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HASTA, the comeliest mountain on the continent, for centuries marked the northmost limit of the Spanish possessions and the southmost limit of the French, afterward known as the Oregon territory. The name is of French origin, meaning chaste, pure. The mountain was always known in early days as Chaste Butte. There are "buttes," named by the French, all along, from Montana, through Idaho, Washington, Oregon, to Mount Shasta.

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Fremont made the singular mistake, for a Frenchman-for he was French than American-of ignoring the French origin of the name and accepting the belief, popular in California, that the name was Indian, and he spelled it in his reports to congress, and also in his memoirs, Shast-1. The Indian name is Poo-yoh. Shasta is the most shapely mountain in the world, if we except Fuji. As lone and white as the Great White Throne, you adore him for his sublime isolation, his splendid solitude, his chastened miter, his trinity of peaks that companion with the stars: "For whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth."

No. 6

Shasta City, that was, marks the limit of the vast wheat fields of the Sacramento valley and the beginning of the red foothills that climb and climb toward the north, hills of gold, mountains of copper, blazing pinnacles of cinnabar, piles of precious red hills, then piles of peaks somber with pine and spruce and cedar and yew trees, till the very garment's hem of the god of mountains forbids familiar touch or farther approach toward the vast, majestic presence.

Shasta City, the once brawling, sprawling, stormy child of this serene sublimity, is now only a hamlet, its hundreds of soaring brick palaces, that were, are quietly settling back into the common clay. And yet, the skies are the same, the comely king of mountains, the sweet air, the perfume of pines the same; and there is a touch of tenderness over all things here that makes the dead city dearer than was the great living city of half a century ago.

I went into the graveyard last night, and sat there long and late with my old, old friends of the days of gold. The young pines stood thick and thrifty and tall, and the katy-dids trilled and trilled, Then the moon sank low, so low, and