CHAPTER XVIII.
THE UMPQUA VALLEY.
It was a clear, sharp, October morning, when we left Eugene to go down into Southern Oregon. As the stage rattled out of town in the direction of the Umpqua, we took a last, lingering look at the fair, level valley we were leaving. The encircling hills of russet-color, dotted with bits of green, in groups of oaks or pines; of Spenser's Butte, with its sharp, dark-tinted cone; and of the blue Cascades, now purpling under the morning sunrise. From the most distant mountains, light-gray mists were rising; in the middle distance, was a purple interval; on the nearer hills, rich, yellow sunlight. The orb of day was not yet high enough to shine on the hither side of the peaks behind which he was mounting. They stood in their own shadow, and let his slant beams bridge the valleys between their royal heights, until they rested on the humbler foot-hills among which we were wending our way, and touched with a golden radiance the yellow leaves of the maples, or silvered the ripples in the Wallamet water.
Such gorgeousness of color never shone, out of the tropics, as the vine-maple, ash, and white-maple display, along the streams in this part of Oregon. We had thought them bright, glowing, radiant, on the Columbia and Lower Wallamet; but nowhere had we found them so brilliant as at the head of the Wallamet
