ing day, and Harry leaned beside me
over the platform rails of a car hooked on for our accommodation, while
Lee sat on the step close by wrapped in an old skin coat Harry had given
him. A shrill whistle came ringing out of the stirred-up dust ahead, then
the roar of wheels grew louder, rolling back repeated and magnified from
the rocks above, while half-seen through the mist that rose from a river
spectral pines reeled by, and an icy blast lashed my cheeks like a whip
as, with throttle wide open and the long cars bouncing behind, the great
mountain locomotive thundered down a declivity.

"Steve's letting her go," said the surveyor, who came out from the car.
"Got to rush her through for the side-track ahead of the west-bound mail.
Say, the light is growing; stay just where you are, for presently there'll
be unrolled the most gorgeous panorama that ever delighted a sinful
mortal's eye, and you'll see the first of what some day is going to be of
all lands on this wide green earth the greatest country."

I looked up, and already the mist was rolling back like a curtain from the
great slopes of rock above, sliding in smoky wreaths across the climbing
pines, while as the brightness increased we could see the torrent, whose
voice now almost drowned the clash of couplings and the clamor of wheels,
frothing green and white-streaked among mighty boulders in the gorge
below. Then as we swung giddily over a gossamer-like timber bridge, the
walls of quartz and blue grit fell back on either hand; and, for the first
time, I gazed in rapt silence upon the cold unsullied whiteness of eternal
snow, undefiled from the beginning by any foot of man. It stretched in a
glimmering saw-edge high above us athwart the brightening east, and,
below, smooth-scarped slopes of rock polished to a steely luster by
endless ages of grinding ice, slid down two, or it may have been four,
thousand feet, to the stately pines on the hillsides below.

There were peaks like castles, spires like the fretted stonework of Indian
minarets, wrought by the hand of nature out of an awful cold purity, and
mountains which resembled nothing I had ever seen or dreamed of, banded
white with broken edges of green by winding glaciers; while sombered
forests, every trunk in which the surveyor said exceeded two hundred feet
in height, were wrapped about their knees. It was a scene of plutonic
grandeur, weirdly impressive under the first of the light, with a stamp
upon it of u