glorious brightness of frosty mornings; the floods of sunbeams pouring over the white domes and crags into the groves and waterfalls, kindling marvelous iris fires in the hoarfrost and spray; the great forests and mountains in their deep noon sleep; the good-night alpenglow; the stars; the solemn gazing moon drawing the huge domes and headlands one by one glowing white out of the gloomy shadows, hushed and breathless like an audience in awful enthusiasm, while the meadows at their feet, afire with frostdiamonds, shine like the starry sky; the sublime darkness of storm-nights, when all the lights are out; the clouds in whose depths the frail snow-flowers grow, the behavior and many voices of the storms, trees, birds, waterfalls, snow avalanches in the ever-changing weather-and so on and on without end.

Every bright frosty morning loud sounds boom and reverberate from side to side of the Valley at intervals of a few minutes, beginning soon after sunrise and continuing an hour or two like a thunder-storm. They are made by the fall of frozen spray from the face of the cliff over which the Upper Yosemite Fall pours, and are loudest in the calmest, sunniest weather.

Frozen spray also gives rise to one of the most interesting winter features of the great fall-a pure white crystal hill, four or five hundred feet high, steep and hard to climb, shining at the foot of the fall and the smooth gray cliff, and often made glorious with irised spray. When nearly approached, it is seen to be a hollow, truncated cone, with the whole volume of the fall plunging down its crater-like throat with deep, muffled, rumbled explosions of compressed air, and, after being well churned and ground, escaping by arched openings at its base. It is built during the night and early hours of the morning; only in spells of exceptionally cold and cloudy weather is the work continued through the day. The greater part of the spray material falls in crystalline showers direct to its place; but a considerable portion is first frozen upon the face of the cliff along the sides of the fall, where it stays until expanded and cracked off by the sun in irregular masses, tons in weight. Thus the finest

of the downy wafts and curls of spraydust, which in mild nights fall about as silently as dew, are held back until sunrise to make a store of heavy ice to reinforce the waterfall's thunder-tones, and announce the arrival of the calmest, brightest days.

The Upper Yosemite Fall, on account of its greater height and exposure, is more influenced by the wind than any of the others. The summer winds that come up the river cañon from the sea and the plains are seldom stormy; but the winter gales do some very wild work, bending and twisting and at times fairly worrying the falls and forests, and hanging snow banners a mile long on the summit peaks.

One morning I was awakened by a pelting shower of pine-cones, and soon learned that a grand Norther was storming about the Valley, playing with the falls as if they were mere wisps of mist, and making the great pines bow and sing with glorious, exhilarating enthusiasm. Soon after sunrise, when I was seeking a place safe from flying branches, I saw the Lower Yosemite Fall thrashed and pulverized from top to bottom into one glorious mass of rainbow dust; while a thousand feet above it the main Upper Fall was suspended on the face of the cliff in the form of an inverted bow, all silvery white and fringed with short wavering strips. Then, suddenly assailed by a tremendous blast, the whole mass of the fall was blown into threads and ribbons, and driven back over the brow of the cliff whence it came, as if denied admission to the Valley. This kind of show-work was continued about ten or fifteen minutes; then another change in the play of the huge exulting swirls and billows and upheaving domes of the gale allowed the baffled fall to gather and arrange its tattered waters, and sing down again in its place. As the day advanced, the wild, triumphant gale gave no sign of dying, excepting brief lulls; the Valley was filled with its weariless roar, and the bright, cloudless sky grew garish white from myriads of minute sparkling snow-spicules. In the afternoon, when I was watching the storm from the shelter of a big pine-tree, the Upper Fall was suddenly arrested about half-way

down the cliff without being blown either upward or sidewise. The whole ponderous flood, weighing hundreds of tons, was simply held stationary in mid-air about one and a half minutes, resting on the invisible arm of the wind as if gravitation at that point in its path had been abolished. The ordinary amount of water, in the meantime, was pouring over the cliff, swedging and widening, forming a cone about seven hundred feet high. At length, as if ordered to go on, scores of arrowy comets shot down from the base of the majestic cone of white water as if escaping through separate outlets.

But glorious as are these Yosemite waterfalls rejoicing in all their bright array of icy jewelry and light, and in their sublime fullness of beauty and power in the spring, they sometimes enjoy a glad storm glory that excels all this, to be seen only once in a long rare while, when the snow lying deep on the mountains is suddenly melted into music and floods in the depth of winter. In all the years I have lived in Yosemite, only once have I seen the Valley in full universal flood-bloom. In the afternoon of December 16, 1871, a magnificent crimson cloud towered aloft in solitary grandeur above the Cathedral Rocks. It had a noble buttressed base, and smooth shaft like an old Sequoia, and a broad bossy down-curling crown, with all its parts colored alike in glowing crimson. Wondering what the meaning of this lonely red cloud might be, I was up betimes next morning watching the sky. Nothing like a storm sign came in sight until near noon, when thin curly gray clouds began to blur the sunshine, and after dark rain fell, which soon changed to

snow.

By daylight next morning nearly a foot had fallen, and it was still snowing thick and fast, and the avalanches began to sound.

In the night of the 18th there was another change to heavy rain, but as the temperature was only two degrees above the freezing point, the snow-line was only a few hundred feet above the Valley floor. The streams, therefore, instead of being increased in volume by this rain, were diminished, because the fresh snow sponged up part of their waters and choked the smaller tributaries. But to

ward midnight the temperature suddenly rose to 42 degrees, carrying the snowline above the rim of the Valley over the upper basins, and next morning the Valley was white, not with snow, but with waterfalls. The warm rain falling on the snow was at first absorbed and held back in perfect hushed silence, and so also was that portion of the snow that the rain melted, and all that was melted by the roaring, devouring flood of warm wind until the whole mass of the snow was saturated, became sludgy, and at length slipped, melted, and rushed simultaneously from a thousand slopes into the upper channels in wild, overwhelming extravagance, swelling and heaping flood over flood, and plunging down the cliffs in stupendous rock-shaking avalanches.

Called by the glorious storm, I made haste into the midst of it. The rain was like one vast cataract, and the wind blowing a gale was working in passionate accord with the rain and the streams. The section of the north wall of the valley opposite my cabin was covered with a network of falls and cascades, a glorious company of visitors that seemed strangely out of place, coming down everywhere like the rain without any apparent reference to channels. The two Sentinel cascades back of my cabin, scarce noticeable in summer, rivaled the great falls at ordinary stages, and across the Valley by the Three Brothers there were more falls and cascades than I could readily count, while the whole Valley, throbbing and trembling, was filled with an awful, solemn, sea-like roar. Gazing awhile in glad bewilderment, too rich and happy to know what to do, I at length tried to reach the upper meadow, where the Valley is widest, to gain general views. But the river by this time was over its banks, and the flooded meadows were lakes dotted with blue islands of half-melted snow. Along the sides of the Valley innumerable streams were hurrying to the river scattering gravel and tree ruins over the smooth garden levels. By climbing talus slopes, where the strength of these gray torrents is divided among earthquake boulders, I made out to cross them, forced my way up the Valley to Hutching's bridge,

crossed the river, and waded out to the middle of the upper meadow. Here most of the new falls were in sight, the most glorious congregation of waterfalls I ever saw or dreamed of. On that portion of the south wall between the Sentinel rock and a point opposite the Hutching's bridge there were ten falls plunging and booming from a height of nearly three thousand feet, the smallest of which might have been heard miles away. In the neighborhood of Glacier Point there were six; between the Three Brothers and Yosemite Fall, nine; between the Yosemite and Royal Arch Falls, ten; from Washington Column to Mount Watkins, ten; and on the shoulder of Half Dome facing the Valley, three; on the slopes of Half Dome and Cloud's Rest, eight-fifty-six new falls in the upper half of the Valley. In the whole Valley there must have been more than a hundred, besides a countless host of silvery embroidering threads and ribbons gleaming everywhere. As if celebrating some great Sierra event, these enthusiastic streams in holiday attire came thronging into the Yosemite temple from all the surrounding mountains, waving white banners, shouting, rejoicing, arousing every rock and crystal of the mighty walls to throb and tingle in glad accord.

Those who have visited the Valley in summer will remember the comet-like forms of the Upper Yosemite Fall and the laces of the Nevada and Bridal Veil. In this winter jubilee the lace forms predominated, but there was no lack of heavy, hard-headed thundering comets rushing through the air in rows and clusters with sublime display of beauty and power. The lower part of one of the Sentinel cascades was composed of two main white shafts, and the space between them was filled in with chained and beaded gauze of intricate pattern, through the singing threads of which the purplish

gray wall could be dimly seen. The group above Glacier Point was still more complicated in structure, displaying every imaginable form and action that water might be dashed, drawn out, combed, and woven into. Those on the north wall between Washington Column and the Royal Arch Fall were so closely related that they formed an almost continuous sheet, only slightly separated from those about Indian Cañon and the magnificent series extending to Mount Watkins. The Three Brothers and El Capitan groups were indescribably braided and netted and adorned with clusters of long-tailed comets on account of peculiarities of rock cleavage. The Dome Falls were smaller and finer. The great Half Dome at the head of the Valley, clad in light or cloud, veiled in mist or avalanches, has always seemed to me the noblest of Sierra rocks, and never nobler than in this jubilee arrayed in living

water.

In the midst of all this passionate music and motion the main Yosemite Fall sang its old every-day song, as if nothing unusual was going on, until after

noon.

Then, just when the storm glory seemed highest, I heard a stupendous, overbooming explosive crash and roar, as if one of the great headland rocks was falling. This was the gathered, heaped-up flood-waters of Yosemite Creek, which had just arrived, laden with logs. and ice, delayed by the distance the widespread tributary streams had to travel and the comparative levelness of their basin. Now, with volume more than tenfold increased above even its springtime fullness, the great fall took its place as leader of the glorious choir.

Thus, two days and nights, sang the Yosemite waters. Then came frost; the flood visitors vanished, and the commonweather glory of sunshine and clouds, snow-storms and wind-storms, flowed on in divine winter rhythm.

M

Y first meeting with John Muir was in the spring of 1889, in a cañon of the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. I had arrived but a few days before, and was dressing for a dinner en ville when he was announced. Rather than keep him waiting, I sent word begging him to come up. It was an unconscionably long time before I heard along the corridor a high, thin, but cheery voice calling, "Johnson! Where are you? I can't find my way in these confounded city cañons !" and when greetings were over, he launched into a disquisition on the superior intelligence with which nature marks her paths with streams and bent trees and moraines so that the wayfaring man, though city-bred, cannot err therein.

That evening was memorable to me for two manifestations of natural forceone my only experience of an earthquake shock, and the other my first impression of this human embodiment of outdoor life. Muir's subsequent knowledge of cities and of world-travel has not been able to sophisticate the lover of mountains as I saw him that night. His spare, wiry frame, thin face, and longish curling hair and beard suggested Donatello's John the Baptist in the Bargello at Florence, a comparison in which I like to indulge myself. Surely a diet of locusts and wild honey would have no terrors to Muir, who, with no sentimental pretensions to asceticism, has practiced the recently discovered "simple life" for half a century and has thriven on it. I was struck at once with the keenness and the kindliness of his eye and with the shy humor in his muffled voice, which, however, soon revealed resources of varied expression which make it to me one of the most individual and attractive voices I have ever heard.

To know Muir at his best one must have camped with him as I did in the Sierra-for, he generously agreed to go with me to the Yosemite. Here, happily for me, he proved to be, indeed, not only guide and philosopher, but friend. After

a few days in the Valley itself, he arranged a camping expedition to the Tuolumne River and Cañon, the next gorge to the north. We had three burros, Muir, as usual, taking the worst of things provided-in this case the most obstinate and lazy piece of horseflesh out of fiction. I can see him now, astride this pernickity beast, his long legs nearly touching the ground, endeavoring to urge him along the trail, while our factotum, a Pike County woodsman, who had nearly lost his voice, kept shouting back to Muir in a stage-whisper, "Wallop him, John, wallop him!" Muir, unperturbed, was meanwhile roaring out line after line of Burns. Occasionally, when these two and their wonder-stricken tenderfoot would stop to breathe the cattle, Muir would point out a natural phenomenon with a gesture of his long, thin arm, or would break into laughter at some witticism of his own, usually directed against the folly of living in cities. His humor, which came out more sparklingly in the leisure of the camp-fire, was of rare brilliancy and point, as Scotch humor is apt to be. Underneath his most telling ridicule there was always a sympathetic tolerance of the man he was laughing at, as though to say, "God made him among the animals, and I suppose we must not be too hard on him." He disliked most the vandals of the forest-particularly those who then were stupidly taking the wildness out of the Yosemite by "improving" it; but when he met these fellows, he always had a more excellent way to show them, along with a gentle but incisive joke at their expense, which, though it turned the laugh on them, did not impair their respect for him.

It was at our camp-fire at the Tuolumne fall at the head of the cañon that Muir let himself go in whimsical denunciation of the commissioners who were doing so much to make ducks and drakes of the less rugged beauty of the Yosemite by ill-judged cutting and trimming of trees, arbitrary slashing of vistas, tolerating of pig-sties, and making room for