and twin propellers in plain sight.  The fish dart under her and all about as in some large aquarium.  There a big lake-trout shoots by like a silver streak of light, or here is a school of hundreds of little fingerlings.  Every stick or stone shows on the bottom as one starts out on the steamer, and as one sails along where the water is sixty or seventy feet deep.  In the middle the lake’s depth is fifteen hundred feet and the water is a dark indigo-blue.  At the edge and along shallow places the color is bright green, as at Emerald Bay, a beautiful inlet three miles long.  Lake Tahoe is twenty miles in length and about five wide, and its icy cold waters are of crystal clearness and very pure.

Fallen Leaf Lake is a smaller Tahoe, and Donner Lake, not far from Truckee, and now the camping-place of many a summer visitor, is the place where years ago the Donner overland party spent a terrible winter in the Sierra snows.

Clear Lake and the Blue Lakes in Lake County are delightful places to visit, and in this county, too, are the geysers.  Some wonderful curiosities are seen here.  You will find springs that spout up a stream of hot water every few minutes, mineral springs from which you can have a drink of soda water, and an acid spring that flows lemonade.  Alum, iron, or sulphur waters, either hot or cold, bubble up out of the ground at every turn.  At one spring you may boil an egg.  Other springs are used for steam baths and also hot mud-baths.  In Geyser Canon is the strange place every sight-seer hurries to at once.  Such rumblings and thunderings, such hot vapors and gases come from the cracks in the ground, that the Indians thought this was the workshop where the bad spirit which white people call the devil used to live and work.  The deeper one goes into this canon, the hotter and noisier it gets.  All round are signs telling where it is dangerous to step, while the ground is hot, and boiling water runs by in little streams.  Steam rises from many pools, and the sulphur smell almost chokes one.  Another curious spring, called the devil’s inkstand, seems full of ink.  Mount St. Helena, near here, is a dead or extinct volcano, and probably there are fires in the earth under this region which keep up these steam and sulphur springs.

[Illustration:  NATURAL BRIDGE, SANTA CRUZ.]

Many of the Sierra summits are capped with volcanic rock, and Lassen’s Peak and Mount Shasta are extinct volcanoes.  There are hot springs and cracks from which steam and sulphur rise on both of these mountains, and as earthquakes often shake the earth in different parts of the state we know that underground fires are still at work.  A great piece of land on Mount San Jacinto in Southern California lately sank down about a hundred feet, and cracks both deep and wide show that some force from below gave a thorough shaking-up to that part of the state.