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They last well, such people, as well, almost, as agatized wood on museum shelves; and the most you can do for them is to keep them well dusted. Old Mrs. Carr belonged, in a degree, to this order of persons. Only the coming of Mercy's young life into the feeble current of her own had saved it from entire stagnation.
Some of the most remarkable of these are Niagara Falls, the Yosemite Valley, with its crowning glory, the Yosemite Falls, the Hetch-Hetchy Falls, Mammoth Cave, the Garden of the Gods, the Grand Cañon of the Colorado, the Agatized Forests of Arizona, Yellowstone Park, The Natural Bridge of Virginia, Great Salt Lake, and dozens of others, less wonderful, but scarcely less beautiful, and equal to the most talked-of beauties of Europe, such as the Palisades of the Hudson, Lake Champlain, the Shenandoah Valley, the Dalles of Oregon, Pike's Peak, Mount Rainier, Lookout Mountain, the Adirondacks, and the entire Rocky Mountain region.
The length of the trunk exposed by erosion is one hundred and eleven feet; a fraction still remains embedded in the sandstone. The ruins of several ancient Indian pueblos are scattered about the park, nearly all of them built of logs of this richly colored, agatized wood.
Men call it agatized wood, by a feeble effort to translate the mystery of its existence; but it is not wood, except to the eye. To the touch, and in fact, it is stone, hard, cold, unalterable, eternal stone. The slow wear of monotonous life in a set groove does very much such a thing as this to human beings.
Many years ago a firm at Sioux Falls undertook to manufacture table tops, mantels, pedestals, and various decorative articles out of sections of this agatized wood by cutting them into the desired forms and polishing them. Tiffany and Company, the famous jewellers, also used this material for the base of the beautiful silver testimonial presented to the French sculptor, Bartholdi.
He told her of the petrified forest just over some low hills off to the left; acres and acres of agatized chips and trunks of great trees all turned to eternal stone, called by the Indians "Yeitso's bones," after the great giant of that name whom an ancient Indian hero killed.
The gods were not so kind to the snakes as men were, for the agatized trees of Chalcedony Park, in Arizona, are held to be arrows shot by the angry deities at the monsters who vexed this region. Indians living on the shore of Canandaigua Lake, New York, tamed a pretty spotted snake, and fed and petted it until it took a deer at a meal.
The gods were not so kind to the snakes as men were, for the agatized trees of Chalcedony Park, in Arizona, are held to be arrows shot by the angry deities at the monsters who vexed this region. Indians living on the shore of Canandaigua Lake, New York, tamed a pretty spotted snake, and fed and petted it until it took a deer at a meal.
To the eye they retain the semblance of other beings; but try them by touch, that is by contact with people, with events outside their groove, and they are stone, agatized men and women. Carry them where you please, after they have reached middle or old age, and they will not change. There is no magic water, a drop of which will restore to them the vitality and pliability of their youth.
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