FAR AND NEAR 



red and angry torrent of Price River, a mountain 

 brook of licjuid mud near which we lay, was quite 

 in keeping with the scene. How staid and settled 

 and old Nature looks in the Atlantic States, with 

 her clear streams, her rounded hills, her forests, her 

 lichen-covered rocks, her neutral tints, in contrast 

 with large sections of the Rocky Mountain region. 

 In the East the great god Erosion has almost done 

 his w^ork, — the grading and shaping of the land- 

 scape has long since been finished, the seeding and 

 planting are things of the remote past, — but in this 

 part of the West it is still the heat of the day with 

 him; we surprise his forces with shovels and piclvs 

 yet in hand, as it were, and the spectacle is strange 

 indeed and in many ways repellent. In places, the 

 country looks as if all the railroad forces of the 

 world might have been turned loose to delve and 

 rend and pile in some mad, insane carnival and 

 debauch. 



In crossing the Rockies I had my first ride upon 

 the cowcatcher, or rather upon the bench of the 

 engine immediately above it. In this position one 

 gets a much more vivid sense of the perils that en- 

 compass the flying train than he does from the car 

 window. The book of fate is rapidly laid bare be- 

 fore him and he can scan every line, while from 

 his comfortable seat in the car he sees little more 

 than the margin of the page. From the engine he 

 reads the future and the immediate. From the cai 



8 



