y
than the sun to lighten it, and the sea shall be of crystal.

King was to have joined us in our Yo-Semite trip. We little knew that we
were losing, for this world, our last opportunity of close daily
intercourse with his sweet spirit, though we were grievously
disappointed when he told us, on the eve of our setting out, that work
for the nation must detain him in San Francisco, after all.

If report was true, we were going to the original site of the Garden of
Eden,--into a region which out-Bendemered Bendemere, out-valleyed the
valley of Rasselas, surpassed the Alps in its waterfalls, and the
Himmal'yeh in its precipices. As for the two former subjects of
comparison, we never met any tourist who could adjust the question from
his own experience; but the superiority of the Yo-Semite to the Alpine
cataracts was a matter put beyond doubt by repeated judgments, and a
couple of English officers who had explored the wildest Himmal'yeh
scenery told Starr King that there was no precipice in Asia to be
compared for height or grandeur with Tu-toch-anula and Tis-sa-ack.

We were going into the vale whose giant domes and battlements had months
before thrown their photographic shadow through Watkins's camera across
the mysterious wide continent, causing exclamations of awe at Goupil's
window, and ecstasy in Dr. Holmes's study. At Goupil's counter and in
Starr King's drawing-room we had gazed on them by the hour already,--I,
let me confess it, half a Thomas-a-Didymus to Nature, unwilling to
believe the utmost true of her till I could put my finger in her very
prints. Now we were going to test her reported largess for ourselves.

No Saratoga affair, this! A total lack of tall trunks, frills, and
curling-kids. Driven by the oestrum of a Yo-Semite pilgrimage, the
San-Francisco belle forsakes (the Western vernacular is "goes back on")
her back-hair, abandons her capillary "waterfalls" for those of the
Sierra, and, like John Phoenix's old lady who had her whole osseous
system removed by the patent tooth-puller, departs, leaving her
"skeleton" behind her. The bachelor who cares to see unhooped womanhood
once more before he dies should go to the Yo-Semite. The scene was three
or four times presented to us during our seven weeks' camp
there,--though the trip is one which might well cost a feeble woman her
life.

Our male preparations were of the most pioneer description. One wintry
day since my return I was riding in a train on the N