"Berth's ready, suh," said the porter, and passed to my companion. "Hyah's Devil's Gulch Sidin', suh," said he, rousing the slumbering lobbyist. "You get off, hyah, suh!" He passed out of the door with a Chesterfieldian bow and good night. I passed a sleepless and anxious night. The shock, or something, made me quite ill. I have not yet recovered my peace of mind. An effort which I made to place the matter before Doctor Byproduct, the president of the university of which I am an alumnus, led to such a stern reproof that I was forced to subside. The doctor said that the story was a libel upon a great and good man who had partially promised the university an endowment of ten millions of dollars. I am ready, however, to appear before any congressional committee which may be appointed to investigate the matter, or before the Interstate Commerce Commission, and to testify to the facts as above written, if it costs me my career. * * * * * "By gad, sir!" shouted the Colonel, breaking a long silence. "That infernal scheme would work!" The party went one by one to their tents. Soon no one but the Colonel and the Hired Man were left. "It sounds to me," remarked the Hired Man oracularly. CHAPTER XII "If these lovely little waterfalls," asserted the Bride, as she gazed upon the graceful Tower Falls, "could only have a fair chance, they would win fame--but they are overshadowed here--and they don't seem to care." Undine Falls, the Virginia Cascade, Mystic Falls, Kepler Cascade and Crystal Falls were in the mind of the Bride; but she might have mentioned many more, which in their incursion into the Park they had not seen. "This," said the Artist, "is no place to look at, and leave--it is a region for the artist to live in, to study, to make a part of his life, and finally, to understand." "I reckon," said the Hired Man, "that he'd git homesick f'r the corn country after a winter or so." Some competent judges think Tower Falls the most beautiful cascade on earth. Perhaps it is. Certainly no fault has ever been found with it as a picture. The Seven Wonderers spent a day near their pretty camp, resting, exploring, and renewing their acquaintance with the gorge of the Yellowstone, and forming that of the Needle, slender as a campanile, and three hundred feet high, marking the end of the Grand Cañon. Junction Butte, which they crossed the New Bridge to see, standing where many roads and rivers meet, seemed to the Bride another monument placed there by the gods with manifest intention. Why otherwise, she queried, could not the Needle be anywhere else, just as well as at the lower end of the Grand Cañon, or Junction Butte, in any other place as easily as in this cross-roads of highways and waters? "Why, indeed?" assented the Groom. "When you find a stone stuck on end at the corner of a parcel of land, you know that the stone was placed there to mark the corner, don't you?"