Enthusiasm sometimes exaggerates the reality, just as colored glass confuses the sight; but when it serves to please without doing harm, the fault may be pardoned. To the enthusiasm of the occasion, and our great and unique enterprise, may therefore be charged the burst of admiration that manifested our feelings, when, rolling along the prairies on the Union Pacific R. R., we saw, rising far to the southwest, nearly one hundred miles away, the broad shoulders of Pike’s Peak, breaking into russet above the clouds and showing a head of saffron, mellowed by the soft rays of a sun just falling into the deep valleys of the Occident. It was the chief object to chain our attention for the while, and this first impression awakened most delightful anticipations of the work which lay before us. A few hours later we were in Denver, making final preparations for a photographing tour of the picturesque West. Fortunately, our arrangements were so nearly complete upon leaving St. Louis that only a short stay in Denver was necessary, and it was with eager desire that we had our car attached to a Union Pacific train and started for the heart of the Rockies. The long range of mountains, rising into sharp peaks, and again spreading their tops into truncated cones, elbowing and pushing each other like a brigade in too close quarters at parade-rest, are only fifteen miles from Denver, forming a grand background to an immense expanse of prairie landscape. Starting on the Colorado Central Branch of the Union Pacific, we soon pass through the gate-way of the Rockies; thence on to Golden, a beautiful mining town that nestles in the bed of a dried-up lake, and looks up with pleasing satisfaction to the guardian gods of North and South Table Mountains. Here a stop is made for a trip up Bear Creek Cañon, which is reached by stage, by which conveyance the traveler is trundled into a gorge of surpassing beauty and noble grandeur. Through this great gash the water dashes, swollen by melting snows, and fed by a thousand sources. On either side the frowning and dusky walls, weaving a tortuous way like the path of a drunken giant, rear up their castellated heads until they remind us of the walled cities of Jericho, over which Joshua’s spies were lowered by Rahab. [Illustration: MARSHALL FALLS, CLEAR CREEK CAÑON.]