Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: A FOREST OF AGATE. ROM the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad it is still easier to reach a great natural curiosity—the huge Petrified Forest of Arizona. Much the nearest point is the little station of Billings, but there are scant accommodations there for the traveler — only a railroad section-house and a ranch-house. Only a mile south of the track, at that point, one may see a low, dark ridge, marked by a single cotton-wood tree. Walking thither (over a valley so alive with jack-rabbits that there is some excuse for the cow-boy declaration that " you can walk clear across on their backs! ") one soon reaches the northern edge of the forest, which covers hundreds of square miles. Unless you are more hardened to wonderful sights than I am, you will almost fancy yourself in some enchanted spot. You seem to stand on the glass of a gigantic kaleidoscope, over whose sparkling surface the sun breaks in infinite rainbows. You are ankle-deep in such chips as 111 warrant you never saw from any other woodpile. What do you think of chips from trees that are red moss-agate, and amethyst, and smoky topaz, and agate of even,- hue ? That is exactly the sort ofsplinters that cover the ground for miles here, aroiuid the huge prostrate trunks—some of them five feet through— from which Time's patient ax has hewn them. I broke a specimen from the heart of a tree there, years ago, which had, around the stone pith, a remarkable array of large and exquisite crystals; for on one side of the specimen—which is not so large as my hand—is a beautiful mass of crystals of royal purple amethyst, and on the other an equally beautiful array of smoky topaz crystals. Oue can also get magnificent cross-sections of a whole trunk, so thin as to be portable, and showing every vein and even the bark. There is not a c... --This text refers to the Paperback edition.