and wild, with the distance lost in blue haze.  The vegetation was dense and rather low.  I saw both prickly-pear and mescal cactus, cedars, manzanita brush, scrub oak, and juniper trees.  These last named were very beautiful, especially the smaller ones, with their gray-green foliage, and purple berries, and black and white checkered bark.  There were no pine trees.  Since we had left the rim above the character of plant life had changed.

We crossed the plateau leading to the valley where the Natural Bridge was located.  A winding road descended the east side of this valley.  A rancher lived down there.  Green of alfalfa and orchard and walnut trees contrasted vividly with a bare, gray slope on one side, and a red, rugged mountain on the other.  A deep gorge showed dark and wild.  At length, just after sunset, we reached the ranch, and rode through orchards of peach and pear and apple trees, all colored with fruit, and down through grassy meadows to a walnut grove where we pitched camp.  By the time we had supper it was dark.  Wonderful stars, thick, dreamy hum of insects, murmur of swift water, a rosy and golden afterglow on the notch of the mountain range to the west—­these were inducements to stay up, but I was so tired I had to go to bed, where my eyelids fell tight, as if pleasantly weighted.

After the long, hard rides and the barren camp-sites what delight to awaken in this beautiful valley with the morning cool and breezy and bright, with smell of new-mown hay from the green and purple alfalfa fields, and the sunlight gilding the jagged crags above!  Romer made a bee-line for the peach trees.  He beat his daddy only a few yards.  The kind rancher had visited us the night before and he had told us to help ourselves to fruit, melons, alfalfa.  Needless to state that I made my breakfast on peaches!

I trailed the swift, murmuring stream to its source on the dark green slope where there opened up a big hole bordered by water-cress, long grass, and fragrant mint.  This spring was one of perfectly clear water, six feet deep, boiling up to bulge on the surface.  A grass of dark color and bunches of light green plant grew under the surface.  Bees and blue dragon-flies hummed around and frogs as green as the grass blinked with jewelled eyes from the wet margins.  The spring had a large volume that spilled over its borders with low, hollow gurgle, with fresh, cool splash.  The water was soft, tasting of limestone.  Here was the secret of the verdure and fragrance and color and beauty and life of the oasis.

It was also the secret of the formation of the wonderful Natural Bridge.  Part of the rancher’s cultivated land, to the extent of several acres, was the level top of this strange bridge.  A meadow of alfalfa and a fine vineyard, in the air, like the hanging gardens of Babylon!  The natural bridge spanned a deep gorge, at the bottom of which flowed a swift stream of water.  Geologically this tremendous arch of