r even to creep like worms into dark holes and caverns
underground, not only to learn something of what is going on in those
out-of-the-way places, but to see better what the sun sees on our return
to common every-day beauty.

Our way from Murphy's to the cave lay across a series of picturesque,
moory ridges in the chaparral region between the brown foot-hills and
the forests, a flowery stretch of rolling hill-waves breaking here and
there into a kind of rocky foam on the higher summits, and sinking into
delightful bosky hollows embowered with vines. The day was a fine
specimen of California summer, pure sunshine, unshaded most of the time
by a single cloud. As the sun rose higher, the heated air began to flow
in tremulous waves from every southern slope. The sea-breeze that
usually comes up the foot-hills at this season, with cooling on its
wings, was scarcely perceptible. The birds were assembled beneath leafy
shade, or made short, languid flights in search of food, all save the
majestic buzzard; with broad wings outspread he sailed the warm air
unwearily from ridge to ridge, seeming to enjoy the fervid sunshine like
a butterfly. Squirrels, too, whose spicy ardor no heat or cold may
abate, were nutting among the pines, and the innumerable hosts of the
insect kingdom were throbbing and wavering unwearied as sunbeams.

This brushy, berry-bearing region used to be a deer and bear pasture,
but since the disturbances of the gold period these fine animals have
almost wholly disappeared. Here, also, once roamed the mastodon and
elephant, whose bones are found entombed in the river gravels and
beneath thick folds of lava. Toward noon, as we were riding slowly over
bank and brae, basking in the unfeverish sun-heat, we witnessed the
upheaval of a new mountain-range, a Sierra of clouds abounding in
landscapes as truly sublime and beautiful--if only we have a mind to
think so and eyes to see--as the more ancient rocky Sierra beneath it,
with its forests and waterfalls; reminding us that, as there is a lower
world of caves, so, also, there is an upper world of clouds. Huge, bossy
cumuli developed with astonishing rapidity from mere buds, swelling with
visible motion into colossal mountains, and piling higher, higher, in
long massive ranges, peak beyond peak, dome over dome, with many a
picturesque valley and shadowy cave between; while the dark firs and
pines of the upper benches of the Sierra were projected against their
pearl b