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 for them by the next holiday season it would be as much as we could hope for.

The business preliminaries being pretty well settled early in October, there seemed to be no special reason for keeping up so lively a correspondence as before. John evidently regretted this, and he cudgelled his brains for pretexts for writing. I do not mean that the letters ceased coming altogether, but there were pauses and John fretted. I was not surprised, about this time, to find him dwelling a good deal upon the winter climate in Colorado. He managed to beat up considerable information on the subject, and it all tended to prove that the man who had not seen Pike's Peak in mid-winter was a fit subject for commiseration. That, at least, was the drift of his communications to me. Preparing my mind, as I afterward learned, for his grand coup.