colored lime takes their place. How many centuries it takes for this transformation no one can tell, yet when it is complete, only a small part of the scores, hundreds of thousands of years that have elapsed since the trees were standing, have passed. For now the lake becomes filled up with the washings-down from the hills and nearby mountains, and the surface of the earth subsides and lets the lake be swallowed up. Down, down, it goes, a thousand, two, three, five, ten, twenty, and perhaps more thousands of feet into the interior of the earth. During the vast number of years that pass while this great change is going on the trees are secure in their muddy matrix, are slowly getting harder and harder; beautiful crystals are forming, of exquisite color, in places where holes had been made in the trees, and the greater the pressure upon the trees from above the harder their stone becomes.

Then another change takes place in the uneasy crust of the earth. From subsiding-being lowered -some interior force starts an uplift, and days, weeks, months, years, centuries elapse, possibly, during which time our long-buried trees are being brought up to their former level. As the strata that have been deposited upon them ascends and appears, terrific storms, vast floods that far surpass our most vivid conceptions of the biblical deluge, and other processes plane them off, wash them away, until at length, about the time man appeared upon the earth,

or later, the trees again were exposed, to be found a few decades ago when men were surveying the country for the building of a railroad.

Such are the songs the Petrified Forest sings. And time and space would fail me were I to attempt to more than call attention to the songs of the incomparable Grand Canyon, of the glorious Yosemite, of King's River Canyon, of the Palisades of the Columbia and the Hudson, of the thousands of wonderful exhibitions of rocky formations in America alone, leaving out of consideration those of Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australasia. No matter where man is, upon the surface of the earth, the rocks and mountains sing of the glory and power of the loving Creator, and he is wise who catches the songs as far as he can, and joins in with them to his own uplift and the increase of the Universal Symphony.

CHAPTER XX

THE SONGS OF THE BROOKS

He who has not enjoyed the song of a mountain

brook from its source in the snows or springs of the peerless heights, until it discharged its clear and limpid waters into a larger stream has missed one of the exhilarating, healthful and soul-inspiring experiences of life. How tiny is the voice of the baby brook. The stream may come flowing out, almost silently, from under the melting snow, or it may bubble joyously from a bed of moss between two sheltering rocks. Ten, a hundred, a thousand, a million such streamlets, flow along, each in its own pathway, but all guided by the same Master Director to places of union, where they flow one into another, increasing and enlarging, until the united rivulets become a real mountain creek. At the same time a score, a hundred, other creeks have been formed, and they, in turn, unite with the others, and thus make a mountain torrent. Follow the rivulet, streamlet, stream, creek, torrent, all the way down and you will see pictures of peace, of content, of sunshine and shadow, of joy, and hear songs of spontaneous, bubbling, gurgling, tinkling delight that

will never leave you. No two rods are alike either in appearance or sound. Here you have open country, with grasses and monkey flowers nodding their heads over the narrow ribbon of glistening blue; there you find trees arched over a mottled pathway of silver with great masses of spikenard leaves and a host of happy, winging, singing birds that come to bathe and drink. Yonder is a tiny fall, where the water rushes together between two masses of granite and there is a rush and a dash, a splash and a clash, in the song it sings. Twenty-five feet further on it flows from granite basin into granite basin, and now sings a flute-like song, with delicate under and over tones that enchant you. A mile further on there are large falls, fifty, a hundred, two and more hundred feet down. Here there is a continuous roar that can be heard a mile away; yet it is not tuneless, monotonous, tiresome. Listen carefully and you will hear a whole orchestra playing in that one fall— from the delicate yet piercing strains of the oboe or piccolo to the rattle and crash of the heavy brasses and the tympani.

There is an exhilaration and stimulation about a waterfall that few people escape. I have watched and listened to the remarks of thousands of spectators in the Yosemite Valley, at the Idaho Falls, at Shasta Falls, at Multnomah Falls, at the exquisitely beautiful falls of Havasu Creek, at Niagara, and all alike pay tribute to their influence. Robert Southey, one

time poet laureate of England, expressed some of this at the tiny and insignificant falls of Lodore, when he answered the question of his little daughter: How does the water come down at Lodore? Get it and read it aloud and you will begin to understand how many persons feel as they sit by the side of a waterfall, or stand looking at it and listening to its various voices.

Some people imagine a waterfall is a wild, chaotic, turbulent mass of waters, but this is a great mistake. The water comes to the lip of the fall and generally flows over with great calmness and dignity. There is a solemn serenity (if one may use such words of water) about its leap that is most impressive. Then, while it may divide into fine spray, or its whole column sway to and fro in the wind, it descends with deliberation. As a rule thousands of descending rockets are formed, the heads becoming more refined the lower they come, and their tails swaying along behind, glistening and dancing like diamonds in the sunlight.

In his Yosemite Trails, J. Smeaton Chase tells of his joy and delight at finding certain meadows in the High Sierras :

Each of these meadows seems more delightful than the last. Sequestered in deep forest and hushed eternally by its murmur, they are heavenly places of birds and flowers, bits of original paradise. The little brooks that water them ring carillons of tinkling melody as they wind through shady tunnels of carex and bending grasses. At morning