Planning to return and give more attention to the waters of both branches at this place, I started to inspect first the forested sides. The lower of these slopes were tilted with a twenty to twenty-five per cent grade, and covered with a primeval Engelmann spruce forest of tall, crowding trees, the age of which, as I had learned during previous visits, was only a few years less than two centuries. The forest floor was covered with a thick carpet of litter,--one which the years had woven out of the wreckage of limbs and leaves. This, though loosely, coarsely woven, has a firm feeling when trodden during dry weather. To-day however, the forest floor seemed recently upholstered. It is absorbent; hence the water had filled the interstices and given elasticity. I cleared away some of this litter and found that it had an average depth of fifteen inches. The upper third lay loosely, but below it the weave was more compact and much finer than that on or near the surface. I judged that two inches of rain had fallen and had soaked to an average depth of eight inches. It was interesting to watch the water ooze from the broken walls of this litter, or humus, on the upper sides of the holes which I dug down into it. One of these was close to a bare, tilted slope of granite. As I stood watching the water slowly dripping from the broken humus and rapidly racing down the rocks, the thought came to me that, with the same difference in speed, the run-off from the deforested land might be breaking through the levees at New Orleans before the water from these woods escaped and got down as far as the sawmill. The forest might well proclaim: "As long as I stand, my countless roots shall clutch and clasp the soil like eagles' claws and hold it on these slopes. I shall add to this soil by annually creating more. I shall heave it with my growing roots, loosen and cover it with litter rugs, and maintain a porous, sievelike surface that will catch the rain and so delay and distribute these waters that at the foot of my slope perennial springs will ever flow quietly toward the sea. Destroy me, and on stormy days the waters may wash away the unanchored soil as they run unresisted down the slopes, to form a black, destructive flood in the home-dotted valley below." The summit of the forested slope was comparatively smooth where I gained it, and contained a few small, ragged-edged, grassy spaces among its spruces and firs. The wind was blowing and the low clouds pressed, hurried along the ground, whirled through the grassy places, and were driven and dragged swiftly among the trees. I was in the lower margin of cloud, and it was like a wet, gray night. Nothing could be seen clearly, even at a few feet, and every breath I took was like swallowing a saturated sponge.