all
its mountaineering done,--no more foaming rock-leaping, no more wild,
exulting song. It falls into a smooth, glassy sleep, stirred only by the
night-wind, which, coming down the canon, makes it croon and mutter in
ripples along its broidered shores.

Leaving the lake, it glides quietly through the rushes, destined never
more to touch the living rock. Henceforth its path lies through ancient
moraines and reaches of ashy sage-plain, which nowhere afford rocks
suitable for the development of cascades or sheer falls. Yet this beauty
of maturity, though less striking, is of a still higher order, enticing
us lovingly on through gentian meadows and groves of rustling aspen to
Lake Mono, where, spirit-like, our happy stream vanishes in vapor, and
floats free again in the sky.

Bloody Canon, like every other in the Sierra, was recently occupied by a
glacier, which derived its fountain snows from the adjacent summits, and
descended into Mono Lake, at a time when its waters stood at a much
higher level than now. The principal characters in which the history of
the ancient glaciers is preserved are displayed here in marvelous
freshness and simplicity, furnishing the student with extraordinary
advantages for the acquisition of knowledge of this sort. The most
striking passages are polished and striated surfaces, which in many
places reflect the rays of the sun like smooth water. The dam of Red
Lake is an elegantly modeled rib of metamorphic slate, brought into
relief because of its superior strength, and because of the greater
intensity of the glacial erosion of the rock immediately above it,
caused by a steeply inclined tributary glacier, which entered the main
trunk with a heavy down-thrust at the head of the lake.

Moraine Lake furnishes an equally interesting example of a basin formed
wholly, or in part, by a terminal moraine dam curved across the path of
a stream between two lateral moraines.

At Moraine Lake the canon proper terminates, although apparently
continued by the two lateral moraines of the vanished glacier. These
moraines are about 300 feet high, and extend unbrokenly from the sides
of the canon into the plain, a distance of about five miles, curving and
tapering in beautiful lines. Their sunward sides are gardens, their
shady sides are groves; the former devoted chiefly to eriogonae,
compositae, and graminae; a square rod containing five or six profusely
flowered eriogonums of several species, about the sam