oary with frost in a room with a fire all
night. Evans was lying ill, with his bed covered with snow. Returning
from my cabin after breakfast, loaded with occupations for the day, I
was lifted off my feet, and deposited in a drift, and all my things,
writing book and letter included, were carried in different directions.
Some, including a valuable photograph, were irrecoverable. The writing
book was found, some hours afterwards, under three feet of snow.

There are tracks of bears and deer close to the house, but no one can
hunt in this gale, and the drift is blinding. We have been slightly
overcrowded in our one room. Chess, music, and whist have been
resorted to. One hunter, for very ennui, has devoted himself to
keeping my ink from freezing. We all sat in great cloaks and coats,
and kept up an enormous fire, with the pitch running out of the logs.
The isolation is extreme, for we are literally snowed up, and the other
settler in the Park and "Mountain Jim" are both at Denver. Late in the
evening the storm ceased. In some places the ground is bare of snow,
while in others all irregularities are leveled, and the drifts are
forty feet deep. Nature is grand under this new aspect. The cold is
awful; the high wind with the mercury at zero would skin any part
exposed to it.

October 19.

Evans offers me six dollars a week if I will stay into the winter and
do the cooking after Mrs. Edwards leaves! I think I should like
playing at being a "hired girl" if it were not for the bread-making!
But it would suit me better to ride after cattle. The men don't like
"baching," as it is called in the wilds--i.e. "doing for themselves."
They washed and ironed their clothes yesterday, and there was an
incongruity about the last performance. I really think (though for the
fifteenth time) that I shall leave to-morrow. The cold has moderated,
the sky is bluer than ever, the snow is evaporating, and a hunter who
has joined us to-day says that there are no drifts on the trail which
one cannot get through.

LONGMOUNT, COLORADO, October 20.

"The Island Valley of Avillon" is left, but how shall I finally tear
myself from its freedom and enchantments? I see Long's snowy peak
rising into the night sky, and know and long after the magnificence of
the blue hollow at its base. We were to have left at 8 but the horses
were lost, so it was 9:30 before we started, the WE being the musical
young French Canadian and myself. I h