t last, horses and men came out on a
bit of level woodland opening into glades full of snow. We were
eighty-four hundred feet in air, on a spur of Amethyst or Specimen
Mountain. We had meant, having made eighteen miles, to camp somewhere on
this hill, but the demon who drives men to go a bit farther infested the
major that day; so presently the bugle sounded, and we were in the
saddle again, and off for a delusive five-mile ride. As Mr. G. Chopper
once remarked, "De mile-stones to hebben ain't set no furder apart dan
dem in dis yere land;" and I believed him ere that day was done.

The top of this great hill, which may be some ten thousand feet in
height, is large and irregular. Our trail lay over its south-eastern
shoulder. After a little ride through the woods we came out abruptly on
a vast rolling plain sloping to the north-east, and broadening as it
fell away from us until, with intervals of belts of wood, it ended in a
much larger plain on a lower level, quite half a mile distant, and of
perhaps one thousand acres. About us, in the coolies, the "Indian
paint-brush" and numberless flowers quite strange to us all so tinted
the dried grasses of these little vales as to make the general hue seem
a lovely pink-gray. Below us, for a mile, rolled grassy slopes, now
tawny from the summer's rainless heat, and set with thousands of
balsam-firs in groups, scattered as with the hand of unerring taste here
and there over all the broad expanse. Many of them stood alone, slim,
tall, gracious cones of green, feathered low, and surrounded by a
brighter green ring of small shoots extending from two to four feet
beyond where the lowest boughs, touching the earth, were reflected up
from it again in graceful curves. On all sides long vistas, bounded by
these charming trees, stretched up into the higher spurs. Ever the same
flowers, ever the same amazing look of centuries of cultivation, and the
feeling that it would be natural to come of a sudden on a gentleman's
seat or basking cows, rather than upon the scared doe and dappled fawn
which fled through the coverts near us. We had seen many of these parks,
but none like this one, nor any sight of plain and tree and flowers so
utterly satisfying in its complete beauty. It wanted but a contrast,
and, as we rode through and out of a line of firs, with a cry of wonder
and simple admiration the rudest trooper pulled up his horse to gaze,
and the most brutal mule-guard paused, with nothing in h