e family solemnly gathered in the
living-room, and there, in plain traveling garb, Zulime Taft stood up
with me, while the Judge gravely initiated her into a perilous
partnership, a coalition in which she took the heaviest chances of
sorrow and regret.

The Judge was as good as his word. He made the ceremony a short but very
serious interchange of intentions, and at last, in sonorous and solemn
tones, pronounced us man and wife.

Altogether, it did not take five minutes, and then, at twelve-forty,
while the man of law was writing out the certificate, the "breakfast"
was announced and we all sat down to what was really a dinner, a meal to
which the Judge did full justice, for he had been up since early
morning, and had ridden twelve or fifteen miles.

If the old professor retained any anxieties concerning his daughter's
future, he masked them with a smile and discoursed genially of the
campaigns of Cyrus--or some such matter. At the close of the meal, the
Judge, comfortable and friendly, rose to go. With him, he said, it had
not only been a duty but a pleasure, and as he had given to our brief
wedding just the right touch of dignity, we were grateful to him. It was
the kind of service which cannot be obtained by any fee.

At four o'clock we took a dusty, hesitating local train for the small
town in Nebraska where we expected to catch the express for Colorado
Springs. In such drab and unromantic fashion did Zulime Taft and Hamlin
Garland begin their long journey together. "But wait!" I repeated. "Wait
till you see the Royal Gorge and Shavano!"

CHAPTER TEN

The New Daughter and Thanksgiving

At about half-past seven of a clear November morning I called my bride
to the car window and presented to her, with the air of a resident
proprietor, a first view of Pike's Peak, a vast silver dome rising
grandly above the Rampart Range. "Well, there it is," I remarked. "What
do you think of it?"

Her cry of surprise and her words of delight were both entirely genuine.
"Oh, how beautiful!" she exclaimed, as soon as she recovered breath.

It _was_ beautiful. Snow covered, flaming like burnished marble, the
range, with high summits sharply set against the cloudless sky, upreared
in austere majesty, each bleak crag gilded with the first rays of the
morning sun. Above the warm, brown plain the giants towered remotely
alien like ancient kings on purple thrones, and the contrast of their
gleaming drifts of snow, with the