child-like confidence and questions as they can be.
They get the lunch ready and get into the buggy, and keep thinking of things they have forgotten, till they get 400 miles from home, and they sing little pieces of old songs, and won't let the great, horrid man in charge of the excursion have any lunch when he gets hungry, because they are hunting for a romantic spot beneath the boughs of a magnificent elm, while every sane man in the Territory knows that there isn't an elm big or little, within 1,4321 1/2 miles.
We went up in the mountains, because we wanted to go where it would be cool. As a search for a cool resort, this picnic of ours was the most brilliant success. We kept going up at an angle of forty-five degrees from the time we left home until we had to get out and walk to keep warm. We got into one of the upper strata of clouds; and a cold mist mixed with fragments of ice-cream, and large chunks of hail and misery, about the size of a burglar-proof safe came gathering over us. Then we camped in the midst of the mountain storm, and the various ladies sat down on their feet, and put the lap-robes over them, and looked reproachfully at me. We hovered around under the buggy, and two or three little half-grown parasols, and watched the storm. It was a glorious spectacle to the thinking mind.
They began to abuse me because I did not make a circus of myself, and thus drive away the despair and misery of the occasion. They had brought me along, it seemed, because I was such an amusing little cuss. It made me a good deal sadder than I would have been otherwise. Here in the midst of a wild and bitter mountain storm, so thick that you couldn't see twenty yards away, with nothing to eat but some marble cake soaked in vinegar, and a piece of cold tongue with a red ant on it, I was expected to make a hippodrome and negro minstrel show of myself. I burst into tears, and tried to sit on my feet as the ladies did. I couldn't do it, so simultaneously and so extemporaneously, as it were, as they could. I had to take them by sections and sit on them. My feet are not large, but at the same time I cannot hover over them both at the same time.
Dear reader, did you ever sit amidst the silence and solitude of the mountains and feel the hailstones rolling down your back, melting and soothing you, and filling your heart with great surging thoughts of the sweet bye-and-bye, and death, and the grave, and other mirth-provoking topics? We had now been about two hundred years without food, it seemed to me, and I mildly suggested that I would like something to eat rather than die of starvation in the midst of plenty; but the ladies wouldn't give me so much as a ham handwich to preserve my life. They told me to smoke if I felt that I must have nourishment, and coldly refused to let me sample the pickled spiders and cold-pressed flies.
So in the midst of all this prepared food I had to go out into the sagebrush and eat raw grasshoppers and grease-wood.
Bye and bye, when we concluded that we had seen about all the mountain storm we needed in our business, and didn't pine for any more hail-stones and dampness, we hitched up again and started home. Then we got lost. The ladies felt indignant, but I was delighted. I never was so lost in all my life. When I was asked where I thought I was, I could cheerfully reply that I didn't know, and that would stop the conversation for as much as two minutes.