Early next morning we blocked up our car and took off the rear axle, uncoupled the differential case and found everything there intact.  We then removed the caps from the wheel hubs and took out the floating axles, or drive shafts.  One of them was broken into two pieces.  It either had a flaw in it when made or had crystallized, no one could determine which.  We got Los Angeles by phone, ordered the necessary parts by express to Porterville, and, think of it, we had these parts delivered to us at two o’clock the next afternoon!

The Soda Spring.

We spent the rest of Friday, June ninth, in visiting a magnificent soda and iron spring, a mile above camp, which is for all the world like the spring of the same quality in Runkle’s Meadows, above the lake on Kern River, some ninety miles above Kernville.  The waters of the spring were deliciously cool and refreshing.

A Tramp Up A Mountain.

Next morning the male members of our party started up a steep mountain trail to see some sequoias I had heard about.  Unused as we were to excessive exercise and the altitude, the climb was a hard one.  We ascended from four thousand feet elevation to over seven thousand feet.  Most of the way the trail was through heavy fir and sugar-pine.  Going up we ran into two beautiful full-grown deer, a buck and a doe.  They fled to security with easy, graceful jumps, into the thick underbrush.  We heard grouse drumming loudly, in two or three different localities and saw one bird make a long dive from one pine tree to another.  We found wild flowers in profusion, of the same variety, fragrance and coloring as encountered in the canyon the day before.  Just as we reached the summit, we found, standing on the backbone of the ridge—­so located that rain falling on it would flow from one side of it into one water-shed, and from the other side into another water-shed—­a great, stately sequoia gigantea fully three hundred feet high and of immense circumference.  There wasn’t a branch on it within one hundred feet of the ground.  It was in good leaf, except at the top, which was gnarled and weather-beaten.  Its base had been cruelly burned.  This tree bears a striking resemblance to the grizzly giant which we saw later in the Mariposa big tree grove near Wawona.  Not far from this fine old guardian of the pass, were groups of noble trees, fully as tall, but not as large as the one described, but perfect trees, erect, stately, and imposing.  The bark of all of these trees was very smooth and very red, much more highly colored than the trees in the Wawona grove.

I was too much fatigued to make another mile down the west side of the mountain (we had come up from the east) to inspect a much larger grove of still larger trees.  Two of the younger members of our party, my son Francis and Harry Graves, our chauffeur, made the trip while Dr. Macleish and I awaited their return on the summit.  They came back enthusiastic over the lower groves, the trees there being much more