"Why?"
"Because it is all the money I have, except a nickel."
"I suppose it will have to do," he said, and I jingled my fifty cents on the counter as loudly as though it was a whole dollar, but could not help laughing heartily at the low ebb of my finances. The several little extras I had met with had taken about all.
I then went to find brother Charlie's boarding-place and surprised him at the breakfast table.
August 1st, Charley and I visited Rock City, or rather, the city of rocks, just across the New York line. Houses of rock they are in size, but are only inhabited by sight-seers. I wish I could describe them to you, reader. All I know is, they are conglomerate rocks, made up of snowy white pebbles from the size of a pea to a hickory nut, that glisten in the sunlight, making the rocks a crystal palace. As I dig and try to dislodge the brightest from its bed of hardened sand, I wonder how God made the cement that holds them so firmly in place, and how and why He brought these rocks to the surface just here and nowhere else. Down, around, and under the rocks we climbed, getting lost in the great crevices, and trying to carve our names on the walls with the many that are chiseled there, but only succeeded in making "our mark." They are one of the beautiful, wonderful things that are beyond description.
Friday, August 3, I left on the Rochester & Pittsburgh R.R. for DuBois. Took a last look at Main street with its busy throng, and then out among the grand old hills that tower round with their forests of trees and derricks, winding round past Degoliar, Custer City, Howard Junction, and crossing east branch of "Tuna" creek. Everything is dumped down in wild confusion here—mountains and valleys, hills and hollows, houses and shanties, tanks and derricks, rocks and stones, trees, bushes, flowers, logs, stumps, brush, and little brooks fringed with bright bergamot flowers which cast their crimson over the waters and lade the air with their perfume. On we go past lots of stations, but there are not many houses after we get fairly out of the land of derricks. Through cuts and over tressels and fills—but now we are 17 miles from B., and going slowly over the great Kinzua bridge, which is the highest railway bridge in the world. It is 2,062 feet from abutment to abutment, and the height of rail above the bed of the creek is 302 feet. Kinzua creek is only a little stream that looks like a thread of silver in the great valley of hemlock forest. Will mother earth ever again produce such a grand forest for her children? Well, for once I feel quite high up in the world. Even Ex-President Grant, with all the honors that were heaped upon him while he "swung around the circle," never felt so elevated as he did when he came to see this bridge, and exclaimed while crossing it, "Judas Priest, how high up we are!"
It is well worth coming far to cross this bridge. I do not experience the fear I expected I would. The bridge is built wide, with foot walks at either side, and the cars run very slow.
One hotel and a couple of little houses are all that can be seen excepting trees. I do hope the woodman will spare this great valley—its noble trees untouched—and allow it to forever remain as one of Pennsylvania's grandest forest pictures.
Reader, I wish I could tell you of the great, broad, beautiful mountains of Pennsylvania that lift their rounded tops 2,000 to 2,500 feet above sea level. But as the plains of Nebraska are beyond description, so are the mountains.
J. R. Buchanan says: "No one can appreciate God until he has trod the plains and stood upon the mountain peaks."