stance of about thirty miles. Here the
scenery undergoes a sudden and startling condensation. Mountains, red,
gray, and black, rise close at hand on the right, whitened around their
bases with banks of enduring snow; on the left swells the huge red mass
of Mount Gibbs, while in front the eye wanders down the shadowy canon,
and out on the warm plain of Mono, where the lake is seen gleaming like
a burnished metallic disk, with clusters of lofty volcanic cones to the
south of it.

When at length we enter the mountain gateway, the somber rocks seem
aware of our presence, and seem to come thronging closer about us.
Happily the ouzel and the old familiar robin are here to sing us
welcome, and azure daisies beam with trustfulness and sympathy, enabling
us to feel something of Nature's love even here, beneath the gaze of her
coldest rocks.

The effect of this expressive outspokenness on the part of the
canon-rocks is greatly enhanced by the quiet aspect of the alpine
meadows through which we pass just before entering the narrow gateway.
The forests in which they lie, and the mountain-tops rising beyond them,
seem quiet and tranquil. We catch their restful spirit, yield to the
soothing influences of the sunshine, and saunter dreamily on through
flowers and bees, scarce touched by a definite thought; then suddenly we
find ourselves in the shadowy canon, closeted with Nature in one of her
wildest strongholds.

After the first bewildering impression begins to wear off, we perceive
that it is not altogether terrible; for besides the reassuring birds and
flowers we discover a chain of shining lakelets hanging down from the
very summit of the pass, and linked together by a silvery stream. The
highest are set in bleak, rough bowls, scantily fringed with brown and
yellow sedges. Winter storms blow snow through the canon in blinding
drifts, and avalanches shoot from the heights. Then are these sparkling
tarns filled and buried, leaving not a hint of their existence. In June
and July they begin to blink and thaw out like sleepy eyes, the carices
thrust up their short brown spikes, the daisies bloom in turn, and the
most profoundly buried of them all is at length warmed and summered as
if winter were only a dream.

Red Lake is the lowest of the chain, and also the largest. It seems
rather dull and forbidding at first sight, lying motionless in its deep,
dark bed. The canon wall rises sheer from the water's edge on the south,
but on th