136 



day's run, she frisks and caracoles like a 

 colt at play. 



Princess may be nay, is the better 

 weight-carrier. She is heavier, stouter, too 

 powerful indeed for symmetry. Yet you 

 shall ride all day many days before you 

 find cattle to outmatch the pair whose 

 heads are now turned up-stream to the bath- 

 ing-pool. 



Nature, our mother, builded it, with Chance 

 for her architect. Fifty years ago a huge 

 dead tree-trunk fell slantwise athwart the 

 stream. Drift silt, gravel, bedded it so firm- 

 ly in place that now a bar makes across the 

 channel, holding the laughing waters still 

 and clear in a pool breast-deep above it. 



Well may the water be clear as new sun- 

 rays, cool as the dawn. It comes from the 

 springs bubbling out at foot of big gray 

 bluffs. This narrow valley is veined and 

 threaded with them. Each pellucid wave- 

 let is yet surcharged with the vital force 

 drawn from Earth, the great mother. 



How they leap and dance up-stream 

 through the flumes of blue-gray stone, hast- 

 ing, hasting to this smooth reach of bright 

 water, from out whose clear-shining engird- 

 ling trees and rock and shrubs laugh back 

 to you, as real as this upper world. At last 



