The sunsets now and then were magnificent, and one particularly beyond Fort Sedgwick or Julesburg deserves further mention. We were rolling rapidly along, when the sun went down behind a cloud, that formed the huge segment of a circle on the horizon, and from around and behind this his rays came flashing forth with a beauty--a glory and a gorgeousness--that we had never seen equalled. Heavy, sombre clouds hung about the west, while over head and off to the east they thinned out into fleecy mottled masses almost invisible, until his reflected rays illuminated them. Up among these, across the whole dome of the heavens, the colors flamed and went, as tremulous as a maiden's blushes--now crimson and gold, then purple and violet, and now again a dreamy, hazy, half-pink, half rosy light, that baffles description. I had seen gorgeous sunsets elsewhere--on the Hudson, among the Alleghanies, by the sea--but never any so full of glory and majesty, and sublimity as this. The fleecy masses overhead seemed to hang in curtains, one behind the other, like the top scenes at a theatre, and the shifting light playing about among them added to the illusion. Nature seemed here to enrobe the heavens in her most magnificent and gorgeous tapestry, as if trying to show what glorious fabrics her noiseless looms could weave; and over all brooded that mysterious silence of the Plains, that seems like the hush of eternity. It must have been some such scene, that flamed through the poet's brain when he wrote: "All the west was washed with fire; Great clouds were standing round the setting sun, Like gaping caves, fantastic pinnacles, Citadels throbbing in their own fierce light, Tall spires that came and went like spires of flame, Cliffs quivering with fire-snow, and peaks Of piléd gorgeousness, and rocks of fire A-tilt and poised, bare beaches, crimson seas." A singular part of it all was, that passengers in the next stage-coach, a hundred miles east, were struck with the same magnificent sunset, and followed us into Denver with similar accounts of its grandeur and sublimity, at the point where they had been. FOOTNOTE: [2] The line thence to California was run by Wells, Fargo & Co. CHAPTER IV. UP THE PLATTE TO DENVER (_Concluded_).