contrasting finely with the green foliage below, the pale 

 gray cones and the blue sky above. The valley, too, had 

 breadth enough to obviate the effect of sombre gloom 

 that canyons often have, deep cuts where water in its 

 swing has not had time to cut a wider swathe. Sunlight 

 entered here abundantly, lighting its walls ' rich tones and 

 showing the beauty of their weathered faces. 



One memory I have always cherished. A spring of 

 water, rare in that region and delightful always, issued — 

 at some distance from the valley floor — from a long crack 

 or crevice in the sandstone, and, rooted in the rock-face 

 below, draping and hiding it, there grew a splendid cur- 

 tain of Maidenhair fern with magnificent fronds and long 

 wiry stems that allowed the fronds to freely over-lap, 

 while the water dropped and trickled through the mass 

 to gather at the cliff-foot finally and flow away. The rich 

 color-contrast of the fronds and rock, the fresh green hue 

 and splendid vigor of the fronds themselves, and the de- 

 light of the water dripping quietly down made an im- 

 pression on me in that arid region which is as fresh to- 

 day as then. 



That night we slept on the sandy valley floor, where 

 I remember the swift passage of the stars against the 

 cliffs, then being waked at dawn by ants, tiny but innu- 

 merable, whom I found attacking me in two apparently 

 well organized and well directed columns, one on either 

 side ; and I remember, too, finding when I rose the tracks 

 of a night-prowling coyote in the sand between me and 

 my next sleeping neighbor, not half a dozen feet away. 



Where we slept that night and watched the breaking 

 of the dawn, the canyon opened grandly out as if for 

 the enthronement of some ancient god, and there, from 

 its deep embayment, rose a dangerous and only trail 

 connecting the canyon bottom with the plains above — a 

 summer-grazing ground for cattle, whose bones marked, 

 like vestiges of ancient sacrifice, the bases of the cliffs 

 it climbed. 



11 



