of majestic
Silver Fir 200 feet high. The ground beneath the trees is covered with a
luxuriant crop of grasses, chiefly triticum, bromus, and calamagrostis,
with purple spikes and panicles arching to one's shoulders; while the
open meadow patches glow throughout the summer with showy
flowers,--heleniums, goldenrods, erigerons, lupines, castilleias, and
lilies, and form favorite hiding and feeding-grounds for bears and deer.

The rugged south wall is feathered darkly along the top with an imposing
array of spirey Silver Firs, while the rifted precipices all the way
down to the water's edge are adorned with picturesque old junipers,
their cinnamon-colored bark showing finely upon the neutral gray of the
granite. These, with a few venturesome Dwarf Pines and Spruces, lean out
over fissured ribs and tablets, or stand erect back in shadowy niches,
in an indescribably wild and fearless manner. Moreover, the
white-flowered Douglas spiraea and dwarf evergreen oak form graceful
fringes along the narrower seams, wherever the slightest hold can be
effected. Rock-ferns, too, are here, such as allosorus, pellaea, and
cheilanthes, making handsome rosettes on the drier fissures; and the
delicate maidenhair, cistoperis, and woodsia hide back in mossy
grottoes, moistened by some trickling rill; and then the orange
wall-flower holds up its showy panicles here and there in the sunshine,
and bahia makes bosses of gold. But, notwithstanding all this plant
beauty, the general impression in looking across the lake is of stern,
unflinching rockiness; the ferns and flowers are scarcely seen, and not
one fiftieth of the whole surface is screened with plant life.

The sunnier north wall is more varied in sculpture, but the general tone
is the same. A few headlands, flat-topped and soil-covered, support
clumps of cedar and pine; and up-curving tangles of chinquapin and
live-oak, growing on rough earthquake taluses, girdle their bases. Small
streams come cascading down between them, their foaming margins
brightened with gay primulas, gilias, and mimuluses. And close along the
shore on this side there is a strip of rocky meadow enameled with
buttercups, daisies, and white violets, and the purple-topped grasses
out on its beveled border dip their leaves into the water.

The lower edge of the basin is a dam-like swell of solid granite,
heavily abraded by the old glacier, but scarce at all cut into as yet by
the outflowing stream, though it has flowe