These new scenes were all very strange to the young German girl.
The trail was bordered with young ferns; wild violets lay in beds of purple along the running streams, and the mountain phlox with its kindling buds carpeted the shelving ways under the murmuring pines.

The woman and girl came at last to a wild, open space; before them rolled the Oregon, beyond it stretched a great treeless plain, and over it towered a gigantic mountain, in whose crown, like a jewel, shone a resplendent glacier.
Just before them, on the bluffs of the river, under three gigantic evergreens, each of which was more than two hundred feet high, stood an odd structure of logs and sods, which the builders called the Sod School-house.

It was not a sod school-house in the sense in which the term has been applied to more recent structures in the treeless prairie districts of certain mid-ocean States; it was rudely framed of pine, and was furnished with a pine desk and benches.
Along the river lay a plateau full of flowers, birds, and butterflies, and over the great river and flowering plain the clear air glimmered.

Like some sun-god's abode in the shadow of ages, St.Helens still lifted her silver tents in the far sky.

Eagles and mountain birds wheeled, shrieking joyously, here and there.