It was no easy task. Fertile fields, whose irrigated areas now presented billowy breasts of ripening grain; mighty ditches like younger and better-behaved rivers; a railway following the general direction of the old trail; ranch-houses and fat haystacks indenting the sky-line once so bare of all except clumps of sagebrush––these all conspired to make the task next to impossible.
Man may scratch the hillsides, but cannot mar the majesty of the mountains; they were unchanged. The map he carried was the one his father made on the spot more than a generation before. It had been well made and the specifications were minute. After a long while, carefully measuring and comparing, he found the spot to him so sacred. The juniper tree, so rare in that section, had not been disturbed by the new owner of the land, and 29 as the precious burden, secured at last, was borne away, it still stood on guard––as if lonely now. Like father, like son. Both were faithfully bound by the strongest tie in the universe––love!
THE DESERT
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Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air. ––Gray. |
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As geographers, Sosius, crowd into the edges of their maps parts of the world which they do not know about, adding notes in the margin to the effect that beyond this lies nothing but sandy deserts full of wild beasts, and unapproachable bogs. ––Plutarch. |