Turning back, and passing south of Colorado Springs some four or five miles, we are brought again into the Rocky range and enter at one of the Cheyenne Cañons, between beetling brows of tremendously high cliffs, through which a mad-dashing water-course has eaten its way. Whether we visit North or South Cañon, the view is augustly sublime and awful in its grandeur. We stand in the bed of the gorge and gaze upward on either side to a dizzy height, where the eagles float lazily about, just below the level of the summit, and build their nest upon the breast of the escarpment because the apex is sky-piercing in its loftiness. Yet tumbling down from that great eminence, where the gray spires of the peaks are dwarfed by distance until they grow thin as needles, is a stream of water, fed by springs that lie in the lap of still taller mountains in the rear, rushing in tumultuous flow until it breaks into seven waterfalls, and then checks its pace as it joins the river that runs on to the sea. A stair-way has been built alongside of the falls, by which the visitor may mount to a height of two hundred feet, and then stand upon a platform and watch the play of leaping waterfall as it breaks into rainbows and mist below, and hear its ceaseless song of praise mingling with the echoes that sport between the cañon walls. They who can feel no inspiration under the moving power of Cheyenne Mountain are hopelessly prosaic, who close their ears against the most entrancing hymns of nature. It is not strange that the simple people who were reared centuries ago in this cradle of natural wonders entertained strange conceptions of the curious formations and mighty mountains that distinguished their surroundings from other places. Indeed, it would be matter for surprise had the primitive tribes of this region left no legends telling how Manitou, the Great Spirit, had upheaved the peaks, fashioned the grotesque images, scooped out the cañons and set his sign of ever- flowing mercy in the welling spring and roaring waterfall. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Illustration: BALANCED ROCK, GARDEN OF THE GODS.—Balanced Rock is one of the most remarkable curiosities in the Garden of the Gods. It is an immense stone, weighing thousands of tons, balanced upon so small a pedestal that it seems as if the hand of a child could push it over, and yet the winter storms and the summer cyclones have raged around it for centuries without shaking it from its solid bearings. Nature does many things more wonderful than art or ingenuity of man can devise, and this is one of them. If Balanced Rock were the only curiosity in the Garden of the Gods it would be worth a trip there to see it, and as many of us are not able to bear the expense of such a trip it is gratifying to have within our reach, almost without cost, the living image of these wonders of nature. ]