Railroads have made the Rocky Mountain country familiar and contiguous, I may say, to the whole world; but the somber canon, the bald and blackened cliff, the velvety park and the snowy, silent peak that forever rests against the soft, blue sky, are ever new. The foamy green of the torrent has whirled past the giant walls of nature's mighty fortress myriads of years, perhaps, and the stars have looked down into the great heart of earth for centuries, where the silver thread of streams, thousands of feet below, has been patiently carving out the dark canon where the eagle and the solemn echo have their home. I said this to a gentleman from Leadville a short time ago as we toiled up Kenoska Hill, between Platte canon and the South Park, on the South Park and Pacific Railway. He said that might be true in some cases and even more so, perhaps, depending entirely on whether it would or not. I do not believe at this moment that he thoroughly understood me. He was only a millionaire and his soul, very likely, had never throbbed and thrilled with the mysterious music nature yields to her poet child. He could talk on and on of porphyry walls and contact veins, gray copper and ruby silver, and sulphurets and pyrites of iron, but when my eye kindled with the majestic beauty of these eternal battlements and my voice trembled a little with awe and wonder; while my heart throbbed and thrilled in the midst of nature's eloquent, golden silence, this man sat there like an Etruscan ham and refused to throb or thrill. He was about as unsatisfactory a throbber and thriller as I have met for years. At an elevation of over 10,000 feet above high water mark, Fahrenheit, the South Park, a hundred miles long, surrounded by precipitous mountains or green and sloping foot-hills, burst upon us, In the clear, still air, a hundred miles away, at Pueblo, I could hear a promissory note and cut-throat mortgage drawing three per cent a month. So calm and unruffled was the rarified air that I fancied I could hear the thirteenth assessment on a share of stock at Leadville toiling away at the bottom of a two hundred and fifty foot shaft. Colorado air is so pure that men in New York have, in several instances, heard the dull rumble of an assessment working as far away as the San Juan country. At Como, in the park, I met Col. Wellington Wade, the Duke of Dirty Woman's Ranch, and barber extraordinary to old Stand-up-and-Yowl, chief of the Piebiters.