ckthorn, makes an opening to communicating rooms and runways deep
under the snow.

The light filtering through the snow walls is blue and ghostly, but
serves to show seeds of shrubs and grass, and berries, and the
wind-built walls are warm against the wind. It seems that live plants,
especially if they are evergreen and growing, give off heat; the snow
wall melts earliest from within and hollows to thinness before there is
a hint of spring in the air. But you think of these things afterward. Up
in the street it has the effect of being done consciously; the
buckthorns lean to each other and the drift to them, the little birds
run in and out of their appointed ways with the greatest cheerfulness.
They give almost no tokens of distress, and even if the winter tries
them too much you are not to pity them. You of the house habit can
hardly understand the sense of the hills. No doubt the labor of being
comfortable gives you an exaggerated opinion of yourself, an exaggerated
pain to be set aside. Whether the wild things understand it or not they
adapt themselves to its processes with the greater ease. The business
that goes on in the street of the mountain is tremendous,
world-formative. Here go birds, squirrels, and red deer, children crying
small wares and playing in the street, but they do not obstruct its
affairs. Summer is their holiday; "Come now," says the lord of the
street, "I have need of a great work and no more playing."

But they are left borders and breathing-space out of pure kindness. They
are not pushed out except by the exigencies of the nobler plan which
they accept with a dignity the rest of us have not yet learned.

WATER BORDERS

I like that name the Indians give to the mountain of Lone Pine, and find
it pertinent to my subject,--Oppapago, The Weeper. It sits eastward and
solitary from the lordliest ranks of the Sierras, and above a range of
little, old, blunt hills, and has a bowed, grave aspect as of some woman
you might have known, looking out across the grassy barrows of her dead.
From twin gray lakes under its noble brow stream down incessant white
and tumbling waters. "Mahala all time cry," said Winnenap', drawing
furrows in his rugged, wrinkled cheeks.

The origin of mountain streams is like the origin of tears, patent to
the understanding but mysterious to the sense.

They are always at it, but one so seldom catches them in the act. Here
in the valley there is no cessation of waters ev