ur old friends of the --th. They had expected to go,
but didn't.

It is a rare, rare day in June, but where are the soft breezes, the
sweet fragrance, the blossoms and the bliss of that month of months at
the dear old Point? Rare indeed is the breeze, cloudless the sky,
brilliant, beaming, magnificent, the sunshine, but not a leaf stirs in
answering rustle to the wind. Far and near no patch of shade delights
or tempts the eye. Look where you will,--look for miles and miles over
boundless expanse of rolling upland, of ridge and ravine, of dip and
"divide," of butte and swale, no speck of foliage, no vision is there of
even isolated tree. The solid earth beneath our feet is carpeted with
dense little bunches of buffalo-grass, juicy, life-giving, yet bleaching
already of the faint hues of green that came peeping through the last
snows left in May. Tiny wild flowers purple the surface near us, but
blend into the colorless effect of the general distance. We stand on a
wave of petrified ocean, tumbling in wild upheaval close at hand;
stretching away to the east in a league-long level flat as the barn
floor of tradition, and bare as the description.

Far to the east the prairie rolls up to the horizon wave after wave till
none is seen beyond. Far to the north, bare and treeless, too, the same
effect is maintained. Far to the south, across an intervening low-land
one would call a valley elsewhere, the ground rises against the sky,
until its monotonous gray-green meets the gray-blue of the southern
heaven; but west of south, what have we here? The farthest wave of
prairie surges, not against the naked sky, but against a cold gray
range, whose peaks and turrets are seamed and sprinkled with glistening
snow. Aye, there they stand, the monarchs of the Rockies; there through
the short summer sunshine their lofty crests defy the melting rays and
bear their plumage through the very dog-days, to greet and welcome the
first, faint, timid snow-flakes of the early fall. There they gleam and
glisten, no longer as we saw them from the Kansas plains, dim in the
western distance, unapproachable, but close at hand, neighborly,
sheltering, for we nestle under their very shoulders. Here, to the west,
just behind us, no great day's walk away and seemingly far nearer, in
jagged outline against the blue of heaven, are the guardians of the old
transcontinental pass. Here, to the west, where you see the rugged spurs
jutting out from the range, runs