and there, to
give it character, and surrounded as a hen by her chickens, by tents,
six or eight in every conceivable position, and at every possible angle
except a right angle. Add to this picture the sweet voices of birds, and
the music of water rushing and hurrying over the stones; let your
glance take in on one side the grand outlines of Cheyenne Mountain,

"Made doubly sacred by the poet's pen
And poet's grave,"

and on the other the rest of the range, overlooked by Pike's Peak,
fourteen thousand feet higher than the streets of New York. Do this, and
you will come as near to realizing Camp Harding as one can who is
hundreds of miles away and has never seen a Colorado camp.

Do not think, however, that such camps are common, even in that land of
outdoors, where tents are open for business in the streets of the towns,
and where every householder sets up his own canvas in his yard, for the
invalids to sleep in, from June to November. The little settlement of
tents was an evolution, the gradual growth of the tent idea in the mind
of one comfort-loving woman. She went there seven or eight years before,
bought a grove under the shadow of Cheyenne, put up a tent, and passed
her first summer thus. The next year, and several years thereafter, she
gradually improved her transient abode in many ways that her womanly
taste suggested,--as a wooden floor, a high base-board, partitions of
muslin or cretonne, door and windows of wire gauze. The original
dwelling thus step by step grew to a framed and rough-plastered house,
with doors and windows _en regle_.

Grouped picturesquely around the house, however, were some of the most
unique abiding-places in Colorado. On the outside they were permanent
tents with wooden foundations; on the inside they were models of
comfort, with regular beds and furniture, rugs on the floor, gauzy
window curtains, drapery wardrobes, and even tiny stoves for cool
mornings and evenings. They combined the comforts of a house with the
open air and delightful freshness of a tent, where one might hear every
bird twitter, and see the dancing leaf shadows in the moonlight. Over
the front platform the canvas cover extended to form an awning, and a
wire-gauze door, in addition to one of wood, made them airy or snug as
the weather demanded.

The restfulness craved by the weary worker was there to be had for both
soul and body, if one chose to take it. One might swing in a hammock all
day, and be happy wat