perplexing problems which Nature, as it were in mocking humor, bids
us solve.

[Illustration: A SPECIMEN OF NATURE'S HANDIWORK.]

Was Nature ever really sportive? In the old days, when she produced
her uncouth monsters of the deep, was she in manner, as in age, a
child? Did she then play with her continents, and smile to see them
struggle up from the sea only to sink again? Was it caprice that made
her wrap her vast dominions in the icy bands of glaciers, or pour
upon them lava torrents, and frequently convulse them with a mighty
earthquake? If so, New Mexico and Arizona must have been her favorite
playgrounds. At many points her rock formations look like whimsical
imitations of man's handicraft, or specimens of the colossal
vegetation of an earlier age. Some are gigantic, while others bear a
ludicrous resemblance to misshapen dwarfs, suggesting, as they stand
like pygmies round their mightier brethren, a group of mediaeval
jesters in a court of kings. In the faint dusk of evening, as one
flits by them in the moving train, their weird, uncanny forms appear
to writhe in pain, and he is tempted to regard them as the material
shapes of tortured souls.

[Illustration: A MESA.]

The _mesas_ of New Mexico and Arizona are, usually, regular in
outline, sometimes resembling in the distance cloud-banks on the edge
of the horizon, but oftener suggesting mighty fortresses, or ramparts
to resist invasion, like the wall of China. These are not only
beautiful in form and color, but from the fact that they recall the
works of man, we gaze at them with wonder, and find in them a