are mountains of pure limestone, or the white quartz
rock. There are mountains, again, upon which neither tree nor leaf is
to be; seen; but, in their stead, the most vivid colours of red and
green and yellow and white, appearing in stripes along their sides, as
though they had been freshly painted. These stripes mark the strata of
different coloured rocks, of which the mountains are composed. And
there are still other mountains in the Great American Desert, to startle
the traveller with their strange appearance. They are those that
glitter with the mica and selenite. These, when seen from a distance
flashing under the sun, look as though they were mountains of silver and
gold!

The rivers, too. Strange rivers are they. Some run over broad shallow
beds of bright sand. Large rivers--hundreds of yards in width, with
sparkling waters. Follow them down their course. What do you find?
Instead of growing larger, like the rivers of your own land, they become
less and less, until at length their waters sink into the sands, and you
see nothing but the dry channel for miles after miles! Go still farther
down, and again the water appears, and increases in volume, until--
thousands of miles from the sea--large ships can float upon their bosom.
Such are the Arkansas and the Platte.

There are other rivers that run between bleak, rocky banks--banks a
thousand feet high, whose bald, naked "bluffs" frown at each other
across the deep chasm, in the bottom of which roars the troubled water.
Often these banks extend for hundreds of miles, so steep at all points
that one cannot go down to the bed of their stream; and often--often--
the traveller has perished with thirst, while the roar of their water
was sounding in his ears! Such are the Colorado and the Snake.

Still others go sweeping through the broad plains, tearing up the clay
with their mighty floods, and year after year changing their channels,
until they are sometimes an hundred miles from their ancient beds. Here
they are found gurgling for many leagues under ground--under vast rafts
formed by the trees which they have borne downward in their current.
There you find them winding by a thousand loops like the sinuosities of
a great serpent, rolling sluggishly along, with waters red and turbid as
though they were rivers of blood! Such are the Brazos and the Red
River.

Strange rivers are they that struggle through the mountains, and
valleys, and plateau-lands of th