at his
lips, and a deep, elemental hymn is sung while the blast surges wild
through the pines. Mother Nature is quietly singing, singing soft and
low while the breezes pause and play in the pines. From the past one
has been ever coming, with the future destined ever to go when, with
centuries of worshipful silence, one waits for the winds in the pines.
Ever the good old world grows better both with songs and with silence
in the pines.

Here the energy and eloquence of silence was at its best. That
all-pervading presence called silence has its happy home within the
forest. Silence sounds rhythmic to all, and attunes all minds to the
strange message, the rhapsody of the universe. Silence is almost as
kind to mortals as its sweet sister sleep.

A primeval spruce forest crowds all the mountain-slopes of the
Uncompahgre region from an altitude of eight thousand feet to
timber-line. So dense is this forest that only straggling bits of
sun-fire ever fall to the ground. Beneath these spiry, crowding trees
one has only "the twilight of the forest noon." This forest, when seen
from near-by mountain-tops, seems to be a great ragged, purple robe
hanging in folds from the snow-fields, while down through it the white
streams rush. A few crags pierce it, sun-filled grass-plots dot its
expanse at intervals, and here and there it is rent with a vertical
avalanche lane.

Many a happy journey and delightful climb I have had in the mountains
all alone by moonlight, and in the Uncompahgre district I had many a
moonlight ramble. I know what it is to be alone on high peaks with the
moon, and I have felt the spell that holds the lonely wanderer when,
on a still night, he feels the wistful, tender touch of the summer
air, while the leaves whisper and listen in the moonlight, and the
moon-toned etchings of the pines fall upon the magic forest floor.

One of the best moonlit times that I have had in this region was
during my last visit to it. One October night I camped in a grass-plot
in the depths of a spruce forest. The white moon rose grandly from
behind the minareted mountain, hesitated for a moment among the
tree-spires, then tranquilly floated up into space. It was a still
night. There was silence in the treetops. The river near by faintly
murmured in repose. Everything was at rest. The grass-plot was full
of romantic light, and on its eastern margin was an etching of spiry
spruce. A dead and broken tree on the edge of the grass-plot l