w down, the ravine broadens out to inclose a meadow the width of a
lark's flight, blossomy and wet and good. Here the stream ran once in a
maze of soddy banks and watered all the ground, and afterward ran out at
the canyon's mouth across the mesa in a wash of bone-white boulders as
far as it could. That was not very far, for it was a slender stream. It
had its source on the high crests and hollows of the near-by mountain,
in the snow banks that melted and seeped downward through the rocks. But
the stream did not know any more of that than you know of what happened
to you before you were born, and could give no account of itself except
that it crept out from under a great heap of rubble far up in the Canyon
of the Pinon Pines.

And because it had no pools in it deep enough for trout, and no trees on
its borders but gray nut pines; because, try as it might, it could never
get across the mesa to the town, the stream had fully made up its mind
to run away.

"Pray, what good will that do you?" said the pines. "If you get to
the town, they will turn you into an irrigating ditch, and set you to
watering crops."

"As to that," said the stream, "if I once get started I will not stop at
the town."

Then it would fret between its banks until the spangled frills of the
mimulus were all tattered with its spray. Often at the end of the summer
it was worn quite thin and small with running, and not able to do more
than reach the meadow.

"But some day," it whispered to the stones, "I shall run quite away."

If the stream had been inclined for it, there was no lack of good
company on its own borders. Birds nested in the willows, rabbits came to
drink; one summer a bobcat made its lair up the bank opposite the brown
birches, and often the deer fed in the meadow.

In the spring of one year two old men came up into the Canyon of Pinon
Pines. They had been miners and partners together for many years. They
had grown rich and grown poor, and had seen many hard places and strange
times. It was a day when the creek ran clear and the south wind smelled
of the earth. Wild bees began to whine among the willows, and the meadow
bloomed over with poppy-breasted larks.

Then said one of the old men: "Here is good meadow and water enough; let
us build a house and grow trees. We are too old to dig in the mines."

"Let us set about it," said the other; for that is the way with two who
have been a long time together,--what one thinks of, the oth