y except a native. I met plenty of tourists who had
seen people who had seen him, but never a tourist who had seen him with
his own eyes. In addition to being rare, he is highly gifted.

I think almost anybody will agree with me that the common, ordinary
skunk has been most richly dowered by Nature. To adorn a skunk with any
extra qualifications seems as great a waste of the raw material as
painting the lily or gilding refined gold. He is already amply equipped
for outdoor pursuits. Nobody intentionally shoves him round; everybody
gives him as much room as he seems to need. He commands respect--nay,
more than that, respect and veneration--wherever he goes. Joy-riders
never run him down and foot passengers avoid crowding him into a corner.
You would think Nature had done amply well by the skunk; but no--the
Hydrophobic Skunk comes along and upsets all these calculations. Besides
carrying the traveling credentials of an ordinary skunk, he is rabid in
the most rabidissimus form. He is not mad just part of the time, like
one's relatives by marriage--and not mad most of the time, like the
old-fashioned railroad ticket agent--but mad all the time--incurably,
enthusiastically and unanimously mad! He is mad and he is glad of it.

We made the acquaintance of the Hydrophobic Skunk when we rode down
Hermit Trail. The casual visitor to the Grand Canon first of all takes
the rim drive; then he essays Bright Angel Trail, which is sufficiently
scary for his purposes until he gets used to it; and after that he grows
more adventurous and tackles Hermit Trail, which is a marvel of
corkscrew convolutions, gimleting its way down this red abdominal wound
of a canyon to the very gizzard of the world.

Alongside the Hermit, traveling the Bright Angel is the same as
gathering the myrtles with Mary; but the civil engineers who worked out
the scheme of the Hermit and made it wide and navigable for ordinary
folks were bright young men. They laid a wall along its outer side all
the way from the top to the bottom. Now this wall is made of loose
stones racked up together without cement, and it is nowhere more than a
foot or a foot and a half high. If your mule ever slipped--which he
never does--or if you rolled off on your own hook--which has not
happened to date--that puny little wall would hardly stop you--might not
even cause you to hesitate. But some way, intervening between you and a
thousand feet or so of uninterrupted fresh air, it gives a t