xt morning, the snow had ceased to
fall, but the sky was magnificently, grandly savage. Great clouds in
career across the valley momentarily caught and dung to the crags, but
let fall no frost, and as the sun rose laggardly above the dazzlingly
white wall, the snow-laden pines on the lower slopes appeared delicate
as lace with distance. At intervals enormous masses of vapor, gray-white
but richly shot with lavender, slid suddenly in, filling the
amphitheater till all its walls were hid, then quite as suddenly shifted
and streamed away. From time to time vistas opened toward the west,
wondrous aisles of blinding splendor, highways leading downward to the
glowing, half-hid, irridescent plain. In all my experience of the
mountains I had never seen anything more gorgeous, more stupendous--what
it must have meant to my bride, who had never seen a hill, I can only
faintly divine.

At two o'clock, the sky having cleared, I hired a team and sleigh, and
we drove up the high-climbing mining trail which leads toward Telluride,
a drive which in itself was worth a thousand-mile journey, an experience
to be remembered all our lives. Such majesty of silent, sunny cliffs!
Such exquisite tones, such balance of lights and shadows, such tracery
of snow-laden boughs! It was impossible for my lowland bride to conceive
of any mountain scene more gorgeous, more sumptuous, more imperial.

For two hours we climbed, and then, at a point close to timber-line, I
reluctantly halted. "We must turn here," I said regretfully. "It will be
dark by the time we reach the hotel."

Slowly we rode back down the valley, entranced, almost oppressed, by the
incommunicable splendor of forested hills and sunset sky. It was with a
sense of actual relief that we reentered our apartment. Our eyes ached
with the effort to seize and retain the radiance without, and our minds,
gorged with magnificence, were grateful for the subdued light, the ugly
furniture, the dingy walls of our commonplace little hotel.

To some of my readers, no doubt, this wedding trip will seem a lunatic,
extravagant fantasy on my part; but Zulime declared herself grateful to
me for having insisted upon it, and for three days we walked and drove
by daylight or by moonlight amid these grandiose scenes, absorbing with
eager senses the sounds, sights and colors which we might never again
enjoy, returning now and then to a discussion of our future.

"We'll go East after our visit to the old folks