been the chief quarryman in excavating the canon, and to find how
inadequate it looks for the work ascribed to it. Viewed from where
we sat, I judged it to be forty or fifty feet broad, but I was
assured that it was between two and three hundred feet. Water and
sand are ever symbols of instability and inconstancy, but let them
work together, and they saw through mountains, and undermine the
foundations of the hills.

It is always worth while to sit or kneel at the feet of grandeur, to
look up into the placid faces of the earth gods and feel their
power, and the tourist who goes down into the canon certainly has
this privilege. We did not bring back in our hands, or in our hats,
the glory that had lured us from the top, but we seemed to have been
nearer its sources, and to have brought back a deepened sense of the
magnitude of the forms, and of the depth of the chasm which we had
heretofore gazed upon from a distance. Also we had plucked the
flower of safety from the nettle danger, always an exhilarating
enterprise.

In climbing back, my eye, now sharpened by my geologic reading,
dwelt frequently and long upon the horizon where that cross-bedded
Carboniferous sandstone joins the Carboniferous limestone above it.
How much older the sandstone looked! I could not avoid the
impression that its surface must have formed a plane of erosion ages
and ages before the limestone had been laid down upon it.

We had left plenty of ice and snow at the top, but in the bottom we
found the early spring flowers blooming, and a settler at what is
called the Indian Gardens was planting his garden. Here I heard the
song of the canon wren, a new and very pleasing bird-song to me. I