led it about, the creature holding back heavily at every step and now
and again tangling itself, its cord, and its disconcerted bleats about
its conductor's long and stalwart legs. Another of the herders,--all of
whom were hunters and explorers as well,--whose mind was of a
topographical cast, introduced her to much fine and high company in the
various mountain peaks, gathered in solemn symposium dark and purple in
the faintly tinted and opaline twilight. He repeated their Cherokee
names and gave an English translation, and called her attention to marks
of difference in their configuration which rendered them distinguishable
at a distance; and when she lent some heed to this and noted on the
horizon contours of the mountains about her home, faint and far in an
elusive amethystine apotheosis against the red and flaming west, and
called out her glad recognition in a voice as sweet as a thrush, his
comrades waxed jealous, and contravened his statements and argued and
wrangled upon landmarks to which they had never before given a second
thought in all their mountaineering experience, so keenly they competed
for her favor. It was her little day of triumph, and right royally she
reigned in it and was wont to tell of it for forty years thereafter!

At last the dusk was slipping down; the mountains grew a shadowy gray
far away and a looming black close at hand; a star palpitated in the
colorless crystal-clear concave of the fading skies; the vernal stretch
of the savannas, whose intense green was somehow asserted till the
latest glimmer of light, ceased to resound with the voices of the herds;
only here and there a keen metallic note of a bell clanked forth and was
silent, and again the sound came from a farther pen like a belated echo;
the fire flaring out from the open door of the nearest hut of the
ranchmen's little hamlet gave a pleasant sense of hospitality and homely
hearth-side cheer, for it requires only a few nights under a tent or the
open canopy of heaven to make a woman, always the most artificially