such a flower of Paradise
as sacred human love?

The mercury is eleven degrees below zero, and I have to keep my ink on
the stove to prevent it from freezing. The cold is intense--a clear,
brilliant, stimulating cold, so dry that even in my threadbare flannel
riding dress I do not suffer from it. I must now take up my narrative
of the nothings which have all the interest of SOMETHINGS to me. We
all got up before daybreak on Tuesday, and breakfasted at seven. I
have not seen the dawn for some time, with its amber fires deepening
into red, and the snow peaks flushing one by one, and it seemed a new
miracle. It was a west wind, and we all thought it promised well. I
took only two pounds of luggage, some raisins, the mailbag, and an
additional blanket under my saddle. I had not been up from the park at
sunrise before, and it was quite glorious, the purple depths of
M'Ginn's Gulch, from which at a height of 9,000 feet you look down on
the sunlit park 1,500 feet below, lying in a red haze, with its pearly
needle-shaped peaks, framed by mountain sides dark with pines--my
glorious, solitary, unique mountain home! The purple sun rose in
front. Had I known what made it purple I should certainly have gone no
farther. Then clouds, the morning mist as I supposed, lifted
themselves up rose lighted, showing the sun's disc as purple as one of
the jars in a chemist's window, and having permitted this glimpse of
their king, came down again as a dense mist, the wind chopped round,
and the mist began to freeze hard. Soon Birdie and myself were a mass
of acicular crystals; it was a true easterly fog. I galloped on,
hoping to get through it, unable to see a yard before me; but it
thickened, and I was obliged to subside into a jog-trot.

As I rode on, about four miles from the cabin, a human figure, looking
gigantic like the spectre of the Brocken, with long hair white as snow,
appeared close to me, and at the same moment there was the flash of a
pistol close to my ear, and I recognized "Mountain Jim" frozen from
head to foot, looking a century old with his snowy hair. It was "ugly"
altogether certainly, a "desperado's" grim jest, and it was best to
accept it as such, though I had just cause for displeasure. He stormed
and scolded, dragged me off the pony--for my hands and feet were numb
with cold--took the bridle, and went off at a rapid stride, so that I
had to run to keep them in sight in the darkness, for we were off the