"It was Wednesday when we reached Denver. The eclipse was to occur the following Monday.
"We haunted the telegraph-rooms, and sent imploring messages. We placed ourselves at the station, and watched the trains as they tossed out their freight; we listened to every express-wagon which passed our door without stopping, and just as we were trying to find if a telescope could be hired or bought in Denver, the glasses arrived.
"It was now Friday; we must put up tents and telescopes, and test the glasses.
"It rained hard on Friday—nothing could be done. It rained harder on Saturday. It rained hardest of all on Sunday, and hail mingled with the rain. But Monday morning was clear and bright. It was strange enough to find that we might camp anywhere around Denver. Our hostess suggested to us to place ourselves on 'McCullough's Addition.' In New York or Boston, if I were about to camp on private grounds I should certainly ask permission. In the far West you choose your spot of ground, you dig post-holes and you pitch tents, and you set up telescopes and inhabit the land; and then the owner of the land comes to you, and asks if he may not put up a fence for you, to keep off intruders, and the nearest residents come to you and offer aid of any kind.
"Our camping-place was near the house occupied by sisters of charity, and the black-robed, sweet-faced women came out to offer us the refreshing cup of tea and the new-made bread.
"All that we needed was 'space,' and of that there was plenty.
"Our tents being up and the telescopes mounted, we had time to look around at the view. The space had the unlimitedness that we usually connect with sea and sky. Our tents were on the slope of a hill, at the foot of which we were about six thousand feet above the sea. The plain was three times as high as the hills of the Hudson-river region, and there arose on the south, almost from west to east, the peaks upon peaks of the Rocky mountains. One needs to live upon such a plateau for weeks, to take in the grandeur of the panorama.
"It is always difficult to teach the man of the people that natural phenomena belong as much to him as to scientific people. Camping parties who put up telescopes are always supposed to be corporations with particular privileges, and curious lookers-on gather around, and try to enter what they consider a charmed circle. We were remarkably free from specialists of this kind. Camping on the south-west slope of the hill, we were hidden on the north and east, and another party which chose the brow of the hill was much more attractive to the crowd. Our good serving-man was told to send away the few strollers who approached; even our friends from the city were asked to remove beyond the reach of voice.
"There is always some one to be found in every gathering who will not submit to law. At the time of the total eclipse in Iowa, in 1869, there passed in and out among our telescopes and observers an unknown, closely veiled woman. The remembrance of that occasion never comes to my mind without the accompaniment of a fluttering green veil.
"This time it was a man. How he came among us and why he remained, no one can say. Each one supposed that the others knew, and that there was good reason for his presence. If I was under the tent, wiping glasses, he stood beside me; if the photographer wished to make a picture of the party, this man came to the front; and when I asked the servant to send off the half-vagrant boys and girls who stood gazing at us, this man came up and said to me in a confidential tone, 'They do not understand the sacredness of the occasion, and the fineness of the conditions.' There was something regal in his audacity, but he was none the less a tramp.