Yes, seven feet, and if we’d have fell in, swimming wouldn’t saved us.
“You, Balley, what are you a doin’ on?
‘’Neath the hill in the flowing vale.’
And what’s more, we couldn’t have crawled up that bank, nohow.
‘My own dear Lillie Dale.’
You’d like to kick over them traces, would you? Keep your doggoned neck up snug against that collar, and take that.
“We’d drowned, sir; drowned sure as thunder.
‘In the place where the violets grow.’”
Desert hills, and low, mountain gateways, opening views of vast, sterile plains, no longer formed our eastern outlook. The White Mountains, a lofty, barren chain vying with the Sierras in altitude, rose in splendid rank and stretched southeast, parallel with the great range. Down the broad, intermediate trough flowed Owen’s River, alternately through expanses of natural meadow and desolate reaches of sage.