ng bare and perpendicularly from 50
to 300 feet; as a late traveller describes it, "looking like a mere
clean skeleton of the world." Nothing is visible but pure rock on every
side. Vast stones lie heaped up into pyramids, as if they had been rent
from the sky. Cubical masses, each covering an acre of surface, and
reaching to a perpendicular height of thirty or forty feet, suggest the
buttresses of some gigantic palace, whose superstructure has crumbled
away with the race of its Titanic builders. It is these regions
especially which have given the mighty range the appropriate name of the
_Rocky Mountains_.

THE SAGE COCK.

In some spots, the limitless wastes are covered by a scrubby plant known
as mountain sage. It rises from a tough gnarled root in a number of
spiral shoots, which finally form a single trunk, varying in
circumference from six inches to two feet. The leaves are grey, with a
strong offensive smell resembling true sage. In other places there
appear mixed with it the equally scrubby but somewhat greener
grease-wood--the two resinous shrubs affording the only fuel on which
the emigrant can rely while following the Rocky Mountain trail.

These sage regions are the habitation of a magnificent bird--the Sage
Cock. He may well be called the King of the grouse tribe. When
stalking erect through the sage, he looks as large as a good-sized wild
turkey--his average length being, indeed, about thirty-two inches, and
that of the hen two feet. They differ somewhat, according to the season
of the year. The prevailing colour is that of a yellowish-brown or warm
grey, mottled with darker brown, shading from cinnamon to jet-black.
The dark spots are laid on in a longitudinal series of crescents. The
under parts are a light grey, sometimes almost pure white, barred with
streaks of brown, or pied with black patches. In the elegance of his
figure and fineness of his outlines he vies with the golden pheasant.
His tail differs from that of the grouse family in general by coming to
a point instead of opening like a fan. On each side of his neck he has
a bare orange-coloured spot, and near it a downy epaulet. His call is a
rapid "Cut, cut, cut!" followed by a hollow blowing sound. He has the
partridge's habit of drumming with his wings, while the hen-bird knows
the trick of misleading the enemy from her young brood. He seldom rises
from the ground, his occasional flights being low, short, and laboured.
He run