and great credit to Nature.

Have been sketching a silver fir that stands on a granite ridge a few
hundred yards to the eastward of camp--a fine tree with a particular
snow-storm story to tell. It is about one hundred feet high, growing on
bare rock, thrusting its roots into a weathered joint less than an inch
wide, and bulging out to form a base to bear its weight. The storm came
from the north while it was young and broke it down nearly to the
ground, as is shown by the old, dead, weather-beaten top leaning out
from the living trunk built up from a new shoot below the break. The
annual rings of the trunk that have overgrown the dead sapling tell the
year of the storm. Wonderful that a side branch forming a portion of one
of the level collars that encircle the trunk of this species (_Abies
magnifica_) should bend upward, grow erect, and take the place of the
lost axis to form a new tree.

Many others, pines as well as firs, bear testimony to the crushing
severity of this particular storm. Trees, some of them fifty to
seventy-five feet high, were bent to the ground and buried like grass,
whole groves vanishing as if the forest had been cleared away, leaving
not a branch or needle visible until the spring thaw. Then the more
elastic undamaged saplings rose again, aided by the wind, some reaching
a nearly erect attitude, others remaining more or less bent, while those
with broken backs endeavored to specialize a side branch below the break
and make a leader of it to form a new axis of development. It is as if a
man, whose back was broken or nearly so and who was compelled to go
bent, should find a branch backbone sprouting straight up from below the
break and should gradually develop new arms and shoulders and head,
while the old damaged portion of his body died.

Grand white cloud mountains and domes created about noon as usual,
ridges and ranges of endless variety, as if Nature dearly loved this
sort of work, doing it again and again nearly every day with infinite
industry, and producing beauty that never palls. A few zigzags of
lightning, five minutes' shower, then a gradual wilting and clearing.

[Illustration: ILLUSTRATING GROWTH OF NEW PINE FROM BRANCH BELOW THE
BREAK OF AXIS OF SNOW-CRUSHED TREE]

_July 23._ Another midday cloudland, displaying power and beauty that
one never wearies in beholding, but hopelessly unsketchable and
untellable. What can poor mortals say about clouds? While a description
of their