[Illustration:  Comrades]

The forest always has a weird fascination for me, with its soft whisperings, as if the trees were confiding secrets to each other.  One can become intimately acquainted with it, and learn to love its quiet solitude, only by living in or near it, and wandering at will through its trackless, leaf-carpeted aisles.  Your eyes must be trained to constant watching, you must learn to be a close observer, to note the flowers, vines, and tangled shrubbery that are seldom mentioned by botanists, and your ear must be tuned to catch the elfin music that is heard within the confines of the forest.  You cannot travel a rod under the trees without being watched by the small forest inhabitants, who regard you with suspicion, and peer at you from under decaying logs or leafy covert like self-appointed detectives.

Muir Woods comprises nearly three hundred acres, the principal trees being laurel, fir, oak, redwood, and madrone, of which the giant redwood (Sequoia) predominates.  The redwoods in Muir Woods are thousands of years old, and rise from two to three hundred feet in air.  The bark is from one to two feet in thickness, of a cinnamon color, and the base of the largest trees from twenty-five to thirty feet in diameter.  A clear and cold mountain brook runs through the forest, and ferns grow in rich profusion along its margin, some of them reaching a height of six feet.

One cannot but note the profound quiet of the forest, as if these mighty trees that had withstood the storms of centuries were afraid their secrets might be wrested from them.

In some past ages fire has swept through the forest, laying some of these giants low, but other trees have sprung from their charred stumps, and rear their straight trunks and green-crowned heads hundreds of feet above the surrounding foliage.  These stately trees have grown and flourished like Solomon’s Temple with no sound of woodman’s axe to mar the quiet solemnity of this primeval forest.  One stands in awe in the presence of these wonderful sequoias, the greatest of trees, and we converse in low tones, as if standing in the presence of spirits of bygone ages.

[Illustration:  Among the redwoods]

Muir Woods was accepted by the United States government as a national monument in 1908, by special proclamation of President Theodore Roosevelt, and was named in honor of John Muir, the celebrated California naturalist.

There is no place in California where one can more profitably spend a day in the enjoyment of the wonderful beauties of nature than in this grove of giant redwoods.

[Illustration]

San Francisco Bay

  Where once the Indian’s canoe roamed o’er the bay,
  With silent motion, sped by warrior’s hand;
  The sea gulls wheel and turn in columns gray,
  And on the beach the miners’ cabins stand;

  Now, white-sailed ships sail outward with the tide,
  The stately ocean liners lead the van;
  And iron warships anchor side by side,
  With sister ships from China and Japan.