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Sunday, at Broadlands. From Walter’s Ferry, day before yesterday, we climbed back upon the main road, which crosses the plateau of the Snake, cutting off a great bend of the river, to see it again far below in the bottom of the Grand Canon.

The alkali growth is monotonous here; but there was a world of beauty and caprice in the forms of the seed-pods dried upon their stalks. Most of these pretty little purses were empty. Their treasure went, like the savings of a maiden aunt, when the idle wind got hold of it. There is an almost humorous ingenuity in the pains Nature has taken to secure the propagation of some of the meanest of her plant-children. The most worthless little vagabond seeds have wings or fans to fly with, or self-acting bomb-receptacles that burst and empty their contents (which nobody wants) upon the liberal air, or claws or prickers to catch on with to anything that goes. And once they have caught on, they are harder to get rid of than a Canadian “quarter.”

“And do you call this a desert?” cries Miss Kitty. “Why, millions of creatures live here! Look at the footprints of all the little beasties. They must eat and drink.”

“That is the cheek of us humans,” said Tom. “We call our forests solitudes because we have never shown up there before. Precious little we were missed. This desert subsisted its own population, and asked no favors of irrigation, till man came and overstocked it, and upset its domestic economies. When the sheep-men and the cattle-men came with their foreign mouths to fill, the wild natives had to scatter and forage for food, and trot back and forth to the river for drink. They have to travel miles now to one they went before. Hence all these desert thoroughfares.”

And he showed us in the dust the track of a lizard, a kangaroo-mouse, and a horned toad. We could see for ourselves Bre’r Jack-rabbit and Sis’ Gopher skipping away in the greasewood. The horses and cattle had their own broad-beaten roads converging from far away toward an occasional break in the canon wall, where the thirsty tracks went down.

We plodded along, and having with much deliberation taken the wrong road, we found ourselves about nightfall at the bottom of the canon, in a perfect cul-de-sac. The bluffs ahead of us crowded close to the river, stretching their rocky knees straight down into deep water, and making no lap at all for our wagon to go over. And now, with this sweet prospect before us, it came on steadily to rain. The men made camp in the slippery darkness, while we sat in the wagon, warm and dry, and thanked our stars there were still a few things left that men could do without our aid or competition. Presently a lantern flashed out, and spots of light shifted over them as they slaved–pounding tent-pegs, and scraping stones away from places where our blankets were to be spread, hacking and hewing among the wet willows, and grappling with stovepipes and tent-poles; and the harder they worked the better their spirits seemed to be.

“I wish some of the people who used to know Cecil Harshaw in England could see him now,” said Kitty.

“What did he do in England?” I asked.

“He didn’t hammer stovepipes and carry kitchen-boxes and cut fire-wood, you know.”

“Don’t you like to see men use their muscle?” I asked her. “Very few of them are reflective to any purpose at his age.”

“Why, how old, or how young, do you take him to be?”

“I think you spoke of him as a boy, if I remember.”

“If I called him a boy, it was out of charity for his behavior. He’s within six months of my own age.”