des, so I chose it as the most attractive highway. After I had
passed the tall groves that stretch a mile above Mirror Lake, and
scrambled around the Tenaya Fall, which is just at the head of the lake
groves, I crept through the dense and spiny chaparral that plushes the
roots of the mountains here for miles in warm green, and was ascending
a precipitous rock front, smoothed by glacial action, when I suddenly
fell--for the first time since I touched foot to Sierra rocks. After
several somersaults, I became insensible from the shock, and when
consciousness returned I found myself wedged among short, stiff bushes,
trembling as if cold, not injured in the slightest.

Judging by the sun, I could not have been insensible very long; probably
not a minute, possibly an hour; and I could not remember what made
me fall, or where I had fallen from; but I saw that if I had rolled a
little further, my mountain climbing would have been finished, for just
beyond the bushes the canyon wall steepened and I might have fallen to
the bottom. "There," said I, addressing my feet, to whose separate skill
I had learned to trust night and day on any mountain, "that is what you
get by intercourse with stupid town stairs, and dead pavements." I felt
degraded and worthless. I had not yet reached the most difficult portion
of the canyon, but I determined to guide my humbled body over the
most nerve-trying places I could find; for I was now awake, and felt
confident that the last of the town fog had been shaken from both head
and feet.

I camped at the mouth of a narrow gorge which is cut into the bottom of
the main canyon, determined to take earnest exercise next day. No plushy
boughs did my ill-behaved bones enjoy that night, nor did my bumped head
get a spicy cedar plume pillow mixed with flowers. I slept on a naked
boulder, and when I awoke all my nervous trembling was gone.

The gorged portion of the canyon, in which I spent all the next day, is
about a mile and a half in length; and I passed the time in tracing the
action of the forces that determined this peculiar bottom gorge, which
is an abrupt, ragged-walled, narrow-throated canyon, formed in the
bottom of the wide-mouthed, smooth, and beveled main canyon. I will not
stop now to tell you more; some day you may see it, like a shadowy line,
from Cloud's Rest. In high water, the stream occupies all the bottom of
the gorge, surging and chafing in glorious power from wall to wall.
But the sou