The Sunday which followed I remember chiefly for its glorious sunshine and the view which I had in the morning of Pike’s Peak. Its summit seemed to leap into the sky as it rose stark and bald above the timber-line, and yet there was infinite repose in its splendid height, standing out clear and majestic in the full rays of the morning sun. I remember, too, a service in a well-filled church, and an odd reminder in its worshippers of the Eastern seaboard, and the exciting expectancy of chance sight of some familiar face, and, finally, the figure of a girl, who, entering after the service had begun, slipped noiselessly into a seat at my side in a pew near the door. A wonderful vision she was of what men mean when they speak feelingly out here of “God’s country,” for you no sooner saw her than there flashed into sight the long vista of the avenue as it heaves to the lift of Murray Hill. You could see her there--and can see her superior nowhere under heaven--with the light streaming in red, level rays through the side streets on a late afternoon in the cold, crisp air of autumn, with the tan of a summer on the New England coast upon her, and her exquisite figure instinct with the vitality which comes of yachting and hard riding, her frock and jacket fitting her like a glove, and her clear, frank eyes looking you straight between your own and making you feel in her presence what a clean, wholesome, manly thing is life! She little dreamed, as she cordially shared her prayer-book with me, how deeply indebted to her I was for being so fine a type of the finest and handsomest women in the world, and how much I owed her for so fair a vision before I launched into the mining regions of the frontier. Monday dawned as bright as Sunday had been, and by eight o’clock I reached Manitou and was ready to begin the ascent of Pike’s Peak. There was a wide choice of route, for there was a road, and a well-beaten trail, and the bed of the cog railway. I took to the railway as the most unmistakable and very likely the directest course. With infinite engineering skill the first ascent of the cog-road is cut as a ledge along the side of a deep gorge or cañon, down which rushes a mountain stream of considerable volume. Following the great turns of the cañon the road ascends in the shadow of huge rocks, that tower straight above it or slope in a more gradual rise, furnishing place for the cabin of a miner or of some lover of camp life. The mountain-sides are dark with evergreen, which seems to grow deep-rooted in the rock, clinging at times to a bare, protruding ledge with naked roots thrust deep into crevices where soil and moisture are found. The quaking aspen shares this bare subsistence with the pine, and, green with the rich green of late summer at the mountain-base, it marked all the stages of the autumn in the ascent, until at the timber-line I found its leaves turned yellow and fast falling to the ground.