Page:A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879).djvu/217

 two children for kitchen, parlour, and bedroom, is the pattern of brightness, cleanliness, and comfort. At supper there were canned raspberries, rolls, butter, tea, venison, and fried rabbit, and at seven I went to bed in a carpeted log room, with a thick feather-bed on a mattress, sheets, ruffled pillow slips, and a pile of warm white blankets! I slept for eleven hours. They discourage me much about the route which Governor Hunt has projected for me. They think that it is impassable, owing to snow, and that another storm is brewing.

2em I have ridden 150 miles since I wrote last. On leaving Twin Rock on Saturday I had a short day's ride to Colonel Kittridge's cabin at Oil Creek, where I spent a quiet Sunday with agreeable people. The ride was all through parks and gorges, and among pine-clothed hills, about 9000 feet high, with Pike's Peak always in sight. I have developed much sagacity in finding a trail, or I should not be able to make use of such directions as these: "Keep along a gulch four or five miles till you get Pike's Peak on your left, then follow some wheel-marks till you get to some timber, and keep to the north till you come to a creek, where you'll find a great many elk tracks; then go to your right and cross the creek three times, then you'll see a red rock to your left," etc. etc. The K.'s