The hide of the
buffalo which La Salle showed in Paris is now almost as great a curiosity
in the valley as it was in Paris in 1680. Wild beasts now slink only in
the mountains' margins. Domestic animals, natives of distant lands, live
about the dwellings of men.
Even the streams of water that bore the French into the valley have
dwindled, many of them, or are in despair and tears, between shallows and
torrents, longing for the forests, it is said by the scientists--longing
for the days of the French, the poet would put it. So are the rivers
crying, "In the days of Pere Marquette"--the days of the "River of the
Immaculate Conception." And so are the prophets of science crying as the
prophets of inspiration cried of old: O valley of a hundred thousand
streams, O valley of a million centuries of rock and iron and earth, O
valley of a century of man! The riches of the gathering of a million years
are spent in a day. Baldness has come upon the mountains, as upon Gaza of
old. The trees have gone down to the waters.
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