its frosty diadem gleams with the glances of the
departing sun long after the shades of night have
overs}3read the surrounding hills.
Before us at the portal two sentinels, Helena and Diablo, guard either side, with Tamalpais picketed near the entrance ; while far to the south, over the Tulare lakes and meadows, from the cold starlit ether or glowing in the roseate hues of day, the tall obelisks and stately domes and bristlhig minarets of mounts Brewer, Whitney, and Tyndall look down in grave guardianship. Proud immutability ! Yet whether dripping with slimy sea-beds, or being graven by glaciers, or smoothed into forms of comeliness by tempest, these mighty ministers to needful lowlands do nevertheless slowly crumble in decay, and with their dust feed forest aijd flower. So man is laid low, and mind.
A little to our left, and almost hidden by granite- waves and conoidal domes that rise out of broad fir- planted snow-fields, yawns the plateau-rent of Yosem- ite. It lies in the Sierra foothills, nearly at right angles to their trend, and consists of a trough-like erosion, or sink, about a mile in jierpendicular depth, six miles in length, with a flat bottom from half a mile to a mile in irregular width. Angles and square recesses press into walls of light gray granite, bril- liantly white under the reflection of the sun's rays, in places reddened by moss, fantastically carved, or stained with vertical parallel stripes of brown and black. Over these smooth white walls the Merced and its tributaries leap in wavy silver threads, and dashing in dusty foam upon the chasm floor, intone eternal hallelujahs. Any one of the scores of domes, and peaks, and perpendicular channels, and lichen- covered precipices that here present themselves taken apart constitutes of itself a study.
Climbing up the outer side of the basin, and emer- ging from the level forest that covers the thick flat rim and veils the approach to the chasm^ the tourist
