to visit a glacier lake, as the sedge is the first of plants.  So the young lake grows in beauty, becoming more and more humanly lovable from century to century.  Groves of aspen spring up, and hardy pines, and the hemlock spruce, until it is richly overshadowed and embowered.  But while its shores are becoming enriched, the soil-beds creep out with incessant growth, contracting its area, while the lighter mud-particles deposited on the bottom cause it to grow shallower, until at length the last remnant of the lake vanishes,—­closed forever in ripe and natural old age.  And now its feeding-stream goes winding on without halting through the new gardens and groves that have taken its place.

The length of the life of any lake depends ordinarily upon the capacity of its basin, as compared with the carrying power of the streams that flow into it, the character of the rocks over which these streams flow, and the relative position of the lake toward other lakes.  In a series whose basins lie in the same canyon, and are fed by one and the same main stream, the uppermost will, of course, vanish first unless some other lake-filling agent comes in to modify the result; because at first it receives nearly all of the sediments that the stream brings down, only the finest of the mud-particles being carried through the highest of the series to the next below.  Then the next higher, and the next would be successively filled, and the lowest would be the last to vanish.  But this simplicity as to duration is broken in upon in various ways, chiefly through the action of side-streams that enter the lower lakes direct.  For, notwithstanding many of these side tributaries are quite short, and, during late summer, feeble, they all become powerful torrents in spring-time when the snow is melting, and carry not only sand and pine-needles, but large trunks and bowlders tons in weight, sweeping them down their steeply inclined channels and into the lake basins with astounding energy.  Many of these side affluents also have the advantage of access to the main lateral moraines of the vanished glacier that occupied the canyon, and upon these they draw for lake-filling material, while the main trunk stream flows mostly over clean glacier pavements, where but little moraine matter is ever left for them to carry.  Thus a small rapid stream with abundance of loose transportable material within its reach may fill up an extensive basin in a few centuries, while a large perennial trunk stream, flowing over clean, enduring pavements, though ordinarily a hundred times larger, may not fill a smaller basin in thousands of years.

[Illustration:  Tamarack and Echo Lakes]

[Illustration:  Cascade Lake, Near the Automobile Bouldvard, Lake Tahoe]

[Illustration:  Memorial Cross at Donner Lake]