nd edition, November 27, 1879.)

Once on horseback my embarrassment disappeared, and I rode through
Truckee, whose irregular, steep-roofed houses and shanties, set down in
a clearing and surrounded closely by mountain and forest, looked like a
temporary encampment; passed under the Pacific Railroad; and then for
twelve miles followed the windings of the Truckee River, a clear,
rushing, mountain stream, in which immense pine logs had gone aground
not to be floated off till the next freshet, a loud-tongued, rollicking
stream of ice-cold water, on whose banks no ferns or trailers hang, and
which leaves no greenness along its turbulent progress.

All was bright with that brilliancy of sky and atmosphere, that blaze
of sunshine and universal glitter, which I never saw till I came to
California, combined with an elasticity in the air which removed all
lassitude, and gives one spirit enough for anything. On either side of
the Truckee great sierras rose like walls, castellated, embattled,
rifted, skirted and crowned with pines of enormous size, the walls now
and then breaking apart to show some snow-slashed peak rising into a
heaven of intense, unclouded, sunny blue. At this altitude of 6,000
feet one must learn to be content with varieties of Coniferae, for,
except for aspens, which spring up in some places where the pines have
been cleared away, and for cotton-woods, which at a lower level fringe
the streams, there is nothing but the bear cherry, the raspberry, the
gooseberry, the wild grape, and the wild currant. None of these grew
near the Truckee, but I feasted my eyes on pines[4] which, though not
so large as the Wellingtonia of the Yosemite, are really gigantic,
attaining a height of 250 feet, their huge stems, the warm red of cedar
wood, rising straight and branchless for a third of their height, their
diameter from seven to fifteen feet, their shape that of a larch, but
with the needles long and dark, and cones a foot long. Pines cleft the
sky; they were massed wherever level ground occurred; they stood over
the Truckee at right angles, or lay across it in prostrate grandeur.
Their stumps and carcasses were everywhere; and smooth "shoots" on the
sierras marked where they were shot down as "felled timber," to be
floated off by the river. To them this wild region owes its scattered
population, and the sharp ring of the lumberer's axe mingles with the
cries of wild beasts and the roar of mountain torrents.

[4] P