The town of Mayfield was in one of the pleasantest counties in Massachusetts. The region was very beautifully wooded and had several small rivers in it, and one range of low hills called the Saycross Hills; the highest of these was perhaps three thousand feet high, and Nelly had spent many a day on its top: but she had never seen any thing which gave her any idea of the grandeur of a high mountain till she saw this picture of Pike's Peak. It seemed as if she could not take her eyes away from this picture: she looked at it as one looks at the picture of the face of a friend. "Oh papa!" she exclaimed at last, "let me have this picture for my own: won't you? I'll be very, very careful of it." "Yes, you may have it if you want it so much," replied Mr. March, "but be very sure not to lose it. I may want to show it to some one, any day." "I won't lose it, papa," said Nelly, in a tone of so much feeling that her father looked at her in surprise. "Why, Nell," he said, "you must be a born mountaineer I think." And so she was. From the day she first looked on this picture of Pike's Peak till the day when she stood at the foot of the real mountain itself, it was seldom out of her mind. She kept the little card in the box with Mrs. Napoleon's best bonnet and gown, and she talked so much about it that her father called her his "little Pike's Peak girl." The rest of the pictures were of some of the towns in Colorado, some ranches,--ranches is the word which the Coloradoans use instead of farm,--and some beautiful canyons. A canyon is either a narrow valley with very high steep sides to it, or a chasm between two rocky walls. The most beautiful and wonderful things in Colorado are the canyons; they all have streams of water running through them; in fact, the canyons may be said to be roads which rivers and creeks have made for themselves among the mountains. Sometimes the river has cut a road for itself right down through solid rock, twelve hundred feet deep. You can think how deep that must be, by looking at the walls of the room you are sitting in, as you read this story. Probably the walls of your room are about ten feet high. Now imagine walls of rock one hundred and twenty times as high as that; and only far enough apart for a small river to go through at the bottom; and then imagine beautiful great pine-trees, and many sorts of shrubs and flowers growing all the way down these sides, and along the upper edges of them, and don't you see what a wonderful place a canyon must be? You mustn't think either that they are just straight up and down walls, such as a mason might build out of bricks, or that they run straight in one direction for their whole length. They are made up often of great rocks as big as houses piled one on top of another, and all rough and full of points, and with big caves in them; and they turn and twist, just as the river has turned and twisted, to the north or south or east or west. Sometimes they take