Judging by the sun, I could not have been insensible very long; probably not a minute, possibly an hour; and I could not remember what made me fall, or where I had fallen from; but I saw that if I had rolled a little further, my mountain climbing would have been finished, for just beyond the bushes the canyon wall steepened and I might have fallen to the bottom.  “There,” said I, addressing my feet, to whose separate skill I had learned to trust night and day on any mountain, “that is what you get by intercourse with stupid town stairs, and dead pavements.”  I felt degraded and worthless.  I had not yet reached the most difficult portion of the canyon, but I determined to guide my humbled body over the most nerve-trying places I could find; for I was now awake, and felt confident that the last of the town fog had been shaken from both head and feet.

I camped at the mouth of a narrow gorge which is cut into the bottom of the main canyon, determined to take earnest exercise next day.  No plushy boughs did my ill-behaved bones enjoy that night, nor did my bumped head get a spicy cedar plume pillow mixed with flowers.  I slept on a naked boulder, and when I awoke all my nervous trembling was gone.

The gorged portion of the canyon, in which I spent all the next day, is about a mile and a half in length; and I passed the time in tracing the action of the forces that determined this peculiar bottom gorge, which is an abrupt, ragged-walled, narrow-throated canyon, formed in the bottom of the wide-mouthed, smooth, and beveled main canyon.  I will not stop now to tell you more; some day you may see it, like a shadowy line, from Cloud’s Rest.  In high water, the stream occupies all the bottom of the gorge, surging and chafing in glorious power from wall to wall.  But the sound of the grinding was low as I entered the gorge, scarcely hoping to be able to pass through its entire length.  By cool efforts, along glassy, ice-worn slopes, I reached the upper end in a little over a day, but was compelled to pass the second night in the gorge, and in the moonlight I wrote you this short pencil-letter in my notebook:—­

The moon is looking down into the canyon, and how marvelously the great rocks kindle to her light!  Every dome, and brow, and swelling boss touched by her white rays, glows as if lighted with snow.  I am now only a mile from last night’s camp; and have been climbing and sketching all day in this difficult but instructive gorge.  It is formed in the bottom of the main canyon, among the roots of Cloud’s Rest.  It begins at the filled-up lake basin where I camped last night, and ends a few hundred yards above, in another basin of the same kind.  The walls everywhere are craggy and vertical, and in some places they overlean.  It is only from twenty to sixty feet wide, and not, though black and broken enough, the thin, crooked mouth of some mysterious abyss; but it was eroded, for in many places I