dying foliage, its white-cushioned benches, and long
serrated summits, its rocky pinnacles whose alabaster
crests glisten lustrous to mariners a hundred miles
away, when its crevices were being filled with molten
gold, a sea of sorrow was about to roll at its base, for
the squabble for tliis treasure that is presently to
come will be pitiful to see.
Split a feni-stalk and place it in a dish with the thick ends together, and the leafy sides both lying toward the east, and you have mapped the drainage system of the California valley. The stalks are the two rivers, the Sacramento and the San Joaquin, which, rising respectively at either end of the great valley, graciously receive their tributaries as they wind through oak and poplar vistas; then rolling slowly on, ever slowly, once bright and clear with happy contentment, but presently opaque in sullen shade, on to their junction, and thence together to the sea.
And it is along this eastern side, where the branches and leaves and leaflets rest on the edges of the dish, and form labyrinths of ridges, and subordinate valleys upon which are flung in infinite disorder, bluffs, chasms, and smoothly rounded stone-waves heaped almost mountain high, that we have the Sierra foot- hills, already abnormally classic. Aside from the petrified sentinels left standing adown the centuries, there is ample evidence of what Plutus was hammer- ing at hereabout. Left, after laying the Sierra foun- dation, were the dead volcanoes which we see, and their trachyte spurs flanking dark green forests, all intermingled with lavender and buff lava beds and scoriae; blistered ashen slopes, whose vegetation is stunted and ill-tempered, and fire-riven hills of purple rock, loose and crumbling, to which cling blasted pines and wind-smitten oaks. Over many of her deformities nature spreads a seemly covering, hid- ino|; what were otherwise the bare bones of an un-
