that civilized nations should be compelled to learn the perfection of one of the manliest arts from the Nomads of Tartary, the Plains, and the Arabian Desert. The horse is as capable of friendship as the dog. The more that I see of him, the more I love his nature, and the more am I convinced that the true side for the trainer to approach him on, is his personal devotion to himself. The horse that cannot be approached thus, by wisdom and patience, I have yet to see.

The nearest approach to luxury among the Arrapahoes was a sort of horse-palanquin, made by suspending a hammock of skins between two of the lodgepoles, which are tied at one end to the horse's neck, when the tents are struck for a march. The other ends of the poles drag on the ground; and they possess sufficient elasticity to make the hammock no mean ambulance for a veteran or a sick person.

A little before sunset we pulled up at the one house and the stables representing Latham. Here we took tea from our own supply chest, and passed the time waiting for the westward stage in sketching and botanizing before dark, and writing letters after it. The stage arrived about ten o'clock, and to our great satisfaction we discovered only three inside passengers intending to go further. Night-riding in a stage is an occasion where misery decidedly does not love company.

Just after leaving Latham, we coiled ourselves into one corner for a nap, but had hardly began to nod before we plunged down a steep bank, and began fording the South Platte at a point where the water came just nicely over the floor of the wagon, soaking our boots, gun-cases, and blankets to perfection. The night was dark; but, to judge by feeling, the road

during the first half of the night continued nearly as level as from Fremont's Orchard to Latham. We dozed up the steep grades, and got rattled wide awake down them, coming feverishly into the dawn during our first severely mountainous climb, along the bed of the Cache-la-Poudre. This stream is one of the most beautiful mountain torrents which we saw on our entire journey. It comes from the everlasting snow-line of the peaks about Cheyenne Pass; and its entire course to the Platte is a roaring sluice, broken by no great fall, but obstructed by gigantic boulders, with a tolerably even grade and considerable winding of direction. At Camp Halleck, where we arrived at sunrise, the stream was about thirty yards wide, and plunged through a densely tangled forest. The soldiers encamped at this station were a detachment of Colorado volunteers, sent out to watch the Utes and Snakes. I envied them their trout-fishing. The Cachela-Poudre swarms with fine fish, and is the most mysteriously seductive of streams to an artist. We should have been glad to trace it up to the top of its cañon, but turned off its course shortly after leaving Camp Halleck, and ascended to a new level.

We now began to understand the significance of the title Rocky Mountains. We had reached a minor plateau between the snow-ridges, where the granite and sandstone outcrops projected from fifty to three hundred feet above the general sandy level, bare and perpendicular as the side of a house, varied by rolling buttes or ridges of similar height, thinly tufted with the gray gramma-grass, and dotted with clumps of sage brush. This was the first place where sage, so called (though I believe it is properly an artemisia), becomes the prominent feature of the Overland land

scape, though it occurs previously at intervals all the way from Denver, and other wormwoods abound on the Plains much further east. The sage rises from a tough gnarled root in a number of spiral shoots which finally twist together into a single trunk, varying in circumference from six inches to two feet, and tenacious as a hawser. The leaves of the plant are gray, woolly, and crisp, with a strong offensive smell, resembling true sage. From Camp Halleck to the Wasatch, almost the only vegetable life not distinctly arborescent greets the traveller's eye in the shape of limitless wastes abandoned to this scrubby sage, and the equally scrubby but somewhat greener "greasewood." For long stages between the high timbered snow-ridges, the only resource for fuel on which the emigrant can rely while following the Rocky Mountain trail, is this pair of dry, resinous shrubs; and they burn so freely as to be a great improvement on the method of boiling his kettle over dry buffalo droppings, which he was compelled to adopt on some level stretches of the Plains.

Where the sage was lacking, the plateau to which we had climbed from Camp Halleck was a mere clean skeleton of the world. Telescopes reveal to us a very similar tract in the moon, and geology takes us back to a time when the earth was all thus. I think that the man who stands where we rode on the 24th of June, need never be without a tolerably correct idea of the azoic period, nor use a glass to see the Lunar Desert. We might have been visiting this sphere by some magical anachronism before the first river flowed, or sea felt tidal fluctuation; when as yet there had been neither Ganoid, nor Euripterus, nor Trilobite. When we descended into a depression

of the plateau, there was nothing but pure rock between us and the horizon. Vast stones lay heaped up into pyramids as if they had been rained from the sky. Cubical masses, each covering an acre of surface and rising to a perpendicular height of thirty or forty feet, appeared in strange series about a rude square, irresistibly suggesting the buttresses of some gigantic palace or prison whose superstructure had crumbled away with the race of its Titanic builders. The most remarkable instance of geologic record which I ever saw or heard of, occurred in a vast rectangular pile of altered red sandstone, which we encountered on this tract. It was a mass nearly the eighth of a mile in circuit, and stood nearly four-square to the height of a hundred feet or more above a basin of waterwashed pebbles. It was a pile as entirely isolated as the dome of St. Peter's, yet on its eastern face it bore the unmistakable signs of having once formed the wall of a mighty cataract. Its upper horizontal edge was channeled in polished grooves; its face was broken into ledges, and the angles of these worn again to curves; there were pot-holes on the top of the rock, and gravel strewn with boulders lining the conical basin at its foot; in fact, to one standing on the eastern side of the rock, there appeared every condition requisite for a Niagara, except the water. That was nowhere within sight or credibility. A poet might have fancied that he heard it; that it was an invisible fall, a ghost of some Old World torrent which roared gently as 'twere any sucking dove to the vulgar, but had rhythm and thunder for the ears which can hear the spheres sing. To scientific eyes it was such a wonder as the Niagara precipice might be if a cube of its present mass were cut away from the rest

of the world on the American and Canada side and at the upper end of Goat Island, the surrounding country leveled to the plane of the lower river, and the water led by some far distant channel to the St. Lawrence. The man who, ten centuries afterward, looked on the scarred dry precipice resulting from such a process, beheld the deep furrows of the brink, counted the slippery shelves beneath it, yet heard no voice of water break the desert silence, would experience some such sensation as I did on beholding that Rocky Mountain stone-pile. Where did the water come from? Where were the successive terraces, where the cradling cañon by which the mighty freshets hurled themselves down from the snows to grind this silex into sand or crack it into ledges? To leap this wall with the force recorded, the water must have descended a succession of steep grades towering far above the precipice. Every vestige of such formations has been moved out of the way by some colossal agency, and one might as well look for a cataract from the roof of a house. Yet here stands the unanswerable record, -a witness which has survived cataclysm, -a monument, compared with which the Pyramids were things of yesterday, to a cataract whose very bed had departed, like its vapor, from the face of the modern world.

Another curious formation of this plateau was an uplift of trap-rock in the neighborhood of the sandstone cataract, taking the form of a colossal steamship, much keeled to leeward, and rising the crest of a lofty billow of sandstone. At the distance of forty yards, the illusion was absolutely startling. We could see a handsome clean cut-water, a clipper bow, a mainmast broken off short at the cross-trees, a battered