fty yards in width, between
perfectly naked and perpendicular precipices of basalt. Just beyond this
mighty mill-race, where one of the grandest floods of the continent is
sliding in olive-green light and umber shadow, smoothly and resistlessly
as time, the river is a mile wide, and plunges over a ragged wall of
trap blocks, reaching, as at the lower cataract, from shore to shore. In
other neighboring places it attains even a greater width, but up to
Celilo is never out of torment from the obstructions of its bed. Not
even the rapids of Niagara can vie with these in their impression of
power, and only the Columbia itself can describe the lines of grace made
by its water, rasped to spray, churned to froth, tired into languid
sheets that flow like sliding glass, or shot up in fountains frayed away
to rainbows on their edges, as it strikes some basalt hexagon rising in
mid-stream. The Dalles and the Upper Cataracts are still another region
where the artist might stay for a year's University-course in
water-painting.

At Celilo we found several steamers, in register resembling our second
of the day previous. They measured on the average about three hundred
tons. One of them had just got down from Walla Walla, with a large party
of miners from gold-tracts still farther off, taking down five hundred
thousand dollars in dust to Portland and San Francisco. We were very
anxious to accept the Company's extended invitation, and push our
investigations to or even up the Snake River. But the expectation that
the San-Francisco steamer would reach Portland in a day or two, and that
we should immediately return by her to California, turned us most
reluctantly down the river after Bierstadt and I had made the fullest
notes and sketches attainable. Bad weather on the coast falsified our
expectations. For a week we were rain-bound in Portland, unable to leave
our hotel for an hour at a time without being drenched by the floods
which just now set in for the winter season, and regretting the lack of
that prescience which would have enabled us to accomplish one of the
most interesting side-trips in our whole plan of travel. While this
pleasure still awaited us, and none in particular of any kind seemed
present, save the in-door courtesies of our Portland friends, it was
still among the memories of a lifetime to have seen the Columbia in its
Cataracts and its Dalles.

OUR LAST DAY IN DIXIE.

It was not far from eleven o'clock at ni