mountains, that the hunter takes no notice of them, and seldom throws away upon the skulking beasts a charge of powder and lead.” Mr. Ruxton pitched his camp at Rib Creek one night; at La Culebra, or Snake Creek, the next; at La Trinchera, or Bowl Creek, on the third. The cold continued excessive. The blast seemed to carry death upon its wings; snow and sleet fell in heavy showers; the streams were covered with a solid crust of ice. But the worst part of the journey was through the Vallerito, or Little Valley—the “Wind-trap,” as the mountaineers expressively call it—a small circular basin in the midst of rugged mountains, which receives the winds through their deep gorges and down their precipitous sides, and pens them up in its confined area to battle with one another, and with the unfortunates who are forced to traverse it. How they beat and rage and howl and roar! How they buffet the traveller in the face, and clasp him round the body as if they would strangle him! How they dash against the stumbling mules, and whirl the thick snow about them, and plunge them into dense deep drifts, where they lie half buried! This “Wind-trap” is only four miles long; and yet Mr. Ruxton was more than half a day in getting through it. Once clear of it, he began the ascent of the mountain which forms the watershed of the Del Norte and Arkansas rivers. The view from the summit was as wild and drear as one of the circles in Dante’s “Inferno.” Looking back, the traveller saw everywhere a dense white pall or shroud of snow, which seemed to conceal but partially the rigid limbs of the dead and frozen earth. In front of him stretched the main chain of the Rocky Mountains, dominated by the lofty crest of James’s or Pike’s Peak; to the south-east, large against the sky, loomed the grim bulk of the two Cumbres Españolas. At his feet, a narrow valley, green with dwarf oak and pine, was brightened by the glancing lights of a little stream. Everywhere against the horizon rose rugged summits and ridges, snow-clad and pine-clad, and partly separated by rocky gorges. To the eastward the mountain mass fell off into detached spires and buttresses, and descended in broken terraces to the vast prairies, which extended far beyond the limit of vision, “a sea of seeming barrenness, vast and dismal.” As the traveller gazed upon them, billows of dust swept over the monotonous surface, impelled by a driving hurricane. Soon the mad wind reached the mountain-top, and splintered the tall pines, and roared and raved in its insatiable fury, and filled the air with great whirls of snow, and heaped it up in dazzling drifts against the trees. Its stern voice made the silence and the solitude all the more palpable. For not a sound of bird or beast was to be heard; nor was there sign or token of human life. In such a scene man is made to feel his own littleness. In the presence of the giant forces of Nature he seems so mean and powerless that his heart