ngs, had really tended. However, he was not ready to
acknowledge that a large part of the charm of the place was due to the
glamour of a slender maid lit by the sunset light.

This delight in the town and its surroundings gained a new quality
next morning as he looked from his window upon a single white cloud
resting like a weary swan on the keen point of old Kanab. Though the
mesas of New Mexico and the deserts of Arizona were his special field,
he bared his head to the charm of "the high country."

Each summer, after months of prolonged peering into the hidden heart
of microscopic things in his laboratory (he was both analytical
chemist and biologist), it was his custom to return for a few weeks to
huge, crude synthetic, nature for relief. After endless discussion of
"whorls of force" and of "the office of germs in the human organism,"
he enjoyed the racy vernacular of the plainsman, to whom bacteria
were as indifferent as blackberry-seeds. Each year he resolved to go
to the forest, to the lake regions, or to the mountains; but as the
day of departure drew near the desert and the strange peoples living
thereon reasserted their dominion, and so he had continued to return
to the sand, to the home of the horned toad and the rattlesnake. These
trips restored the sane balance of his mind. To camp in the chaparral,
to explore the source of streams, and to relive the wonder of the boy
kept his faculties alert and keen.

His love of the sands and the purple buttes of the plain did not blind
him to the beauty of coloring and the gracious majesty of these peaks,
clothed as they were with the russet and gold and amber of ripened
grasses, which grew even to the very summits (only the kingliest of
the peaks were permitted to wear the ermine robes which denoted
sovereignty); the Continental Divide was, indeed, much more impressive
than he had expected it to be.

He was not one of those who seek out strange women, and he had no hope
of meeting the girl of the mountain-side again. He was content to have
her remain a poem--a song of the sunset--a picture seen only for a
moment, yet whose impression outlasts iron. Everything in nature had
converged to make her momentous. His long stay among the ugly, dusky
women of the desert, his exultant joy in the mountain sunset, and his
abounding health (which filled his heart with the buoyancy of a
boy)--all these causes combined to revive emotions which his absorption
in scientific investiga