at our good fortune.

They would have kept us indefinitely had I not carefully explained my
plan to show my bride the Crestones and Marshall Pass. "We must make the
Big Circle and get back to Wisconsin in time for Thanksgiving," I said
to Louis, who, as a loyal Colorado man, immediately granted the force of
this excuse. He understood also the pathos of the old mother in West
Salem, watching, waiting, longing to see her new daughter. "You are
right," he said. "To fail of that dinner would be cruel."

That night we took the Narrow Gauge train, bound for Marshall Pass and
the splendors of the Continental Divide.

At daylight the next morning we were looping our way up the breast of
Mount Shavano, leaving behind us in splendid changing vista the College
Range, from whose lofty summits long streamers of snow wavered like
prodigious silver banners. Unearthly, radiant as the walls of the sun,
lonely and cold they stood. For three hours we moved amid colossal
drifts and silent forests, and then, toward midday, our train plunged
into the snow-sheds of the high divide. When we emerged we were sliding
swiftly down into a sun-warmed valley sloping to the west, where hills
as lovely as jewels alternated with smooth opalescent mesas over which
white clouds gleamed. The whole wide basin glowed with August colors,
and yet from Montrose Junction, where we lunched, the rugged slopes of
Uncompagre, hooded with snow and dark with storms, were plainly visible,
so violently dramatic was the land.

"From here we proceed directly toward those peaks," I explained to
Zulime, who was in awe of the land I was exhibiting.

As we approached the gateway to Ouray, the great white flakes began to
fall athwart the pines, and when we entered the prodigious amphitheater
in which the town is built, we found ourselves again in mid-winter,
surrounded by icy cliffs and rimy firs. Dazzling drifts covered the
rocks and almost buried the cottages from whose small windows, lights
twinkled like gleaming eyes of strange and roguish animals. Every detail
was as harmonious as an ideally conceived Christmas card. It was the
antithesis of Kansas.

Upon entering our room at the hotel, I exultantly drew Zulime's
attention to the fact that the sky-line of the mountains to the South
cut across the upper row of our window panes. "You are in the heart of
the Rockies now," I declared as if somehow that fact exalted me in her
regard.

When we stepped into the street ne