gurgling over pebbles down a gentle slope; and the narrower it was, the better it was, almost, given only some fair measure of clearness, movement enough to lend it here and there an eddying dimple, and, most of all, a look of being perennial. I hold in loving recollection two or three such streamlets, and at this very minute can seem to see and hear them, dipping smoothly over certain well-remembered flat boulders, and bearing down a few tufts of wavering sweet-flag leaves. Yes, I see them with all plainness, though the breadth of a continent stretches between them and this present dwelling-place of mine, where near mountains half circle me about and the Pacific surf dashes almost against my doorstep, but where there is never a sound of running water all the long summer through. Often and often I say to myself,

'If there were only one dear Massachusetts brook, to make the charm complete!'

But with all this, as I say, I had always, to my own surprise, made strangely small account of our boasted New England cataracts; pleasant to look upon they might be, no doubt, but hardly worth much running after. And now these falls of the Merced and its larger tributaries had taken me by storm. Indeed they are altogether another story; as little to be compared with anything in New Hampshire as Flagstaff Hill on Boston Common is to be set beside Mount Washington. Merely a difference in degree? Yes, if you choose to put it so; but such a difference in degree as amounts fairly to a difference in kind. Imagine the Merrimac tumbling over the face of a ledge five hundred, six hundred, fifteen hundred feet high! And the Yosemite Fall, be it remembered, after its first plunge of fifteen or sixteen hundred feet, makes at once two others of four hundred and six hundred feet respectively. In other

words, it drops almost plumb from an altitude nearly as great (as great within six hundred feet) as that of the summit of Mount Lafayette above the level of Profile Notch. And furthermore, it is to be considered that the water does not slip over the edge of the awful cliff, but comes to it at headlong speed, foaming white, having been crowded together and rounded up between the rocky walls of its steep and narrow bed, exactly as the Niagara River is in the rapids above the whirlpool, — which rapids are to my apprehension, as I suppose they are to most men's, hardly a whit less astounding than the Horseshoe Fall itself.

This wild outward leap it was that most of all impressed me when more than once I stood at the top of the Yosemite Fall, amazed and silent. But that was some time later than the day now spoken of, and must be left for mention in its turn.

I had heard before coming to the Valley, and many times since, that the one place excelling all others of those, that is to say, immediately above the Valley wall, and so falling within the range of ordinary pedestrians was Glacier Point; and now, having given my legs and wind a moderate preliminary test, I inquired of the camp-manager how difficult the trail to that point might be, as compared with the one I had just gone over.

'I should call it twice as difficult,' he said, 'though not so long.'

The answer surprised, and for the moment almost discouraged me. Age was never so inopportune, I thought.

'But anyhow,' said I, 'there is no law against my having a look at the beginning of the way and judging of its possibilities for myself.'

And the very next morning, being apparently in good bodily trim, and certainly in good spirits, I made an early start. The trail offered at least

one advantage: it began at my door, with no six miles of superfluous valley road such as the previous day's jaunt had burdened me with. As for its unbroken steepness, that, I reasoned with myself, was to be overcome by the simple expedient of taking it in short steps at a slow pace.

Well, not to boast of what is not at all boastworthy (Mr. Galen Clark, ninety-five years old, - may God bless him, he was always showing me kindness, had made the descent unaccompanied the season before, though you would never hear him tell of it), I reached the Point in slow time, but without fatigue, the hours having been enlivened by the frequent presence of some jovial members of the California Press Club, trailing one behind another, who by turns overtook and were overtaken by me (the tortoise having sometimes the better of it), till every fresh encounter became matter for a jest. We arrived in company, cutting across lots over the hard snow near the top, and then there was no taking of no for an answer. Three of the men were set upon going out upon the celebrated overhanging rock-three thousand feet, more or less, over empty space to be photographed, and, would he or would n't he, the old 'Professor,' as with friendly impudence, meaning no disrespect, they had dubbed him, must go along and have his picture taken with the rest. And go along the old professor did, keeping, to be sure, at a prudent remove from the dizzy edge, though he flattered himself, of course, that only for not choosing to play the fool, he could stand as near it as the next man. This pleasing ceremony done with, I was left to go my own gait, and then my enjoyment of the marvelous place began.

A good-natured and conversable young driver, who had picked me up one day on the road, quizzed me as to

what I thought about the origin of the Valley; and after I had tried to set forth in outline the two principal opinions of geologists upon the subject, not suspecting what a philosopher I had to do with, he informed me that he took no stock in either of them, He cared nothing for Whitney or Le Conte or Muir. No subsidence theory or glacial theory for him. He believed that the place was made so to start with, on purpose that people might come from all parts of the world and enjoy it. And to-day, as I moved about the rim of Glacier Point for the first time, I was ready to say with equal positiveness, if with something less of serious intention,— This place was made for prospects.

If I doubted, I had only to look at the level green valley, with the green river meandering through it; at the wall opposite, so variously grand and beautiful, from El Capitan to the Half Dome; and, best of all, at the Merced Canyon, as seen from the neighborhood of the hotel, with my two falls of the day before in full sight across it, and beyond them a world of snowy peaks, a good half of the horizon studded with them, lonely-looking though so many, and stretching away and away and away, till they faded into the invisible; a magnificent panorama of the high Sierras, minarets and domes, obelisks and battlemented walls; such a spectacle as I had never thought to look upon. It was too bad I could not spend the night with it, to see it in other moods; but when I was informed that the hotel would be open before many days were past, I consoled myself with the promise of another and a longer visit.

I was better than my word. Four times afterward I climbed to the Point, once by the 'long trail,' via Nevada Fall (which, with the afternoon descent over the short trail added, really made some approximation to a day's

work), and altogether I passed six nights there, taking in the splendors of the dawn and the sunset, and, for the rest, ranging more or less about the snowy woods. One afternoon (May 23) we were favored with a lively snowstorm of several hours' duration, with a single tremendous thunder-clap in the midst, which drove three young fellows into the hotel-office breathless with a tale of how the lightning had played right about their heads till almost they gave themselves up for dead men; and when the clouds broke away little by little shortly before sunset, the shifting views of the canyon, the falls, and the mountain summits near and far, were such as put one or two amateur photographers fairly beside themselves, and drove the rest of us to silence or to rapturous exclamation according as the powers had made us of the quiet or the noisy kind. Whatever we poor mortals made of it, it was a wondrous show.

Thrice I went to the top of Sentinel Dome (eighty-one hundred feet), an easy jaunt from the hotel, though just at this time, while attempting it in treacherous weather, with the trail, if there be one, buried under the winter snow, a young tourist became bewildered and lost his life- vanished utterly, as if the earth had swallowed him. The prospect from the summit is magnificent, if inferior, as I think it is, to that from the hotel piazza; and the place itself is good to stand on: one of those symmetrical, broadly rounded, naked granite domes, so highly characteristic of the Sierras, and of which so many are to be seen from any point upon the Valley rim. Some agency or other, once having the pattern, seems to have turned them out by the score.

One day I looked down into the Fissures, so called, giddy, suicide-provoking rents; and more than once, on the Wawona road, I skirted two of those

beautiful Sierra Nevada meadows, so feelingly celebrated by Mr. Muir, and so surprising and grateful to all newcomers in these parts. At this moment one of them was starred with thousands of greenish-white marsh marigolds-Caltha leptosepala, as I learned afterward to call them, when good Mr. Clark produced, out of his treasures new and old, for my enlightenment, a much-desired copy of Brewer and Watson's Botany of California.

After the two trails thus 'negotiated,' to speak a little in the Western manner, there remained one that by all accounts was steeper and harder still, the trail to Yosemite Point, or, if the walker should elect to travel its full length, to Eagle Peak. As to the Peak, I doubted. The tale of miles sounded long, and as the elevation was only seventy-eight hundred feet, substantially the same as that of Glacier Point, it appeared questionable whether the distance would pay for itself.

'Oh, the trail is n't difficult,' a neighborly-minded, middle-aged tourist had assured me (he spoke of the trail to Yosemite Point only); 'we made it between breakfast and luncheon.'

But they had made it on horseback, as came out a minute later, which somewhat damaged the argument. Difficult or easy, however (and if there had been forty, or even twenty, less years in my pack, all this debate concerning distances and grades would have been ridiculous), to Yosemite Point I was determined to go. Once, at least, I must stand upon the rocks at the top of that stupendous fall, at which I had spent so many half-hours in gazing. And stand there I did, not once, but thrice; and except for the Glacier Point outlook, which must always rank first, I enjoyed no other Yosemite experience quite so much. So I speak; yet sometimes, while loitering downward in the late afternoon,

I sang another song. 'After all,' I thought, 'these are the best hours. And really there is no reaching any final verdict in matters of this nature, so much depending upon mood and circumstance.'

I was walking in the shade of a vertical cliff so near, so high, so overpowering in its enormous proportions, that I often felt it to be more impressive than El Capitan itself; and, walking thus in deep shadow, I looked out upon a world of bright sunlight: the fall at my side ('Oh, I say,' an enthusiastic, much-traveled man had exclaimed in my hearing, 'it beats Niagara. Yes, sir, it beats Niagara!'), every turn of the path bringing it into view at a new angle, and, as it seemed, to increased advantage; the shining green valley, with its jewel of a river; and yonder, up in the sky, all those illuminated snowy Sierra peaks. Well, I could only stop and look, and stop and look again, rejoicing to be alive.

As for Eagle Peak, with its two or three extra miles, before the business was over (after the way thither became dry enough to be passable without wading) I had paid it four visits. The Peak itself offered no transcendent attraction, but the trail proved to be at once so comfortable and so very much to my mind, that, once at the end of the sharp zigzags, and on the level of the river above the fall, it seemed impossible not to keep on,-just this once more, as I always said; such pleasure I took in the forest of stately pines and firs, the multitude of wild flowers by the way, and in another and more extensive of those fair mountain meadows (natural grassy meads, green as emerald, shining in the sun amidst the dark evergreen forest), along the border of which the winding trail carried me. In this were no marsh marigolds, but instead a generous sprinkling of sunbright buttercups, while a pool in the

midst was covered with lily-pads and yellow spatter-dock lilies, — old New England friends whose homely faces were trebly welcome in these far-off California altitudes.

I never approached the meadow — which melting snowbanks all about still rendered impossible of dry-shod exploration without pleasing anticipations of deer. They must frequent it, I thought; but I looked for them in vain. The curiously distinctive slow drum-taps of an invisible Williamson sapsucker, a true Sierran, handsomest of the handsome, were always to be counted upon; swallows and swifts went skimming over the grass; robins and snowbirds flitted about; but if deer ever came this way, it was not down for me to find them.

At the end of the trail, after a tedious gravelly slope, where I remember a close bed of the pretty mountain phlox, with thin remnants of a snowdrift no more than a rod or two above it, there remained a brief clamber over huge boulders, with tufts of gorgeous pink pentstemon growing in such scanty deposits of coarse soil as the desolate, unpromising situation afforded; the scantier the better, as it seemed; for this clever economist is a lover of rocks, if there ever was one. It was to be found in all directions, in the valley and on the heights, but never anywhere except in the most inhospitablelooking, impossible-looking of stony places. And out of a few grains of powdered granite it manages somehow to extract the wherewithal not merely upon which to subsist, but for the putting forth of as bright a profusion of exquisite bloom as the sun ever shone upon.

The outlook from the topmost boulder of this Titans' cairn, for it looked like nothing else, was commanding, -valley, river, and mountain, but to me, as I have said, the Peak was mainly of

use as the conclusion of a walk through an enchanting Sierra forest; for I, no less than my fellows, have yet to outgrow the primitive need of ‘a place to go to,' even when I go mostly for what is to be enjoyed by the way.

So much for what might be more strictly accounted as climbs to the valley rim. More wearisome, perhaps, because quite as long, while without the counterbalancing stimulation which a mountain trail seems always, out of its own virtue, to communicate, were an indefinite number of jaunts to Inspiration Point (hateful name!) and into the forest a mile or two beyond. Precisely why I expended so much labor upon the long miles of this dusty uphill road, it might be troublesome to determine; but here, also, there were so many things to be looked at, and so many others to be hoped for, that the going thither about once in so many days grew little by little into something like a habit. Between the moist riverbanks and the dry hillside, what a procession of beautiful and interesting wild flowers the progress of the season led before me! And if many of them seemed to be the same as I had known in the East, they were certain to be the same with a difference: dogwood and azalea (azalea hedges by the mile); tall columbines and lilies; yellow violets and blue larkspurs; salmonberry and mariposa tulips; an odd-looking dwarf convolvulus, not observed elsewhere; the famous blood-red snowplant, which there was reported to be a heavy fine for picking; and whole gardens of tiny, high-colored, fairylike blossoms, kind after kind and color after color, growing mostly in separate parterres, 'ground-flowers in flocks,' and veritable gems for brightness, over which, in my ignorance, I could only stand and wonder.

Of birds, as compared with plants, the walk might offer little in the line of

novelty, but such as it did offer, taking old and new together, they were always enough to keep a man alive: a pair of golden eagles, for instance, soaring in the blue,—a display of aviation, as we say in these progressive days, fitted to provoke the most earthbound spirit to envy; a pair of violet-green swallows, loveliest of the swallow tribe, never so busy, hastening in and out of an old woodpecker's hole in a stunted wayside oak; tiny hummingbirds, of course, by name Calliope, wearing the daintiest of fan-shaped, cherry-colored gorgets, true mountaineers, every soul of them, fearless of frost and snow, if only the manzanita bells would hold out; and, in particular, a sooty grouse, who nearly put my neck out of joint before after a good half-hour, at least I finally caught sight of him as he hitched about in his leafy hidingplace near the top of a tall pine tree, complaining by the hour. Boom, boom, boom, boo-boom, boom, boom, so the measure ran, with that odd grace note invariably preceding the fourth syllable, as if it were a point of conscience with the performer that it should stand just there and nowhere else. A forlorn, moping kind of amorous ditty, it sounded to me; most unmusical, most melancholy, though perhaps I had no call to criticize.

Hark, from the pines a doleful sound,
My ears attend the cry,

my old-fashioned, orthodox memory fell to repeating, while the hollow, sepulchral notes grew fainter and fainter with distance as I walked away. Yet I might appropriately enough have envied the fellow his altitudinous position, if nothing else, remembering how grand and almost grown-up a certain small Massachusetts boy used to feel as he surveyed the world from a perch not half so exalted, in what to his eyes was about the tallest pine tree in the world, up in his father's pasture.