The South Park line--Oscar Wilde on sunflowers as food--In a wash-hand basin--Anti-Vigilance Committees--Leadville the city of the carbonates--"Busted" millionaires--The philosophy of thick boots--Colorado miners--National competition in lions--Abuse of the terms "gentleman" and "lady"--Up at the mines--Under the pine-trees. STARTING from Denver for Leadville in the evening, it seemed as if we were fated to see nothing of the very interesting country through which the South Park line runs. At first there is nothing to look at but open prairie land sprinkled with the homesteads of agricultural pioneers, but as the moon got up there was gradually revealed a stately succession of mountain ridges, and in about two hours we found ourselves threading the spurs of the Sangre di Christi range and following the Platte River up toward its sources. Crossing and recrossing the cañon, with one side silvered, and the other thrown into the blackest shadow by the moon, and the noisy stream tumbling along beside us in its hurry to get down to the lazy levels of the great Nebraska Valley, I saw glimpses of scenery that can never be forgotten. It was fantastic in the extreme; for apart from the jugglery of moonlight, in itself so wonderful always, the ideas of relative distance and size, even of shape, were upset and ridiculed by the snowy peaks that here and there thrust themselves up into the sky and by the patches and streaks of snow that concealed and altered the contour of the nearer rocks in the most puzzling manner imaginable. And all this time the little train--for the line is narrow-gauge--kept twisting and wriggling in and out as if it were in collusion with the hills, and playing into their hands to disconcert the traveller.