And sheddeth sweetly on the summer air
Her farewell breathing; and the forest tree,
That standeth for a hundred years, fulfils
Its daily sunset prophecy at last,
And falleth, falleth! Art thou comforted?
Nay, then, behold the shadows of the Hills,
Attesting they are perishable too,
And cry no more thou art companionless.

A DRIFT FOR LIFE.

THE Great Central Pacific Railway, just
opened across the whole continent of
America from sea to sea, runs in the
neighbourhood of some of the wildest
territories now left to explorers. There is,
particularly, one district beyond the Rocky
Mountains, marked on the map as
belonging partly to the State of Utah, and
partly to that of Colorado, which has
scarcely ever been approached until the last
two years, and which contains some of the
strangest scenery in the world. It consists
of a series of high table- lands in steps, one
behind the other, seamed with gulfs or
chasms thousands of feet deep, at the
bottom of which run the rivers. It is
completely barren, as every drop of water
drains off at once from the surface above:
an arid desert, with no vegetation beyond
a prickly scrub or a distorted cactus.
Whether these extraordinary fissures, called
cañons [canyons], are volcanic rents in the earth,
or have been produced by the action of
the rivers themselves, or by both together,
is a geological point not yet decided. In
some of the shallower ravines trees are to
be found growing by the beds of the
streams and in their broken sides, and an
enormous cactus is mentioned which often
reaches forty feet in height, but the deeper
clefts are more like immense drains than
anything else, sometimes even larger at
the bottom than the top, where the softer
rock is worn by the water and not more
than a hundred feet wide; the sun scarcely
penetrates to such enormous depths, the
soil is washed away by the floods, and
there is scarcely any footing for plants or
shrubs.

The only white men who have hitherto
explored this inhospitable region have been
the "prospectors" or seekers for gold, and
latterly some of the Yankee pioneers in
search of "new tracks." One of these,
General Palmer, is quoted by Dr. Bell in
his recent interesting work on these
regions,* as follows: " Suddenly there yawned
at our feet, without the least previous

* New Tracks in North America, by W. A. Bell.

indication, one of those fearful chasms with
its precipitous sides hundreds of feet deep,
and apparently so narrow that you hardly
realise the fact that, before you can
continue your march you must either find a
place sufficiently broken to descend and
mount again on the other side with your
loaded mules, or consume days in heading
the inexorable channel." On one occasion,
he with his party of soldiers had decided
on going down and travelling in the bed
of the stream, following an Indian trail,
when upon reaching a spot where the cliffs
in the rear, ahead, and above, looked like a
grey coffin, they suddenly heard a horrible
war-whoop echoing as if all the savages in
the Rocky Mountains were upon them, and
they received a perfect shower of arrows
and bullets, followed by the rolling down
of enormous stones on their heads by the
stealthy Apache Indians. In this case
General Palmer's force was large enough
to send two scaling parties, who mounted
the cliff like cats, took the Indians in the
rear and put them to flight; but, says he,
if the soldiers had been fewer in number
they must all have been killed.

The hero, however, of cañon explorers,
though an involuntary one, is a certain
James White, whose story, as given by
Dr. Bell, follows here somewhat stewed
down as it were.

In the spring of 1867 a small party
of Yankee prospectors having heard that
small lumps of gold had been seen in the
pouch of an Indian from that district, set off
to try their luck. At the miserable village
called Colorado city, situated on the last
hem of the known land, they heard such
an account of the hardships of the country
and the dangers from the Indians, that one
of the party fell off. The other three, with
two pack mules to carry their provisions,
mining tools, and blankets, travelled on in
a south- western direction four hundred
miles beyond all trace of the white man.
They found a little gold, on " striking"
the San Juan, but not enough to satisfy
them, and went on another hundred miles
or so, into the wilderness, until they
reached the great cañon of the Colorado
river, by no means at its deepest part.
They and their animals were suffering
sadly from thirst, and the only water was
foaming and dashing like a silver thread
two thousand feet below, at the bottom of
perpendicular cliffs. They pushed on,
hoping to find a place by which they might
climb down. After a most toilsome day
among the rough rocks, they succeeded in