which the short Sierra-draining rivers reach
the ocean; its threading stream is the Merced; and if on any good
United-States Survey-map you will please to follow that river back to
the mountains, when your finger-nail touches the Sierra it will be (or
would, were the maps somewhat correcter) in the Great Yo-Semite. You
will then see that our course led us across three streams, after leaving
the San Joaquin at Stockton _en route_ for Mariposa,--the Stanislaus,
the Tuolomne, and the Main Merced. The distance from Stockton to
Mariposa is about one hundred miles, a small part of the way between
fenced ranches, a much greater part on wide, open, rolling plains,
somewhat like those of Nebraska, embraced between the two great ranges
of the State. Here and there you find an isolated herdsman or a small
settlement dropped down in this not unfruitful waste, and thrice you
come to a hybrid town, with a Spanish _plaza_, and Yankee notions sold
around it. We went the distance leisurely, consuming four days to
Mariposa, for we stopped here and there to sketch, "peep, and botanize";
besides, we were dragging with us a Jersey wagon, bought second-hand in
Stockton, in which we carried our heavier outfit till we should get our
extra pack-beasts at Mariposa, and to which we had harnessed for their
first time an implacable white mule with an incapable white horse, to
neither of which each other's society or their own new trade was
congenial.

I shall not linger here as we did there. To an ornithologist the whole
road is interesting,--especially to one making a specialty of owls. The
only game within easy reach is the dove and the California
ground-squirrel,--a big fellow, much like our Northeastern gray,
barring the former's subterranean habits. On the plains threaded by the
road the pasture is good, save in the extremest drought of summer, when
the great herds which usually feed at large on and between the
river-bottoms are driven to the rich green grass in the high valleys of
the Sierra,--or ought to be: many cattle died along the San Joaquin last
summer for want of this care. Occasionally the road winds through the
refreshing shadow of a grove of live-oaks, standing far from any water
on a sandy knoll. But the most magnificent trees of the oak family that
I ever beheld were growing on the banks of the Tuolomne River, where we
forded it at Roberts's Ferry. They were not merely in dimension superior
to the finest white-oaks of the East, b