intenser than that of any of the sandstones I am acquainted with, in a bright sun seeming almost like carnelian. A rock of similar look and type which I have omitted to mention on the way from Denver, was at least four miles away, yet made as clear and conspicuous a blot of red against the mountain-side as if it had been laid on with a heavily charged paint-brush. This, from some fancied resemblance, was called "Church" or "Brick Church" Rock.

These "gods" rise abruptly out of perfectly level ground. The right hand or northern warder of the gateway is more wedge-shaped than tabular, and contains within it a cavern, which we penetrated with some difficulty by a small aperture opening near the base of the western side. Twelve feet of prostrate squeezing brought us into a vault about fifty feet long, ten feet high, and a dozen wide. We lighted our candles, but there was not much to see. The walls of the hollow were damp; but there was no dripping water, and of course, in a gritty rock like this, there were no stalactites or secondary formations of any kind. One of the other red rocks resembles a statue of Liberty standing by her eseutcheon, with the usual Phrygian cap on her head. Still another is surmounted by two figures which it requires very little poetry, at the proper distance from them, to imagine a dolphin and an eagle aspecting each other across a field gules. The spinecracking curve of the dolphin, and his nice, impossibly fluted mouth would have delighted any of the old bronze-workers. Quentin Matsys would have used him for a model in some civic fountain. The eagle, too, was quite striking. Together, we regarded these animals as the emblems of our national supremacy

over field and flood, and named them The American Arms. Another rock resembles a pilgrim (poetical, not Plains' variety) pressing forward with a staff in his hand; another is supposed to look exactly like a griffin. Indeed, from the right point of view one feels that a griffin must very probably look thus, though the difficulty of comparing it with an original specimen prevents absolute certainty.

It was a great disappointment to some of our kind friends that our artist did not choose the Garden of the Gods for a "big picture." It was such an interesting place in nature that they could not understand its unavailability for art. Everywhere we went during our journey, we found the same ideas prevailing, and had to be on our guard against enthusiasms, lest we should waste time in getting at the "most magnificent scenery in the world" to find some solitary castle-rock or weird simulation of another kind, which, however impressive it might be outdoors, was absolutely incommunicable by paint and canvas, when the attempt to convey it, being simply the imitation of an imitation, must have looked either like a very poor castle, or a mountain put up by an association of stone-masons. But the artist's selective faculty is not to be looked for among practical men.

The morning after our visit to the god-patch, we bade good-by to our friends at Colorado City, and once more turned our ambulance, now considerably heavier by a rich collection of specimens, in the direction of Denver. Instead of keeping near the outer edge of that field of giant grave-stones between which we had picked our avenue on the way down, we followed the Fontaine qui Bouille up to its effervescent springs, took a last deep draught of the

champagne which Nature keeps there endlessly on tap, and, steering inward, passed the gods in final, quick review.

Just as we got to the gateway of the Garden of the Gods, one of our ambulance horses broke his whiffletree by a sudden start. His excuse was an alarm from a gun fired by a gentleman of our party at one of the numerous hares which we encountered in the furze about the Garden. He and the gentleman magnanimously divided the inconvenience of the accident; the one riding and the other letting himself be ridden down to Colorado City for a new spar.

We were not sorry for an excuse to linger beyond our intention in one of the most interesting spots of the Continent. In politeness to us, that portion of the expedition represented by the buck-board also halted. Pierce geologized, and the artist sketched. Judge Hall found sufficient employment in the mere act of admiration; expressing himself with an enthusiasm in regard to the gods, which assured me that they were gods indeed, being no respecters of persons, else had they risen and bowed to the Chief Justice of the Territory. The other member of our party went hare-hunting with good success, using the gun which the gentleman in search of the whiffletree had left behind him,—a state of things which has its high moral illustration in the history of virtue from Hogarth down to the last Sunday-school book, or herein, where the bad little boy, who fires in an original style out of the coach, has to go away from the hares, and get a whiffletree, while the good little boy, who was careful not to fire till he could do it under the most proper circumstances, stays behind, and shoots a great many hares with the bad little

boy's gun. We remarked to our bad little boy, on his return, that we regarded him as a lofty moral lesson. It was a very hot day to ride five miles in the open, on a hard trotting horse and bare-back; so that he did not wish to be a lofty moral lesson, and expressed that view strongly.

As for myself during his absence, I gave over all thought of business, and wandered around in a much more æsthetic atmosphere than yesterday. I visited the gypsum hill near by, and, instead of asking it questions, let it talk to me. The intense glow of to-day's sun made it more lustrous than I had seen it before; or else it may have been that my eyes were no longer occupied with minutiae of structure, and gave themselves up to its entire impression. It was a beautiful object in the landscape; such an exquisite pure white, with such a fleecy look from the softening influence of the débris scattered over its crystals, that a poet would have called it one of the gods' sheep who had lain down in the garden when the doom came, and suffered petrifaction with his masters. I interested myself in the attempts which here and there were making by inhabitants of Colorado City to turn the level bottom below the Garden into a valuable tract for agricultural purposes. It requires little expense of time or labor to secure a foothold on Uncle Sam's soil in this Territory. Four notched logs laid in a square on the ground, will keep a preëmpted quarter-section for a year, being to all legal intents, as has been decided, sufficient earnest of the fact that the owner purposes building " a house suitable for human habitation." During our present trip we saw several such squares of logs; and they were quite as well respected by new-comers as if they had been

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squares of infantry. At one time Mr. Garvin had set his stake in the Garden of the Gods, intending to enjoy the luxury of ownership in that great natural curiosity; but other business prevented his carrying out his plan of a large house there, and, not to interfere with actual settlers who might wish the spot, he finally withdrew his claim. George Tappan, some time before I came to Denver, preempted the section containing the springs of the Fontaine qui Bouille. But Nature is not quite as easy with the new settler as Uncle Sam. If she is to yield him anything, she demands pay beforehand. He can't put in his seeds, and give her a due-bill on Heaven to be presently paid in showers; but he must advance her moisture in the shape of irrigation, prior to all possibility of her growing a valuable crop. Through the low bottom immediately east of the Gods' Garden, I found a number of "sequis," or distributing ditches, already run, connecting with a small rivulet which came from Camp Creek Cañon, and fell lower down into the Fontaine qui Bouille. Along these grew a profusion of the willow-leaved cotton-wood, a tree so much resembling the common swamp willow of our Eastern States, that but for the character of the bark I should have taken it for an old friend. The cottonwood with the cordiform leaf abounds around Denver, but is comparatively scarce here. Wandering through the thicket, I collected several of the largest and most gorgeous butterflies found out of California, and had my first open-air interview with a Coloradorattlesnake. He was so near me, as I stooped to put my hat over a giant papilio sucking from the mud of the stream, that if he had not been a noble enemy, he could have killed me more easily than I caught the