.

In autumn, when the colors are ripe, the whole circular grove, at a
little distance, looks like a big handful of flowers set in a cup to be
kept fresh--a tuft of goldenrods. Its feeding-streams are exceedingly
beautiful, notwithstanding their inconstancy and extreme shallowness.
They have no channel whatever, and consequently are left free to spread
in thin sheets upon the shining granite and wander at will. In many
places the current is less than a fourth of an inch deep, and flows with
so little friction it is scarcely visible. Sometimes there is not a
single foam-bell, or drifting pine-needle, or irregularity of any sort
to manifest its motion. Yet when observed narrowly it is seen to form a
web of gliding lacework exquisitely woven, giving beautiful reflections
from its minute curving ripples and eddies, and differing from the
water-laces of large cascades in being everywhere transparent. In
spring, when the snow is melting, the lake-bowl is brimming full, and
sends forth quite a large stream that slips glassily for 200 yards or
so, until it comes to an almost vertical precipice 800 feet high, down
which it plunges in a fine cataract; then it gathers its scattered
waters and goes smoothly over folds of gently dipping granite to its
confluence with the main canon stream. During the greater portion of the
year, however, not a single water sound will you hear either at head or
foot of the lake, not oven the whispered lappings of ripple-waves along
the shore; for the winds are fenced out. But the deep mountain silence
is sweetened now and then by birds that stop here to rest and drink on
their way across the canon.

LAKE STAKE KING

A beautiful variety of the bench-top lakes occurs just where the great
lateral moraines of the main glaciers have been shoved forward in
outswelling concentric rings by small residual tributary glaciers.
Instead of being encompassed by a narrow ring of trees like Orange Lake,
these lie embosomed in dense moraine woods, so dense that in seeking
them you may pass them by again and again, although you may know nearly
where they lie concealed.

[Illustration: LAKE STARR KING.]

Lake Starr King, lying to the north of the cone of that name, above the
Little Yosemite Valley, is a fine specimen of this variety. The ouzels
pass it by, and so do the ducks; they could hardly get into it if they
would, without plumping straight down inside the circling trees.

Yet these isolated gems, lying