Page:A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879).djvu/304

 atmosphere (some would call it the hothouse atmosphere) of this house. But with the bare, hard life, and the bare, bleak mountains around, who could find fault with even a hothouse atmosphere, if it can nourish such a flower of Paradise as sacred human love?

The mercury is eleven degrees below zero, and I have to keep my ink on the stove to prevent it from freezing. The cold is intense—a clear, brilliant, stimulating cold, so dry that even in my threadbare flannel riding-dress I do not suffer from it. I must now take up my narrative of the nothings which have all the interest of somethings to me. We all got up before daybreak on Tuesday, and breakfasted at seven. I have not seen the dawn for some time, with its amber fires deepening into red, and the snow peaks flushing one by one, and it seemed a new miracle. It was a west wind, and we all thought it promised well. I took only two pounds of luggage, some raisins, the mail bag, and an additional blanket under my saddle. I had not been up from the Park at sunrise before, and it was quite glorious, the purple depths of M'Ginn's Gulch, from which at a height of 9000 feet you look down on the sunlit Park 1500 feet below, lying in a red haze, with its pearly needle-shaped peaks, framed by mountain-sides dark with pines—my glorious, solitary, unique mountain home! The purple sun rose in front. Had