After carefully crawling down to where he was held as in a vise, I unloosed his saddle girths and supporting myself partly by the little tree and partly by the rock beneath it, seized the horse by his foretop and slowly swung him round until his head turned up the slope, and then assisted him to roll upon his face as a preliminary to an effort to rise upon his feet. He took one more solemn thoughtful look downward toward the gulf beneath him, and then began his struggle for life in the effort to gain a safe footing up the mountain side, to which effort I gave some assistance from my anchorage. I put my trust in the quaking asp and held to it firmly until the loose stones which the horse dislodged in his scramble had rolled by, and then dragging the saddle, I slowly crawled up by the same pathway and found the animal quietly awaiting my arrival, with an expression upon his countenance that seemed to indicate a desire to give thanks for what was really a narrow escape from a disastrous plunge. He was again saddled, but was not again mounted until we reached a safer footing. Finding myself at a point from which it seemed that the summit of the mountain could now be reached, and led as is the average young man by an irrepressible desire to descend into the deepest hole or reach the top of the highest hill at any time within the range of vision, I determined to complete the ascent and take a look down upon that part of the world. On nearing the summit I observed a dense mist slowly creeping along the eastern slope of the mountain and bridging the ravine with soft billowy folds upon which the bright sunlight rested. When it had risen to within a few hundred feet of my course, the cloud became luminous for an instant. The flash was quickly followed by a sharp report like the discharge of a piece of artillery at hand and the detonation combined with its echo back from another mountain side in one single sharp response. This was quickly repeated three or four times with startling effect. As I have often observed, when thunder storms among mountain peaks float beneath the observer, there is no prolonged roar and rumbling, as when the deep-toned thunder reverberates above lower levels. The prospect of being wrapped in the cold and wet embrace of the rising storm clouds, when upon a difficult and untried mountain pathway, was not cheering. The sky overhead had been clear, and the bright light intensified the grandeur and beauty of the soft billows below, which seemed as sharply outlined as the waves of the ocean, but there came some scurrying clouds in a higher stratum above the summit which later sent down driving snow flakes, all of which melted in the air on nearly the level where I stood, on coming into contact with the warmer current near the storm below. The lower storm did not rise to the mountain top, but majestically moved onward somewhere by a course the eye could not follow, and on its fleeing skirts was painted a beautiful rainbow, as