That evening, in a village inn, while the rain poured without, I sat cheek by jowl with a Knight Templar who had just returned from a convention of his order in Denver. It was not the meeting that now inspired him; it was the mountains. Reared on the prairie, he had never seen even hills before, and the sight of the earth rising from a plain until it touched high heaven was like giving to his mind the sense of a new dimension. For hours, he said, he would let his eyes wander from Long’s Peak to Pike’s and back again, while his imagination lost itself among the gorges and dark cañons, and in the midsummer glitter of aged snow. There lay the charm of it, in the plain telling of the opening to him of a world of majesty and beauty such as he had never dreamed of, revealing powers of reverence and admiration that he had not known were his. The humor of it, touched with charm, was all in his description of concrete experience of the new world of mystery. His account of an ascent of Pike’s Peak would have made the reputation of a humorist. An expedition to the Pole could hardly take itself more seriously. A few of his fellow-knights and he, with the ladies who were of their company, set out at midnight from Manitou to make sure of reaching the summit (a four hours’ walk) before dark of the following day. Not “the steep ascent of heaven” is beset with greater difficulty and danger for a struggling saint than was the climb along the line of a “cog” railway for this band of knights-errant and ladies fair. One can readily conceive the peril of the adventure—for feet accustomed only to the prairie—in treading from midnight until dawn the brinks of yawning chasms, with water falling in the dark. Nor did day dispel the terrors. The precipices were still there and a growing awfulness in the height above the plain that caused a “giddiness” which was the harder to resist because of the increasing difficulty of breathing the rarefied air. Some of the women fainted on the way, and the last hour’s climb was an agony to all the company; for now the effort of a few steps exhausted them, and they despaired of ever reaching the goal. It was past noon when finally they sank down at the summit in the shelter of rocks that shielded them from the piercing wind and ate what was left of their store of provision. The unconscious exaggeration took now a form even more comical in an account of what was visible from the mountain. I have heard, in a national convention, a young negro from Texas second the nomination of a party leader with a fervor and in terms that might befit an archangel. The play of fancy about Pike’s Peak was comparable with it, not in eloquence, perhaps, but certainly in a pitch which made both speeches memorable as gems of unstudied humor