LETTERS FROM AN OREGON RANCH
vaulting over them with a tossing of green billows and flying spray it reels stormily on, bent upon still madder pranks. You may call this ranting, and perhaps think it inspired by this same mountain vintage; but you have never seen the mountain streams of Oregon. Ours seemed so wild and elfish that we immediately christened it “Deer Leap.” When we came here, a high, strong bridge spanned it. In one of these recent night carousals that bridge was lifted bodily and borne away, and no plank of it was ever seen again. One day last winter, after heavy rains, Deer Leap was tearing and plunging down from the hills, floating a mighty drift of logs, stumps, boards, and such débris, when, seeing Mary and me watching from the bank, in sudden fury he hurled the whole mass at us, and there it remains to this day.
In summer-time, when canopied by green leaves and swinging vines, with birds singing glad hallelujahs above it, and the elusive speckled trout darting through it, then indeed is our brook a thing of beauty and a joy forever. However, it is but one of the many charms of this old place. We have lovely springs of pure soft water. One of these, high upon the hill back of the house, gushing from a rocky ledge beneath a clump of pines, comes tumbling down in a mossy fern-shaded rill, to slip beneath the shadows of a near-by alder and creep into an ugly wooden spout, and thence be carried to a still uglier wooden trough at the end of the kitchen porch.
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