of miners, gamblers,
and social outcasts, is now risen (or declined) to the quiet of a New
England summer resort, supported partly by two or three big mines
(whose white ore is streaked with gold), but more and more by the
growing fame of its mountains and their medicinal springs, for these
splendid peaks have their waters, hot and cold and sweet and bitter,
whose healing powers are becoming known to an ever-growing number of
those Americans who are minded to explore their native land.

This centre of aerial storms, these groups of transcendent summits,
would be more widely known still, but for the singular sense of
proprietorship with which each discoverer regards them. The lucky
traveller who falls into this paradise is seized with a certain
instant jealousy of it, and communicates his knowledge only to his
family and his friends. Nevertheless, its fame spreads slowly, and
each year new discoverers flock in growing numbers to the one little
hotel and its ramshackle bath-house, so that the community once
absolutely and viciously utilitarian begins to take timid account of
its aesthetic surroundings, and here and there a little log-cabin (as
appropriate to this land as the chalet to the Alps) is built beside
the calling ripples of the river, while saddled horses, laden burros
in long lines, and now and then a vast yellow or red ore-wagon
creaking dolefully as it descends, still give evidence of the mining
which goes on far up the zigzag trails towards the soaring, shining
peaks of the Continental Divide.

II

THE MAID ON THE MOUNTAIN-SIDE

One day in July a fair young girl, with beautiful gray eyes, sat
musingly beside one of these southern trails gazing upon the inverted
pyramid of red sky which glowed between the sloping shoulders of the
westward warding peaks. Her exquisite lips, scarlet as strawberry
stains, were drawn into an expression of bitter constraint, and her
brows were unnaturally knit. Her hat lay beside her on the ground, her
brown hair was blowing free, and in her eyes was the look of one
longing for the world beyond the hills. She appeared both lonely and
desolate.

It was a pity to see one so young and so comely confronting with sad
and sullen brow such aerial majesty as the evening presented. It was,
indeed, a sort of impiety, and the girl seemed at last to feel this.
Her frowning brow smoothed out, her lips grew more girlish of line,
and at length, rapt with wonder, she fixed her eyes