It had sounded like murmuring thunder in their ears the greater part of that day, and as they approached it the voice of its roar became so deafening that they were prepared for something unusually grand, but not for the stupendous sight and sound that burst upon them when, on turning round the base of a towering precipice, they came suddenly in full view of one of the most wonderful of the Creator’s works in that land.
A succession of wall-like mountains rose in two tiers before them into the clouds. Some of the lower clouds floated far below the highest peaks. From the summit of the highest range, a river, equal to the Thames at Richmond, dropt sheer down a precipice of more than two thousand feet. Here it met the summit of the lower mountain-range, on which it burst with a deep-toned sullen roar, comparable only to eternal thunder. A white cloud of spray received the falling river in its soft embrace, and sent it forth again, turbulent and foam-bespeckled, towards its second leap,—another thousand feet,—into the plain below. The entire height of this fall was above three thousand feet!
Our hero was of course anxious to make a careful drawing of it, but having already exhausted the greater part of the day, he was fain to content himself with a sketch, after making which they pushed rapidly forward, and encamped for the night, still within sight and sound of the mighty fall.
“D’you know, Joe,” said Frank, leaning back against a tree stem, as he gazed meditatively into into the fire after supper was concluded, “it has often struck me that men are very foolish for not taking full possession of the splendid world in which they have been placed.”
Frank paused a few moments, but the observation not being sufficiently definite for Joe, who was deep in the enjoyment of his first pipe, no reply was made beyond an interjectional “h’m.”
“Just look around you,” pursued Frank, waving his hand towards the landscape, “at this magnificent country; what timber, what soil, what an amount of game, what lakes, what rivers, what facilities for farming, manufacturing, fishing,—everything, in fact, that is calculated to gladden the heart of man.”
“Includin’ gold,” suggested Joe.
“Including gold,” assented Frank; and there it all lies—has lain since creation—hundreds of thousands of acres of splendid land unoccupied.
“Ha! there’s a screw loose somewhere,” said Joe, taking the pipe from his lips and looking at it earnestly, as if the remark were addressed to it, “somethin’ out o’ j’int—a plank started, so to speak—cer’nly.”
“No doubt of it,” said Frank; “and the broad acres which we now look upon, as well as those over which we have lately travelled, are as nothing compared with the other waste but fertile lands in America, on which hundreds of thousands of the human race might live happily. Yet, strange to say, men seem to prefer congregating together in little worlds of brick, stone, and mortar, living tier upon tier above each other’s heads, breathing noxious gases instead of the scent of flowers, treading upon mud, stone, and dust, instead of green grass, and dwelling under a sky of smoke instead of bright blue ether—and this, too, in the face of the Bible command to ‘go forth and replenish the earth.’”