of rough stone cliff, and a waterfall of greater height, than any they
had visited. Correspondents had written it up with extravagant rhetoric
and inordinate poetical quotation. Men and women who had never enjoyed a
sunset, a tree, or a flower, who had never appreciated the graciousness
or meaning of the yellow sunlight that flecked their homely doorways,
or the tenderness of a midsummer's night, to whose moonlight they bared
their shirt-sleeves or their tulle dresses, came from thousands of miles
away to calculate the height of this rock, to observe the depth of this
chasm, to remark upon the enormous size of this unsightly tree, and to
believe with ineffable self-complacency that they really admired
Nature. And so it came to pass, that, in accordance with the tastes or
weaknesses of the individual, the more prominent and salient points of
the valley were christened; and there was a "Lace Handkerchief Fall,"
and the "Tears of Sympathy Cataract," and one distinguished orator's
"Peak," and several "Mounts" of various noted people, living or dead,
and an "Exclamation-Point," and a "Valley of Silent Adoration." And, in
course of time, empty soda-water bottles were found at the base of the
cataract, and greasy newspapers, and fragments of ham-sandwiches, lay
at the dusty roots of giant trees. With this, there were frequent
irruptions of closely-shaven and tightly-cravated men, and delicate,
flower-faced women, in the one long street of Five Forks, and a
scampering of mules, and an occasional procession of dusty brown-linen
cavalry.

A year after "Hawkins's Idiot Asylum" was completed, one day there
drifted into the valley a riotous cavalcade of "school-marms,"
teachers of the San Francisco public schools, out for a holiday. Not
severely-spectacled Minervas, and chastely armed and mailed Pallases,
but, I fear, for the security of Five Forks, very human, charming, and
mischievous young women. At least, so the men thought, working in the