river systems of the Continent are centred. Their contour and position are the important facts of the range to the theoretical, the all-important ones to the practical student of physical geography.

Big and Little Laramie, where we crossed the Plain, flow nearly parallel and about fourteen miles apart. Their width, at the bridges maintained by the Overland Route, is about thirty or forty yards. Their banks, but especially those of the latter branch, are enameled with flowers of a brilliancy unequaled, but of titles unknown in my experience. One variety

was a scarlet vivid as flame, and at a distance resembled a salvia. The leguminaceae were represented by several plants bearing the richest mauve and purple blossoms; besides which I noticed some flowers seemingly allied to the larkspur, of a deep-blue shade, and sparingly interspersed among the profusion of the others. The sun was just on the western verge of the plateau as we reached Little Laramie; and the effect of his level rays upon the exquisite cool verdure of the grass, with all these brilliant flowers dashed in for the high tones, was something out of which to manufacture peaceful memories for a lifetime.

During the next seventeen miles the ground gradually grew less even; but the general characteristics of the plateau were preserved until twilight gave way to starlight, and we arrived at the station of Cooper's Creek. Here the moon rose, and revealed to us one of the loveliest little dells in all the Rocky Mountain scenery. Along the bottom of a shallow depression ran, crystal-clear and icy cold, a small stream, rising from the same Black range as the Laramie, and belonging to one of three classes which

abound in this immediate vicinity: the streams which lose themselves upon the Plain in "sinks," or lakes without outlet; those which penetrate the Black range to join the North Platte immediately; and those which flow thither indirectly, by emptying into Medicine Bow. For these three systems, the terrace including Cooper's Creek forms a nodal point on the small scale; to which of them the creek belongs, I am not positive. We ate our supper from the box of private stores, sitting dappled with the moon-shadow of the luxuriant cotton-woods which embowered the creek; and listening to its tuneful gurgling, or watching the silver flash of ripples break across an umber pool of shade, we could have forgotten that this was not the end of our wanderings.

The hoarse "All right!" of the driver startled us from our lotus margin. We had a great deal more before us; so we arose to shake the crumbs from our beards, and the romance from our souls. We turned back one lingering glance at the paradise of Laramie Plains. Far off we heard the shrill yelp of the coyote; and as far, a silver spark went shooting across the shadow of a grassy terrace, with that electric swiftness which denotes the antelope. The whole great level was powdered with silvery mist. The moonlight seemed to lie on the nearer grass in silvery globules. Moonlight was tangled into the texture of the grossest things. The ragged cotton-wood bark by the creek looked like strips of silver foil; the bleak station-house was soaked in a solution of romance, and might have been let for a palace to Rasselas ; there was antiquity and a sort of Gothic strength about the company's stables; while the very mules of the new relay seemed touched by the divinity of

the hour, and became hallowed, or moon-mellowed mules, who might have walked into the traces out of some old Italian "Flight into Egypt," or "Adoration of the Magi."

With a sigh at turning our backs upon this lovely view, we drove across the creek, and immediately entered a rolling country. The transition between the general level of Laramie Plains and the intricately convoluted tract just west of Cooper's Creek, is almost as abrupt as the threshold of a door. The simple passage of a stream which does not wet our hubs, takes us at once into the view of an entirely new type of landscape. We are now, strictly speaking, out of the Laramie Plateau, and beginning to ascend toward Elk Mountain and the head of Medicine Bow, by the foot-hills of the range including them. We were entering the extremity of the Black range, which had imperceptibly swung round nearly a whole quadrant while we were crossing the Plains, to blend with the Elk Mountain range as we ascended. The evening had been bracing, but not unpleasantly sharp, upon the Plains. Ascending from an elevation of eight thousand feet, however, a man is not compelled to go very far for cold weather. We had not climbed an hour among the gray, cerebral convolutions of this tract, before the cold became intense enough, not only for overcoats, but for all the blankets we could wrap in. I was quite benumbed upon my favorite seat at the driver's side; and he himself suffered severely under a heavy-caped coachman's coat of pilot-cloth, his fingers aching and stiffening around the lines inside Indian mittens of thick buckskin. Yet we could scarcely have chosen a more favorable season to cross the range, and this

was one of the pleasantest nights in the entire year. I expressed to the driver my sincere desire that I might never be here during the least pleasant ones, and climbed around through the stage door into the interior.

It was early daybreak when we stopped at the base of the great Elk Mountain. The air was perfectly clear, and so intensely cold that while our horses were changing, we collected the dead boughs of some stinted cedars, and made ourselves a jolly camp-fire, at which we simultaneously warmed our benumbed bodies, and extracted our breakfast coffee.

Just at our left and southernmost hand rose the rugged wedge of the Elk Mountain, save in occasional reddish-gray patches of protruding granite, snow-clad from base to edge. It overtopped our own lofty level by full three thousand feet, we ourselves being at between nine thousand and ten thousand feet of elevation.

The two most massive mountains which I saw during my entire journey, were this Elk Mountain and the Old Cheyenne, guarding the south approach to Pike's Peak. There are higher peaks, but no nobler mountains than these broad masses of bald or snowclad rock, with a general trapezoidal surface, broken into splendid variations of light and shade, and having an almost horizontal sky-line, when the sunlight strikes its crest of eternal ice, defined as sharply as a razor's edge.

The base of the Elk Mountain is surrounded with forests, consisting of all the mountain species; and the water from its snow rivulets keeps the herbage fresh under the trees. As a result, game has always been very plenty here, the Elk Mountain hunting-grounds.

being famous alike to the Indian and the white man, who, by struggles not a few, have tested their relative rights of entry upon the domain. The animals which gave the mountain its name were abundant at this season, and the Colorado deer and antelope no less So. We had frequent opportunities to try the meat of all these animals, and found elk-meat a translation of venison into the vulgar dialect, while antelope was venison's apotheosis.

After leaving the Elk Mountain, we continued during the entire morning to traverse one of these desert plateaus, which are characteristic of the Rocky Mountain system, and to which I have already referred in the itinerary of the day before we reached Laramie Plains. It consisted of a series of terraces, casually mistakable for an effect of wind-blown sand, had not occasional ledges of trap shown that all belonged to one system of elevation, and that where the sand had heaped the rock out of sight, the dikes still kept their strike uniform. For ten miles the plateau was mainly covered with sand. Through this here and there projected a columnar mass, or a curious series of trapezoids, arranged stair-fashion; but its general effect was that of a level ash-bed, in which throve the pale saffron blossoms of the palmate cacti, and the delicate pink cactus flower, like a baby's finger-tips seen in sunlight, which grows on a globular body like an aristocratic artichoke. Add to the inventory of vegetable life an occasional whorl of gramma-grass, a scattering of dwarfed wormwoods, a patch of grease-wood here and there, and a variety of those pale-leaved plants, covered with a soft sessile down, which, all over the barrenest tracts east of Salt Lake, cling to the ground so close that frequently they are not distinguished from it by the traveller.