we rushed at a pace that Phæton, in his first hours of freedom, might have enjoyed in his chariot, but which to us, in an old buckboard, was simply torture. Why we didn’t pitch off the imminent verge, why we didn’t fall to pieces against some one of the thousand rocks we assaulted, why our bones were not broken and our diaphragms bursted, is incomprehensible.
Rico is situated in the center of a volcanic upburst which has parted the sandstones and limestones once spread thousands of feet thick over the area, and whose edges now stand as bold bluffs all around this break, which is nearly four miles in breadth and about eight in length. The town itself is made up of a scattered, gardenless collection of log cabins and some frame buildings, with a log suburb called Tenderfoot Town, and numbers about six hundred people. It is very dull, compared with most Colorado camps, but this is owing to the fact that everybody is waiting until the railway gets a little nearer.
The Rico mines are characterized by their great dissimilarity with each other. Nearly every sort of ore, of both silver and gold, is found mingled in a most heterogeneous way among the lavas, recalling that marvelously mixed mineralogical madrigal in the Colorado comic opera, Brittle Silver.
“I have found out a gift for my fair,
I have found where the cálcites abound,
Where sklópsite and zírcon appear
With sárcolite scattered around.
“Then come love, and never say nay;
With picrosmine thy heart I’ll delight,
With diaspore and mangandblend gay,