ess, which it seemed could not fail to develop us, to mould us, to
age us, to leave on us its scars, to bequeath us its peace or remorse
or despair, as would some great mysterious dark experience direct from
the sources of life. And then abruptly we were exhausted, as we should
have been by too great emotion. We fell asleep. The morning dawned
still and clear, and garnished and set in order as though such things
had never been. Only our white towel fluttered like a flag of truce in
the direction the mighty elements had departed.

XVI

THE VALLEY

Once upon a time I happened to be staying in a hotel room which had
originally been part of a suite, but which was then cut off from the
others by only a thin door through which sounds carried clearly. It
was about eleven o'clock in the evening. The occupants of that next
room came home. I heard the door open and close. Then the bed
shrieked aloud as somebody fell heavily upon it. There breathed across
the silence a deep restful sigh.

"Mary," said a man's voice, "I'm mighty sorry I didn't join that
Association for Artificial Vacations. They guarantee to get you just as
tired and just as mad in two days as you could by yourself in two
weeks."

We thought of that one morning as we descended the Glacier Point Trail
in Yosemite.

The contrast we need not have made so sharp. We might have taken the
regular wagon-road by way of Chinquapin, but we preferred to stick to
the trail, and so encountered our first sign of civilization within an
hundred yards of the brink. It, the sign, was tourists. They were
male and female, as the Lord had made them, but they had improved on
that idea since. The women were freckled, hatted with alpines, in
which edelweiss--artificial, I think--flowered in abundance; they
sported severely plain flannel shirts, bloomers of an aggressive and
unnecessary cut, and enormous square boots weighing pounds. The men
had on hats just off the sunbonnet effect, pleated Norfolk jackets,
bloomers ditto ditto to the women, stockings whose tops rolled over
innumerable times to help out the size of that which they should have
contained, and also enormous square boots. The female children they
put in skin-tight blue overalls. The male children they dressed in
bloomers. Why this should be I cannot tell you. All carried toy
hatchets with a spike on one end built to resemble the pictures of
alpenstocks.

They looked business-like, trod with an assu