IN THE MOUNTAINS 



Near Evamton, W^o. Monday the fourteenth. 



Since daylight, from the observation platform, I have watched 

 the low hills in the rear of the train, itself running several thousand 

 feet above sea level, in changing vistas shouldering their way 

 against the sky in long procession. They sweep and soar in 

 luminous gray bulk against a goldenly-glowing cloudy sky in the 

 east ; that to south and north in low down rifts breaks into 

 the loveliest pearl greens, and overhead into a wet blue that has 

 the merest ghost of south Atlantic sea water elusively hovering 

 in its placid depths. And from their shimmering gray distances 

 in the sunlit east the hills come sliding down into the valley in 

 long, sweeping curves to take their local color as they come into 

 full light, of faded old gold. On this field, the aspens, turned by 

 the frost, flame in orange vermilion, blazing the brighter for the 

 gray undertone of their bare stems. Now we leave the ranges, 

 covered with morning frost that departs before the sun, and come 

 into a level valley, bound about with yet other hills. The color 

 of these, full of light, is not so much gray as a prismatic, light- 

 quivering field of minute, separately unseen points of color — red, 

 violet, pale green, full green, dull yellow, bright yellow, olive, 

 blue of a dozen different tones of blueness, purplishness, or green- 

 ness, all under the morning light, broken, reflected, and refracted 

 in multitudinous ways, brought and harmonized together into 

 a gray that is the sum of all color — alike a painter's delight and a 

 painter's despair. 



And their scale. This is not realized until, holding a pencil 

 at arm's length — one eye closed, the length of one side of a quarter 

 section of irrigated corn half a mile away, looking about as big as 

 a pocket handkerchief, is taken off with a sliding finger, and then 

 four times increased on the length of the pencil, giving a propor- 

 tionate mile, the length so shown is again at arm's length sighted 

 against the rising side of a hill just beyond the corn patch. It 

 covers something less than the twentieth part of the length of the 

 incline from base to peak, beyond which most likely rises another 

 yet nobler in height and contour. 



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