“Then come along. I will give you the finest horse in the park to ride, and show you views that the tourists never see.”
We all urged her to go, one lending a hat, another a coat, until at last she appeared with a khaki divided skirt, white blouse, blue coat, and sailor hat, looking very presentable, very pretty, and rather ill at ease. While Toodles was dressing he told us that he had been in the park for years and had charge of the saddle-horses and riding parties. As it was all a lark, and we thought she might not want her name known to him, we told him that her name was “Toodles.” “All right,” with a grin; “I’m on.” When starting he whistled to his dog and called, “Come on, Toodles,” and she nearly fell off her horse (he made her ride astride).
“What’s the matter? I am just calling my dog.”
“Oh, is that your dog’s name?” Toodles replied faintly. “How funny!”
Off they rode up the mountains, and did not return until six o’clock. That evening “Charlie” appeared at the dance in ordinary citizen’s clothes, but the picturesque cowboy was gone. He had written a book of “all the fool questions people have asked me in twenty years.” He kept us gasping at the tales of Western adventure until nearly midnight. In the morning he was on hand to see us off.
The next day was clear and beautiful. Our road took us east over the Continental Divide and along the shores of Yellowstone Lake, past the mud geysers, to the Grand Canyon Hotel. On the divide is lily-covered Isa Lake, whose waters in springtime hesitate whether to flow out one end, into the Pacific, or out the other, into Atlantic waters, and usually compromise by going in both directions. We passed over very steep grades commanding a superb view of Mt. Washburne (ten thousand feet high) through the knotted woods and dense pine forests, past the upper and lower falls, stopping at Artist’s Point to get our first view of the Grand Canyon. It is twenty miles long—the most glorious kaleidoscope of color you will ever see in nature! You look down a thousand feet or more at the foaming Yellowstone River. A little south of this point a waterfall twice as high as Niagara, seemingly out of the dense pine heights above, roars and tumbles into the depths below. “Rocky needles rise perpendicularly for hundreds of feet, like groups of Gothic spires.” Again, “the rocks, carved and fretted by the frost and the erosion of the ages.” And the coloring—this is almost impossible to describe. From the deepest orange to pale yellow, from Indian red to exquisite shell-pink, in all shades of soft green touched by Autumn’s hand. With the greenish cascade of water foaming beneath us and the blue dome of the heavens above, we stood there awed by its fearful majesty and unequaled beauty. As if to make the picture more perfect, an eagle soared through the canyon, lighting on a pinnacle of jagged rocks, where his nest clung as if by magic. As we watched him in silence, the words of Tennyson, to which McDowell has written his exquisite composition, “The Eagle,” came to us:
“He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring’d with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;