ON THE NYARLING 



137 



varies continually and is always beautiful. Every- 

 thing that I have said of the Little Buffalo applies to 

 the Nyarling with fourfold force, because of its more 

 varied scenery and greater range of bird and other 

 life. Sometimes, like the 

 larger stream, it presents a 

 long, straight vista of a 

 quarter-mile through a sol- 

 emn aisle in the forest of 

 mighty spruce trees that 

 tower a hundred feet in 

 height, all black with 

 gloom, green with health, 

 and gray with moss. 



Sometimes its channel 

 winds in and out of open 

 grassy meadows that are 

 dotted with clumps of 

 rounded trees, as in an 

 English park. Now it nar- 

 rows to a deep and sinu- 

 ous bed, through alders so 

 rank and reaching that 

 they meet overhead and 

 form a shade of golden 



green; and again it widens out into reedy lakes, the 

 summer home of countless Ducks, Geese, Tattlers 

 Terns, Peetweets, Gulls, Rails, Blackbirds, and half 

 a hundred of the lesser tribes. Sometimes the fore- 

 ground is rounded masses of kinnikinnik in snowy 

 flower, or again a far-strung growth of the needle 



Senecio 



