COOL AND DARK. 
6l 
Get into a carriage at Boulder, and we will 
drive up its creek for ten miles. Imagine a sum- 
mer morning, faultlessly cool and clear. We 
are just a mile from the mouth of the defile we 
would explore when we start. You can see it 
perfectly, though, right up the main street, just 
where the purple shadows take for a little way 
the place of the glaring rocks of the mountain 
sides. We do not care for houses, so we will 
not notice mills and reduction works. This hill 
at our left, as we enter the canon, is eleven hun- 
dred feet high, but that is nothing to what we 
shall come to by-and-by ! How cool and dark 
the evergreens look up among the precipices 
upon its side ! I do not know the height of 
those sandstone cliffs at the right. But see ! 
our road is occupying all the space between 
two streams of water ! This one, on a level with 
the track, is the Farmer’s Ditch. It winds 
around the base of the foot-hills and out on to 
the plains to irrigate the land. That embank- 
ment you see, fifty feet or more above it, is the 
edge of the ditch that feeds the reservoir for the 
town. This water, eight or ten feet down the 
embankment at our left, is the creek proper. See 
how swift it is, and how its waters are dashed 
into foam against its rocks ! It is so all its way. 
You wonder what would happen if we should 
meet some one? We must look out for that, 
