ty and grandeur.

Here, at the entrance of the canyon, the train stopped, giving the
passengers an opportunity to alight and enjoy the scenery. On all
sides rose masses of rock, some fashioned in wondrous beauty, others
in forms weird and fantastic; some gray and rugged, some tinted with
intermingling shades of color, and others sparkling in the sunlight as
though studded with gems innumerable. Here and there were piles of
rock, crimson and green and golden, resembling the moss-grown,
ivy-covered castles of the olden time. Farther on were mountains
covered with heavy forests of pine, through which the winds sighed and
whispered mysteriously, while at their feet the little streams
lingered lovingly long enough to catch the whispered secrets, and
bear them away, laughing and singing, on their journey toward the
great sea.

The train moved slowly on to another canyon, more grand in its awful
solitude than the first, surrounded on all sides by walls nearly a
thousand feet in height. At one side, a broad sheet of water,
shimmering in the sunlight, fell, like a bridal veil, down the
precipitous rock, with a deafening roar disappearing into unseen
depths below, while at the base of the canyon lay a lake of sapphire,
in whose calm, untroubled depths, rocks and cascade and sky were
mirrored in perfect beauty.

Slowly the train wound its way upward, until it paused again near the
summit of the range, on the "divide," the boundary line between the
east and the west. There were the serried ranks of the mountains,
vast, solemn, grand; and in that awful solitude, under the spell of
that eternal silence, a sense of the infinite hushed every tongue, and
each one stood with bated breath, as if on holy ground. On every side
the billowy ranges surged, like the gigantic waves of a storm-tossed
ocean suddenly congealed to stone, while here and there, towered
mighty peaks, like huge sentinels, their brows seamed with furrows
plowed by the hand of the centuries, their heads white with the snows
of countless ages.

Here two tiny streams flowed side by side, then separated; the one to
start on its long journey toward the old Atlantic, the other toward
the Golden Gate, to mingle its waters with those of the sunset sea.

Slowly the passengers returned to the train, stopping on their way to
gather the little wild flowers growing between the loosened
rocks,--frail mountain children of the sun and wind,--to be preserved
as souvenirs of the "d