Leaving Santa Fé, we packed up under the base of Baldy mountain, and struck camp near timber line, at the head of the North Picorice. Here we stayed several days, and prospected out different ways from camp. It was now past midsummer. The mountains were grand! The scenery sublime and awe-inspiring! From our camp, at this place, we had only to climb a short distance to where we could look west and northwest across the Rio Grande and behold the San Juan range. Nearly due north of us were the towering Spanish Peaks; and on still further the Greenhorn mountains; and east of us the Pecos river. Still on south, down, over and beyond Santa Fé, the Placer Mountains loomed up as out of a desert. The whole formed a grand and imposing scene. Once this panoramic view is seen, it is never to be forgotten. We were in a broken, distorted and chopped-up country. I was reminded of the story I had heard of the atheist and some cowboys, which I will here relate. A herd of cattle had been contracted for to be delivered at Taos, New Mexico. They were being driven up the Arkansas river from near where the Great Bend is. The atheist fell in with the outfit near old Fort Dodge. He was an excellent and interesting conversationalist, and after each day's drive, in the evenings around the camp-fire, the boys would get him started; he was always wound up. They gave him respectful hearings, which were always entertaining and interesting to them. He got to injecting his favorite doctrine from time to time in his talks; and finally, as they were approaching the mountains, he gave them a fine discourse upon "The beauties of nature," telling his hearers that "this was a world of chance; that it was an absurd idea that it had been made by Divine hands, as there was no such thing as a Supreme Being," etc. When they got well up into the mountains they came one day to a place where Nature had seemed to do her best, by way of cañons, storm-scarred peaks, broken and castellated buttes, wild and yawning gorges or chasms; and as they were gazing, far and near, on the grand sublimity of the scene, the atheist remarked: "O, what magnificence! How beautiful! How remarkable! How unsurpassingly grand and awe-inspiring!" One of the cowboys drawled out—"Yes sir-ee. You've been preachin' no God to us fellers; but I'm right here to tell you that if there ain't any God now there has been one, sometime." Near this camp there was a place where we could gather mountain dewberries and huckleberries at the same time. Not more than fifty feet away we could make snowballs and shy at the saucy magpies. We had grass in abundance for our saddle-horses and pack-burros. Our camp was at the margin of a clear, beautiful rivulet bordered with water-cress and fringed with quaking-asp. At night we tied our riding-horses to trees, and turned them loose in the daytime. Mr. Justice's mountain-climber was a free lance, the doctor's was hobbled, and mine had a bell on.