That is all very well, except the “clear” part of the lake.  It certainly is clearer than a great many lakes, but how dull its waters are compared with the wonderful transparence of Lake Tahoe!  I speak of the north shore of Tahoe, where one can count the scales on a trout at a depth of a hundred and eighty feet.  I have tried to get this statement off at par here, but with no success; so I have been obliged to negotiate it at fifty percent discount.  At this rate I find some takers; perhaps the reader will receive it on the same terms—­ninety feet instead of one hundred and eighty.  But let it be remembered that those are forced terms—­Sheriff’s sale prices.  As far as I am privately concerned, I abate not a jot of the original assertion that in those strangely magnifying waters one may count the scales on a trout (a trout of the large kind,) at a depth of a hundred and eighty feet—­may see every pebble on the bottom—­might even count a paper of dray-pins.  People talk of the transparent waters of the Mexican Bay of Acapulco, but in my own experience I know they cannot compare with those I am speaking of.  I have fished for trout, in Tahoe, and at a measured depth of eighty-four feet I have seen them put their noses to the bait and I could see their gills open and shut.  I could hardly have seen the trout themselves at that distance in the open air.

As I go back in spirit and recall that noble sea, reposing among the snow-peaks six thousand feet above the ocean, the conviction comes strong upon me again that Como would only seem a bedizened little courtier in that august presence.

Sorrow and misfortune overtake the legislature that still from year to year permits Tahoe to retain its unmusical cognomen!  Tahoe!  It suggests no crystal waters, no picturesque shores, no sublimity.  Tahoe for a sea in the clouds:  a sea that has character and asserts it in solemn calms at times, at times in savage storms; a sea whose royal seclusion is guarded by a cordon of sentinel peaks that lift their frosty fronts nine thousand feet above the level world; a sea whose every aspect is impressive, whose belongings are all beautiful, whose lonely majesty types the Deity!

Tahoe means grasshoppers.  It means grasshopper soup.  It is Indian, and suggestive of Indians.  They say it is Pi-ute—­possibly it is Digger.  I am satisfied it was named by the Diggers—­those degraded savages who roast their dead relatives, then mix the human grease and ashes of bones with tar, and “gaum” it thick all over their heads and foreheads and ears, and go caterwauling about the hills and call it mourning.  These are the gentry that named the Lake.

People say that Tahoe means “Silver Lake”—­“Limpid Water”—­“Falling Leaf.”  Bosh.  It means grasshopper soup, the favorite dish of the Digger tribe,—­and of the Pi-utes as well.  It isn’t worth while, in these practical times, for people to talk about Indian poetry—­there never was any in them—­except in the Fenimore Cooper Indians.  But they are an extinct tribe that never existed.  I know the Noble Red Man.  I have camped with the Indians; I have been on the warpath with them, taken part in the chase with them—­for grasshoppers; helped them steal cattle; I have roamed with them, scalped them, had them for breakfast.  I would gladly eat the whole race if I had a chance.