once more and with all the vigor of a despairing tail. And this time he
was safe. A third crevice, twice the width of the second, split the
rocks, riving a deeper cleft in the mountain that held back the inland
sea, making a gorge through the majestic chain of the Cascades and
opening a way for the torrent oceanward. It was the crack of doom for
the fiends. Essaying the leap, they fell far short of the edge, where
the Devil lay panting. Down they fell and were swept away by the flood;
so the whole race of fiends perished from the face of the earth. But
the Devil was in sorry case. His tail was unutterably dislocated by his
last blow; so, leaping across the chasm he had made, he went home to
rear his family thoughtfully. There were no more antagonists; so,
perhaps, after all, tails were useless. Every year he brought his
children to The Dalles and told them the terrible history of his
escape. And after a time the fires of the Cascades burned away; the
inland sea was drained and its bed became a fair and habitable land,
and still the waters gushed through the narrow crevices roaring
seaward. But the Devil had one sorrow. All his children born before the
catastrophe were crabbed, unregenerate, stiff-tailed fiends. After that
event every new-born imp wore a flaccid, invertebrate, despondent
tail--the very last insignium of ignobility. So runs the legend of The
Dalles--a shining lesson to reformers.

Leaving The Dalles in the morning, a splendid panorama begins to unfold
on this lordly stream--"Achilles of rivers," as Winthrop called it. It
is difficult to describe the charm of this trip. Residents of the East
pronounce it superior to the Hudson, and travelers assert there is
nothing like it in the Old World. It is simply delicious to those
escaped from the heat and dust of their far-off homes to embark on this
noble stream and steam smoothly down past frowning headlands and "rocks
with carven imageries," bluffs lined with pine trees, vivid green, past