to feel stiff and sore in every joint, languid and woe-be-gone;
but such was not the case. It is wonderful how soon one recovers
strength among these heights. How bracing is the cool mountain air, if
you breathe it deeply! As I began the descent, I whistled and
sang,--that is, I tried to. To be frank, it was all noise and no music,
but I must have some way of giving expression to the uplifted emotions
that filled my breast. Again and again I said to myself, "I'm so glad!
I'm so glad! I'm so glad!" It was gladness pure and simple,--the
dictionary has no other word to express it. No pen can do justice to the
panorama of mountain and valley and plain as viewed from such a height
on a clear, crisp morning of June. One felt like exclaiming with George
Herbert:

"Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridal of the earth and sky!"

So far as the aesthetic value of it went, I was monarch of all I
surveyed, even though mile on mile of grandeur and glory was spread out
before me. The quatrain of Lowell recurred to my mind:

"'Tis heaven alone that is given away,
'Tis only God may be had for the asking;
No price is set on the lavish summer;
June may be had by poorest comer."

Before leaving the Peak, I watched a flock of birds eating from the
waste-heap at the Summit House. They were the brown-capped rosy finches,
called scientifically _Leucosticte australis_. Their plumage was a rich
chocolate, suffused over neck, breast, and back with intense crimson,
while the pileum was quite black. With one exception--the white-tailed
ptarmigan--they range the highest in summer of all Colorado birds. They
are never seen below timber-line in that season, and are not known to
breed below twelve thousand feet; thence to the tops of the highest
peaks they hatch and rear their young. In August old and young swarm
over the summits picking edible insects from the snow, while in winter
they descend to timber-line, where most of them remain to brave the
arctic weather and its frequent storms.

Bidding a regretful good-by to the summit, for it held me as by a
magician's spell, I hastened down the steep incline of the cog-wheel
road, past Windy Point, and turning to the right, descended across the
green slope below the boulder region to the open, sunlit valley which I
had visited on the previous afternoon. It was an idyllic place, a
veritable paradise for birds. Such a chorus as greeted me from the
throats of I kn