I entered the Rocky Mountains at a place called Golden City. It lies in a gap of the first range. Till lately it was the capital of Colorado, which honour has now been transferred to Denver. It is chiefly of brick—the proof, in this part of the world, of mature age in a town. I counted three churches in the place; the best of the three belongs, as I was told, to the Episcopalians. The population appeared to be about three thousand. A thick seam of good coal is exposed just at the foot of the hill close to the town. I had heard that I should find a place of this name, but I was not at all prepared for the brick, and the churches, and the population. There is a good hotel here, kept by an Englishman; but, judging from those I fell in with, the well-to-do people of the place were mostly New Englanders. Just beyond Golden City the road passes through a grand defile, between precipitous mountains of dark rock; this, as it leads to the auriferous regions up in the mountains, is called the Golden Gates. Up in the mountains I visited the three mining towns of Black Hawk, Central City, and Nevada. The district to which these towns belong had a population of fifteen thousand persons engaged in mining, but I found several of the mills not at work, and was told that the population had lately fallen off considerably. In the neighbourhood of these towns all the timber has been cut down for building and mining; and as everything that would burn has also been cleared off for fuel, every accessible mountain has been made as bare as a ploughed field. Their sides are covered with what appear to be gigantic mole-hills, but which in reality are the heaps of earth the miners have thrown up in prospecting—that is, examining the ground for auriferous veins, which is done by digging holes ten or twelve feet deep. It will be a long time before the forest appears again, for at this altitude it was composed entirely of pine, and I could nowhere, on exposed places, find any young trees: I could find plenty of little seedlings, but they all were dead or dying, I supposed from their inability to bear without protection the wind, or the cold, or the drought. I saw some magnificent trees of, I believe, a kind of spruce, and a kind of silver fir, on the hills, from which it would have been difficult to have removed them if cut down. They were of great height, and very straight, though of course nothing like what we hear of as growing on the western slopes, and down to the Pacific coast. On the lower hills I saw abundance of a white-barked poplar, of a kind of alder, of birch, and of willow. Gooseberry bushes in places covered the ground. I heard that currants, raspberries, blueberries, and some other small edible fruit were to be found in equal plenty. I saw large spaces on the hill sides, where the undergrowth was chiefly Berberis aquifolium. In the valleys of the outer ranges there was a great deal of the small cactus