of nature--of earthquake shock or volcanic explosion. It does not
suggest the crush of matter and the wreck of worlds. Clearly it is
the work of the more gentle and beneficent forces. This probably
accounts for the friendly look. Some of the inner slopes and
plateaus seemed like familiar ground to me: I must have played upon
them when a school-boy. Bright Angel Creek, for some inexplicable
reason, recalled a favorite trout-stream of my native hills, and the
old Cambrian plateau that edges the inner chasm, as we looked down
upon it from nearly four thousand feet above, looked like the brown
meadow where we played ball in the old school-days, friendly,
tender, familiar, in its slopes and terraces, in its tints and
basking sunshine, but grand and awe-inspiring in its depths, its
huge walls, and its terrific precipices.

The geologists are agreed that the canyon is only of yesterday in
geologic time,--the Middle Tertiary,--and yet behold the duration of
that yesterday as here revealed, probably a million years or more!
We can no more form any conception of such time than we can of the
size of the sun or of the distance of the fixed stars.

The forces that did all this vast delving and sculpturing--the air,
the rains, the frost, the sunshine--are as active now as they ever
were; but their activity is a kind of slumbering that rarely makes a
sign. Only at long intervals is the silence of any part of the
profound abyss broken by the fall of loosened rocks or sliding
talus. We ourselves saw where a huge splinter of rock had recently
dropped from the face of the cliff. In time these loosened masses
disappear, as if they melted like ice. A city not made with hands,
but as surely not eternal in the earth! In our humid and severe
Eastern climate, frost and ice and heavyrains working together, all