the opening between the capes filled with a flood of golden glory, may be enjoyed from the mountain-tops. ‘ To witness a scene like this,” exclaims Steel, in his report, “ many a man would circle the globe.” Imagine the effect of moonlight upon it—a full moon—“ changing the day’s brilliance into a subdued glory.” Surely there is matter for inspiration here. But at seven o’clock the wind blew fiercely, almost carrying the chronicler from his feet, and he had to keep in constant motion not to freeze. It lasted but for an hour, and at eleven o’clock the red fire was burned, casting a rosy glow over the whole mountain side, bringing into relief every crag and pinnacle, and causing the neighboring mountains to blush more delicately.
I have m}’self seen Hood only from the common level, but have beheld him in many moods and phases, when white, cold, and stern he towered rigidly over a winter landscape, and when draped from summit to base in a golden-tinted tissue of morning mist, through which he peeped like a girl in trying on a robe of yellow gauze,—not quite shaken down on one side, the petticoat of snow showing daintily underneath. Many are the solid old mountain’s masquerading airs, and, despite the dignity of his thousands of years, he sometimes affects the blushes of the rose.
To pioneers of 1845 and later Mount Hood is full of meaning. The road over the range at its base, opened that year, was the Eubicon which they passed in pain and peril. The most skilful driving was not skilful enough to guide the staggering oxen through the way provided by the road-makers, and the constant tendency of a forward wheel to run up a tree on one side or the other was a dread to the drivers. But if wagons would run up trees on ascending ground, what was their course when they came to an incline of sixty degrees on the descending side, with a load urging the jaded oxen from behind ? As succeeding trains widened the way a new difficulty arose. It was better to be halted by a tree than not to be able to stop at all, and to find one’s team rushing down the side of a mountain like an avalanche, to death and destruction. To overcome this tendency, good-sized trees were attached by chains to the rear of the wagons, the branches left to act like grappling-irons, and hold back the weight. But woe to the unfortunate wight whose im-
