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F you have not been to Glacier point you have not seen Yosemite. There are several ways of making the ascent. You can take the regulation horse or mule, climb the trail in the morning and return the same afternoon. This way is too hurried to be entirely satisfactory. Or you may go up on foot, an undertaking not half so formidable as it seems. Start early in the morning, while that side of the valley is deep in the shadows and the paths are yet cool. The way will be long, you expect that, but you would never expect the ascents to be so easy and gradual.

The trail winds in and out, around and around the face of the cliff, and the wonderful views constantly opening before you will tempt you to make numerous stops. By noon you will be seated on the veranda of the Glacier Point hotel gazing out upon a panorama whose like is not elsewhere in the world, and you will feel that great indeed has been your reward. You are three thousand three hundred feet above the valley, taking in at one glance crag and canyon, waterfall and sierra. Before you are Half Dome and Clouds' Rest, Liberty Cap and Little Yosemite and the magnificent drop of Nevada and Vernal falls. In the background are the high Sierras, bare and snow-streaked.

Across the valley Yosemite fall thunders with a mighty sound. And the air is such as you never breathed beforelife giving and exhilarating. You are no longer tired, you forget that you ever were tired, and are ready for Sentinel Dome after lunch. It is a short walk, and the climb is simply nothing after what you have accomplished. Sentinel Dome stands on the south margin of the Yosemite canyon, a round, bald-headed dome standing four thousand five hundred feet above the valley and eight thousand five hundred feet above the level of the sea. A trail from the hotel leads to its very summit. You pass through a little firwood and over a carpet of the tiniest and daintiest wild flowers possible to imagine. Here and there you will see a snow plant glowing red among

a tangle of roots and decaying fir boughs. Contrary to tradition, it does not grow in the snow itself, but makes its appearance where the snow has recently been.

By and by the path grows more rocky, and before long you are climbing the bare and windy dome. When you have mounted it you are in the center of a panorama that will awe you into breathlessness. To the left stands El Capitan, in front are Yosemite falls, to the right Half Dome, a little farther on Nevada and Vernal falls, with the Cap of Liberty, and encircling the whole horizon are mountains on mountains, waves and billows of peaks, the high Sierras, encompassing you on every hand and making you feel as though you were standing on the very top of the world. The winds seem to blow from all points of the compass and the lone pine tree on the summit of the dome is gnarled and twisted like a corkscrew. But you hold your hat as best you can and feast your eyes on the prospect, for it is one of the great spectacles of the earth. At last you realize with reluctance that time is flying and you must descend. But you take down with you a memory that time can never efface, although language may prove inadequate to recreate a scene of such exaltation and grandeur.

Of course, while you are on Glacier point you go out on the overhanging rock and, leaning over the railing, peep down into the valley. Hotel buildings, fields, groves, are spread out before you like pawns on the squares of a chessboard, for you are three thousand three hundred feet above them.

Evening on Glacier point! Who can describe it? Long after the valley depths are full of blue shadows this and companion heights are in the rosebloom of sunset. The light retires reluctantly, but at last come darkness and the stars; such stars, so clear, so large, so multitudinous in the dense. violet of the sky. They seem unfamiliar -not those same twinkling points of light of former acquaintance. They almost frighten you, they look so strange. Indeed, there is something uncanny about night on Glacier point, so it is well

to retire early to your room on the canyon side, where you may see the sun rise the next morning.

A flash awakens you. You jump up, run to your window and see-sunrise on Glacier point! It comes suddenly, overwhelmingly, not by a gradual revelation, but by an instantaneous flash. The heights are warm, bright and glowing in the clear, unclouded day while the depths have not yet awakened out of night. Vernal and Nevada falls have caught the light, and across the canyon Yosemite sways its gauzy veil and booms the everlasting note, the sound of many waters. After breakfast you can descend by way of the Vernal and Nevada trail.

There is still another way to visit Glacier point. The stage company will, if requested, take you out of the valley by this route. When you reach Chinquapin on your outward trip, you change your direction and retrace your way over the Monroe meadows until you get back to where you started, but, of course, three thousand feet in a vertical line above it. Chinquapin consists of one house and a stable, and here we expected to stop and enjoy a picnic lunch. But alas! the lunch had been forgotten, and the lone housekeeper was too far from a base of supplies to improvise a meal for an unexpected and hungry party. So we were fain to make the best of it, and to beguile the time as best we might by mak

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ing friends with her little boy. The little chap was by no means reticent. He told us that his name was Charley Dappella, and gave us fair warning of bears down by the creek. He took much pride in a miniature stage which he had constructed of a box mounted on four tin wheels which had been the tops of lard cans. Charley informed us with conscious and visible pride that when he grew to be a man he intended to be a stage driver.

After our adieux we turned into the Monroe meadows. Nothing more beautiful than these glacier meadows can be imagined. Although it was July the snow still lay here and there in great patches, filling the sheltered hollows. Where it had but just melted the ground was carpeted with the softest, greenest and most velvety grass. Here and there among the roots gleamed snow plants. Firs of great size and numerous varieties predominated over the other conifers, although the yellow and the sugar pine were not wanting. In one place we passed a grove of trembling aspens. The flowers were coming up, the air was crisp and cool, the streams were full and overflowing.

It is almost a day's ride over these vernal meadows and through the primeval forest. You reach the hotel in time for dinner and pass the night here, leaving next day for Wawona.

TH

HE bright, burning Mexican sun was looking down upon the patio where lay the nine great tortas, each holding a hundred tons of silver ore in a state of wet pulp. They looked as though they had been carefully stirred and the swirling motion petrified on the surface when the stirring stopped.

Jefe was standing in the bath, having his legs washed. He had been walking round in No. 5 torta for a long time, and a mixture of silver ore, copper ore, salt, quicksilver and mud, even though chiefly mud, is not good for a horse's legs. But this was his business: to walk there in a circle, churning and mixing the pulp so that all the silver could be easily washed out of it. And then, every morning, after his work was finished, Ramon, his driver, who had been in the middle of the torta for all the world like some circus ringmaster, would drive him out and go and wash his own bare, brown legs first and then take Jefe and wash his. They were of a greenish tinge in spite of his daily bath and constantly pained him until he wished he could do without them. A stout man wearing a hundred dollar sombrero (his owner, though Jefe did not know it) had disgustedly examined them the day before.

Jefe had originally been intended for a vaquero's horse, but, when mounted in order to be taught his business, had displayed such singular powers of getting rid of his rider without his rider's consent that he had been drafted among the incorrigibles and in due time had become. a patio horse, since it does not require much education to know how to walk in a circle with the assistance of a driver, nor can one be very wicked in stiff mud two feet deep.

In the years that followed this choice of vocation Jefe had done his duty conscientiously, as indeed most horses do. Sometimes, when laboriously wading in the torta under the ferocious July sunlight he would feel envious of the horses. and even of the mules, who were working at the mills in the shade under the cool,

low archways, surrounding the patio. He once sounded his partner, El Perro, on the subject.

"You can't have much respect for yourself," snorted El Perro, "do you want to be hitched to a big stone wheel and walk round it all day? Do you want to wear blinds over your eyes? Perhaps you wish you were a mule."

Finding no encouragement, Jefe became reconciled to his lot because he felt that a change might be for the worse. But his hoofs were in very bad condition and his legs so stiff that any one could have ridden him now. The best years of a patio horse are few and occur at the beginning of his career.

On this particular morning, as he was about to follow El Perro and the others to the stables, he found himself suddenly diverted and driven through another gateway, out over the sounding cobblestones, under the deep archway, where a niche in the wall held a cross, hung with faded flowers, and again out on the road with a high adobe wall on one side and on the other a few wretched trees, shivering over an empty, dusty watercourse, and the tumbled ruins of some deserted houses. There he was joined by two other horses, strangers to him, and the three were driven away by a weedy boy, chiefly hat and leggings, mounted on a still weedier horse, so puny that there was not much of him visible under the saddle.

Soon they climbed the steep hill between the uniform rows of flat-roofed, flat-faced houses, each with a single door and one barred window, with here and there an old church or a vecindad, where a gateway gave entrance to a larger building than usual, accommodating several families. But all was torpid under the July sun, and even the few customers of the Pearl and the Azure Dove moved like drowsy insects in the dirty, dark drinking shops.

Jefe was unaccountably excited; he was wondering at a strange sensation. that was rising in him. He felt light and

with the invariable blue scarfs, folded shawlwise over the head, balancing their heavy water pots; the filthy half-naked children, impervious to the blaze of the sun; the hollow-cheeked man carrying a bright blue coffin filled with paper roses; the deep-toned bell of the cathedral and the faint, intensely repugnant odor of generations of much unwashed humanity, with a flavor of stale incense and garlic; all made up the same complex offering to the senses that Jefe remembered so well and yet remembered as so different. And memory played him a strange trick and a cruel one, such as it sometimes does the simpler natures of human beings. So vivid was it that it drew him back to his youth again, as each familiar recollection awoke and he joyed to feel that he was indeed slipping back to his former self and hoped that the end of his journey would find him as he was before his patio life began, for, you see, he was only a horse.

Elevated with this hope he kicked out twice to feel his muscles and then pranced sideways in a somewhat ghastly attempt at skittishness, laying his inefficiency to want of practice. The little group went clattering down the street through the center of the town and out on to the other side for about a mile, where they stopped before a gateway; not a heavy, solid arch like the gateway of the hacienda, but a mere opening in the long, white adobe wall. Through this they passed and Jefe had just time to notice by the low rays of the sinking sun that he was in some sort of enclosure where a few peons were handling heavy timbers with bumpings and words of direction to one another, when he was driven into a smaller enclosure. By nature sociable he would have attempted conversation with his companions if he had not been absorbed in his new experience. He felt confident, though puzzled.

Night fell and passed under glittering stars and a dry dazzling full moon, then came the blazing sun in the thin, bitter air of the day. The shadows had shortened and were growing longer again when a rider, with spurs and leggings, entered the corral, and walking up to Jefe bridled him and drew a heavy leather band over his eyes, which effectually blinded him. For an instant he

thought of the mules in the tahonas, with their leather goggles and ceaseless toil, and felt much relieved when a saddle was thrown upon him. Another wave of recollection swept across his memory, his mind was once more submerged in the past, and instinctively he humped his back, for which he received a kick in the ribs as he was led forward-somewhere.

A murmur, which he had not noticed at first grew louder at this moment, and suddenly the strains of the Mexican national hymn burst forth, almost immediately followed by applause. Jefe was intensely interested, but more puzzled than ever and surprised to feel his legs trembling under him. Being in profound darkness his confidence had somewhat evaporated.

The music ceased, but the murmur grew louder and he plainly perceived the odor of dust. Then he felt some one swing himself into the saddle and a stinging pain in each side warned him of spurs. He obeyed the bit and moved gingerly through the darkness, until the murmur was no longer in front, but all round him. Then he was stopped by a violent wrench at his jaw.

Jefe,

Soft footfalls, light and rapid, came and went, and slight gusts of wind flicked his face. Then a heavy gallop approached him closely with a deep, hard breathing and he felt his rider receive a shock that almost unseated him. observant to an acute pitch, ascertained thus that the man carried a long pole. At this moment a violent shudder ran through the horse's frame, an awful foreboding, not to be conceived by the human race with its blunted senses, invaded every fiber of his being. He could smell blood and longed frantically to see, but the spurs raked his smarting sides and drove him forward.

The murmur swelled to applause and sank again to a murmur, punctuated by the monotone of the cake seller. A light step, almost as impalpable as thought, brushed by him and instantly a stunning blow struck him in the chest. The snorting and blowing in front warned him to fly, but he could not see. Then a loud clapping of hands followed, but Jefe's attention was elsewhere. The momentary numbness was over: his chest seemed a red-hot coal, although he felt it was wet and dripping. He staggered, but