sunset, and the horizon towards which we were travelling was flushed with a clear salmon hue, which contrasted finely with the dark green of the valleybottom, the lighter emerald of the band beneath the snows of the encircling precipice, and the third, almost black shade of the same color, manifested by the occasional groups of stinted evergreens, which marked the base of the slopes; while a still livelier tone was infused into the middle ground by the leaping jets of yellow flame which rose from the crackling sage and grease wood of the camp-fires where supper was cooking for three hundred men, women, and children, and, as it flickered, made the snow-white tilts of the great ox-wagons seem to dance and waver, go and come, like cheerful ghosts. The camp was full of farm-yard noises. Cows were lowing to be miked, and suckling calves were bleating to their mothers; a wandering, sniffing pack of curs were yelping at the welcome smell of supper and the thought of bones in reversion; and, from their coops slung to the backs of the wagons, side by side with that cooking stove and hickory-bottomed chair which are the emigrant's inevitable Lares, bewildered hens were clucking, and anachronistic cocks uttering a real break-o'-day crow, their ideas utterly turned topsyturvey by the inability to mark time with the proper roosting pole, and the mimicry of sunrise by the flash of camp-fires. We got cheerful nods and friendly greetings as we trundled through the camp, and came a few miles further on to our own supper at the Overland station of Sulphur Springs. This was the most elaborate meal we had enjoyed for some time. Sitting on the box with the driver, I had so fascinated that high authority's imagination by a description of

the canned provisions in our "outfit," that he warmed to the proposition of stopping at Sulphur until I could prepare "a good square meal." The station-keeper at Sulphur had a wife and a baby. We expressed much delight at this joyful sight,- by no means a common one in the mountains or on the Desert, unless on an emigrant wagon in transitu,—and so won the family heart that we were admitted to all the rights and privileges of the cooking-stove. Getting out our provision box from under our feet in the wagon, we soon had employment provided for every utensil known to the Sulphur Springs cuisine. The sight of men cooking is no such portent in the Rocky Mountains as (unfortunately for health and good taste) it is in the rural districts of the East; and the mother beamed on us kindly as she tended the baby with one arm and handed us condiments with the other, all with such dispatch that we had to warn her against mistaking hands in her excitement, and throwing the baby into the stewed tomatoes while she dandled the pepper. It would do the hearts of our Eastern acquaintance good to see the skilled fingers which had composed a glacier and innumerable mountain tops equally glib in hotter preparations, where the spoon was substituted for the paint brush; laying in a background of prepared coffee, and gradually bringing up the high-lights with an inspired touch of condensed cream; while literary fingers, gambolling in long vacation from the pen, were preparing an article on the theme of Shaker sweet corn, another upon canned beef, and still another upon tomatoes, the whole edition of the work containing these to be absorbed eagerly as soon as published. The driver, who had travelled widely, and become

conversant with the most elaborate cuisines of Denver and Salt Lake City, declared that even in those luxurious capitals this "outfit" was not to be surpassed.

After tea, while the fresh horses were getting attached, I wandered a few steps away from the back of the station to the springs which gave it its name. There were two of them, side by side-one, a white sulphur, of strength and flavor almost exactly resembling the Clifton water in Ontario County, State of New York; the other, more of the Kentucky Blue Lick type, but much more intense. The first I found very agreeable. I felt sorry that the rest of the party abhorred all such springs alike, for this was deliciously cold and limpid, beside being free from the saline and alkaline properties which were to make most of the springs henceforth, until we reached California, nauseous or wholly undrinkable. Though an epicure in the matter of mineral water, being very fond even of Blue Lick, I was obliged to confess that I could not drink the second spring. It was fairly saturated with sulphide of hydrogen, and had numerous other distinguishable flavors as badly intense, none of which I recognized save the chalybeate.

Shortly after we left Sulphur Springs, the moon rose, now near her full. As long as I could keep my eyes open, I sat on the box. The country was a congeries of bare round hills, receding and rising on either hand to mountain ranges, transverse to that which we had penetrated at Bridger's Pass. It was difficult to imagine that we were still in the very thick of the mountain system, and at an elevation at least as high as Laramie Plains. The stupendous scale upon which this system is constructed, constantly prevents the traveller from realizing where

he is. Not till he has climbed over many ridges, and penetrated many passes, does he understand that his descent over the one or his emerging from the other is only equivalent to the entrance upon another lofty plateau, a plain raised upon the very summit of the mountains themselves, or into a basin formed by the inosculation of several separate mountain-crests. The ridges which bound the plateau or the basin recede so as to lose their prominence in the landscape; and until one reaches the spot where they curve together again, or encounters some new range which forms a boundary to the comparative level he has been travelling, he might easily suppose he had reached a lowland tract, and got out of the mountains altogether. There is no more appropriate name for the Rocky Mountain system than to call it a chain, and to no other mountain system is the term equally applicable. The traveller crossing one of its basins or plateaus is inside a link; a break in one of these links is a pass or cañon. As he goes through this break, he enters another link, belonging to another parallel and lower or higher series. Not until he descends to Salt Lake City through that tremendous system of connecting cañons which breaks through the Wahsatch, can he say that he has crossed the Rocky Mountains. In some places along the system one line of links, in some others all but one, disappear entirely; but any where on the United States line between New Mexico and the Great South Pass, the interoceanic traveller must cross a parallel series of them amounting to a score or more. One of these links is sometimes found to be constructed of a single line of upheaval, curving from its very origin; but the link oftenest seems to have been constructed by two separate sets

of uplifts, operating at as many periods of disturbance: one, which we may call the primary, elevating the axial ranges of the Continent, whose principal trend is north and south; and the other, which we may call the secondary, operating subsequently between the parallel lines of the first uplift, with a general trend at right angles to it. The first upheaval produced a mountain region about six hundred miles wide at its widest part, with lofty valleys between its highest ranges. The second barred these valleys at intervals, turning them into the present plateaus or basins, and completing the link formation which we now see.

Though not entirely limited in its occurrence to the Rocky Mountains, this formation is strikingly characteristic of that system, and is nowhere else so constant a trait both of scenery and geology. Upon its existence depend the most important results to the future settlement of the interior. Wherever these transverse bars occur, it will instantly appear that the ease of irrigating the levels between the axial ranges is vastly enhanced. Many of them rise to a height as great as that of the longitudinal ranges; some of them are higher than those in their immediate neighborhood. They condense the moisture of the upper atmosphere currents, turn it into snow, and thus become reservoirs of irrigation-storehouses of fertility for the included levels below.

Any good map constructed after the latest surveys, but the maps of the War Department especially, will exhibit the link formation with peculiar clearness in many different portions of the range, but in none more strikingly than in the tract lying between 38° and 41° lat. N. and 105° and 107° lon. W. Within these boundaries lie three great links, whose interior