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Show JOURNEY TO THE RIO GRANDE. 219 our work, made a bridge on which the ladies succeeded in being helped across with fewer screams than could have been expected. A short walk brought us to the next station, where the coach overtook us in an hour. We are now out upon the high plains of north- eastern New Mexico, a region of fierce winds and chilling rains at this season, inhabited only by nomadic herders. We breakfast at Maxwell's Ranche, head-quarters of the Maxwell estate, an old Mexican grant containing two or three hundred square miles, including fifty sections of the best land in New Mexico, and one gold mine. Maxwell has lately sold the grant to an English company, who are bringing in machinery to work the mine, and utilize the abundant water- power. A good breakfast, with a pint of hot coffee apiece, restored the intellectual balance, and we entered upon the third day of staging with renewed vigor. We travel all day in a south- east direction over rolling plains and low mountain spurs, leaving the main range some distance to the west, and cross the Rayado, Ocate, and minor tributaries of the Can-adian. At noon a cold rain comes on, changing soon to a light sleet; we are miserable, and long for port. Late in the afternoon we reach Fort Union, when Captain Humphreys and family leave us, and my only companion is a young German thence to Las Vegas. This is a little south of Santa Fe on the headwaters of the Pecos River. It dates back to the early days of Spanish occupation, and is a rather prosperous place of three or four thousand. There our coach took on three U. S. army officers and the Right Reverend John B. Lamy, bishop of the diocese, who exerted himself to cheer up the heavy hours of the night as the coach labored through the mountain passes down to Santa Fe. The cold was intense, and the dawn showed three inches of freshly fallen snow. The open growth of mountain pines relieved the landscape but little ; the bare knolls looked inexpressibly dreary, and the dark gorges suggested wild beasts and banditti. The rising sun illumined the ragged peaks to our left, and poured a flood of light through the side cafions, bringing out the red and yellow stripes upon the wind- worn rocks, and producing for a brief space a scene of strange, weird beauty. At one station the occupants were dressing a bear which they had killed the previous night. This is my fourth day of continuous travel, and I begin to weaken; my head pitches forward and back in involuntary " cat-naps" of a minute each. After four hours riding down hill, by 10 o'clock in the morning the snow had disappeared; once more nature asserted herself, and I was really feeling bright again |