h calm and storm since
first they arrived. They look lonely here, strangers in a strange
land,--huge blocks, angular mountain chips, the largest twenty or thirty
feet in diameter, the chips that Nature has made in modeling her
landscapes, fashioning the forms of her mountains and valleys. And with
what tool were they quarried and carried? On the pavement we find its
marks. The most resisting unweathered portion of the surface is scored
and striated in a rigidly parallel way, indicating that the region has
been overswept by a glacier from the northeastward, grinding down the
general mass of the mountains, scoring and polishing, producing a
strange, raw, wiped appearance, and dropping whatever boulders it
chanced to be carrying at the time it was melted at the close of the
Glacial Period. A fine discovery this. As for the forests we have been
passing through, they are probably growing on deposits of soil most of
which has been laid down by this same ice agent in the form of moraines
of different sorts, now in great part disintegrated and outspread by
post-glacial weathering.

Out of the grassy meadow and down over this ice-planed granite runs the
glad young Tamarack Creek, rejoicing, exulting, chanting, dancing in
white, glowing, irised falls and cascades on its way to the Merced
Canon, a few miles below Yosemite, falling more than three thousand feet
in a distance of about two miles.

All the Merced streams are wonderful singers, and Yosemite is the centre
where the main tributaries meet. From a point about half a mile from our
camp we can see into the lower end of the famous valley, with its
wonderful cliffs and groves, a grand page of mountain manuscript that I
would gladly give my life to be able to read. How vast it seems, how
short human life when we happen to think of it, and how little we may
learn, however hard we try! Yet why bewail our poor inevitable
ignorance? Some of the external beauty is always in sight, enough to
keep every fibre of us tingling, and this we are able to gloriously
enjoy though the methods of its creation may lie beyond our ken. Sing
on, brave Tamarack Creek, fresh from your snowy fountains, plash and
swirl and dance to your fate in the sea; bathing, cheering every living
thing along your way.

Have greatly enjoyed all this huge day, sauntering and seeing, steeping
in the mountain influences, sketching, noting, pressing flowers,
drinking ozone and Tamarack water. Found the white fragrant