eir prime, running crystal clear, deep and full but not overflowing
their banks--about as deep through the night as the day, the difference
in volume so marked in spring being now too slight to be noticed. Nearly
all the weather is cloudless and everything is at its brightest--lake,
river, garden and forest with all their life. Most of the plants are in
full flower. The blessed ouzels have built their mossy huts and are now
singing their best songs with the streams.

In tranquil, mellow autumn, when the year's work is about done and
the fruits are ripe, birds and seeds out of their nests, and all the
landscape is glowing like a benevolent countenance, then the streams
are at their lowest ebb, with scarce a memory left of their wild spring
floods. The small tributaries that do not reach back to the lasting
snow fountains of the summit peaks shrink to whispering, tinkling
currents. After the snow is gone from the basins, excepting occasional
thundershowers, they are now fed only by small springs whose waters
are mostly evaporated in passing over miles of warm pavements, and in
feeling their way slowly from pool to pool through the midst of boulders
and sand. Even the main rivers are so low they may easily be forded, and
their grand falls and cascades, now gentle and approachable, have waned
to sheets of embroidery.

Chapter 4

Snow Banners

But it is on the mountain tops, when they are laden with loose, dry snow
and swept by a gale from the north, that the most magnificent storm
scenery is displayed. The peaks along the axis of the Range are then
decorated with resplendent banners, some of them more than a mile long,
shining, streaming, waving with solemn exuberant enthusiasm as if
celebrating some surpassingly glorious event.

The snow of which these banners are made falls on the high Sierra in
most extravagant abundance, sometimes to a depth of fifteen or twenty
feet, coming from the fertile clouds not in large angled flakes such as
one oftentimes sees in Yosemite, seldom even in complete crystals, for
many of the starry blossoms fall before they are ripe, while most of
those that attain perfect development as six-petaled flowers are more
or less broken by glinting and chafing against one another on the
way down to their work. This dry frosty snow is prepared for the grand
banner-waving celebrations by the action of the wind. Instead of at
once finding rest like that which falls into the tranquil depths of
t