His was a happy, careless life--as aimless and as dreamy as my own. Nature supplied his every want. His orchards were the thickets of cherries and wild-plums. His harvests of golden grain were the fields of yellow sun-flowers. His gardens were the untilled fields, and there his vegetables grew. The roots and bulbs he knew supplied his pottage. Honey was stored for him by the wild bees, and the beasts of the field gave him their furry coats to keep him warm. His dusky mate was an easy love, and she always treated him with kindness. His life was one of sportive ease, and I have often envied him his happy lot. It was an indescribable joy to me in those old days to stroll along the white-pebbled beach of the lake and gather shells. I also loved to roam among the green, round hills near by and gaze out across the calm blue lake, or let my glances wander afar off up those shining straits, channeled out, as they are, like mighty gateways among the cliffs and crags of the ancient hills. Far away they would widen out again into broad lakes, or else they would wander off and lose themselves in narrow straits among the splintered crags and snow-capped peaks of the not distant mountains. Often, as I would sit gazing up into those mystic gulfs and weird canons, stretching far away among the hills, I would fancy in my childish innocence that I could catch glimpses of another world which lay dimly visible in the “far beyond.” I had hopes of being able, some day, to propel my little bull-hide boat into that wonderful realm of the “great unknown.” The long lines of “sand hill” cranes, the sharp phalanx of white geese, the flutter of swans’ wings, circling away across the distant marsh lands, appeared as the flash of angel wings. To me they seemed as the spirits of the blest, circling through celestial skies or hovering above the shores of Paradise. _THOSE ARE THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS_ “Those are the Rocky Mountains”--yes, those long, blue lines of cordilleras just above you are the foot-hills, and those tall, white peaks standing afar off beyond, and appearing ethereal and ghost-like in the dim distance, are the ice-clad summits of the “snowy-range.” “Those are the Rocky Mountains”--yes, and _these_ are the great plains. Oh, what a beautiful, green, wild world this is! How can one live in such a land and not be glad! It is a day of God, and the wild herds of the plain are grazing all around us. They range in droves among the low, round hills near by, or lick “alike” in the deep, basin-like valleys below, where often we catch the shimmer of some fairy lake.