is seen cantering gracefully across the wider openings. The nights are
calm and dewless during the summer, and a thousand voices proclaim the
abundance of life, notwithstanding the desolating effect of dry sunshine
on the plants and larger animals. The hylas make a delightfully pure and
tranquil music after sunset; and coyotes, the little, despised dogs of
the wilderness, brave, hardy fellows, looking like withered wisps of
hay, bark in chorus for hours. Mining-towns, most of them dead, and a
few living ones with bright bits of cultivation about them, occur at
long intervals along the belt, and cottages covered with climbing roses,
in the midst of orange and peach orchards, and sweet-scented hay-fields
in fertile flats where water for irrigation may be had. But they are
mostly far apart, and make scarce any mark in general views.

Every winter the High Sierra and the middle forest region get snow in
glorious abundance, and even the foot-hills are at times whitened. Then
all the range looks like a vast beveled wall of purest marble. The rough
places are then made smooth, the death and decay of the year is covered
gently and kindly, and the ground seems as clean as the sky. And though
silent in its flight from the clouds, and when it is taking its place on
rock, or tree, or grassy meadow, how soon the gentle snow finds a voice!
Slipping from the heights, gathering in avalanches, it booms and roars
like thunder, and makes a glorious show as it sweeps down the
mountain-side, arrayed in long, silken streamers and wreathing, swirling
films of crystal dust.

The north half of the range is mostly covered with floods of lava, and
dotted with volcanoes and craters, some of them recent and perfect in
form, others in various stages of decay. The south half is composed of
granite nearly from base to summit, while a considerable number of
peaks, in the middle of the range, are capped with metamorphic slates,