d different beauties of color and chiaroscuro in
the glacier-like cradles of its upper ice; but so far as height and form
were concerned, it seemed to have no more parallax than a fixed star.
This fact is of course partly due to its being a nearly regular cone,
but much of it depends on the intrinsic grandeur of a mountain standing
lonely on the plain, full sixty miles in cincture, and in stature nearly
eighteen thousand feet.

We came back from our expedition with an abundance of venison, a number
of interesting color-studies, and memories of California scenery
surpassed only by the Yo-Semite. We had struggled through miles of
_chaparral_, after which no abatis that I ever saw on the Potomac would
have been any discouragement to us, provided only we had the same
wonderful horses. To get some idea of this peculiarly Californian
institution as we encountered it, imagine a side-hill which would have
given the best horse a hard pull, even had it been bare of undergrowth,
and set this hill as thick as it will hold with _manzanita_ and
burr-oak: the former, as its name implies, like a little apple-tree,
only more viciously gnarled, leathery, and complicated in its boughs
than the most picturesque old russet in a New-England orchard, and
ramifying at once from the root without any main trunk; the latter, an
oak-bush of the same general characteristics, having its swarming
acorn-cups covered with spikes like the chestnut. When these have
interlocked with each other till the earth is invisible and the whole
tract has become a lattice of springes and pitfalls, push a horse
through it three miles up a slope of forty-five degrees, the breast-high
twigs scourging him at every step; and if you get out, as we did,
without a fall or a broken leg to either man or beast, you will not only
have acquired a just idea of the California _chaparral_, but an
admiration for the California horse which will last you to your
dying-day. To repay us for this struggle, we had found one lake lying in
a precipitous gorge, only twice before visited by white men; while
Bierstadt, always the indefatigable explorer of every party we were in
together, climbed with his color-box to still another lake, of which he
was the first discoverer, and whose lovely lineaments he preserved in
one of the best studies of our trip. Besides these results of our
expedition, we brought away the satisfaction of having leaped our horses
across the Sacramento River. Where it fl