ghs enough to kindle a roaring
fire,--made a kitchen-table by wedging logs between the trunks of a
three-forked tree, and thatching these with smaller sticks,--selected a
cedar-canopied piece of flat sward near the fire for our bed-room, and
as high up as we could reach despoiled our fragrant _baldacchini_ for
the mattresses. I need not praise to any woodsman the quality of a sleep
on evergreen-strewings.

During our whole stay in the Valley, most of us made it our practice to
rise with the dawn, and, immediately after a bath in the ice-cold
Merced, take a breakfast which might sometimes fail in the
game-department, but was an invariable success, considered as slapjacks
and coffee. Then the loyal nephew of the Secesh governor and the
testamentary guardian of the orphan mules brought our horses up from
picket; then the artists with their camp-stools and color-boxes, the
sages with their goggles, nets, botany-boxes, and bug-holders, the
gentlemen of elegant leisure with their naked eyes and a fish-rod or a
gun, all rode away whither they listed, firing back Parthian shots of
injunction about the dumpling in the grouse-fricassee.

Sitting in their divine workshop, by a little after sunrise our artists
began labor in that only method which can ever make a true painter or a
living landscape, _color_-studies on the spot; and though I am not here
to speak of their results, I will assert that during their seven weeks'
camp in the Valley they learned more and gained greater material for
future triumphs than they had gotten in all their lives before at the
feet of the greatest masters. Meanwhile the other two vaguely divided
orders of gentlemen and sages were sight-seeing, whipping the covert or
the pool with various success for our next day's dinner, or hunting
specimens of all kinds,--_Agassizing_, so to speak.

I cannot praise the Merced to that vulgar, yet extensive, class of
sportsmen with whom fishing means nothing but catching fish,--to that
select minority of _illuminati_ who go trouting for intellectual
culture, because they cannot hear Booth or a _Sonata_ of
Beethoven's,--who write rhapsodies of much fire and many pages on the
divine superiority of the curve of an hyperbola over that of a parabola
in the cast of a fly,--who call three little troutlings "_a splendid
day's sport, me boy_!" because those rash and ill-advised infants have
been deceived by a feather-bug which never would have been of any use to
them, inst