"'Well,' said I, 'I'll step down this morning anyway, and take a look.' "'You can saddle the brown horse whenever you like. You were too sleepy to take note of it last night, but you came up here by a track fit for a lady's pony-carriage. My predecessor engineered it to connect his two places of business. In its way, it's the most palatial thing in the Rockies--two long legs with a short tack between, gentle all the way--and it brings you out by the Necropolis gate. You can hitch the horse up there.'" "By ten o'clock I had saddled the brown horse, and was walking him down the track at an easy pace. Hewson had omitted to praise its beauty. Pine-needles lay underfoot as thick and soft as a Persian carpet; and what with the pine-tops arching and almost meeting overhead, and the red trunks raying out left and right into aisles as I went by, and the shafts of light breaking the greenish gloom here and there with glimpses of aching white snowfields high above, 'twas like walking in a big cathedral with bits of the real heaven shining through the roof. The river ran west for a while from Cornice House, and then tacked north-east with a sudden bend round the base of the foot-hills; and since my track formed a sort of rough hypotenuse to this angle, I heard the voice of the rapids die away and almost cease, and then begin again to whisper and murmur, until, as I came within a mile or so of Eucalyptus, they were loud at my feet, though still unseen. I am not a devout man, but I can take off my hat now and then; and all the way that morning a couple of sentences were ring-dinging in my head: 'Lift up your hearts! We lift them up unto the Lord!' You know where they come from, I dare say. "By and by the track took a sharp and steep trend down hill, then a curve; the trees on my right seemed to drop away; and we found ourselves on the edge of a steep bluff overhanging the valley, the whole eastern slope of which broke full into sight in that instant, from the river tumbling below--by sticking out a leg I could see it shining through my stirrup--to the rocky _aretes_ and smoothed-out snowfields round the peaks. It made a big spectacle, and I suppose I must have stared at it till my eyes were dazzled, for, on turning again to follow the track, which at once dived among the pines and into the dusk again, I did not observe, until quite close upon her, a woman coming towards me. "And yet she was not rigged out to escape notice. She had on a scarlet Garibaldi, a striped red-and-white skirt, bunched up behind into an immense polonaise, and high-heeled shoes that tilted her far forward. She wore no hat, but carried a scarlet sunshade over her shoulder. Her hair, in a towsled chignon, was golden, or rather had been dyed to that colour; her face was painted; and she was glaringly drunk.