d her. My saddle had an arrangement in front by which to
attach the lasso, in catching animals. The miner said that just the same
pattern was still in use in Andalusia and other Spanish provinces. I
felt as if I were starting on quite a new career. When he lifted me on
to the horse, he said, "How light you are!" It was because every care
had dropped off from me.

We rode over the wildest desert country, with great black walls of rock,
and wonderful canyons, with perpendicular sides, extending far down into
the earth. Mr. Bowles, in his book, "Across the Continent," says he
cannot compare any thing else to the exhilaration of the air of the
upland plains; neither sea nor mountain air can equal it. The extreme
heat, too, seemed to intensify every thing in us, even our power of
enjoyment, notwithstanding the discomfort of it. The thermometer marked
117 deg. in the shade. I felt as if I had never before known what breezes
and shadows and streams were. Just as we had reached the last limit of
possible endurance, the shadow of some great wall of rock would fall
upon us, or a little breeze spring up, or we would find the land
descending to the bed of a stream. At length our miner, who had been
for the last part of the way looking and listening with the closest
attention, struck almost directly to the spot, hardly a step astray. It
was all below the surface of the earth, so that hardly any sound rose
above; and there was no sign of any path to it, not a tree, nor shrub,
nor blade of grass near, but an amphitheatre of rock, and the beautiful
white river, in its leap into the canyon falling a hundred and ninety
feet. The cliffs and jagged pinnacles of basaltic rock around it were
several hundred feet high. It looked like a great white bridal veil. It
was made up of myriads of snowy sheaves, sometimes with the faintest
amethyst tint. It shattered itself wholly into spray before it struck
the water below,--that is, the outer circumference of it,--and the inner
part was all that made any sound.

The miner looked upon it with perfect rapture. He said to me, "It is a
rare pleasure to travel with any one who enjoys any thing of this kind."
I felt it so too.

His striking directly at the spot, after many miles of travel, without
any landmarks, reminded me of the experience of Ross, the Hudson Bay
trader, when he travelled from Fort Okanagan on foot, two hundred miles
to the coast, taking with him an Indian, who told him they would go