Odin’s Garden proved to be a wonderful assemblage of rocky shapes rising from the grass and flowers of a lonely little plain on the far side of the mesa, four or five miles from St. Helen’s.  The name of the place came probably from something suggestive in the forms of the rocks, which reminded Clover of pictures she had seen of Assyrian and Egyptian rock carvings.  There were lion shapes and bull shapes like the rudely chiselled gods of some heathen worship; there were slender, points and obelisks three hundred feet high; and something suggesting a cat-faced deity, and queer similitudes of crocodiles and apes,—­all in the strange orange and red and pale yellow formations of the region.  It was a wonderful rather than a beautiful place; but the day was spent very happily under those mysterious stones, which, as the long afternoon shadows gathered over the plain, and the sky glowed with sunset crimson which seemed like a reflection from the rocks themselves, became more mysterious still.  Of the merry young party which made up the picnic, seven out of nine had come to Colorado for health; but no one would have guessed it, they seemed so well and so full of the enjoyment of life.  Altogether, it was a day to be marked; not with a white stone,—­that would not have seemed appropriate to Colorado,—­but with a red one.  Clover, writing about it afterward to Elsie, felt that her descriptions to sober stay-at-homes might easily sound overdrawn and exaggerated, and wound up her letter thus:—­

“Perhaps you think that I am romancing; but I am not a bit.  Every word I say is perfectly true, only I have not made the colors half bright or the things half beautiful enough.  Colorado is the most beautiful place in the world. [N.B.—­Clover had seen but a limited portion of the world so far.] I only wish you could all come out to observe for yourselves that I am not fibbing, though it sounds like it!”

CHAPTER VIII.

HIGH VALLEY.

Clover was putting Phil’s chamber to rights, and turning it into a sitting-room for the day, which was always her first task in the morning.  They had been at St. Helen’s nearly three weeks now, and the place had taken on a very homelike appearance.  All the books and the photographs were unpacked, the washstand had vanished behind a screen made of a three-leaved clothes-frame draped with chintz, while a ruffled cover of the same gay chintz, on which bunches of crimson and pink geraniums straggled over a cream-colored ground, gave to the narrow bed the air of a respectable wide sofa.

“There! those look very nice, I think,” she said, giving the last touch to a bowl full of beautiful garden roses.  “How sweet they are!”

“Your young man seems rather clever about roses,” remarked Phil, who, boy-like, dearly loved to tease his sister.

“My young man, as you call him, has a father with a gardener,” replied Clover, calmly; “no very brilliant cleverness is required for that.”