THE DEVIL'S SLIDE, CRIPPLE CREEK SHORT LINE
In her connection with a leading Denver journal Miss Meredith wields a trenchant pen, and one reading these strong and able articles could hardly realize that the same writer is the author of poems,—delicate, exquisite, tender,—and of prose romance which is increasingly sought by all lovers of the art of fiction. With such a party of friends as these, what words can interpret the necromancy of this sunset journey winding down the heights of majestic mountains, amid a forest of towering peaks, and colossal rocks looming up like giant spectres through the early twilight that gathers when the sun sinks behind some lofty pinnacle! The rose of afterglow burned in the east, reflecting its color over the Cheyenne cañons, and even changing the granite precipice of the "Devil's Slide"—a thousand feet of precipitous rock, through which the steel track is cut—with a reflection of its rose and amber. Cathedral Park took on a new majesty in the deepening haze. At the foot of one of its tall spires is an ice cavern, which holds its perpetual supply all summer. The solid roadbed, uniformly ballasted with disintegrated granite, built on solid rock for its entire extent, and totally devoid of dust, gives to the hand car the ease and smoothness of a motor on level ground. No one can wonder that this road, built originally to convey coal and other supplies to Cripple Creek, and to bring the ore from the mines to the mills and smelters (a transportation it serves daily), has also, by its phenomenal fascinations, achieved a great passenger traffic made up of the tourists and visitors to Colorado. Even travellers going through to the Pacific Coast make the detour from La Junta to Colorado Springs to enjoy the "Short Line," just as they go from Williams to Bright Angel Trail for the Grand Cañon. With this aërial journey through a sunset fairyland, where the mysterious cañons and gorges lay in shadow and the Colorado sunshine painted pinnacles and towers in liquid gold, what wonder that our poet, discovering her lyre, offered the following "Ode" to the "Short Line":
"There's the splendor that was Grecian;
There's the glory that was Rome;
But we know a brighter splendor,
And we find it here at home.
Not old Neptune's foaming brine,
Can surpass the wealth of beauty