Letter I

Lake Tahoe--Morning in San Francisco--Dust--A Pacific
mail-train--Digger Indians--Cape Horn--A mountain hotel--A
pioneer--A Truckee livery stable--A mountain stream--Finding a
bear--Tahoe.

LAKE TAHOE, September 2.

I have found a dream of beauty at which one might look all one's
life and sigh. Not lovable, like the Sandwich Islands, but
beautiful in its own way! A strictly North American
beauty--snow-splotched mountains, huge pines, red-woods, sugar
pines, silver spruce; a crystalline atmosphere, waves of the
richest color; and a pine-hung lake which mirrors all beauty on
its surface. Lake Tahoe is before me, a sheet of water
twenty-two miles long by ten broad, and in some places 1,700 feet
deep. It lies at a height of 6,000 feet, and the snow-crowned
summits which wall it in are from 8,000 to 11,000 feet in
altitude. The air is keen and elastic. There is no sound but
the distant and slightly musical ring of the lumberer's axe.

It is a weariness to go back, even in thought, to the clang of
San Francisco, which I left in its cold morning fog early
yesterday, driving to the Oakland ferry through streets with
side-walks heaped with thousands of cantaloupe and water-melons,
tomatoes, cucumbers, squashes, pears, grapes, peaches,
apricots--all of startling size as compared with any I ever saw
before. Other streets were piled with sacks of flour, left out
all night, owing to the security from rain at this season. I