er good luck, I set out on my
shaggy excursion.

[Illustration: A BEE-PASTURE ON THE MORAINE DESERT, SPANISH BAYONET.]

About half an hour's walk above the cabin, I came to "The Fall," famous
throughout the valley settlements as the finest yet discovered in the
San Gabriel Mountains. It is a charming little thing, with a low, sweet
voice, singing like a bird, as it pours from a notch in a short ledge,
some thirty-five or forty feet into a round mirror-pool. The face of the
cliff back of it, and on both sides, is smoothly covered and embossed
with mosses, against which the white water shines out in showy relief,
like a silver instrument in a velvet case. Hither come the San Gabriel
lads and lassies, to gather ferns and dabble away their hot holidays in
the cool water, glad to escape from their commonplace palm-gardens and
orange-groves. The delicate maidenhair grows on fissured rocks within
reach of the spray, while broad-leaved maples and sycamores cast soft,
mellow shade over a rich profusion of bee-flowers, growing among
boulders in front of the pool--the fall, the flowers, the bees, the
ferny rocks, and leafy shade forming a charming little poem of wildness,
the last of a series extending down the flowery slopes of Mount San
Antonio through the rugged, foam-beaten bosses of the main Eaton Canon.

From the base of the fall I followed the ridge that forms the western
rim of the Eaton basin to the summit of one of the principal peaks,
which is about 5000 feet above sea-level. Then, turning eastward, I
crossed the middle of the basin, forcing a way over its many subordinate
ridges and across its eastern rim, having to contend almost everywhere
with the floweriest and most impenetrable growth of honey-bushes I had
ever encountered since first my mountaineering began. Most of the Shasta
chaparral is leafy nearly to the ground; here the main stems are naked
for three or four feet, and interspiked with dead twigs, forming a stiff
_chevaux de frise_ through which even the bears make their way with
difficulty. I was compelled to creep for miles on all fours, and in
following the bear-trails often found tufts of hair on the bushes where
they had forced themselves through.

For 100 feet or so above the fall the ascent was made possible only by
tough cushions of club-moss that clung to the rock. Above this the ridge
weathers away to a thin knife-blade for a few hundred yards, and thence
to the summit of the range it carries a