made a run of twelve miles in an hour, includ ing stoppages. V. THE GRAND CAÑON. The walls of the grand cañon are more than a mile in height. Stand on the south steps of the Treasury Building in Washington and look down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capital Park, measure the distance with your eye, and imagine cliffs extending to that altitude, and you will understand what I mean. Or, stand at Canal Street in New York and look up Broadway to Grace Church, and you have about the distance; stand at Lake Street Bridge in Chicago and look down to the Union Depot, and you have it again. A thousand feet of this is up through granite crags, then slopes and perpendicular cliffs rise one above the other to the summit. The gorge is black and narrow below, red and gray and flaring above, and crags and angular projections on walls which, cut in many places by side cañons, seem to be a vast wilderness of rocks. Down through these gloomy depths we glided, always listening-for the mad waters kept up their roar; always watching and peering ahead - for the narrow cañon was winding, and the river was closed, so that we could see but a few hundred yards; what might be below we knew not. We strained our ears for warning of the falls and watched for rocks, or stopped now and then in the bay of a recess to admire the gigantic scenery; and ever as we went, there was some new pinnacle or tower, some crag or peak, some distant view of the upper plateau, some deep, narrow side cañon, or some strangely shaped rock. On we went, through this solemn, mysterious way. The river was very deep, the cañon very narrow and still obstructed, so that there was no steady flow of the stream, but the waters wheeled, and rolled, and boiled, and we were scarcely able to determine where we could go with greatest safety. Now the boat was carried to the right, perhaps close to the wall, again she was shot into the stream and dragged over to the other side, where, caught in a whirlpool, she spun about like a chip. We could neither land nor run as we pleased; the boats were entirely unmanageable! now one, now another was ahead, each crew looking after its own safety. VI. Clouds were playing in the cañon that day. Sometimes they rolled down in great masses, filling the gorge with gloom; sometimes they hung above from wall to wall, covering the cañon with a roof of impending storm, and we could peer long distances up and down this cañon corridor, with its cloud roof overhead, its walls of black granite, and its river bright with the sheen of broken waters. Then a gust of wind would sweep down a side gulch and make a rift in the clouds, revealing the blue heavens, and a stream of sunlight poured in. Again the clouds drifted away into the distance and hung around crags, and peaks, and pinnacles, and towers, and walls, covering them with a mantle that lifted from time to time and set them all in sharp relief. Then baby clouds crept out of side cañons, glided around points, and crept back again into more distant gorges. Other clouds stretched in strata across the cañon, with intervening vista views to cliffs and rocks beyond. Then the rain came down. Little rills were formed rapidly above; these soon grew into brooks, and the brooks into creeks, which tumbled over the walls in innumerable cascades, adding their wild music to the roar of the river. When the rain ceased, the rills, brooks, and creeks ran dry. The waters that fall during the rain on these steep rocks are gathered at once into the river; they could scarcely be poured in more suddenly if some vast spout ran from the clouds to the stream itself. When a storm bursts over the cañon a side gulch is a dangerous place, for a sudden flood may come, and the inpouring water raise the river so as to drown the rocks before your very eyes. -MAJOR J. W. POWELL, 7. THE FALLS OF THE YOSEMITE. The Yosemite Valley, in California, is a pass about eight miles long. At its eastern extremity it leads into three narrower passes, each of which extends several miles, winding by the wildest paths into the heart of the Sierra Nevada chain of mountains. For seven miles of the main valley, which varies in width from three quarters of a mile to a mile and a half, the walls on either side are from two thousand to nearly five thousand feet above the road, and are nearly perpendicular. From these walls, rocky splinters a thousand feet in height start up, and every winter drop a few hundred tons of granite, to adorn the base of the rampart with picturesque ruin. The valley is of such irregular width, and bends so much and often so abruptly, that there is a great variety and frequent surprise in the forms and combinations of the overhanging rocks as one rides along the bank of the stream. The patches of luxuriant meadow, with their dazzling green, and the grouping of the superb firs, two hundred feet high, that skirt them, and that shoot above the stout and graceful oaks and sycamores through which the horse-path winds, are delightful rests of sweetness and beauty amid the threatening awful ness. The Merced, which flows through the same pass, is a noble stream, a hundred feet wide and ten feet deep. It is formed chiefly of the streams that leap and rush through the narrower passes, and it is swollen, also, by the bounty of the marvellous water-falls that pour down from the ramparts of the wider valley. The sublime poetry of Habakkuk is needed to describe the impression, and, perhaps, the geology, of these mighty fissures: "Thou didst cleave the earth with rivers." At the foot of the break-neck declivity of nearly three thousand feet by which we reach the banks of the Merced, we are six miles from the hotel, and every rod of the ride awakens wonder, awe, and a solemn joy. As we approach the hotel, and turn toward the opposite bank of the river, what is that "Which ever sounds and shines, A pillar of white light upon the wall, That, reader, is the highest waterfall in the world -the Yosemite cataract, nearly twenty-five hundred feet in its plunge, dashing from a break or depression in a cliff thirty-two hundred feet sheer. A writer who visited this valley in September, calls the cataract a mere tap-line of water dropped from the sky. Perhaps it is so, toward the close of the dry season; but as we saw it, the blended |