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Show 154 WESTERN WILDS. bare, bald head 3,300 feet above us, beautifully, purely gray, in clear outline against the rosy sky. Darkness shuts out all beauty by the time we reach Hutehings' Hotel, and we gladly sink to rest, with little thought of the wonderland we are in. We rise to view a new creation, as it seems a rift in the earth five miles long and nearly two miles wide in the center, walled in by ever-during granite. Here is a minor cosmos, where nature seems to have proceeded on a more extensive plan, as if determined to outdo all in the outer world of common- place. A forenoon we give to rest and gazing, for there is enough to be seen for that time from the porch of the hotel. After noon we start out northward, to the foot of Yosem-ite Falls, one and a half miles from us. The cliffs in front rise nearly 3,000 feet above us, and all along the perpendicular wall we see the marks of ancient glaciers and waves wearing smooth the rocky face ; but above, where first the peaks rose from the sea of primal chaos, rough and frowning battlements attest the violence of the rent which divided this from the southern side. About half way up the cliff is a small offset, where grows a beautiful pine, with branch and foliage forming a perfect cone, seeming like the larger growth of orna-mental shrubbery. Yet that shrub is a monster tree 160 feet high, and above it the perpendicular cliff is just eleven times its height. Go into the forests of Ohio or Indiana and select the tallest tree, and remember that the upper division merely of Yosemite Fall is at least ten times that height! Or imagine ten Niagaras piled one above another. A thick forest of pines and firs fills the center of the valley, and through it we follow up the bed, now almost dry, of Yosemite Creek, the bowlders increasing regularly in size as we proceed, until at last the way is blocked by vast masses of granite, hurled, as in Titanic war, from the cliffs above. The immense wall gives back, leaving an inlet into the mountain, the sides of which, like buttresses, approach each other at a sharp angle, and down one side of this inlet pours the Yosemite, now shrunk to a mere rill. But in May and June the congealed floods, on heights 5,000 feet above, are loosed and fill the high flume with a raging torrent. Then great liquid volumes fall from the first height, 1,600 feet, strike and break to a thousand splintered streams, lacing all the second fall for 400 feet with daz-zling lines of foam ; then gather in another flume, take another plunge, and rebounding from the cliff in a million comminuted streams, roar into the basin below. Large logs from the mountain forests plunge a thousand feet without check and splinter into frag- |