142 With Feet to the Earth 



relate unseemly narratives in order to see 

 the clergyman and the professor wince. 

 They claimed to have committed many 

 sins, but they never worried over them. 

 It was different with a "rustler" we met 

 out there. 



After some days of heat and freezing 

 nights, some jolting and climbing and 

 struggling, much marvelling at hot springs 

 and geysers, some swimming to erase from 

 our backs the dents of rocks that had been 

 our beds, and daily tussles with mosquitoes, 

 it was like entering the land of Beulah to 

 descend to Yellowstone Lake, one of the 

 loveliest sheets of water in the world, and 

 to pitch our tent on the soft sward near its 

 shore. Dinner eaten, we trudged off to 

 Natural Bridge, near the lake's western 

 edge, a dike of travertine that had been 

 pierced and worn in long past centuries by 

 a stream, and that is wide enough for a 

 person to walk upon, from one side of the 

 ravine to the other. The passage is only 

 ten yards long, or thereabout, but there 

 is a drop of nearly a hundred feet to the 

 bottom if one makes a misstep, which he 



