regular freight train, running day and night,
the track unincumbered with returning cars (they were returned by the
elevated road of the upper air)--burdened with dissolved rock and earth.

A slip into this river scarcely seemed to wet the foot; it seemed
rather to coat it thickly with mud rescued from its plunge toward the
sea. What unimaginable amounts the larger river must have carried in
uncounted ages! In the short time the Mississippi has been at work it
has built out the land at its mouth one hundred miles into the Gulf.

In the side canon down which we worked our sublime and toilful way it
was easy to see the work done. Sometimes the fierce torrent would pile
the bottom of a side canon with every variety of stone, from the wall a
mile high, into one tremendous heap of conglomerate. The next rush of
waters would tear a channel through this and pour millions of tons into
the main river. For years Boston toiled, in feeble imitation of
Milton's angels, to bring the Milton Hills into the back Bay and South
Boston Flats. Boston made more land than the city originally
contained, but it did not move a teaspoonful compared with these
excavations.

The section traversed that day seemed while we were in it like a mighty
chasm, a world half rent asunder, full of vast sublimities, but the
next day, seen from the rim as a part of the mighty whole, it appeared
comparatively little. One gets new meanings of the words almighty,
eternity, infinity, in the presence of things done that seem to require
them all.

In 1869 Major J. W. Powell, aided by nine men, attempted to pass down
this tumultuous river with four boats specially constructed for the
purpose. In ninety-eight days he had made one thousand miles, much of
it in extremest peril. For weeks there was no possibility of climbing
to the plateau above.

Any great scene in nature is like the woman you fall in love with at
first sight for some pose of head, queenly carriage, auroral flush of
color, penetrative music of voice, or a glance of soul through its
illumined windows. You do not know much about her, but in long years
of heroic endurance of trials, in the great dignity of motherhood, in
the unspeakable comfortings that are scarcely short of godlike, and in
the supernal, ineffable beauty and loveliness that cover it all, you
find a richness and worth of which the most ardent lover never dreamed.
The first sight of the canon often brings strong men to their kn