other glacial
features of the landscape.

On the head waters of the rivers there are what are called "Big
Meadows," usually about from five to ten miles long. These occupy the
basins of the ancient ice-seas, where many tributary glaciers came
together to form the grand trunks. Most, however, are quite small,
averaging perhaps but little more than three fourths of a mile in
length.

One of the very finest of the thousands I have enjoyed lies hidden in an
extensive forest of the Two-leaved Pine, on the edge of the basin of the
ancient Tuolumne Mer de Glace, about eight miles to the west of Mount
Dana.

Imagine yourself at the Tuolumne Soda Springs on the bank of the river,
a day's journey above Yosemite Valley. You set off northward through a
forest that stretches away indefinitely before you, seemingly unbroken
by openings of any kind. As soon as you are fairly into the woods, the
gray mountain-peaks, with their snowy gorges and hollows, are lost to
view. The ground is littered with fallen trunks that lie crossed and
recrossed like storm-lodged wheat; and besides this close forest of
pines, the rich moraine soil supports a luxuriant growth of
ribbon-leaved grasses--bromus, triticum, calamagrostis, agrostis, etc.,
which rear their handsome spikes and panicles above your waist. Making
your way through the fertile wilderness,--finding lively bits of
interest now and then in the squirrels and Clark crows, and perchance in
a deer or bear,--after the lapse of an hour or two vertical bars of
sunshine are seen ahead between the brown shafts of the pines, showing
that you are approaching an open space, and then you suddenly emerge
from the forest shadows upon a delightful purple lawn lying smooth and
free in the light like a lake. This is a glacier meadow. It is about a
mile and a half long by a quarter of a mile wide. The trees come
pressing forward all around in close serried ranks, planting their feet
exactly on its margin, and holding themselves erect, strict and orderly
like soldiers on parade; thus bounding the meadow with exquisite
precision, yet with free curving lines such as Nature alone can draw.
With inexpressible delight you wade out into the grassy sun-lake,
feeling yourself contained in one of Nature's most sacred chambers,
withdrawn from the sterner influences of the mountains, secure from all
intrusion, secure from yourself, free in the universal beauty. And
notwithstanding the scene is so impressively spirit