Tower Falls was amid the spruces above a canyon of the
Yellowstone, five or six hundred feet deep. It was a beautiful and
impressive situation,--shelter, snugness, even cosiness, looking over
the brink of the awful and the terrifying. With a run and a jump I
think one might have landed in the river at the bottom of the great
abyss, and in doing so might have scaled one of those natural obelisks
or needles of rock that stand up out of the depths two or three
hundred feet high. Nature shows you what an enormous furrow her plough
can open through the strata when moving horizontally, at the same time
that she shows you what delicate and graceful columns her slower and
gentler aerial forces can carve out of the piled strata. At the Falls
there were two or three of these columns, like the picket-pins of the
elder gods.

Across the canyon in front of our camp, upon a grassy plateau which was
faced by a wall of trap rock, apparently thirty or forty feet high, a
band of mountain sheep soon attracted our attention. They were within
long rifle range, but were not at all disturbed by our presence, nor
had they been disturbed by the road-builders who, under Captain
Chittenden, were constructing a government road along the brink of the
canyon. We speculated as to whether or not the sheep could get down the
almost perpendicular face of the chasm to the river to drink. It
seemed to me impossible. Would they try it while we were there to see?
We all hoped so; and sure enough, late in the afternoon the word came
to our tents that the sheep were coming down. The President, with coat
off and a towel around his neck, was shaving. One side of his face was
half shaved, and the other side lathered. Hofer and I started for a
point on the brink of the canyon where we could have a better view.

"By Jove," said the President, "I must see that. The shaving can wait,
and the sheep won't."

So on he came, accoutred as he was,--coatless, hatless, but not
latherless, nor towelless. Like the rest of us, his only thought was
to see those sheep do their "stunt." With glasses in hand, we watched
them descend those perilous heights, leaping from point to point,
finding a foothold where none appeared to our eyes, loosening
fragments of the crumbling rocks as they came, now poised upon some
narrow shelf and preparing for the next leap, zig-zagging or plunging
straight down till the bottom was reached, and not one accident or
misstep amid all that insecure