For the one prairie flower which I think more beautiful than the blower I cannot find a name. It rises to about six inches above ground, and spreads in a circle of a foot across. Its leaf is thin and spare; its flower-bloom a white cup, about two inches in diameter; and its buds pink and pendulent. All our garden annuals are to be found in masses acres in size upon the plains. Penstemon, coreopsis, persecaria, yucca, dwarf sumach, marigold, and sunflower, all are flowering here at once, till the country is ablaze with gold and red. The coreopsis of our gardens they call the “rosin-weed,” and say that it forms excellent food for sheep. The view of the “Cordillera della Sierra Madre,” the Rocky Mountain main chain, from the outskirts of Denver is sublime; that from the roof at Milan does not approach it. Twelve miles from the city the mountains rise abruptly from the plains. Piled range above range with step-like regularity, they are topped by a long white line, sharply relieved against the indigo of the sky. Two hundred and fifty miles of the mother Sierra are in sight from our veranda; to the south, Pike‘s Peak and Spanish Peak; Long‘s Peak to the north; Mount Lincoln towering above all. The views are limited only by the curvature of the earth, such is the marvelous purity of the Coloradan air, the effect at once of the distance from the sea and of the bed of limestone which underlies the plains. The site of Denver is heaven-blessed in climate as well as loveliness. The sky is brilliantly blue, and cloudless from dawn till noon. In the mid-day heats, cloud-making in the Sierra begins, and by sunset the snowy chain is multiplied a hundred times in curves of white and purple cumuli, while thunder rolls heavily along the range. “This is a great country, sir,” said a Coloradan to me to-day. “We make clouds for the whole universe.” At dark there is dust or thunder-storm at the mountain foot, and then the cold and brilliant night. Summer and winter it is the same. CHAPTER XI RED INDIA. “These Red Indians are not red,” was our first cry when we saw the Utes in the streets of Denver. They had come into the town to be painted as English ladies go to London to shop; and we saw them engaged within a short time after their arrival in daubing their cheeks with vermilion and blue, and referring to glasses which the squaws admiringly held. Still, when we met them with peaceful paintless cheeks, we had seen that their color was brown, copper, dirt, anything you please except red. The Hurons, with whom I had stayed at Indian Lorette, were French in training if not in blood; the Pottawatomies of St. Mary‘s Mission, the Delawares of Leavenworth, are tame Indians: it is true that they can hardly be called red; but still I had expected to have found these wild prairie and mountain Indians of the color from which they take their name. Save for paint, I found them of a color wholly different from that which we call red.