population, would have long since outclassed even Niagara as a tourist's
Mecca.

Reference is made to the Grand Cañon of the Colorado.

Few people have the slightest conception of the magnitude or awfulness
of this cañon. It is clearly one of the wonders of the world, and its
vastness is such that to explore it from end to end is a work of the
greatest possible difficulty.

Even in area, the cañon is extraordinary. It is large enough to contain
more than one Old World country. It is long enough to stretch across
some of the largest States in the Union. Some of the smaller New England
States would be absolutely swallowed up in the yawning abyss could they,
by any means, be removed to it bodily. An express train running at a
high rate of speed, without a single stop and on a first-class road-bed,
could hardly get from one end of the cañon to the other in less than
five hours, and an ordinary train with the usual percentage of stoppage
would about make the distance between morning and evening.

Reduced to the record of cold figures, the Grand Cañon is made up of a
series of chasms measuring about 220 miles in length, as much as 12
miles in width, and frequently as much as 7,000 feet in depth.

This marvelous feature of American scenery is very fully described in
"Our Own Country," published by the National Publishing Company. In
describing the cañon, that profusely illustrated work says that the
figures quoted "do not readily strike a responsive chord in the human
mind, for the simple reason that they involve something utterly
different from anything that more than 99 per cent. of the inhabitants