A BIRD-GAZER AT THE CANON 



him. His spirit is refreshed by it. He relishes it, 

 to use a word that he himself uses often. But 

 with all this (and here we come to the peculiarity), 

 the exceptional and the stupendous are apt to 

 leave him comparatively unaffected. As he says 

 sometimes, meaning, perhaps, to justify his eccen- 

 tricity, he admires the grace of the human figure, 

 but takes no particular interest in giants or dwarfs. 

 These excite curiosity, as a matter of course, but 

 for his part he would not go far out of his way to 

 stare at them. 



The comparison is rather beside the mark. He 

 would own as much himself. Indeed, he had 

 come a long distance out of his way to see the 

 Grand Canon of the Colorado. But, after all, to 

 hear some of the things he began by saying about 

 it (though you would not have heard them, since 

 he had the discretion to say them to himself), 

 you might have inferred that this stupendous rift 

 in the earth's surface was to him, for the mo- 

 ment, at least, a something rather monstrous 

 than beautiful. 



He reached the Canon on a bright Saturday 

 morning in December. All day Thursday he had 

 ridden over the prairies of Kansas, gazing out 

 of the car window, and repeating with " relish " 

 Stevenson's line, — 



" Under the wide and starry sky.'' 

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