remendous
sense of security. Life is largely a state of mind, anyhow, I reckon.

As a necessary preliminary to going down Hermit Trail you take a
buckboard ride of ten miles--ten wonderful miles! Almost immediately the
road quits the rocky, bare parapet of the gorge and winds off through
the noble, big forest that is a part of the Government reserve. Jays
that are twice as large and three times as vocal as the Eastern variety
weave blue threads in the green background of the pines; and if there is
snow upon the ground its billowy white surface is crossed and
criss-crossed with the dainty tracks of coyotes, and sometimes with the
broad, furry marks of the wildcat's pads. The air is a blessing and the
sunshine is a benediction.

Away off yonder, through a break in the conifers, you see one lone and
lofty peak with a cap of snow upon its top. The snow fills the deeper
ravines that furrow its side downward from the summit so that at this
distance it looks as though it were clutched in a vast white owl's claw;
and generally there is a wispy cloud caught on it like a white shirt on
a poor man's Monday washpole. Or, huddled together in a nest formation
like so many speckled eggs, you see the clutch of little mottled
mountains for which nobody seems to have a name. If these mountains were
in Scotland, Sir Walter Scott and Bobby Burns would have written about
them and they would be world-famous, and tourists from America would
come and climb their slopes, and stand upon their tops, and sop up
romance through all their pores. But being in Arizona, dwarfed by the
heaven-reaching ranges and groups that wall them in north, south and
west, they have not even a Christian name to answer to.

Anon--that is to say, at the end of those ten miles--you come to the
head of Hermit Trail. There you leave your buckboard at a way station
and mount your mule. Presently you are crawling downward, like a fly on
a board fence, into the depths of the chasm. You pass through rapidly
succeeding graduations of geology, verdure, scenery and temperature. You
ride past little sunken gardens full of wild flowers and stunty fir
trees, like bits of Old Japan; you climb naked red slopes crowned with
the tall cactus, like Old Mexico; you skirt bald, bare, blistered
vistas of desolation, like Old Perdition. You cross Horsethief's Trail,
which was first traced out by the moccasined feet of marauding Apaches
and later was used by white outlaws fleeing northward