escriptions, sarcastic comments, scornful
denunciations, inimitable mimicry.

Mr. Burroughs, on the contrary, is not a ready talker; he gives of his
best in his books. He establishes intimate relations with his reader,
Mr. Muir with his listener. He is more fond of an interchange of ideas
than is Mr. Muir; is not the least inclined to banter or to get the
better of one; is so averse to witnessing discomfiture that even when
forced into an argument, he is loath to push it to the bitter end. Yet
when he does engage in argument, he drives things home with very telling
force, especially when writing on debatable points.

As we drove along the desert, Mr. Muir pointed to a lofty plateau toward
which we were tending,--"Robbers' Roost,"--where sheep-stealers
hie themselves, commanding the view for hundreds of miles in every
direction. I wish I could make vivid the panorama we saw from this
vantage-ground--the desert in the foreground, and far away against the
sky the curiously carved pink and purple and lilac mountains, while
immediately below us lay the dry river-bed over which a gaunt raven
flew and croaked ominously, and a little beyond rose the various buttes,
mauve and terra-cotta colored, from whose sides and at whose bases
projected the petrified trees. There lay the giant trees, straight and
tapering--no branching as in our trees of to-day. The trunks are often
flattened, as though they had been under great pressure, often the very
bark seemed to be on them (though it was petrified bark), and on some
we saw marks of insect tracery like those made by the borers of to-day.
Some of the trunks were more than one hundred and fifty feet long, and
five to seven feet in diameter, prostrate but intact, looking as though
uprooted where they lay. Others were broken at regular intervals, as
though sawed into stove lengths. In places the ground looks like a
chip-yard, the chips dry and white as though bleached by the sun. The
eye is deceived; chips these surely are, you think, but the ear corrects
this impression, for as your feet strike the fragments, the clinking
sound proves that they are stone. In some of the other forests, visited
later, the chips and larger fragments, and the interior of the trunks,
are gorgeously colored, so that we walked on a natural mosaic of jasper,
chalcedony, onyx, and agate. In many fragments the cell-structure of
the wood is still visible, but in others nature has carried the process
further, and cr