s awful-looking a ruffian
as one could see. By way of contrast he rode a small Arab mare, of
exquisite beauty, skittish, high spirited, gentle, but altogether too
light for him, and he fretted her incessantly to make her display
herself.

Heavily loaded as all our horses were, "Jim" started over the half-mile
of level grass at a hard gallop, and then throwing his mare on her
haunches, pulled up alongside of me, and with a grace of manner which
soon made me forget his appearance, entered into a conversation which
lasted for more than three hours, in spite of the manifold checks of
fording streams, single file, abrupt ascents and descents, and other
incidents of mountain travel. The ride was one series of glories and
surprises, of "park" and glade, of lake and stream, of mountains on
mountains, culminating in the rent pinnacles of Long's Peak, which
looked yet grander and ghastlier as we crossed an attendant mountain
11,000 feet high. The slanting sun added fresh beauty every hour.
There were dark pines against a lemon sky, grey peaks reddening and
etherealizing, gorges of deep and infinite blue, floods of golden glory
pouring through canyons of enormous depth, an atmosphere of absolute
purity, an occasional foreground of cottonwood and aspen flaunting in
red and gold to intensify the blue gloom of the pines, the trickle and
murmur of streams fringed with icicles, the strange sough of gusts
moving among the pine tops--sights and sounds not of the lower earth,
but of the solitary, beast-haunted, frozen upper altitudes. From the
dry, buff grass of Estes Park we turned off up a trail on the side of a
pine-hung gorge, up a steep pine-clothed hill, down to a small valley,
rich in fine, sun-cured hay about eighteen inches high, and enclosed by
high mountains whose deepest hollow contains a lily-covered lake, fitly
named "The Lake of the Lilies." Ah, how magical its beauty was, as it
slept in silence, while THERE the dark pines were mirrored motionless
in its pale gold, and HERE the great white lily cups and dark green
leaves rested on amethyst-colored water!

From this we ascended into the purple gloom of great pine forests which
clothe the skirts of the mountains up to a height of about 11,000 feet,
and from their chill and solitary depths we had glimpses of golden
atmosphere and rose-lit summits, not of "the land very far off," but of
the land nearer now in all its grandeur, gaining in sublimity by
nearness--glimpses,