reful scrutiny, however, proved them to be not stones but live
buffalo. Big Pete had often told me that these animals lived unmolested
by him in the park; but when I realized that I was looking at between
three and four hundred real buffalo my heart gave a great jump of joy. I
tried to view them so as to take in their details, but the apparently
shapeless masses of dark reddish brown wool appeared to have none,
unless indeed the comical fur trousers with frayed bottoms on their
front legs might be called detail.

Even the faces of the beasts were so concealed by masks of knotted wool
that at first I could distinguish neither eyes, noses, horns or ears;
but in spite of their ragged trousers and their masked faces, the bison
are sublime in their mighty strength and ponderous proportions, and as
this was the first wild herd I had ever seen and one of the very few, if
not the only one, then extant, I viewed them with the keenest interest.

But the scattered bunches of antelope, which I now noticed were dotting
the plains around the buffalo, appealed to my love of the beautiful.
Knowing that in other localities these charming little creatures are
rapidly being slaughtered and steadily decreasing in numbers and that
all attempts to breed them in captivity have so far failed, they at once
absorbed my attention to the exclusion of their larger neighbors.

When we moved our camp to the far side of the lake, Big Pete told me
that I could find plenty of trout streams beyond the timber belt, and he
also informed me that I could there see the walls of the park and
satisfy myself that there was but one trail leading into the preserve.

I do not now recall the sort of walls that were pictured in my mind or
know what I really expected to see enclosing Darlinkel's Park, but I do
know that when I suddenly emerged from the dark forests into the sunlit
prairie, the scene which greeted my vision was not the one painted by my
imagination.

Before me stretched an open plain surrounded by mountains arising
abruptly from a bed of many colored flowers; they were the same ranges
whose snow-covered peaks formed a feature of the landscape at the lake
and at our first camp.

Here, however, their appearance was different, as different as the dark
forest from the open sunlit prairie. The scene at first did not seem
real, it had a sort of a drop-curtain effect that was as familiar to me
as the row of footlights and gilded boxes, but never did I ex