We spent three days driving into the valley, staying at delightful inns over night, and stopping when we pleased, to pick flowers, for wonderful ones grow beside the road; Mariposa tulips with their spotted butterfly wings, fairy lanterns, all the shades of blue lupin, and on our detour to see the big trees I found a snow-plant, which looks like a blossom carved out of watermelon—­pink and luscious!  It is hard to realize how big the big trees are!  Like St. Peter’s, they are so wonderfully proportioned you can’t appreciate their height, but I do know that they would be just a little more than my tree-climbing sons would care to tackle.  Stevens was a good driver and approved of our appreciation of “his” scenery, and I think he was proud of Grandmother, who really stood the trip wonderfully well.  At last came the great moment when a bend in the road would disclose the valley with its silver peaks, its golden-brown river, and its rainbow-spanned falls.  We had never suspected it, but Stevens was an epicure in beauty.  He insisted on our closing our eyes till we came to just the spot where the view was most perfect, and then he drew in his horses, gave the word, and we looked on a valley as lovely as a dream.  I am glad that we saw it as we did, after a long prelude of shaded roads and sentinel trees.  Nowadays you rush to it madly by train and motor.  Then it was a dear secret hidden away in the heart of the forest.

We spent five days at the hotel by the Merced River, feasting on beauty and mountain trout, and lulled by the murmur of that gentle stream.  Moonlight illumined the whiteness of the Yosemite Falls in full view of the hotel verandah as it makes the double leap down a dark gorge.  We could see a great deal with very little effort, but after a day or two I began to look longingly upward toward the mountain trails.  At last a chance came, and “Why Not” led me to embrace it.  A wholesale milliner from Los Angeles invited me to join his party.  We had seen him at various places along our way, so that it was not entirely out of a clear sky.  He was wall-eyed—­if that is the opposite of cross-eyed—­which gave him so decidedly rakish a look that it was some time before I could persuade my conservative relatives that it would be safe for me to accept the invitation, but as the party numbered ten, mostly female, they finally gave me their blessing.  Being the last comer, and the mules being all occupied, I had to take a horse, which I was sorry for, as they aren’t supposed to be quite as sure-footed on the trail.  The party all urged me to be cautious, with such emphasis that I began to wonder if I had been wise to come, when Charley, our guide, told me not to pay any attention to them, that I had the best mount of the whole train.  Charley, by the way, was all that Al Stevens was not, and added the note of picturesqueness and romance which my soul had been craving.  He was young, blond, and dressed for the part, and would have entranced