s a chapel, with natural pulpit and
crosses and pews, sermons in every stone, where a priest had said mass.
Mass-saying is not so generally developed in connection with natural
wonders as dancing. One of the first conceits excited by the giant
Sequoias was to cut one of them down and dance on its stump. We have
also seen dancing in the spray of Niagara; dancing in the famous Bower
Cave above Coulterville; and nowhere have I seen so much dancing as in
Yosemite. A dance on the inaccessible South Dome would likely follow the
making of an easy way to the top of it.

It was delightful to witness here the infinite deliberation of Nature,
and the simplicity of her methods in the production of such mighty
results, such perfect repose combined with restless enthusiastic energy.
Though cold and bloodless as a landscape of polar ice, building was
going on in the dark with incessant activity. The archways and ceilings
were everywhere hung with down-growing crystals, like inverted groves of
leafless saplings, some of them large, others delicately attenuated,
each tipped with a single drop of water, like the terminal bud of a
pine-tree. The only appreciable sounds were the dripping and tinkling of
water failing into pools or faintly plashing on the crystal floors.

In some places the crystal decorations are arranged in graceful flowing
folds deeply plicated like stiff silken drapery. In others straight
lines of the ordinary stalactite forms are combined with reference to
size and tone in a regularly graduated system like the strings of a harp
with musical tones corresponding thereto; and on these stone harps we
played by striking the crystal strings with a stick. The delicious
liquid tones they gave forth seemed perfectly divine as they sweetly
whispered and wavered through the majestic halls and died away in
faintest cadence,--the music of fairy-land. Here we lingered and
reveled, rejoicing to find so much music in stony silence, so much
splendor in darkness, so many mansions in the depths of the mountains,
buildings ever in process of construction, yet ever finished, developing
from perfection to perfection, profusion without overabundance; every
particle visible or invisible in glorious motion, marching to the music
of the spheres in a region regarded as the abode of eternal stillness
and death.

The outer chambers of mountain caves are frequently selected as homes by
wild beasts. In the Sierra, however, they seem to prefer home