A SIERRA STORM FROM A TREE TOP.

Being accustomed to climb trees in making botanical studies, I
experienced no difficulty in reaching the top of this one (a pine
about 100 feet high), and never before did I enjoy so noble an
exhilaration of motion. The slender tops fairly flapped and swished in
the passionate torrent, bending and swirling backward and forward,
round and round, tracing indescribable combinations of vertical and
horizontal curves, while I clung with muscles firm braced, like a
bobolink on a reed.

JOHN MUIR,
in _The Mountains of California._



MAY 6.


There is a breeziness, a spaciousness, an undefiled ecstasy of purity
about the High Sierras. Nature, yet untainted by man, has expressed
herself largely in mighty pine-clad, snow-topped blue mountains, and
rolling stretches of foot-hills; in rivers whose clarity is as perfect
as the first snow-formed drops that heralded them; and a sky of chaste
and limpid blue, pale as with awe of the celestial wonders it has
gazed upon. But there is an effect of simplicity with it all, an
omission of sensational landscape contrasts.