They say that winter never "sets in" there in the
Foot Hills, but that there are spells of cold, alternating with bright,
hot weather, and that the snow never lies on the ground so as to
interfere with the feed of cattle. Golden City rang with oaths and
curses, especially at the depot. Americans are given over to the most
atrocious swearing, and the blasphemous use of our Savior's name is
peculiarly revolting.

Golden City stands at the mouth of Toughcuss, otherwise Clear Creek
Canyon, which many people think the grandest scenery in the mountains,
as it twists and turns marvellously, and its stupendous sides are
nearly perpendicular, while farther progress is to all appearance
continually blocked by great masses of rock and piles of snow-covered
mountains. Unfortunately, its sides have been almost entirely denuded
of timber, mining operations consuming any quantity of it. The
narrow-gauge, steel-grade railroad, which runs up the canyon for the
convenience of the rich mining districts of Georgetown, Black Hawk, and
Central City, is a curiosity of engineering. The track has partly been
blasted out of the sides of the canyon, and has partly been "built" by
making a bed of stones in the creek itself, and laying the track across
them. I have never seen such churlishness and incivility as in the
officials of that railroad and the state lines which connect with it,
or met with such preposterous charges. They have handsome little cars
on the route, but though the passengers paid full fare, they put us
into a baggage car because the season was over, and in order to see
anything I was obliged to sit on the floor at the door. The singular
grandeur cannot be described. It is a mere gash cut by the torrent,
twisted, walled, chasmed, weather stained with the most brilliant
coloring, generally dark with shadow, but its utter desolation
occasionally revealed by a beam of intense sunshine. A few stunted
pines and cedars, spared because of their inaccessiblity, hung here and
there out of the rifts. Sometimes the walls of the abyss seemed to
meet overhead, and then widening out, the rocks assumed fantastic
forms, all grandeur, sublimity, and almost terror. After two hours of
this, the track came to an end, and the canyon widened sufficiently for
a road, all stones, holes, and sidings. There a great "Concord coach"
waited for us, intended for twenty passengers, and a mountain of
luggage in addition, and the four passengers w