cular ascent to begin
with, for the ground rises more than the river drops. Stately pine woods
fringe either lip of the gorge, which is the gorge of the Yellowstone.
You'll find all about it in the guide books.

All that I can say is that without warning or preparation I looked into
a gulf seventeen hundred feet deep, with eagles and fish-hawks
circling far below. And the sides of that gulf were one wild welter of
color--crimson, emerald, cobalt, ochre, amber, honey splashed with port
wine, snow white, vermilion, lemon, and silver gray in wide washes. The
sides did not fall sheer, but were graven by time, and water, and air
into monstrous heads of kings, dead chiefs--men and women of the old
time. So far below that no sound of its strife could reach us, the
Yellowstone River ran a finger-wide strip of jade green.

The sunlight took those wondrous walls and gave fresh hues to those that
nature had already laid there.

Evening crept through the pines that shadowed us, but the full glory
of the day flamed in that canyon as we went out very cautiously to
a jutting piece of rock--blood-red or pink it was--that overhung the
deepest deeps of all.

Now I know what it is to sit enthroned amid the clouds of sunset as the
spirits sit in Blake's pictures. Giddiness took away all sensation of
touch or form, but the sense of blinding color remained.

When I reached the mainland again I had sworn that I had been floating.

The maid from New Hampshire said no word for a very long time. Then she
quoted poetry, which was perhaps the best thing she could have done.

"And to think that this show-place has been going on all these days an'
none of we ever saw it," said the old lady from Chicago, with an acid
glance at her husband.

"No, only the Injians," said he, unmoved; and the maiden and I laughed.

Inspiration is fleeting, beauty is vain, and the power of the mind for
wonder limited. Though the shining hosts themselves had risen choiring
from the bottom of the gorge, they would not have prevented her papa
and one baser than he from rolling stones down those stupendous
rainbow-washed slides. Seventeen hundred feet of steep-est pitch and
rather more than seventeen hundred colors for log or bowlder to whirl
through!

So we heaved things and saw them gather way and bound from white rock to
red or yellow, dragging behind them torrents of color, till the noise of
their descent ceased and they bounded a hundred yards clear at the la