the dismalness of a level land comes over me.
The canyon of the St. Vrain was in all its glory of color, but we had a
remarkably ugly crossing of that brilliant river, which was frozen all
over, except an unpleasant gap of about two feet in the middle. Mr.
Nugent had to drive the frightened horses through, while I, having
crossed on some logs lower down, had to catch them on the other side as
they plunged to shore trembling with fear. Then we emerged on the vast
expanse of the glittering Plains, and a sudden sweep of wind made the
cold so intolerable that I had to go into a house to get warm. This
was the last house we saw till we reached our destination that night.
I never saw the mountain range look so beautiful--uplifted in every
shade of transparent blue, till the sublimity of Long's Peak, and the
lofty crest of Storm Peak, bore only unsullied snow against the sky.
Peaks gleamed in living light; canyons lay in depths of purple shade;
100 miles away Pike's Peak rose a lump of blue, and over all, through
that glorious afternoon, a veil of blue spiritualized without dimming
the outlines of that most glorious range, making it look like the
dreamed-of mountains of "the land which is very far off," till at
sunset it stood out sharp in glories of violet and opal, and the whole
horizon up to a great height was suffused with the deep rose and pure
orange of the afterglow. It seemed all dream-like as we passed through
the sunlit solitude, on the right the prairie waves lessening towards
the far horizon, while on the left they broke in great snowy surges
against the Rocky Mountains. All that day we neither saw man, beast,
nor bird. "Jim" was silent mostly. Like all true children of the
mountains, he pined even when temporarily absent from them.

At sunset we reached a cluster of houses called Namaqua, where, to my
dismay, I heard that there was to be a dance at the one little inn to
which we were going at St. Louis. I pictured to myself no privacy, no
peace, no sleep, drinking, low sounds, and worse than all, "Jim"
getting into a quarrel and using his pistols. He was uncomfortable
about it for another reason. He said he had dreamt the night before
that there was to be a dance, and that he had to shoot a man for making
"an unpleasant remark."

For the last three miles which we accomplished after sunset the cold
was most severe, but nothing could exceed the beauty of the afterglow,
and the strange look of the rolling