GLACIER PARK 55 



and they sometimes star the ground for acres, a veritable 

 cloth of gold, at the feet of Dantean shale piles, frown- 

 ing red precipices, or hanging masses of the snow that 

 never melts. When they are gone, sister flowers take 

 their place. Always there is bloom and colour, al- 

 ways the soft tinkle of water and the wine of a wander- 

 ing wind. 



All days are not fair in the Park, of course, though the 

 proportion to one who has been accustomed to the 

 White Mountains or the Adirondacks seems very high, 

 and it is strange at first to waken morning after morn- 

 ing and find the daybreak rosy on cloudless summits, 

 while a good camera will pick out the pattern of a man's 

 clothes half a mile away, so brilliantly sharp is the 

 atmosphere. Clouds do come, however, settling down 

 in a vast, dun pall over the Divide, and forming a rest- 

 less roof over the canoned amphitheatres which lie in the 

 curves of this majestic wall. On such days the colour 

 seems to go out of the rocks, only a streak of dull red 

 here and there remaining. The wild-flower carpet loses 

 its vividness. The snowfields look sooty and cold. 

 You are chiefly aware of the great precipices hemming 

 you in and shooting up into the driving scud, their tops 

 invisible, prison walls of a height that might be infinite. 

 The spirit, on such a day, is unspeakably depressed, and 

 yet there is a strange joy, too, the joy of facing anything 

 in Nature so seemingly stupendous. 



For two such days we waited, impatient, for the 



