be sent to Denver for sale. The
winter fishing is very rich. In the hardest frost, men who fish not
for sport, but gain, take their axes and camping blankets, and go up to
the hard-frozen waters which lie in fifty places round the park, and
choosing a likely spot, a little sheltered from the wind, hack a hole
in the ice, and fastening a foot-link to a cotton-wood tree, bait the
hook with maggots or bits of easily-gotten fresh meat. Often the trout
are caught as fast as the hook can be baited, and looking through the
ice hole in the track of a sunbeam, you see a mass of tails, silver
fins, bright eyes, and crimson spots, a perfect shoal of fish, and
truly beautiful the crimson-spotted creatures look, lying still and
dead on the blue ice under the sunshine. Sometimes two men bring home
60 lbs. of trout as the result of one day's winter fishing. It is a
cold and silent sport, however.

How a cook at home would despise our scanty appliances, with which we
turn out luxuries. We have only a cooking-stove, which requires
incessant feeding with wood, a kettle, a frying pan, a six-gallon brass
pan, and a bottle for a rolling pin. The cold has been very severe,
but I do not suffer from it even in my insufficient clothing. I take a
piece of granite made very hot to bed, draw the blankets over my head
and sleep eight hours, though the snow often covers me. One day of
snow, mist, and darkness was rather depressing, and yesterday a
hurricane began about five in the morning, and the whole park was one
swirl of drifting snow, like stinging wood smoke. My bed and room were
white, and the frost was so intense that water brought in a kettle hot
from the fire froze as I poured it into the basin. Then the snow
ceased, and a fierce wind blew most of it out of the park, lifting it
from the mountains in such clouds as to make Long's Peak look like a
smoking volcano. To-day the sky has resumed its delicious blue, and
the park its unrivalled beauty. I have cleaned all the windows, which,
ever since I have been here, I supposed were of discolored glass, so
opaque and dirty they were; and when the men came home from fishing
they found a cheerful new world. We had a great deal of sacred music
and singing on Sunday. Mr. Buchan asked me if I knew a tune called
"America," and began the grand roll of our National Anthem to the words:

My country, 'tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty, etc.

December 1.

I was to have started for