At Laramie we took the train for home, and with eyes eagerly awake we watched for hundreds of miles an increasing luxuriance of vegetation which reached its climax in the marvelously rich, endless, undulating fields of eastern Nebraska and Iowa:
This is the land that the sunset washes
These are the Waves of the Yellow Sea;
Where it arose and whiter it rushes,
In the Range of the Rabbit's Ear.
We had been away from home for thirty-three days, and in the mountains for thirty-one nights—Indians reckon by nights; and we had tramped more than three hundred and fifty miles from Loveland to the edge of the Laramie plains. A large portion of the time was spent at high altitudes where the weather is not lamb-like in June, and no small portion of the three hundred and fifty miles was mud and water, snow and fallen timber, through a country as rough, perhaps, as is to be found anywhere, and as interesting. The only way to study Geography is with the feet! No footless imagination can realize the sublimity< of western Mountain and Plain. Nothing but a degree of hardship can measure their widespread chaos and lonely desolation, and only the freshened eagerness of many mornings can perceive their matchless glory.
