54 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES 



the trail deep into a rich glade carpeted with green 

 grass, a carpet pricked with golden dog-tooth violets, on 

 which snow patches lay like great bear rugs and ever- 

 greens in groups were the figures forming for a minuet. 

 This glade rose in a series of terraces, and over each 

 terrace poured the white cascade of a brook. The last 

 terrace led to Iceberg Lake, which we now could see ahead 

 of us, lying at the base of a vast semicircle of naked 

 rock, a precipice four thousand feet from the glacier 

 at the foot to the castellated battlements which 

 cut against the sky, red its predominant colour, a great 

 smash in the face, an astonishing revelation in one sheer 

 jump of the Great Divide and it frowning down upon 

 a meadow starred with violets, where fir trees were the 

 stately figures in a minuet, where little ice-water rills 

 sang seductively, where sky-blue forget-me-nots looked 

 up from the crannies and columbines nodded in a wan- 

 dering wind! There is nothing wonderful in the fact 

 that we moulded snowballs in our shirt sleeves by the 

 shore of the lake, which in mid-July was still a sheet of 

 snow-covered ice, nor chopped up its frozen greenness 

 to make our iced tea. The wonder is this conjunction 

 of the stupendous with the delicate, the Grand Canon 

 with something even softer, greener, and more in- 

 timately alluring than the Berkshires or the Lake 

 Country. The dog-tooth violets come up as fast as the 

 drifts disappear; many an impatient one we found 

 blossoming Bravely through two inches of snow, in fact; 



