y are
smooth, level, silky lawns, lying embedded in the upper forests, on the
floors of the valleys, and along the broad backs of the main dividing
ridges, at a height of about 8000 to 9500 feet above the sea.

They are nearly as level as the lakes whose places they have taken, and
present a dry, even surface free from rock-heaps, mossy bogginess, and
the frowsy roughness of rank, coarse-leaved, weedy, and shrubby
vegetation. The sod is close and fine, and so complete that you cannot
see the ground; and at the same time so brightly enameled with flowers
and butterflies that it may well be called a garden-meadow, or
meadow-garden; for the plushy sod is in many places so crowded with
gentians, daisies, ivesias, and various species of orthocarpus that the
grass is scarcely noticeable, while in others the flowers are only
pricked in here and there singly, or in small ornamental rosettes.

The most influential of the grasses composing the sod is a delicate
calamagrostis with fine filiform leaves, and loose, airy panicles that
seem to float above the flowery lawn like a purple mist. But, write as I
may, I cannot give anything like an adequate idea of the exquisite
beauty of these mountain carpets as they lie smoothly outspread in the
savage wilderness. What words are fine enough to picture them I to what
shall we liken them? The flowery levels of the prairies of the old West,
the luxuriant savannahs of the South, and the finest of cultivated
meadows are coarse in comparison. One may at first sight compare them
with the carefully tended lawns of pleasure-grounds; for they are as
free from weeds as they, and as smooth, but here the likeness ends; for
these wild lawns, with all their exquisite fineness, have no trace of
that painful, licked, snipped, repressed appearance that pleasure-ground
lawns are apt to have even when viewed at a distance. And, not to
mention the flowers with which they are brightened, their grasses are
very much finer both in color and texture, and instead of lying flat and
motionless, matted together like a dead green cloth, they respond to the
touches of every breeze, rejoicing in pure wildness, blooming and
fruiting in the vital light.

Glacier meadows abound throughout all the alpine and subalpine regions
of the Sierra in still greater numbers than the lakes. Probably from
2500 to 3000 exist between latitude 36 deg. 30' and 39 deg., distributed, of
course, like the lakes, in concordance with all the