wful in its proportions; spurning the
very earth that crumbles at its very base as it towers to heaven. The
vapors of the air cleave to its massive front. The passing cloud is
caught and torn in the grand carvings of its capitals. Gaze upon it in
the solemnity of its sunlit surface. Impressive, impassive, magnetic;
having a pulse and the organs of life almost; terrible as the forehead
of a god. The full splendor of the noonday can not belittle it, night
can not compass it. The moon is paler in its presence and wastes her
lamp, the stars are hidden and lost over and beyond it. Across the face
of it is borne forever the shadowy semblance of a swift and flying
figure. Despair and desperation are in the nervous energy depicted in
this marvelous medallion. Surely, the Indian may look with a degree of
reverence upon that picture, painted by the morning light, fading in the
meridian day, and gone altogether by evening. A grand etching of
colossal proportions, representing the great chief Tutochanula in his
mysterious flight. The Wandering Jew might look upon it and behold his
traditional beard and flowing robes blown here by the winds in the
rapidity of his desperate haste. It is the last one sees of the valley,
as it is the last any have seen of Tutochanula. He fled into the west,
cycles ago, and I follow him now into the west, nest-building, and
getting into the shadow and resting after the door of the mountain is
passed, and my soul no longer beats impetuously against those stormy
walls.

With uncovered head, having nothing between me and Saturn, wiser, I
trust, for my intercourse with these masters, purer in heart and holier
for my prolonged vigil, with careful and reverential steps I pass out of
Yosemite shadows.

AN AFFAIR OF THE MISTY CITY

I.

WHAT THE MOON SHONE ON

She was a smallish moon, looking very chaste and chilly and she peered
vaguely through folds of scurrying fog. She shone upon a silent street
that ran up a moderate hill between far-scattered corporation
gas-lamps--a street that having reached the hill top seemed to saunter
leisurely across a height which had once been the most aristocratic
quarter of the Misty City; the quarter was still pathetically
respectable, and for three squares at least its handsome residences
stared destiny in the face and stood in the midst of flower-bordered
lawns, unmindful of decay. Its fountains no longer played; even its once
pampered children had grown up, an