are vocal everywhere with the songs of birds and running water.  Miles of fragrant ceanothus and manzanita bushes bloom beneath them, and lily gardens and meadows, and damp, ferny glens in endless variety of fragrance and color, compelling the admiration of every observer.  Sweeping on over ridge and valley, these noble trees extend a continuous belt from end to end of the range, only slightly interrupted by sheer-walled canons at intervals of about fifteen and twenty miles.  Here the great burly brown bears delight to roam, harmonizing with the brown boles of the trees beneath which they feed.  Deer, also, dwell here, and find food and shelter in the ceanothus tangles, with a multitude of smaller people.  Above this region of giants, the trees grow smaller until the utmost limit of the timber line is reached on the stormy mountain-slopes at a height of from ten to twelve thousand feet above the sea, where the Dwarf Pine is so lowly and hard beset by storms and heavy snow, it is pressed into flat tangles, over the tops of which we may easily walk.  Below the main forest belt the trees likewise diminish in size, frost and burning drought repressing and blasting alike.

The rose-purple zone along the base of the range comprehends nearly all the famous gold region of California.  And here it was that miners from every country under the sun assembled in a wild, torrent-like rush to seek their fortunes.  On the banks of every river, ravine, and gully they have left their marks.  Every gravel- and boulder-bed has been desperately riddled over and over again.  But in this region the pick and shovel, once wielded with savage enthusiasm, have been laid away, and only quartz-mining is now being carried on to any considerable extent.  The zone in general is made up of low, tawny, waving foot-hills, roughened here and there with brush and trees, and outcropping masses of slate, colored gray and red with lichens.  The smaller masses of slate, rising abruptly from the dry, grassy sod in leaning slabs, look like ancient tombstones in a deserted burying-ground.  In early spring, say from February to April, the whole of this foot-hill belt is a paradise of bees and flowers.  Refreshing rains then fall freely, birds are busy building their nests, and the sunshine is balmy and delightful.  But by the end of May the soil, plants, and sky seem to have been baked in an oven.  Most of the plants crumble to dust beneath the foot, and the ground is full of cracks; while the thirsty traveler gazes with eager longing through the burning glare to the snowy summits looming like hazy clouds in the distance.