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Inside, wherever the channel widens, there are smaller islands, so disposed as to make it impossible to say what is island and what continent. These are gems in a setting that perfectly reflects the grass and pines fringing the sea's glossy surface, as well as the background of snow-patched mountain. "Yesterday the stillness was reverential, and quite in keeping with Sunday rest.

For the first time in her life she was tasting real loneliness. She wandered over the snow-patched fields down to the frozen bay, and found the intense stillness, punctuated only by the occasional distant gunshot of some optimist trying for duck, oppressive rather than restful.

After breakfast the party resumed their ascent of the mountain, and in due time arrived at the "Notch" a literal gate of rock when they found themselves on the knife-like ridge or backbone of Long's Peak, only a few feet wide, covered with huge boulders, and on the other side shelving in a snow-patched precipice of 3,000 feet to a picturesque hollow, brightened by an emerald lake.

Through these the road wound in silence, through this upper, transcendent desolation, wherein was only the sound of the stream. Sky and snow-patched slopes, then the stony, rocky bed of the defile, full of morning sunshine: this was all. We were crossing in silence from the northern world to the southern.

There were far-stretching grassy prairies, affording rich pasturage for the buffalo and the antelope; rough breaks and bad lands for the climbing mountain sheep; wooded buttes, loved by the mule deer; timbered river bottoms, where the white-tailed deer and the elk could browse and hide; narrow, swampy valleys for the moose; and snow-patched, glittering pinnacles of rock, over which the sure-footed white goat took his deliberate way.

Clothes-lines like a parade-ground of telegraphs, fields like prairies, snow-patched, as far as you could see, with things laid out to whiten!

And so they got the first news of the bitter midwinter battle that ended the days of Big Foot and so many of his band, that cost us the lives of so many gallant officers and men, among the icy flats and snow-patched ravines along the Wounded Knee. But there came a meeting in March that brought surcease for all that fond mother's sorrow.

The dimpling Pacific was never more than a mile from us as we kept the narrow track in the long green grass; and on our left the blunt snow-patched peaks of Mauna Kea rose from the girdle of forest, looking so delusively near that I fancied a two-hours' climb would take us to his lofty summit.

Manfully he marched in his thick hob-nailed boots, earnestly he scrambled up the rocks. We were in the crest of the pass. Broad snow-patched slopes came down from the pure sky; the defile was full of stones, all bare stones, enormous ones as big as a house, and small ones, pebbles.

Achnagart with his L1000 a year rental by no means tops the sheep-farming rentals of his county. Perhaps Robertson of Achiltie, whose sheep-walks stretch up on to the snow-patched shoulders of Ben Wyvis and far away west to Loch Broom, pays the highest sheep-farming rental in Ross-shire, when the factor has pocketed his half-yearly check for L800.