Life often hangs upon the veritable thread. It may be that logs cannot be thrown over the cliff face. Then the surveyor has to don a leathern waist-belt fitted with a heavy swivel to which a rope is attached. In this way he is swung over the edge of a cliff to operate his level and transit along the face of a precipice where no foothold exists. Sometimes it becomes imperative to have recourse to dynamite to blast out a ledge along which to advance. Many a promising young engineer has gone to his last account in work of such a desperate character. In the survey of what is now the Denver and Rio Grande through one of Colorado’s yawning canyons, a young assistant had to be lowered in this manner. Half-a-dozen labourers grasped the end of the rope and steadied the surveyor in his descent over the perilous edge. From the brink to the bottom of the canyon was a matter of 200 feet or so straight down. In a few seconds the young fellow was dangling betwixt earth and sky, steadying his descent as best he could down the face of the cliff. Suddenly there was a cry of alarm! The rope-man nearest the cliff edge noticed that the rope was bearing upon a piece of rock the edge of which was as keen as that of a razor. The rope had been sawn almost in two. Lowering stopped. The two men rushed forward to grasp the rope below the point of pending rupture to ease the strain. But they were too late. There was a slight tremor, the last strand snapped, and before the rope-men realised the situation as the end hung limply in their hands, the cry of the lost engineer as he tumbled through the air was echoed from the depths of the canyon. Life in the field is indisputably hard and exacting, and the task is often aggravated by the scarcity, or monotony, of the food. This condition of affairs, however, is incomparably better to-day than it was thirty years ago. The surveyors are tended more thoughtfully than they were then, and the perfection of food-preserving science has enabled a camp now to be provisioned with tasty comestibles which formerly were unknown. Pork, beans and bannock--a substitute for bread made from flour and bacon fat with a little baking-powder--constituted the staple articles of diet, varied with fish from the streams, game from the forests and wild fruits. The bread was often musty, for immersion time after time in a torrent and storage upon damp ground did not improve the flavour of the flour by any means. The pork or bacon often was rancid, while the cook was invariably an execrable exponent of the culinary art, and his bannock played sad havoc with the digestive organs of the human body. Little wonder that the men, under such conditions, sought to secure additions to the menu from the rivers by methods decidedly unsportsmanlike, but the “end justified the means”; or delighted in bear steaks and venison.