, though Nature
is doing what she can, replanting, gardening, sweeping away old dams and
flumes, leveling gravel and boulder piles, patiently trying to heal
every raw scar. The main gold storm is over. Calm enough are the gray
old miners scratching a bare living in waste diggings here and there.
Thundering underground blasting is still going on to feed the pounding
quartz mills, but their influence on the landscape is light as compared
with that of the pick-and-shovel storms waged a few years ago.
Fortunately for Sierra scenery the gold-bearing slates are mostly
restricted to the foothills. The region about our camp is still wild,
and higher lies the snow about as trackless as the sky.

Only a few hills and domes of cloudland were built yesterday and none at
all to-day. The light is peculiarly white and thin, though pleasantly
warm. The serenity of this mountain weather in the spring, just when
Nature's pulses are beating highest, is one of its greatest charms.
There is only a moderate breeze from the summits of the Range at night,
and a slight breathing from the sea and the lowland hills and plains
during the day, or stillness so complete no leaf stirs. The trees
hereabouts have but little wind history to tell.

Sheep, like people, are ungovernable when hungry. Excepting my guarded
lily gardens, almost every leaf that these hoofed locusts can reach
within a radius of a mile or two from camp has been devoured. Even the
bushes are stripped bare, and in spite of dogs and shepherds the sheep
scatter to all points of the compass and vanish in dust. I fear some are
lost, for one of the sixteen black ones is missing.

_June 17._ Counted the wool bundles this morning as they bounced through
the narrow corral gate. About three hundred are missing, and as the
shepherd could not go to seek them, I had to go. I tied a crust of bread
to my belt, and with Carlo set out for the upper slopes of the Pilot
Peak Ridge, and had a good day, notwithstanding the care of seeking the
silly runaways. I went out for wool, and did not come back shorn. A
peculiar light circled around the horizon, white and thin like that
often seen over the auroral corona, blending into the blue of the upper
sky. The only clouds were a few faint flossy pencilings like combed
silk. I pushed direct to the boundary of the usual range of the flock,
and around it until I found the outgoing trail of the wanderers. It led
far up the ridge into an open place surrounded