138 FISHING WITH THE FLY. 



the contents of that pool, and beat him by one. But to 

 this day he greets me with a smile. When I got back 

 to camp I learned that the Governor had been trying to 

 follow in the footsteps of his father, and had tum- 

 bled into the spring. He had been fished out by the 

 combined efforts of his mother and Mrs. Ferguson, and 

 I discovered him swathed in a blanket by the kitchen 

 stove, mad as a hornet ; I shook hands with him. 



Our camp is pitched in a pleasant spot, with two tall 

 pines, a hundred feet away, for sentinels. Coup do 

 soleil is unknown in Colorado, so I prefer the sun's rays 

 to lightning, especially while trees seared from top to 

 bottom are plentiful in the Park as monitors. To the 

 right is Prospect Mountain, with its west end a beetling 

 cliff, perhaps two thousand feet high, where I once had 

 the buck-ague during an interview with a "big-horn." 

 To the left and in front, the range, where the storm- 

 king holds high carnival, while lower down and nearer 

 is a mountain of towers and pinnacles of brown and 

 red and gray, carved out by that whimsical sculptor, 

 Old Time. With the sun for my artist, the range for 

 both his easel and background, I have lounged away 

 many an hour under one of the old pines. My gaze 

 wandering down the green slope to the river half a mile 

 away, and with the weird music of the tumbling waters 

 coming and receding on the summer breeze to help my 

 dreams, we have together wrought out fantastic ruins 

 and ghostly shapes to people them. A drifting cloud, 

 perhaps, will change a barbacan to a spire, and a Doric 



