There were lion shapes and bull shapes like the rudely chiselled gods of some heathen worship; there were slender, points and obelisks three hundred feet high; and something suggesting a cat-faced deity, and queer similitudes of crocodiles and apes,--all in the strange orange and red and pale yellow formations of the region.

It was a wonderful rather than a beautiful place; but the day was spent very happily under those mysterious stones, which, as the long afternoon shadows gathered over the plain, and the sky glowed with sunset crimson which seemed like a reflection from the rocks themselves, became more mysterious still.

Of the merry young party which made up the picnic, seven out of nine had come to Colorado for health; but no one would have guessed it, they seemed so well and so full of the enjoyment of life.

Altogether, it was a day to be marked; not with a white stone,--that would not have seemed appropriate to Colorado,--but with a red one.

Clover, writing about it afterward to Elsie, felt that her descriptions to sober stay-at-homes might easily sound overdrawn and exaggerated, and wound up her letter thus:-- "Perhaps you think that I am romancing; but I am not a bit.
Every word I say is perfectly true, only I have not made the colors half bright or the things half beautiful enough.