lance of landscape pictures set in rustic frame.

The traveller who attempts to follow the course of the stream in
question will have to keep upon the cliffs above: for no nearer can he
approach its deeply-indented channel. And here he will see only the
sterile treeless plain; or, if trees meet his eye, they will be such as
but strengthen the impression of sterility--some scrambling mezquite
bushes, clumps of cactaceae, perhaps the spheroidal form of a
melocactus, or yucca, with its tufts of rigid leaves--the latter
resembling bunches of bayonets rising above the musket "stacks" on a
military parade ground.

He will have no view of the lush vegetation that enlivens the valley a
hundred yards below the hoofs of his horse. He will not even get a
glimpse of the stream itself; unless by going close to the edge of the
precipice, and craning his neck over. And to do this, he must needs
diverge from his route to avoid the transverse rivulets, each trickling
down the bed of its own deep-cut channel.

There are many such streams in South-Western Texas; but the one here
described is that called _Arroyo de Coyote_--Anglice, "Coyote Creek"--a
tributary of the Colorado.

In part it forms the western boundary of the table-land, already known
to the reader, in part intersecting it. Approaching it from the San
Saba side, there is a stretch of twenty miles, where its channel cannot
be reached, except by a single lateral ravine leading down to it at
right angles, the entrance to which is concealed by a thick chapparal of
thorny mezquite trees. Elsewhere, the traveller may arrive on the
bluff's brow, but cannot go down to the stream's edge. He may see it
far below, coursing among trees of every shade of green, from clearest
emerald to darkest olive, here in straight reaches, there sinuous as a
gliding snake. Birds of brilliant plumage flit about through the
foliage upon its banks, some disporting themselves in its pellucid wave;
some making the valley vocal with their melodious warblings, and others
filling it with harsh, stridulous cries. Burning with thirst, and faint
from fatigue, he will fix his gaze on the glistening water, to be
tortured as Tantalus, and descry the cool shade, without being able to
rest his weary limbs beneath it.

But rare the traveller, who ever strays to the bluffs bounding Coyote
Creek: rarer still, those who have occasion to descend to the
bottom-land through which it meanders.

Some have, nevert