ld not require another
companion on a long mountain tour. All his ways are those of an animal
brought up without curb, whip, or spur, trained by the voice, and used
only to kindness, as is happily the case with the majority of horses in
the Western States. Consequently, unless they are broncos, they
exercise their intelligence for your advantage, and do their work
rather as friends than as machines.

I soon began not only to feel better, but to be exhilarated with the
delightful motion. The sun was behind us, and puffs of a cool elastic
air came down from the glorious mountains in front. We cantered across
six miles of prairie, and then reached the beautiful canyon of the St.
Vrain, which, towards its mouth, is a narrow, fertile, wooded valley,
through which a bright rapid river, which we forded many times, hurries
along, with twists and windings innumerable. Ah, how brightly its
ripples danced in the glittering sunshine, and how musically its waters
murmured like the streams of windward Hawaii! We lost our way over and
over again, though the "innocent" young men had been there before;
indeed, it would require some talent to master the intricacies of that
devious trail, but settlers making hay always appeared in the nick of
time to put us on the right track. Very fair it was, after the brown
and burning plains, and the variety was endless. Cotton-wood trees
were green and bright, aspens shivered in gold tremulousness, wild
grape-vines trailed their lemon-colored foliage along the ground, and
the Virginia creeper hung its crimson sprays here and there, lightening
up green and gold into glory. Sometimes from under the cool and bowery
shade of the colored tangle we passed into the cool St. Vrain, and then
were wedged between its margin and lofty cliffs and terraces of
incredibly staring, fantastic rocks, lined, patched, and splashed with
carmine, vermilion, greens of all tints, blue, yellow, orange, violet,
deep crimson, coloring that no artist would dare to represent, and of
which, in sober prose, I scarcely dare tell. Long's wonderful peaks,
which hitherto had gleamed above the green, now disappeared, to be seen
no more for twenty miles. We entered on an ascending valley, where the
gorgeous hues of the rocks were intensified by the blue gloom of the
pitch pines, and then taking a track to the north-west, we left the
softer world behind, and all traces of man and his works, and plunged
into the Rocky Mountains.