trail skirting northward up the river, leaving
Encleadus grumbling at his crank.

Perhaps, after all, cranks really have to be turned. Still, it seems too
bad, and I have long bewailed it almost as a personal grief, that
utility and ugliness should so often be running mates.

They tell me that the Matterhorn never did a tap of work; and you
couldn't color one Easter egg with all the gorgeous sunsets of the
world! May we all become, some day, perfectly useless and beautiful!

At the foot of the first fall, a mammoth spring wells up out of the
rock. Nobody tells you about it; you run across it by chance, and it
interests you much more in that way. It would seem that a spring
throwing out a stream equivalent to a river one hundred yards wide and
two feet deep would deserve a little exploitation. Down East they would
have a great white sprawling hotel built close by it wherein one could
drink spring water (at a quarter the quart), with half a pathology
pasted on the bottle as a label. But nobody seems to care much about so
small an ooze out there: everything else is so big. And so it has
nothing at all to do but go right on being one of the very biggest
springs of all the world. This is really something; and I like it better
than the quarter-per-quart idea.

In sixteen miles the Missouri River falls four hundred feet.
Incidentally, this stretch of river is said to be capable of producing
the most tremendous water-power in the world.

After skirting four miles of water that ran like a mill-race, we came
upon the Rainbow Falls, where a thousand feet of river takes a drop of
fifty feet over a precipice regular as a wall of masonry. This was much
more to my liking--a million horse-power or so busy making rainbows!
Bully!

It was a very hot day and the sun was now high. I sat down to wipe the
sweat out of my eyes. I wished to get acquainted with this weaver of
iridescent nothings who knew so well the divine art of doing nothing at
all and doing it good and hard! After all, it isn't so easy to do
nothing and make it count!

And in the end, when all broken lights have blended again with the
Source Light, I'm not so sure that rainbows will seem less important
than rows and rows of arc lights and clusters and clusters of
incandescent globes. Are you? I can contract an indefinable sort of
heartache from the blue sputter of a city light that snuffs out moon and
stars for tired scurrying folks: but the opalescent mist-drift of