caused a noisy
plashing and beating of wings among cranes and geese. The ducks, less
wary, kept their places, merely swimming in and out through openings
in the rushes, rippling the glassy water, and raising spangles in their
wake. The countenance of the lava beds became less and less forbidding.
Tufts of pale grasses, relieved on the jet rocks, looked like ornaments
on a mantel, thick-furred mats of emerald mosses appeared in damp spots
next the shore, and I noticed one tuft of small ferns. From year to year
in the kindly weather the beds are thus gathering beauty--beauty for
ashes.

Returning to Sheep Rock and following the old emigrant road, one is soon
back again beneath the snows and shadows of Shasta, and the Ash Creek
and McCloud Glaciers come into view on the east side of the mountain.
They are broad, rugged, crevassed cloudlike masses of down-grinding ice,
pouring forth streams of muddy water as measures of the work they are
doing in sculpturing the rocks beneath them; very unlike the long,
majestic glaciers of Alaska that riverlike go winding down the valleys
through the forests to the sea. These, with a few others as yet
nameless, are lingering remnants of once great glaciers that occupied
the canyons now taken by the rivers, and in a few centuries will, under
present conditions, vanish altogether.

The rivers of the granite south half of the Sierra are outspread on
the peaks in a shining network of small branches, that divide again
and again into small dribbling, purling, oozing threads drawing their
sources from the snow and ice of the surface. They seldom sink out of
sight, save here and there in the moraines or glaciers, or, early in the
season, beneath the banks and bridges of snow, soon to issue again.
But in the north half, laden with rent and porous lava, small tributary
streams are rare, and the rivers, flowing for a time beneath the sky of
rock, at length burst forth into the light in generous volume from
seams and caverns, filtered, cool, and sparkling, as if their bondage in
darkness, safe from the vicissitudes of the weather in their youth, were
only a blessing.

Only a very small portion of the water derived from the melting ice
and snow of Shasta flows down its flanks on the surface. Probably
ninety-nine per cent of it is at once absorbed and drained away beneath
the porous lava-folds of the mountain to gush forth, filtered and pure,
in the form of immense springs, so large, some of them, th