A long, dark object appeared in the trees covered with bark and moss.
Behind these trees was a waterfall, over which hung the crowns of pines.
The sunlight sifted through the odorous canopy, and fell upon the strange,
dark object that lay across the branching limbs of two ancient trees.

Gretchen stopped again.

"Mother, what is that?"

"A grave--an Indian grave."

The Indians bury their dead in the trees out here, or used to do so. A
brown hawk arose from the mossy coffin and winged its way wildly into the
sunny heights of the air. It had made its nest on the covering of the
body. These new scenes were all very strange to the young German girl.

The trail was bordered with young ferns; wild violets lay in beds of
purple along the running streams, and the mountain phlox with its kindling
buds carpeted the shelving ways under the murmuring pines. The woman and
girl came at last to a wild, open space; before them rolled the Oregon,
beyond it stretched a great treeless plain, and over it towered a gigantic
mountain, in whose crown, like a jewel, shone a resplendent glacier.

Just before them, on the bluffs of the river, under three gigantic
evergreens, each of which was more than two hundred feet high, stood an
odd structure of logs and sods, which the builders called the Sod
School-house. It was not a sod school-house in the sense in which the term
has been applied to more recent structures in the treeless prairie
districts of certain mid-ocean States; it was rudely framed of pine, and