ke the rest of us. We are only
so much freight packed upon his back.

The foregoing narrative may be exaggerated in some details, but the
essential facts remain, that the mule has a healthy appetite and that he
looks out for himself.

A little further on I had an opportunity to judge how a passenger would
conduct himself if he should be thrown from the trail. At the point
where the slope of the mountains is most abrupt, certain repairs had
lately been made upon the trail, and a man was now prying large stones
over the edge. They rolled and tumbled down, taking wild leaps into the
air and plunging from rock to rock. After they disappeared in the woods
we could hear them crashing and clattering down the canon. A small
avalanche of broken fragments followed in their wake.

It must have been a fine sight when the blasting was first done in the
side of the rocky precipice: when huge masses of rock, half as big as a
house, were rent from the side of the mountain and thundered down with
frightful crash, cutting off huge trees and shaking the very mountains.
And now I will say again that the trail is wide and safe; the slopes on
the side are seldom very steep, and the mules could not be pushed over
by any available power.

Some people, in fact, prefer the old trail because it is more wild and
romantic and not so well kept. The new road has enough picturesque
features to satisfy me.

I remember when the valley came in sight again, after half an hour's
climbing, the first objects to catch my eye were the storage reservoirs,
which dot the valley and are used in irrigation. Their regular shapes
and the margins of masonry about them give them, from the mountains,
the appearance of mirrors. One seemed almost directly below. Probably it
was at least a hundred feet in length. In the form of a rectangle with
rounded corners, it was the exact counterpart of a framed mirror. The
surface was like polished glass, and trees upon the bank were reflected
with beautiful distinctness.

After another half-hour's ride comes a glimpse in the other direction.
Through a gap in the mountains we look for a moment behind the hills of
Pasadena into the heart of the Sierra Madre. Vistas of mountain-sides
are seen on either hand, one beyond the other, the long slope of one
slightly overlapping that of its nearer neighbor, offering for our
inspection a succession of blue tints, becoming more and more delicate
in the distance till they melt into the s