Roughing it De Luxe. Cobb Irvin Shrewsbury

dwarfed by the heaven-reaching ranges and groups that wall them in north, south and west, they have not even a Christian name to answer to.

      Anon—that is to say, at the end of those ten miles—you come to the head of Hermit Trail. There you leave your buckboard at a way station and mount your mule. Presently you are crawling downward, like a fly on a board fence, into the depths of the chasm. You pass through rapidly succeeding graduations of geology, verdure, scenery and temperature. You ride past little sunken gardens full of wild flowers and stunty fir trees, like bits of Old Japan; you climb naked red slopes crowned with the tall cactus, like Old Mexico; you skirt bald, bare, blistered vistas of desolation, like Old Perdition. You cross Horsethief's Trail, which was first traced out by the moccasined feet of marauding Apaches and later was used by white outlaws fleeing northward with their stolen pony herds.

      You pass above the gloomy shadows of Blythe's Abyss and wind beneath a great box-shaped formation of red sandstone set on a spindle rock and balancing there in dizzy space like Mohammed's coffin; and then, at the end of a mile-long jog along a natural terrace stretching itself midway between Heaven and the other place, you come to the residence of Shorty, the official hermit of the Grand Cañon.

      Shorty is a little, gentle old man, with warped legs and mild blue eyes and a set of whiskers of such indeterminate aspect that you cannot tell at first look whether they are just coming out or just going back in. He belongs—or did belong—to the vast vanishing race of oldtime gold prospectors. Halfway down the trail he does light housekeeping under an accommodating flat ledge that pouts out over the pathway like a snuffdipper's under lip. He has a hole in the rock for his chimney, a breadth of weathered gray canvas for his door and an eighty-mile stretch of the most marvelous panorama on earth for his front yard. He minds the trail and watches out for the big boulders that sometimes fall in the night; and, except in the tourist season, he leads a reasonably quiet existence.

      Alongside of Shorty, Robinson Crusoe was a tenement-dweller, and Jonah, weekending in the whale, had a perfectly uproarious time; but Shorty thrives on a solitude that is too vast for imagining. He would not trade jobs with the most potted potentate alive—only sometimes in mid-summer he feels the need of a change stealing over him, and then he goes afoot out into the middle of Death Valley and spends a happy vacation of five or six weeks with the Gila monsters and the heat. He takes Toby with him.

      Toby is a gentlemanly little woolly dog built close to the earth like a carpet sweeper, with legs patterned crookedly—after the model of his master's. Toby has one settled prejudice: he dislikes Indians. You have only to whisper the word "Injun" and instantly Toby is off, scuttling away to the highest point that is handy. From there he peers all round looking for red invaders. Not finding any he comes slowly back, crushed to the earth with disappointment. Nobody has ever been able to decide what Toby would do with the Indians if he found them; but he and Shorty are in perfect accord. They have been associated together ever since Toby was a pup and Shorty went into the hermit business, and that was ten years ago. Sitting cross-legged on a flat rock like a little gnome, with his puckered eyes squinting off at space, Shorty told us how once upon a time he came near losing Toby.