All that I can say is that without warning or preparation I looked into a gulf seventeen hundred feet deep, with eagles and fish-hawks circling far below. And the sides of that gulf were one wild welter of color--crimson, emerald, cobalt, ochre, amber, honey splashed with port wine, snow white, vermilion, lemon, and silver gray in wide washes. The sides did not fall sheer, but were graven by time, and water, and air into monstrous heads of kings, dead chiefs--men and women of the old time. So far below that no sound of its strife could reach us, the Yellowstone River ran a finger-wide strip of jade green. The sunlight took those wondrous walls and gave fresh hues to those that nature had already laid there. Evening crept through the pines that shadowed us, but the full glory of the day flamed in that canyon as we went out very cautiously to a jutting piece of rock--blood-red or pink it was--that overhung the deepest deeps of all. Now I know what it is to sit enthroned amid the clouds of sunset as the spirits sit in Blake's pictures. Giddiness took away all sensation of touch or form, but the sense of blinding color remained. When I reached the mainland again I had sworn that I had been floating. The maid from New Hampshire said no word for a very long time. Then she quoted poetry, which was perhaps the best thing she could have done. “And to think that this show-place has been going on all these days an' none of we ever saw it,” said the old lady from Chicago, with an acid glance at her husband. “No, only the Injians,” said he, unmoved; and the maiden and I laughed. Inspiration is fleeting, beauty is vain, and the power of the mind for wonder limited. Though the shining hosts themselves had risen choiring from the bottom of the gorge, they would not have prevented her papa and one baser than he from rolling stones down those stupendous rainbow-washed slides. Seventeen hundred feet of steep-est pitch and rather more than seventeen hundred colors for log or bowlder to whirl through! So we heaved things and saw them gather way and bound from white rock to red or yellow, dragging behind them torrents of color, till the noise of their descent ceased and they bounded a hundred yards clear at the last into the Yellowstone. “I've been down there,” said Tom, that evening. “It's easy to get down if you're careful--just sit an' slide; but getting up is worse. An' I found down below there two stones just marked with a picture of the canyon. I wouldn't sell these rocks not for fifteen dollars.” And papa and I crawled down to the Yellowstone--just above the first little fall--to wet a line for good luck. The round moon came up and turned the cliffs and pines into silver; and a two-pound trout came up also, and we slew him among the rocks, nearly tumbling into that wild river. . . . . . .