of an old Yo-Semite brave.
Tis-sa-ack was the tutelar goddess of the Valley, as Tu-toch-anula was
its fostering god,--the former a radiant maiden, the latter an
ever-young immortal,--

"amorous as the month of May."

Becoming desperately fascinated with his fair colleague, Tu-toch-anula
spent in her arms all the divine long days of the California summer,
kissing, dallying, and lingering, until the Valley-tribes began to
starve for lack of the crops which his supervision should have ripened,
and a deputation of venerable men came from the dying people to
prostrate themselves at the foot of Tis-sa-ack. Full of anguish at her
nation's woes, she rose from her lover's arms, and cried for succor to
the Great Spirit. Then, with a terrible noise of thunder, the mighty
cone split from heaven to earth,--its frontal half falling down to dam
the snow-waters back into a lake, whence to this day the beautiful
Valley-stream takes one of its loveliest branches,--its other segment
remaining erect till this present, to be the Great South Dome under the
_in-memoriam_ title of Tis-sa-ack. But the divine maiden who died to
save her people appeared on earth no more, and in his agony
Tu-toch-anula carved her image on the face of the mile-high wall, as he
had carved his own on the surface of El Capitan,--where a lively faith
and good glasses may make out the effigies unto this day.

Sometimes these Indian traditions, being translated according to the
doctrine of correspondences, are of great use to the scientific man,--in
the present instance, as embalming with sweet spices a geological fact,
and the reason of a water-course which else might become obscured by
time. You may lose a rough fact because everybody is handling it and
passing it around with the sense of a liberty to present it next in his
own way; but a fact with its facets cut--otherwise a poem--is
unchangeable, imperditable. Seeing it has been manufactured once, nobody
tries to make it over again. The fact is regarded subject to liberal
translation; poems circulate virgin and _verbatim_. In some future
article I may recur to this topic with reference to the Columbia River,
and the capital light afforded to delvers in its wondrous trap-rock by
the lantern of Indian legend.

Let us leave the walls of the Valley to speak of the Valley itself, as
seen from this great altitude. There lies a sweep of emerald grass
turned to chrysoprase by the slant-beamed sun,--chrysoprase beauti