guard for ever. I watched it long as we rode round
the great base of the hill, and cannot recall any such striking
simulation elsewhere. My guides called it the "Sentinel," but it haunted
me somehow as of a familiar grace until suddenly I remembered the old
town of Innspruck and the Alte Kirche, and on guard around the tomb of
the great Kaiser the bronze statues of knight and dame, and, most
charming of all, the king of the Ostrogoths: that was he on the
mountain-top.

Everywhere on these hills the mining prospector has roamed, and on the
summit of the pass we found a group of cabins where certain claims have
been "staked out" and much digging done. As yet, they are as profitable,
by reason of remoteness, as may be the mines in the lunar mountains.
With careless glances at piles of ore which may or may not be valuable,
we rode on to camp, two miles beyond--not very comfortably, finding
water scarce, some rain falling and a great wealth of midges, such as we
call in upper Pennsylvania "pungies," and needing a smudge for the
routing of them. The night was cold and dewy, and our sufferers were
wretched with sunburn.

The doctor and George Houston here left us, and went on to a salt-lick
famous for game, but this proved a failure, some one having carelessly
set fire to the tract. Indeed, in summer it is hard not to start these
almost endless fires, since a spark or a bit of pipe-cinder will at once
set the grasses ablaze, to the destruction of hunting and the annoyance
of all travellers, to whom a fire is something which suggests man, and
the presence of man needs, sad to say, an explanation. At 6 A. M.,
August 6th, Captain G. and the lad Lee also went off on a side-trail
after game, and with lessened numbers we broke camp rather late, and
rode into dense woods down a steady descent on a fair trail. The changes
of vegetation were curious and sudden--from pines and firs to elders,
stunted willows and sparse cottonwood bending over half-dry beds of
torrents, with vast boulders telling of the fierce fury of water which
must have undermined, then loosened and at last tumbled them from the
hillsides. These streams are, in the early spring, impassable until a
cold day and night check the thaw in the hills, and thus allow the
impatient traveller to ford.

Gradually, as we rode on, the hills to our left receded, and on our
right the summits of Index and Pilot stood up and took the
morning--long, straggling volcanic masses of de