asps.”  He is doubtless the same who, being asked “what that was,” (pointing to the North Dome, six thousand feet in the air) said “he’d be hanged if he knew; some knob or other.”  I recall ten thousand pleasant times as I turn my face seaward; not only the great and omnipotent shadows under the south wall of the valley, nor the continuous canticles of the waters, but innumerable little things that fill up and make life perfect.

The talks, the walks with my friends here, the parrot “Sultan,” fed daily from the table, soliloquizing upon men and things in Arabic and Hindostanee, for he scorns English and talks in his sleep.  There is Bobby, the grossbeak, brought to the door in pin feathers and skin like oiled silk by an Indian.  His history is tragic:  this Indian brained the whole family and an assortment of relatives; Bobby alone remaining to brood over the massacre, was sold into bondage for two bits and a tin dipper without the bottom.  The sun seems to lift his gloom, for he sings a little, sharpens his bill with great gusto and tomahawks a bit of fruit, as though dealing vengeance upon the destroyer of his race.

[Illustration:  Sentinel Hotel, Yosemite, in 1869]

When shall I see another such cabin as this—­its great fireplaces, and the loft heaping full of pumpkins?  O, Yosemite!  O, halcyon days, and bed-time at eight P.M., tucking in for ten good hours and up again at six; good eatings and drinkings day by day, mugs of milk and baked squash forever, plenty of butter to our daily bread; letters at wide intervals, and long, uninterrupted “thinks” about home and friends (as the poet of the “Hermitage” writes in one of his letters).  Shall I ever again sit for two mortal hours hearing a housefly buzz in the window and thinking it a pleasant voice!  But alas! those restless days, when the air was full of driving leaves and I could find nothing on earth to comfort me.

I leave this morning.  Opportunity takes me by the hand and leads me away.  The heart leaps with emotion:  everything is momentous in a quiet life.  This is the portal we entered one deepening dusk.  Its threshold will soon be cushioned with snow; let us hasten on.  If I were asked when is the time to visit Yosemite, I should reply:  Go in the spring; see the freshets and the waterfalls in their glory, and the valley in its fresh and vivid greenness.  Go again, by all means, in the autumn, when the woods are powdered with gold dust and a dreamy haze sleeps in the long ravines; when the stars sparkle like crystals and the mornings are frosty; when the clouds visit us in person, and the trees look like crayon sketches on a vapory background, and the cliffs like leaning towers traced in sepia on a soft ground glass.  Go in spring and autumn, if possible.  I should choose autumn of the two; but go at any hazard, and do not rest till you have been.  You can enter and go out at this portal.  Passing seaward, to the left, out of the gray and groping mists a form,