We toiled on till 11.30 a. m., at which hour we reached "King's Ranch" which for several days I had heard spoken of as a sort of Elysium, marking as it does the termination of the sands, and the commencement of comparative civilization. We halted in front of the house, and after cooking and eating, I walked up to the "ranch," which is a comfortable, well-furnished wooden building. Mr. and Mrs. King had gone to Brownsville; but we were received by Mrs. Bee, the wife of the Brownsville general, who had heard I was on the road. She is a nice lively little woman, a red-hot Southerner, glorying in the facts that she has no Northern relations or friends, and that she is a member of the Church of England. Mr. King first came to Texas as a steamboat captain, but now owns an immense tract of country, with 16,000 head of cattle, situated, however, in a wild and almost uninhabited district. King's Ranch is distant from Brownsville only 125 miles, and we have been six days in reaching it.
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