Page:Letters from an Oregon Ranch.djvu/61

 overgrown with blackberry and wild rose-bushes; beyond it, a narrow strip of gray stubble land, splotched with the brown of dead ferns and weeds; skirting its farthest side is the fringing foliage of the brook, a mass of tender green, yellow, and russet; and back of all this, the mighty hills, an unbroken wall of dark green, splashed with the scarlet and gold of autumn, and just now enmeshed in purple mists.

While writing the last sentence or two, Nature’s scene-shifter must have been busy; for now, as I look, a thin gauzy veil of mist stretches straight across these heights. Through this shadowy screen the hills seem remote, the trees vague and spectral; the vivid hues of autumn have faded to the late afterglow of a summer sunset. These hills are my joy and my despair. I could cry with vexation when I try to picture them to others. Such fleeting and changeful beauty should be sketched only by the hand of a master. I knew this all the time, but fools, you know, rush in where angels fear to tread, and I did so want to show you something of this out-door beauty, that you might at least partially understand why we are not depressed in gloomy weather.

As to being “cooped up” in this little mountain place, I should think we were rather less cramped for room than those friends who write us from city houses and “flats.” We have our own broad domains, besides free range of the whole of the Coast Mountains, for here