glitter of a speck of useful metal in a stray boulder in the lonely
cañon; or the chance outcropping of rock which to the practised eye
denotes the nearness of the deposit of oil--these, or any of the
thousand and one signs, she hangs out along the path in which man is
destined to march on his way to absolute sovereignty, set his forces of
intellect and will in motion, and he will never rest from his labors
until he stands upon the pinnacles of the gods, the crowned monarch of
all nature's forces on this planet.

All phenomena are negative, and are only the external garniture of the
world of man, the spirit, the child of the Eternal, of the father and
mother Creators of him. Thus man is, by absolute inheritance, the
king, and the ruler over all nature. But not without effort can he
enter and possess and maintain his power over his own. Ice and frosts,
and searing sun, and lonely wilds, and trackless wastes, and countless
waters, and evil beasts, and horrible reptiles--all, all he must
encounter and set at naught in his trackless journey. Carefully must
he force the wilderness to bloom, and by his wise efforts "make glad
the waste places" of the earth. Wherever the foot of man has been set,
there is it "hallowed ground." Whatever may have been his intent or
whatever his fate, in his wake shall surely follow the manifest purpose
of that ever-ruling Power which led him. Everywhere along the way,
Nature trails her loose ends, well baited, with which to catch the
unwary, and the whitening bones of the lonely emigrant family lost on
the plains, and the snowy hair of the dead mountaineer bleaching on
high summits or woven in the nests of birds, or the bodies of dead
mariners, or the lonely corpse of the treacherously slain, pulsing with
the tide on foreign shores, or the miners in their pits, forced by the
deadly "damps" from all visible connection with human life, or the
child of a superior race held captive by savages, or the beautiful