re thunderbolts were wont
To smite thy Titan-fashioned front,
And heard dark mountains rock and roll;
I saw the lightning's gleaming rod
Reach forth and write on heaven's scroll
The awful autograph of God!_

And what a mighty heart these Sierras have! Kissing the purple of heaven
now, and now in their awful deeps hiding the shrinking form of darkness
from the sun.

The shaggy monsters that prowl there, the mountains of gold that lie
waiting there, the mystery and the splendor! Oh keep with me, my friend,
for a little while in the Sierras; breathe their balm and health, see
their sublimity, feel their might and their majesty; step upward, as on
stepping stairs to heaven; and my word for it, you will be none the
worse.

In a canyon here, deep, deep, away down in the darkness, where night
seems to have an abiding place, where the sun sifts through the
pine-tops timidly, where the loftiest trees tip-toe up and seem to
strive to reach out of the edge of the chasm, there gurgles a little
muddy stream among the boulders, about the miners' legs, as they bend
their backs wearily and toil for gold.

Here the smoke curls up from a low log cabin; there a squirrel barks a
nut on the roof of a ruined and deserted miner's home, and away up
yonder, where the deep gorge is so narrow you can almost leap across it,
the wild beasts prowl as if it were really night, and great owls beat
their wings against the boughs of the dense wood in everlasting
darkness. But high over gorge and wilderness, gleaming against the cold
blue sky, towers Mount Shasta, the monarch of the Sierras.

Here, where the canyon debouches into the little valley, once stood a
populous mining camp; and a little further on, where the sun fell in
full splendor, a few farms of a primitive kind, tended by broken-down
old miners, lay.

The old glory of the camp was gone, and only a few battered and crippled
men were left. It was as if there had been a great battle of the giants,
and the victorious and successful had gone away with all the fruits of
victory, and left the wounded, the helpless, the half-hearted behind.
The mining camp at the mouth of the great canyon had been worked out, so
far as the placer mines went, and these few broken men who remained, as
a rule, were turning their attention to other things. Here one had
planted a little garden on the hillside, on a spot that had once been a
graveyard. There, an old lawyer had grown grape-vi