owed at the bottom of one deep
ravine we had to traverse, it was a foot deep and ten feet wide. The
twig which cracked under my horse's hoof, and fell into the stream as he
sprang over, a month hence might be dashing about in the scud under the
foot of some Pacific whaler, or, still farther off in time, drift into
the harbor of Hong Kong. Rivers always seem to me like the nerves of
Nature: there is no conductor of thought and impression like that little
silver thread which leads out from the ganglion of a deep forest-spring,
to spread, many leagues off, upon the sensory surface of the Oceanic
World. In an earlier article I spoke of the mighty emotions which came
thronging on me at the heads of the Platte and the Colorado: I felt them
only less powerfully when my horse jumped across the Sacramento's
birthplace.

After a day's rest at Sisson's, we bade the capital fellow and his
excellent wife a good-bye which had more regret in it than we ever felt
before for comrades of a single week's standing, and resumed our
northward journey,--Bierstadt's color-box the fuller by a score of
Shasta studies taken under every possible variety of position, sky, and
time of day.

The country continued thickly wooded for nearly twenty miles from
Strawberry, and the forest-trail was every now and then drowned out of
sight by streams rushing from the snow of Shasta. When we emerged from
the timber, we found ourselves on a plain opening widely to the north
between diverging ridges, and scattered here and there with black
_scoriae_ like the slag of a furnace. In some places an attempt had been
made to mend the road with lava, and as it crunched under our horses'
hoofs we could almost imagine ourselves making the circuit of Vesuvius,
so evident was it from the look and feel of things that Pluto has at no
very remote period boiled his dinner-pot on the hob of Shasta Peak.

The day was fine,--the air more bracing than we had found since leaving
the Yo-Semite. Our week of comparative rest at Sissons had brought our
horses into splendid condition for the road; both we and they were
boiling over with animal spirits; and it was still early in the
afternoon when we rode the fortieth mile of our way into Yreka, on the
full gallop. I need not say that we had made other arrangements than
our pommels for the transportation of our heavy baggage to the next
place where we should need it. Sisson, always full of resources, had
taken good care of that for u