insect-eating
birds. We met with the mountain-grouse, a bird of about the size and
color of _Tetrao cupido_, and one or two hawks. We also saw in the
bushes at the roadside the mountain-rabbit (_Lepus artemisia_), which
from its large size we at first mistook for a fawn. From Heffron's we
continue to ascend for six miles, till just beyond a small lake we got
the first view of the Park: it lay before us like a vast basin, some
hundreds of feet below, surrounded with a rim of high mountains.

The Park itself is 9842 feet above the sea-level, or half as high
again as Mount Washington. The surrounding rim is some two thousand
feet higher, while in the distance, north, south and west, may be seen
the snowy summits, fourteen thousand feet high, of Gray's Peak, Pike's
Peak, Mount Lincoln, and

Other Titans, without muse or name.

The South Park is sixty miles long and thirty wide, with a surface
like a rolling prairie, and contains hills, groves, lakes and streams
in beautiful variety. It formerly abounded with buffalo and other
game, and was a favorite winter hunting-ground of the Indians and the
white trappers, but since the great influx of miners the buffaloes
have mostly disappeared. Such, however, is the excellence of the
pasture that great herds of cattle are driven up here to feed during
the summer. Several towns and villages have sprung up around the mines
in this vicinity, such as Hamilton, Fairplay and Tarryall, to which a
stage-coach runs three times a week from Denver.

In our old atlases, forty years ago, we used to see the Rocky
Mountains laid down as a great central chain or back-bone of the
continent; but they are rather a congeries of groups scattered over
an area of six hundred miles in width and a thousand miles long: among
them are hundreds of these parks, from a few acres in extent to the
size of the State of Massachusetts. These mountains differ so entirely
from those usually visited and described by travelers, the Alps, the
Scottish Highlands and the White Mountains, that one can scarcely
believe that this warm air and rich vegetation exist ten thousand feet
above the sea. In climate the Colorado mountains approach more nearly
to the Andes, where the snow-line varies from fourteen thousand to
seventeen thousand feet. Here snow begins at twelve thousand feet,
and increases in quantity to the extreme height of the tallest peaks,
about fourteen thousand two hundred and fifty feet, though even these
a