at a ranch, where I heard, to my dismay, that I
must ride twenty-four miles farther before I could find any place to
sleep at. I did not enjoy yesterday's ride. I was both tired and
rheumatic, and Birdie was not so sprightly as usual. After starting
again I came on a hideous place, of which I had not heard before,
Hayden's Divide, one of the great back-bones of the region, a weary
expanse of deep snow eleven miles across, and fearfully lonely. I saw
nothing the whole way but a mule lately dead lying by the road. I was
very nervous somehow, and towards evening believed that I had lost the
road, for I came upon wild pine forests, with huge masses of rock from
100 to 700 feet high, cast here and there among them; beyond these
pine-sprinkled grass hills; these, in their turn, were bounded by
interminable ranges, ghastly in the lurid evening, with the Spanish
Peaks quite clear, and the colossal summit of Mount Lincoln, the King
of the Rocky Mountains, distinctly visible, though seventy miles away.
It seemed awful to be alone on that ghastly ridge, surrounded by
interminable mountains, in the deep snow, knowing that a party of
thirty had been lost here a month ago. Just at nightfall the descent
of a steep hill took me out of the forest and upon a clean log cabin,
where, finding that the proper halting place was two miles farther on,
I remained. A truly pleasing, superior-looking woman placed me in a
rocking chair; would not let me help her otherwise than by rocking the
cradle, and made me "feel at home." The room, though it serves them
and their two children for kitchen, parlor, and bed room, is the
pattern of brightness, cleanliness, and comfort. At supper there were
canned raspberries, rolls, butter, tea, venison, and fried rabbit, and
at seven I went to bed in a carpeted log room, with a thick feather bed
on a mattress, sheets, ruffled pillow slips, and a pile of warm white
blankets! I slept for eleven hours. They discourage me much about the
route which Governor Hunt has projected for me. They think that it is
impassable, owing to snow, and that another storm is brewing.

HALL'S GULCH, November 6.

I have ridden 150 miles since I wrote last. On leaving Twin Rock on
Saturday I had a short day's ride to Colonel Kittridge's cabin at Oil
Creek, where I spent a quiet Sunday with agreeable people. The ride
was all through parks and gorges, and among pine-clothed hills, about
9,000 feet high, with Pike's Peak al