they are preferable to inhospitable whites, and I walk over to the house
and stretch my weary frame in - for aught I know - the same bunk in which,
but a few days ago, reposed the ghastly corpses of the poisoned Celestials.
Despite the unsavory memories clinging around the place, and my pillowless
and blanketless couch, I am soon in the land of dreams. It is scarcely
presumable that one would be blessed with rosy-hued visions of pleasure
under such conditions, however, and near midnight I awake in a cold
shiver. The snowy mountains rear their white heads up in the silent
night, grim and ghostly all around, and make the midnight air chilly,
even in midsummer. I lie there, trying in vain to doze off again, for
it grows perceptibly cooler. At two o'clock I can stand it no longer,
and so get up and strike out for Battle Mountain, twenty miles ahead.

The moon has risen; it is two-thirds full, and a more beautiful sight
than the one that now greets my exit from the bunk-house it is scarcely
possible to conceive. Only those who have been in this inter-mountain
country can have any idea of a glorious moonlight night in the clear
atmosphere of this dry, elevated region. It is almost as light as day,
and one can see to ride quite well wherever the road is ridable. The
pale moon seems to fill the whole broad valley with a flood of soft,
silvery light; the peaks of many snowy mountains loom up white and
spectral; the stilly air is broken by the excited yelping of a pack of
coyotes noisily baying the pale-yellow author of all this loveliness,
and the wild, unearthly scream of an unknown bird or animal coming from
some mysterious, undefinable quarter completes an ideal Western picture,
a poem, a dream, that fully compensates for the discomforts of the
preceding hour. The inspiration of this beautiful scene awakes the
slumbering poesy within, and I am inspired to compose a poem-"Moonlight
in the Rockies"-that I expect some day to see the world go into raptures
over!