For myself, I adopted the plan of addressing every negro servant as a "Sultan." It was not abusive and sounded well. He did not know what it meant any more than he knows the meaning of "gentleman," but I saved my self-respect by not pretending to put him on an equality with myself. At Leadville the hotel servants are white men, and the result is civility. But I was in the humour at Leadville to be pleased with everything. The day was divine, the landscape enchanting, and the men with their rough riding-costumes, strange, home-made-looking horses, Mexican saddles (which I now for the first time saw in general use) and preposterous "stirrups," interested me immensely. Of course I went up to a mine, and, of course, went down it. And what struck me most during the expedition? Well, the sound of the wind in the pine-trees. It was a delightful walk--away up out of the town, with its suburbs of mimic pinewood "chalets" and rough log-huts, and the hills all round sloping back from the plateau so finely, patched and powdered with snow-drifts, fringed and crowned with pine-trees, here darkened with a forest of them, there dotted with single trees, and over all, the Swiss magic of sunlight and shadow; away up the hill-side, through a wilderness of broken bottles and battered meat cans, a very paradise of rag-pickers, among which are scattered the tiny homes of the miners. Women were busy chopping wood and bringing in water. Children were romping in parties. But the men, their husbands and fathers, were all up at the mines at work, invisible, in the bowels of the mountain; keeping the kobolds company, and throwing up as they went great hillocks of rubbish behind them like some gigantic species of mole, or burrowing armadillo of the old glyptodon type. And so on, up the shingle-strewn hillside thickly studded with charred tree-stumps, desolation itself--a veritable graveyard of dead pine-trees. Above us, on the crest of the mountain, the forest was still standing, and long before we reached them we heard the wind-haunted trees of Pan telling their griefs to the hills. It is a wonderful music, this of the pine-trees, for it has fascinated every people among whom they grow, from the bear-goblin haunts of Asiatic Kurdistan through the elf-plagued forests of Germany to the spirit-land of the Canadian Indians. It is indeed a mystery, this voice in the tree-tops, with all the tones of an organ--the vox-humana stop wonderful--and in addition all the sounds of nature, from the sonorous diapason of the ocean to the whisperings of the reed-beds by the river. When I came upon them in Leadville the pines were rehearsing, I think, for a storm that was coming. Lower down the slope, the trees were standing as quiet as possible, and in the town itself at the bottom of the hill the smoke was rising straight. But up here, at the top, under the pine-trees, the first act of a tempest was in full rehearsal. And all this time