een the Vernal and Nevada Falls, making magnificent shows
as they go their glacier-sculptured way, sliding, leaping, hurrahing,
covered with crisp clashing spray made glorious with sifting sunshine.
And besides all these a few small streams come over the walls at wide
intervals, leaping from ledge to ledge with birdlike song and watering
many a hidden cliff-garden and fernery, but they are too unshowy to be
noticed in so grand a place.

The correspondence between the Hetch Hetchy walls in their trends,
sculpture, physical structure, and general arrangement of the main
rock-masses and those of the Yosemite Valley has excited the wondering
admiration of every observer. We have seen that the El Capitan and
Cathedral rocks occupy the same relative positions In both valleys; so
also do their Yosemite points and North Domes. Again, that part of the
Yosemite north wall immediately to the east of the Yosemite Fall has two
horizontal benches, about 500 and 1500 feet above the floor, timbered
with golden-cup oak. Two benches similarly situated and timbered occur
on the same relative portion of the Hetch Hetchy north wall, to the east
of Wapama Fall, and on no other. The Yosemite is bounded at the head by
the great Half Dome. Hetch Hetchy is bounded in the same way though its
head rock is incomparably less wonderful and sublime in form.

The floor of the Valley is about three and a half miles long, and from a
fourth to half a mile wide. The lower portion is mostly a level meadow
about a mile long, with the trees restricted to the sides and the river
banks, and partially separated from the main, upper, forested portion by
a low bar of glacier-polished granite across which the river breaks in
rapids.

The principal trees are the yellow and sugar pines, digger pine, incense
cedar, Douglas spruce, silver fir, the California and golden-cup oaks,
balsam cottonwood, Nuttall's flowering dogwood, alder, maple, laurel,
tumion, etc. The most abundant and influential are the great yellow or
silver pines like those of Yosemite, the tallest over two hundred feet
in height, and the oaks assembled in magnificent groves with massive
rugged trunks four to six feet in diameter, and broad, shady,
wide-spreading heads. The shrubs forming conspicuous flowery clumps and
tangles are manzanita, azalea, spiraea, brier-rose, several species of
ceanothus, calycanthus, philadelphus, wild cherry, etc.; with abundance
of showy and fragrant herbaceous plants g