ieroglyphics; every changing season
offers to me a new palimpsest. I do not quite like to play here; I dare
not be simple; I'm altogether too good to last long. How many thousand
ascensions have been made in these worshipful days, I wonder; not merely
getting the body on to the tops of these wonderful peaks, but going
thither in spirit, as when the soul goes up into the mountains to pray?
This eye-climbing is as fatiguing and perilous as any. I feel the want
of some pure blue sky.

A few farewell rambles associate themselves with packing up and plans of
desertion. Not sad farewells in this case, for if I never again meet
these individual mountains, I carry with me their memory, eternal and
incomparably glorious. Let us peep into this nook: I got plentiful
blackberries there in the spring, together with stains and thorny
scratches. I haul myself over the ferry and back, for old acquaintance'
sake; the current is so lazy, it seems incredible that the same waters
are almost impassable at some seasons. I succeed in wrecking a whole
armada of floating leaves with stems like a bowsprit. A few beetles take
passage in these gilded barges--no doubt, for the antipodes.

Did you ever drive up the cattle at milking time? I have; but not
without endless trial and tribulation, for they spill off the path on
either side in a very remarkable way, and when I rush after one with a
flank movement, the column breaks and falls back utterly demoralized. A
little strategy on the part of their commander (which is myself)
triumphs in the end, for I privately reconstruct and march them all up
in detachments of one. I look after the little trees, the unbent twigs;
they are more interesting to me than your monsters. This nursery of
saplings sprang up in a night after a freshet: here are quivering aspens
trembling forever in penance for that one sin. They once were gravely
pointed out by the guide of a party of tourists as "shuddering asps." He
is doubtless the same who, being asked "what that was," (pointing to the
North Dome, six thousand feet in the air) said "he'd be hanged if he
knew; some knob or other." I recall ten thousand pleasant times as I
turn my face seaward; not only the great and omnipotent shadows under
the south wall of the valley, nor the continuous canticles of the
waters, but innumerable little things that fill up and make life
perfect.

The talks, the walks with my friends here, the parrot "Sultan," fed
daily from the table