IN THE COAST RANGE.

5

sightly skeleton. Many of these foundation-hills, and particularly the little valleys between them were finished in her happiest mood. Many of these cinders of spent forces have been well fleshed with soil, well watered, made fragrant with gums and odorous plants, and toned in healthy glistening green.

But it is down into the valleys that you must go, into the valleys of the Coast Range, and that too before man has mutilated everything, if you would see what nature has done for this strip of seaboard. There are natural meadows arabesque with tawny wild-oats, blossoming pea, and golden mustard, interspersed with indigenous vineyards, and fruit-bearing thickets. There are flower-gardens laid out in patterns by the deft fingers of nature, stars and crowns and chaplets of yellow, purple, white, and red. Scattered over broad park-like plains, and rising from tall wavy grass are oaks of various forms and species, some high with broad branches, and many scraggy and storm-bent. Here and there trees cluster in groves, and clumps of under-growth gather round to keep them company. Rising from the broad plain are solitary buttes, with cloud-entangling crests, sharp and high; and all around the borders bluff promontories, and tongues of uplifted land timbered with beech and birch, ash, myrtle, and laurel, shoot out into the valley, sometimes sudsiding in small round hills covered with tulips, wild onions, hemp, flax, and prickly chaparral. Now bring down through rocky cañons the clear dancing water; lead it round in winding courses where it will best moisten the surface, broadening it occasionally into lakes, locking it in lagoons, or leaving it in sluggish sloughs; then go out while the morning is fresh and gray, just as the sun begins to pour a sensuous warmth into the air, to refine the inists and give lustre to the foliage, and to set life glowing under a blue and purple haze, and if the eyes shine not with gladness, and the breast swells not

with gratitude, then the heart is hard indeed, and the breast but little better than a flint.

You say that such a region should teem with animal life, and so it does. You can see there pelicans and sea-gulls fishing together in the bays; seals and sea-lions barking on the islands; wild fowl thickly clustered on lake and tule-marsh; fish darting amid the waters; and beasts of many several sorts roaming the forests. On the tangled hillside is heard the soft note of the curlew; you may listen also to the rustling of the pheasant, the chirrup of the blackbird, the whistling of the partridge, and the sweet songs of the robin and the lark. And they all rest content; they are not driven by intense heat or cold to long migrations, their little journeys between valley and mountain being scarcely more than an afternoon's ramble. Nor need they take much thought for the morrow; even the prudent bee often leaves neglected the honey-bearing flower, and fails to lay in a winter's store. To elk and antelope, deer and bear, hill and plain are one, and that whether scorched by summer's sun or freshened by winter's rain. Bounteous nature plants the fields, brings forth the tender verdure, cures the grass, and stores the acorns. Little of frozen winter is here, little of damp, malarious summer; cool invigorating nights succeed the warmest days. Ice and snow banished hence sit cold and stolid on distant peaks, whence are reflected the impotent rays of the sun.

Where then is winter? November drops its gentle rain upon the sun-burned ground, closing the weathercracks, freshening the Lydian air, and carpeting the late gray hills and vales in green; and this is winter. Spring comes warm and wanton, and nature is clad in holiday garb. Summer, dry and elastic, and trembling in amethystine light, is fragrant with the odor of dried grass, cypress, wild bay, and juniper. The heat of summer is seldom enervating, and the thick sullen fogs that creep in from the ocean are not

WONDERS OF THE REGION.

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unhealthy. The climate of California is reliable; though her women may be fickle, her winds are not. Rain she sends at rain-time, and this having passed prayers are of no avail.

Thus along the centuries seasons come and go, while over all diurnally sweeps the half-tropic sun. In the broad arch float flocks of light clouds, or spread out in long fleecy folds between which at night silently sails the melancholy moon. From the sparkling white on alpine domes the gray and golden sunlight smiles across the amphitheatre, enfolds the lustrous clouds which send shadows crawling along the mountainside and over the plains, nods with its earliest rays to sleepy ocean, dances back from sea to snow-peak; then, palpitating in purple, it rises from violet-banks and grizzly hills, and mingles with the russet haze of the horizon, or creeps in tenderer tones through evanescent mists into deep cañons and murky ravines, and glows warm and tremulous over the sombre shades below.

Before descending to the more practical affairs of life in this region, I might point you out some of the so-called wonders of the arena-rim; though I may say to you that long since I arrived at the conclusion that there is in heaven or earth no one thing more wonderful than another. With whatsoever we are unfamiliar, that to us is wonderful when seen; wonder is but the exclamation of ignorance.

Yonder at the northern end, lonely and white, stands Mount Shasta, girdled by lesser volcanic peaks that look like pigmies beside the monarch of the north which lifts its front so proudly above the solemn forestsea that beats in mournful monotones upon its base. To one not cradled amid such sights its awful grandeur beside our puny life is crushing. Standing in the clear atmosphere, unrivalled and apart, like Orion it catches from over the eastern ridge the first rays of morning, and flashes them far down the vista; while at evening

its frosty diadem gleams with the glances of the departing sun long after the shades of night have overspread the surrounding hills.

Before us at the portal two sentinels, Helena and Diablo, guard either side, with Tamalpais picketed near the entrance; while far to the south, over the Tulare lakes and meadows, from the cold starlit ether or glowing in the roseate hues of day, the tall obelisks and stately domes and bristling minarets of mounts Brewer, Whitney, and Tyndall look down in grave guardianship. Proud immutability! Yet whether

dripping with slimy sea-beds, or being graven by glaciers, or smoothed into forms of comeliness by tempest, these mighty ministers to needful lowlands do nevertheless slowly crumble in decay, and with their dust feed forest and flower. So man is laid low, and mind.

A little to our left, and almost hidden by granitewaves and conoidal domes that rise out of broad firplanted snow-fields, yawns the plateau-rent of Yosemite. It lies in the Sierra foothills, nearly at right angles to their trend, and consists of a trough-like erosion, or sink, about a mile in perpendicular depth, six miles in length, with a flat bottom from half a mile to a mile in irregular width. Angles and square recesses press into walls of light gray granite, brilliantly white under the reflection of the sun's rays, in places reddened by moss, fantastically carved, or stained with vertical parallel stripes of brown and black. Over these smooth white walls the Merced and its tributaries leap in wavy silver threads, and dashing in dusty foam upon the chasm floor, intone eternal hallelujahs. Any one of the scores of domes, and peaks, and perpendicular channels, and lichencovered precipices that here present themselves taken apart constitutes of itself a study.

Climbing up the outer side of the basin, and emerging from the level forest that covers the thick · flat rim and veils the approach to the chasm, the tourist

of later times sharply reins in his steed-if so be that the jaded cayuse requires it-dismounts, and stands on Inspiration point, a rocky eminence commanding a partial view of the valley. Here every one who writes a book stands spell-bound as if in the presence of the almighty, beholds a new heaven and a new earth, feels the omnipotence and majesty of the infinite, attempts in vain to give his vision utterance, indulges in a sublime fit of rhapsody, and then drops into mesmeric silence. Old life and ordinary emotions are suspended, and a new tide of feeling rushes in upon the soul. The mortal part of man shrinks back, and the immortal prostrates the beholder before this apparition of majesty and desolation.

Entering at the lower end by the Mariposa trail, a general view of the valley is obtained, which displays first, on the left, the granite-block El Capitan, a smooth seamless battlement, rising clearly cut 3,300 feet in height; and on the right the Bridal Veil fall, a white cascade of fluttering gossamer, leaping from the western edge of Cathedral rock 630 feet, when striking the heaped-up débris at the base of the cliff, it continues in a series of cascades 300 feet perpendicular to the bottom, where it flows off in ten or twelve streamlets. Summer dries the Virgin's Tears that fall opposite the Bridal Veil, for their source is not the eternal snow of the high sierra. When the stream that feeds the fall runs low, nearly all the water is dissipated by the wind, which first sways, then scatters it, and finally breaks it into quivering spray, which the tardy sun, when it appears, gilds with rainbows.

Over the floor of the enclosure is spread a variegated carpet fit for a palace of the gods. Meadows of thick grass are interspersed with flowers and flowering shrubs, and fringed with thickets of manzanita, alder, maple, and laurel, and groves of oak, cedar, and fir, with occasional moss-covered rocks, marshes, and patches of sand; while high up on the battlement,