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Show FROM MOQUI TO THE COLORADO. 299 much like an ordinary Mormon sermon all self- glorification and dis-paragement of every body else that I got tired and dropped to sleep just as he was telling how great a warrior his father was, and how many horses he once took from the Noch kyh ( Mexican towns). As Espanol rendered all this into voluminous Spanish, with many cross- questionings on my part and repetitions on his, to make sure I had the correct meaning, the conversation would have had its charms to the comparative philologist. Sitting- in the summer night by our camp- fire on the great river, named by the Spaniard three centuries ago, its current roaring against the rocks below us, part of the ro-mance of the sixteenth century seemed to return that romance made real by the lingual contest between the Navajo and Spanish languages. It is scarcely possible there should be a greater contrast between any two tongues spoken by man the one the oldest of living languages, and first heir to the Latin, no one knows how much older; soft, smooth, flowing, musical and rich in expressive inflections; the result of three thousand years of Roman, Moorish and Gothic cultivation ; with the wonderful and stately march of the Latin sentence, the soft lisp of the Moor and sonorous gravity of the Goth : the other, young-est born in the family of languages, with roots striking only in the shallow soil of hard and primitive dialects, probably not a thousand years old as a separate tongue ; without cultivation, without letters, with no abstract expressions, and names only for the material and tangible, a harsh alliance of the nasal and guttural, the speech . of barbarous mountaineers. Yet here they are found on the same soil, struggling for the mastery the Spanish an enduring monument to the energy and bravery of the Castilians of the sixteenth century, who overran and subdued more than half of the New World. Every time a Navajo says agua instead of toh he bears unwitting and involuntary tribute to the hardy vigor and bold intellect of that wonderful race, who carried their arms and arts through these remote regions. On the other side we talked at random, without need of an inter-preter. Mrs. Doyle, as the lady called herself, was a thorough frontier woman, and informed me that " Our old gent had had eighteen wives. Two left him, one went to the States, and another to Montana, and when McKean got up such a bobbery he ( Doyle) divided his property among them that were living. Old gent had had fifty- two children, most of ' em living; had been through New Mexico, and all that country, with the Mormon battalion, and had been a big man in the Church, but was now here on a mission, tending to this ferry. The Mormons will establish a fine ferry here and a good road, as they |
