hard living of winter.  Once without much difficulty I regularly rounded up a big band of them, so that John Burroughs could look at them.  I do not think, however, that he cared to see them as much as I did.  The birds interested him more, especially a tiny owl the size of a robin which we saw perched on the top of a tree in mid-afternoon entirely uninfluenced by the sun and making a queer noise like a cork being pulled from a bottle.  I was rather ashamed to find how much better his eyes were than mine in seeing the birds and grasping their differences.

When wolf-hunting in Texas, and when bear-hunting in Louisiana and Mississippi, I was not only enthralled by the sport, but also by the strange new birds and other creatures, and the trees and flowers I had not known before.  By the way, there was one feast at the White House which stands above all others in my memory—­even above the time when I lured Joel Chandler Harris thither for a night, a deed in which to triumph, as all who knew that inveterately shy recluse will testify.  This was “the bear-hunters’ dinner.”  I had been treated so kindly by my friends on these hunts, and they were such fine fellows, men whom I was so proud to think of as Americans, that I set my heart on having them at a hunters’ dinner at the White House.  One December I succeeded; there were twenty or thirty of them, all told, as good hunters, as daring riders, as first-class citizens as could be found anywhere; no finer set of guests ever sat at meat in the White House; and among other game on the table was a black bear, itself contributed by one of these same guests.

When I first visited California, it was my good fortune to see the “big trees,” the Sequoias, and then to travel down into the Yosemite, with John Muir.  Of course of all people in the world he was the one with whom it was best worth while thus to see the Yosemite.  He told me that when Emerson came to California he tried to get him to come out and camp with him, for that was the only way in which to see at their best the majesty and charm of the Sierras.  But at the time Emerson was getting old and could not go.  John Muir met me with a couple of packers and two mules to carry our tent, bedding, and food for a three days’ trip.  The first night was clear, and we lay down in the darkening aisles of the great Sequoia grove.  The majestic trunks, beautiful in color and in symmetry, rose round us like the pillars of a mightier cathedral than ever was conceived even by the fervor of the Middle Ages.  Hermit thrushes sang beautifully in the evening, and again, with a burst of wonderful music, at dawn.  I was interested and a little surprised to find that, unlike John Burroughs, John Muir cared little for birds or bird songs, and knew little about them.  The hermit-thrushes meant nothing to him, the trees and the flowers and the cliffs everything.  The only birds he noticed or cared for were some that were very conspicuous, such as the water-ousels—­always particular favorites of mine too.  The second night we camped in a snow-storm, on the edge of the canyon walls, under the spreading limbs of a grove of mighty silver fir; and next day we went down into the wonderland of the valley itself.  I shall always be glad that I was in the Yosemite with John Muir and in the Yellowstone with John Burroughs.