Page:A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879).djvu/60

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LADY'S LIFE IN
LETTER IV.

LETTER IV.

A Plague of Flies—A melancholy Charioteer—The Foot Hills—A Mountain Boarding-House—A dull Life—"Being Agreeable"—Climate of Colorado—Soroche and Snakes.

Canyon, September 12.

I was actually so dull and tired that I deliberately slept away the afternoon in order to forget the heat and flies. Thirty men in working clothes, silent and sad-looking, came in to supper. The beef was tough and greasy, the butter had turned to oil, and beef and butter were black with living, drowned, and half-drowned flies. The greasy table-cloth was black also with flies, and I did not wonder that the guests looked melancholy and quickly escaped. I failed to get a horse, but was strongly recommended to come here and board with a settler, who, they said, had a saw-mill and took boarders. The person who recommended it so strongly gave me a note of introduction, and told me that it was in a grand part of the mountains, where many people had been camping out all the summer for the benefit of their health. The idea of a boarding-house, as I know them in America, was rather formidable in the present state of my wardrobe, and