What the Yellowstone is in the early spring only those who have seen it at that season can realize, and only those who have made the summer tour are in a position to imagine. Let one who has breasted the sweltering heat-waves that radiate from Obsidian Cliff in July, trying to picture the impressive beauty of that massive pile of volcanic glass through the translucent dust-clouds raised by the passage of two or three score cars--let him fancy that cliff, its summit crowned with a feathered crest of snow, huge drifts at its base, and its whole face, washed and polished by the elements, glittering as though panelled with shining ebony. Let him think of the time his car was halted on the Continental Divide and the driver endeavoured to point out one of the distant eminences, guessed dimly through the smoke-clouds rising beyond Shoshone Lake, as the Grand Teton, and then fancy himself standing at the same point and looking out across the valley through air that, windowed and cleansed by the winds and snows of the winter, is so clear that the bottle-green in the rims of the glaciers is discernible at forty miles. Let him who has admired the transcendent beauty of the steam-clouds swirling above Old Faithful in the summer imagine these clouds increased two-fold in whiteness and density, and ten-fold in volume, by the quicker condensation of a zero morning. Let him picture the black gorge of the Fire Hole Canyon, where the river plunges down to the Upper Geyser Basin, forming Kepplar Cascade, transformed to a shining fairyland of sparkling crystal and silver, everything in range of the flying spray spangled and plated and jewelled by the ice and frost, as though a whole summer day's sunshine had been shaken up with a winter night's snowfall, and then fashioned by an army of elfin workmen into a marvellous million-pieced fretwork, adorned with traceries ethereal and delicate, and of a fragile loveliness beyond words to describe. All these things, and many more, the summer tourist will have to picture in coming near to a conception of what the wizardry of winter has effected. There is the novelty of seeing a rim of ice around the Devil's Frying Pan, and the great hole that the up-shooting gush of a geyser tears in a cloud of driven snow. There is the massive beauty of the ice bulwark upon Virginia Cascade, and then, in winter as in summer the scenic climax, the lower falls and the Grand Canyon.