the blood of the race, or in gunpowder to kill it; enough salt to savor all the vegetables of the world.  Its acid water, which waits only for a little sugar to make it delicious lemonade, may yet be found in all the drug stores of the country.  The water in one place roars like a steamboat discharging its steam.  Your boots curl with the heat as you stand on the hot rocks, looking.  Almost anywhere a thrust of your cane will evoke a gush of steam.  Our thermometer, plunged into one spring, answered one hundred and seventy-five degrees of heat.  Thrust in the “Witch’s Caldron,” it asserted two hundred and fifteen degrees.  “The Ink-stand” declared itself two hundred degrees.  An artificial whistle placed at the mouth of one of these geysers may be heard miles away.  You get a hot bath without paying for it.  The guide warns you off the crust in certain places, lest you at the same moment be drowned and boiled.  Here an egg cooks hard in three minutes.

The whole scene is unique and incomparable.  The Yosemite makes us think of the Alps; San Francisco reminds us of Chicago; Foss, the stage driver, hurling his passengers down the mountain at break-neck speed, suggests the driver of an Alpine diligence; Hutchings’ mountain horse, that stumbled and fell flat upon us, suggested our mule-back experiences in Tete Noir Pass of Switzerland; but the geysers remind us of nothing that we ever saw, or ever expect to see.  They have a voice, a bubble, a smoke, a death-rattle, peculiar to themselves.  No photographist can picture them, no words describe them, no fancy sketch them.

You may visit them by either of two routes; but do not take the advice of Foss, the celebrated stage driver.  You ought to go by one route, and return the other; yet Foss has made thousands of travelers believe that the only safe and interesting way to return is the way they go—­namely, by his route.  They who take his counsel miss some of the grandest scenery on the continent.  Any stage driver who by his misrepresentations would shut a tourist out of the entrancing beauties of the “Russian Valley” ought to be thrashed with his own raw-hide.  We heard Foss bamboozling a group of travelers with the idea that on the other route the roads were dangerous, the horses poor, the accommodations wretched and the scenery worthless.  We came up in time to combat the statement with our own happy experiences of the Russian Valley, and to save his passengers from the oft-repeated imposition.

And thus I have suggested the chief annoyance of California travel.  The rivalries of travel are so great that it is almost impossible to get accurate information.  The stage drivers, guides and hotel proprietors, for the most part, are financially interested in different routes.  Going to Yosemite Valley by the “Calaveras route,” from the office in San Francisco where you buy your ticket to the end of your journey, everybody assures you that J.M.  Hutchings, one of the hotel