hese bright fountains
for weeks, without meeting any animal larger than the marmots that
burrow beneath glacier boulders along the edges of the meadows.

The highest and youngest of all the lakes lie nestled in glacier wombs.
At first sight, they seem pictures of pure bloodless desolation,
miniature arctic seas, bound in perpetual ice and snow, and overshadowed
by harsh, gloomy, crumbling precipices. Their waters are keen
ultramarine blue in the deepest parts, lively grass-green toward the
shore shallows and around the edges of the small bergs usually floating
about in them. A few hardy sedges, frost-pinched every night, are
occasionally found making soft sods along the sun-touched portions of
their shores, and when their northern banks slope openly to the south,
and are soil-covered, no matter how coarsely, they are sure to be
brightened with flowers. One lake in particular now comes to mind which
illustrates the floweriness of the sun-touched banks of these icy gems.
Close up under the shadow of the Sierra Matterhorn, on the eastern slope
of the range, lies one of the iciest of these glacier lakes at an
elevation of about 12,000 feet. A short, ragged-edged glacier crawls
into it from the south, and on the opposite side it is embanked and
dammed by a series of concentric terminal moraines, made by the glacier
when it entirely filled the basin. Half a mile below lies a second lake,
at a height of 11,500 feet, about as cold and as pure as a snow-crystal.
The waters of the first come gurgling down into it over and through the
moraine dam, while a second stream pours into it direct from a glacier
that lies to the southeast. Sheer precipices of crystalline snow rise
out of deep water on the south, keeping perpetual winter on that side,
but there is a fine summery spot on the other, notwithstanding the lake
is only about 300 yards wide. Here, on August 25, 1873, I found a
charming company of flowers, not pinched, crouching dwarfs, scarce able
to look up, but warm and juicy, standing erect in rich cheery color and
bloom. On a narrow strip of shingle, close to the water's edge, there
were a few tufts of carex gone to seed; and a little way back up the
rocky bank at the foot of a crumbling wall so inclined as to absorb and
radiate as well as reflect a considerable quantity of sun-heat, was the
garden, containing a thrifty thicket of Cowania covered with large
yellow flowers; several bushes of the alpine ribes with berries nearly