the expense of the
terrified women who felt, when too late to retreat, that it would have
been better to heed his advice. Still, after the descent, and then
the ascent, were safely accomplished, we were glad we had not let him
dissuade us. None of us can ever forget that day, with its rich and
varied experiences, the mingled fear and awe and exultation, the
overpowering emotions felt at each new revelation of the stupendous
spectacle, often relieved by the lively sallies of Mr. Muir. We ate
our luncheon on the old Cambrian plateau, the mighty Colorado, still a
thousand feet below us, looking entirely inadequate to have accomplished
the tremendous results we were witnessing.

One day at the canon, feeling acutely aware of our incalculable
privilege, I said, "To think of having the Grand Canon, and John
Burroughs and John Muir thrown in!"

"I wish Muir _was_ thrown in, sometimes," retorted Mr. Burroughs, with a
twinkle in his eye, "when he gets between me and the canon."

In contrast to Mr. Muir, the Wanderer, is Mr. Burroughs, the Home-lover,
one who is under the spell of the near and the familiar. The scenes of
his boyhood in the Catskills, the woods he wandered in about Washington
during the years he dwelt there, his later tramping-ground along the
Hudson--these are the scenes he has made his readers love because he has
loved them so much himself; and however we may enjoy his journeyings in
"Mellow England," in "Green Alaska," in Jamaica, or his philosophical
or speculative essays, we find his stay-at-home things the best. And he
likes the familiar scenes and things the best, much as he enjoyed the
wonders that the great West offered. The robins in Yosemite Valley and
the skylarks in the Hawaiian Islands, because these were a part of his
earlier associations, did more to endear these places to him than did
the wonders themselves. On Hawaii, where we saw the world's greatest
active volcano throwing up its fountains of molten lava sixty or more
feet high, the masses falling with a roar like that of the "husky-voiced
sea," Mr. Burroughs found it difficult to understand why some of us were
so fascinated that we wanted to stay all night, willing to endure the
discomforts of a resting-place on lava rocks, occasional stifling gusts
of sulphur fumes, dripping rain, and heat that scorched our veiled
faces, so long as we could gaze on that boiling, tumbling, heaving,
ever-changing lake of fire. Such wild, terrible, unfamili