lende,
feldspar, quartz, tourmaline. The radiance in some places is so great as
to be fairly dazzling, keen lance rays of every color flashing,
sparkling in glorious abundance, joining the plants in their fine, brave
beauty-work--every crystal, every flower a window opening into heaven, a
mirror reflecting the Creator.

From garden to garden, ridge to ridge, I drifted enchanted, now on my
knees gazing into the face of a daisy, now climbing again and again
among the purple and azure flowers of the hemlocks, now down into the
treasuries of the snow, or gazing afar over domes and peaks, lakes and
woods, and the billowy glaciated fields of the upper Tuolumne, and
trying to sketch them. In the midst of such beauty, pierced with its
rays, one's body is all one tingling palate. Who wouldn't be a
mountaineer! Up here all the world's prizes seem nothing.

The largest of the many glacier lakes in sight, and the one with the
finest shore scenery, is Tenaya, about a mile long, with an imposing
mountain dipping its feet into it on the south side, Cathedral Peak a
few miles above its head, many smooth swelling rock-waves and domes on
the north, and in the distance southward a multitude of snowy peaks, the
fountain-heads of rivers. Lake Hoffman lies shimmering beneath my feet,
mountain pines around its shining rim. To the northward the picturesque
basin of Yosemite Creek glitters with lakelets and pools; but the eye is
soon drawn away from these bright mirror wells, however attractive, to
revel in the glorious congregation of peaks on the axis of the range in
their robes of snow and light.

[Illustration: Cathedral Peak]

Carlo caught an unfortunate woodchuck when it was running from a grassy
spot to its boulder-pile home--one of the hardiest of the mountain
animals. I tried hard to save him, but in vain. After telling Carlo that
he must be careful not to kill anything, I caught sight, for the first
time, of the curious pika, or little chief hare, that cuts large
quantities of lupines and other plants and lays them out to dry in the
sun for hay, which it stores in underground barns to last through the
long, snowy winter. Coming upon these plants freshly cut and lying in
handfuls here and there on the rocks has a startling effect of busy life
on the lonely mountain-top. These little haymakers, endowed with
brain stuff something like our own,--God up here looking after
them,--what lessons they teach, how they widen our sympathy!