Was it strange that we felt a great discrepancy between the memory of this guileless man and some of the self-indulgent priests, once his pupils, in the upper stube?

The next day, the rain promising still to detain us prisoners, Moidel, fearing that her important services must be missed at the Hof, bravely defied wet and mud and tramped resolutely home.  In the afternoon, utterly tired out, we too determined to shift our quarters to Edelsheim, and, engaging a large jolting vehicle, were borne through mire, rain and mist from the Elephant to the Hof.

Long before we reached the door we saw cheerful lights gleaming from the long rows of windows.  Anton, Moidel, the aunt, Uncle Johann were at the door to receive us and our belongings.  They felt sure, somehow, that we should come.

The floors of our rooms had been scrubbed white as snow in our absence, but we must not hesitate to enter with our damp shoes.  Were not the rooms our own?  Letters and newspapers were carefully laid according to their various directions, and with flowers and dainty dishes covered the supper-table.  Moro, the good house-dog, stood by our chairs or caressed the hand of his favorite, E——.  We felt that we had come home—­to our home in the Tyrol.

MARGARET HOWITT.

[TO BE CONTINUED]

COLORADO AND THE SOUTH PARK.

On the 15th of August, 1871, two brothers and a sister—­Sepia, an artist, Levell, an engineer, and Scribe, who is the narrator—­left Chicago by the North-western Railroad, bound for Denver in Colorado, about eleven hundred miles west.  The first day we were climbing the gradual ascent from the Lakes to the Mississippi, which we crossed at 4.30 P.M., at Clinton.  The thirty years which had elapsed since I first traversed this region had changed it from wild, unbroken prairie to a well-cultivated country, full of corn-fields, cattle and flourishing towns.  Then I traveled in a wagon four miles an hour, and had to find my own meat in the shape of a deer from the grove, a grouse from the prairie or a duck from the river.  Now we rushed across the State in six hours, stopping fifteen minutes for dinner in a fine brick hotel, metropolitan in charges, if not in fare.  In 1840, when we arrived at the great river, we waited two or three hours for the ferry-boat, and finally had to cross in a “dug-out,” which seemed but a frail vessel to stem the rapid currents and whirling eddies of the Mississippi.  Now we crossed upon a railroad bridge of iron, which cost more money than all Iowa contained in 1840.  Still, I fancy that the first method of traveling was the more interesting.

Through the still summer afternoon we rushed on over the rolling prairies of Iowa, dotted with towns and villages and covered with great corn- and wheat-farms.  Here in 1840 was absolute wilderness:  we made our hunting-camp seventy-five miles west of the river, and we were twenty miles away from any white settler.  Wolves howled and panthers screamed around our camp, we lived upon elk and deer meat, and our only visitors in two weeks were some Sac and Fox Indians, who disapproved of our intrusion upon their hunting-grounds.