nearer, while the starry sky in glorious brightness stretched
across like a ceiling from wall to wall, and fitted closely down into
all the spiky irregularities of the summits. Then, after a long fireside
rest and a glance at my note-book, I cut a few leafy branches for a bed,
and fell into the clear, death-like sleep of the tired mountaineer.

Early next morning I set out to trace the grand old glacier that had
done so much for the beauty of the Yosemite region back to its farthest
fountains, enjoying the charm that every explorer feels in Nature's
untrodden wildernesses. The voices of the mountains were still asleep.
The wind scarce stirred the pine-needles. The sun was up, but it was yet
too cold for the birds and the few burrowing animals that dwell here.
Only the stream, cascading from pool to pool, seemed to be wholly awake.
Yet the spirit of the opening day called to action. The sunbeams came
streaming gloriously through the jagged openings of the _col_,
glancing on the burnished pavements and lighting the silvery lakes,
while every sun-touched rock burned white on its edges like melting iron
in a furnace. Passing round the north shore of my camp lake I followed
the central stream past many cascades from lakelet to lakelet. The
scenery became more rigidly arctic, the Dwarf Pines and Hemlocks
disappeared, and the stream was bordered with icicles. As the sun rose
higher rocks were loosened on shattered portions of the cliffs, and came
down in rattling avalanches, echoing wildly from crag to crag.

The main lateral moraines that extend from the jaws of the amphitheater
into the Illilouette Basin are continued in straggling masses along the
walls of the amphitheater, while separate boulders, hundreds of tons in
weight, are left stranded here and there out in the middle of the
channel. Here, also, I observed a series of small terminal moraines
ranged along the south wall of the amphitheater, corresponding in size
and form with the shadows cast by the highest portions. The meaning of
this correspondence between moraines and shadows was afterward made
plain. Tracing the stream back to the last of its chain of lakelets, I
noticed a deposit of fine gray mud on the bottom except where the force
of the entering current had prevented its settling. It looked like the
mud worn from a grindstone, and I at once suspected its glacial origin,
for the stream that was carrying it came gurgling out of the base of a
raw moraine that s