own, yellow and deep blue; while the pumice stone, lit up by the
sunbeam, was red like vermilion. The loneliness, the wildness and
romantic beauty of the scene I am not likely to forget.

_Basil._ I should like to see those red rocks very much.

_Hunter._ For six days I once continued my course, with a party of
Indians, across the prairie, without setting my eyes on a single tree,
or a single hill affording variety to the scene. Grass, wild flowers,
and strawberries, abounded more or less through the whole extent. The
spot where we found ourselves at sundown, appeared to be exactly that
from which we started at sunrise. There was little variety, even in
the sky itself; and it would have been a relief, (so soon are we weary
even of beauty itself,) to have walked a mile over rugged rocks, or to
have forced our way through a gloomy pine wood, or to have climbed the
sides of a steep mountain.

_Brian._ I hardly think that I should ever be tired of green grass and
flowers and strawberries.

_Hunter._ Oh yes, you would. Variety in the works of creation is a
gift of our bountiful Creator, for which we are not sufficiently
thankful. Look at the changing seasons; how beautifully they vary the
same prospect! And the changing clouds of heaven, too; what an
infinite and pleasurable variety they afford to us! If the world were
all sunshine, we should long for the shade.

_Austin._ What do you mean by bluffs?

_Hunter._ Round hills, or huge clayey mounds, often covered with grass
and flowers to the very top. Sometimes they have a verdant turf on
their tops, while their sides display a rich variety of many-coloured
earths, and thousands of gypsum crystals imbedded in the clay. The
romantic mixture of bluffs, and hills, with summits of green grass as
level as the top of a table, with huge fragments of pumice stone and
cinders, the remains of burning mountains, and granite sand, and
layers of different coloured clay, and cornelian, and agate, and
jasper-like pebbles; these, with the various animals that graze or
prowl among them, and the rolling river, and a bright blue sky, have
afforded me bewildering delight. Some of the hunters and trappers
believe that the great valley of the Missouri was once level with the
tops of the table hills, and that the earth has been washed away by
the river, and other causes; but the subject is involved in much
doubt. It has pleased God to put a boundary to the knowledge of man in
many things. I t