s a surprise by the nicest
poached eggs and rashers of bacon, home-made bread and wild-strawberry
sweetmeats, which they will find in the State.

Before reaching Clark's we had been astonished at the dimensions of the
ordinary pines and firs, our trail for miles at a time running through
forests where trees one hundred and fifty feet high were very common and
trees of two hundred feet by no means rare, while some of the very
largest must have considerably surpassed the latter measurement.

But these were in their turn dwarfed by the Big Trees proper, as
thoroughly as themselves would have dwarfed a common Green-Mountain
forest. I find no one on this side the continent who believes the
literal truth which travellers tell about these marvellous giants.
People sometimes think they do, but that is only because they fail to
realize the proposition. They have no concrete idea of how the asserted
proportions look. Tell a carpenter, or any other man at home with the
look of dimensions, what you have seen in the Mariposa-County groves,
and his eye grows incredulous in a moment. I freely confess, that,
though I always thought I _had_ believed travellers in their recitals on
this subject, when I saw the trees I found I had bargained to credit no
such story as that, and for a moment felt half-reproachful towards the
friends who had cheated me of my faith under a misapprehension.

Take the dry statistics of the matter. Out of one hundred and thirty-two
trees which have been measured, not one underruns twenty-eight feet in
circumference; five range between thirty-two and thirty-six feet;
fifty-eight between forty and fifty feet; thirty-four between fifty and
sixty; fourteen between sixty and seventy; thirteen between seventy and
eighty; two between eighty and ninety; two between ninety and one
hundred; two are just one hundred; and one is one hundred and two. This
last, before the storms truncated it, had a height of four hundred feet.
I found a rough ladder laid against its trunk,--for it is
prostrate,--and climbed upon its side by that and steps cut in the bark.
I mounted the swell of the trunk to the butt and there made the
measurement which ascertained its diameter as thirty-four feet,--its
circumference one hundred and two feet _plus_ a fraction. Of course the
thickness of its bark is various, but I cut off some of it to a foot in
depth and there was evidently plenty more below that.

To make some rough attempt at a conceptio