It seems as if it should be easy to describe a landscape so peculiar, and yet I feel that I fail utterly to convey any sense of the emotions excited by the splendid sweep of each valley, by the black fierceness of the lava-peaks thrown up in Nature's mood of fury, by the great "orchestra of colors" of the limestone hills, and by a burning red sunset, filling the spaces between the hills with hazy, ruddy gold, and, when all was cold and dark, of a sudden flooding each grim lava-battlement with the dim mysterious pink flush of the afterglow, such as one may see at rare times in the Alps or the Tyrol. In crossing the heads of these valleys, some day to be famous as one of the sights of the world, we forded Clarke's Fork, the major, Jack and I being ahead. We came out on the far side upon a bit of strand, above and around which rose almost perpendicularly the eroded banks of the stream, some fifteen feet high. While the guides broke down the bank to allow of our horses climbing it, I was struck with a wonderful bit of water. To my right this tall bank was perforated by numerous holes, out of which flowed an immense volume of water. It bounded forth between the matted roots and welled up below from the sand, and, higher up the bank, had, with its sweet moisture, bribed the ready mosses to build it numerous green basins, out of which also it poured in prodigal flood. At this point, Dead Indian, we at first decided to await the looked-for scout, but on the next morning the major resolved to leave a note on a tripod for Mr. T., still out hunting, and to camp and wait on top of Canyon Mountain above us. So we left the noisy creek and the broken tepees of Joseph and the Nez Perces, and the buffalo and deer-bones and the rarer bones of men, and climbed some twenty-four hundred feet of the hill above us: then passed over a rolling plain, by ruddy gravel-hills and grasses gray- or pink-stemmed, to camp, on what Mr. Baronette called Canyon Mountain, among scattered groups of trees having a quaint resemblance to an old apple-orchard. Here we held counsel as to whether we should wait longer for the scout, push on rapidly to Custer, or complete our plans by turning southward to see the Black Canyon of the Big Horn River. Our doubt as to the steam-boats, which in the autumn are few and far between, and our failing provisions, decided us to push on to the fort. Having got in all our parties, with ample supplies of game, we started early next day to begin the descent from these delightful hills to the plains below. We rode twenty-eight miles, descending about thirty-seven hundred feet over boundless rolling, grass-clad foot-hills, behind us, to the left, the long mountain-line bounding the rugged canyon of Clarke's Fork, and to the right a march of lessening hills, and all before us one awful vast gray, sad and silent plain, and in dimmest distance again the gray summits about Pryor's Gap. The space before us