14 JOHN BURROUGHS 



mountains; plump, full-breasted, tan-colored heights close 

 about it on all sides, now speckled with sagebrush, then 

 lightly touched by the most delicate green, the first tender 

 caress of May. All the lines are feminine and flowing, 

 only here and there a touch of ruggedness as the brown 

 rock crops out. Cover these mountains with turf, and 

 they are almost a copy of the sheep fells and green ranges of 

 northern England. They are marked by the same fullness 

 and softness of outline. For many miles the Snake flows 

 north, through these treeless, rounded, flower-painted, 

 green-veiled mountains, until it enters the terrible canyon 

 between the Seven Devils and the Wallowas ; reappear- 

 ing at the mouth of the Clearwater it bends westerly and 

 cuts another long canyon across the high plateau of east- 

 ern Oregon and Washington; it does not traverse any 

 flat country until it finally emerges on the sand plains near 

 its junction with the Columbia. 



Our train made a long detour through Oregon and 

 Washington and put us down at Lewiston in Idaho, that 

 we might have a steamboat ride down Snake River to its 

 mouth in the Columbia. I had somehow got the impres- 

 sion that I should see great forests in Washington and 

 Oregon, but we missed them. They are on the moist 

 Pacific slope west of the Cascade range. We sailed 150 

 miles that afternoon down the Snake amid mountains two 

 thousand or more feet high, as smooth and as treeless as 

 the South Downs of England; very novel, very beautiful, 

 their lower slopes pink in places with a delicate flower 

 called Clarkia, in others blue-purple as the cheek of a 

 plum. I say mountains, but they are only the sides of the 

 huge canyon through which the Snake flows. How the 

 afternoon sun brought out their folds and dimples and 

 clinging delicate tints ! The green of the higher slopes 

 was often like a veil of thin green gauze, dropped upon 

 them. The effects were all new to me and pleasing be- 



