FAR AND NEAR 



with thousands of cattle, one of the finest rural picr 

 tures I ever saw. It looked like an olive green velvet 

 carpet, so soft and pleasing was it to the eye, and 

 the cattle were disposed singly or in groups as an 

 artist would have placed them. Rising up behind it 

 and finishing the picture was a jagged line of snow- 

 covered mountains. Presently the sagebrush took 

 the place of grass and another change occurred ; still 

 the lines of the landscape were flowing and the tints 

 soft. The sagebrush is like the sage of the garden 

 grown woody and aspiring to be a bush three or 

 four feet high. It is the nearest that nature comes 

 to the arboreal beard on these great elevated plains. 

 Shave it away, and the earth beneath is as smooth 

 as a boy's cheek. 



Before we get out of Wyoming this youthfulness 

 of nature gives place to mere newness, — raw, tur- 

 bulent, forbidding, almost chaotic. The landscape 

 suggests the dumping-ground of creation, where all 

 the refuse has been gathered. What one sees at 

 home in a clay-bank by the roadside on a scale of 

 a few feet, he sees here on a scale of hundreds and 

 thousands of feet, — the erosions and the sculptur- 

 ing of a continent, vast, titanic ; mountain ranges, 

 like newly piled earth from some globe-piercing 

 mine shaft, all furrowed and carved by the elements, 

 as if in yesterday's rainfall. It all has a new, transi- 

 tory look. Buttes or table mountains stand up here 

 and there Uke huge earth stumps. 

 6 



