and Yo-Semite expeditions
had entered Mariposa on Clark's horse,--lost our eighty golden dollars
at a single session of bluff,--departed gayly for Coulterville, where he
sold Clark's horse at auction for forty dollars, including saddle and
bridle, and immediately at another game of bluff lost the entire
purchase-money to the happy buyer, (Clark got his horse again on proving
title,)--and finally vanished for parts unknown, with nothing in his
pocket but buttons, or in his memory but villanies. Nowhere out of
California or Old Spain can there exist such a modern survivor of the
days of Gil Blas!

Too happy in the recovery of Clark's and our own animals to waste time
in hue-and-cry, I loaded my two reclaimed pack-beasts with all that our
commissariat needed,--nooned at Clark's, on my way back, the third day
after leaving the Valley for Mariposa, and that same night was among my
rejoicing comrades at the head of the Great Yo-Semite. That afternoon
they had come to the bottom of the flour-bag, after living for three
days on unleavened slapjacks without either butter or sirup. I have seen
people who professed to relish the Jewish Passover-bread; but, after
such an experience as our party's, I venture to say they would have
regarded it worthy of a place among the other abolished types of the
Mosaic dispensation. As for me and the mule, we felt our hearts swell
within us as if we had come to raise the siege of Leyden. In that same
enthusiasm shared our artists, _savans_, and gentlemen, embracing the
shaggy neck of the mule as he had been a brother what time they realized
that his panniers were full. Can any one wonder at my early words, "A
slapjack may be the last plank between the woodsman and starvation"?

Just before I started after supplies our party moved its camp to a
position five miles up the Valley beyond Camp Rosalie, in a beautiful
grove of oaks and cedars, close upon the most sinuous part of the Merced
margin, with rich pasture for our animals immediately across the stream,
and the loftiest cataract in the world roaring over the bleak precipice
opposite. This is the Yo-Semite Fall proper, or, in the Indian,
"Cho-looke." By the most recent geological surveys this fall is credited
with the astounding height of twenty-eight hundred feet. At an early
period the entire mass of water must have plunged that distance without
break. At this day a single ledge of slant projection changes the
headlong flood from cataract to