for fires is everywhere abundant. Only a little food will be

required. Berries and plums abound in season, and quail and grouse
and deer--the magnificentshaggy mule deer as well as the common

species.
As you sweep around so grand a center, the mountain itself seems to

turn, displaying its riches like the revolving pyramids in jewelers'
windows. One glacier after another comes into view, and the outlines

of the mountain are ever changing, though all the way around, from
whatever point of view, the form is maintained of a grand, simple cone

with a gently sloping base and rugged, crumbling ridges separating the
glaciers and the snowfields more or less completely. The play of

colors, from the first touches of the morning sun on the summit, down
the snowfields and the ice and lava until the forests are aglow, is a

never-ending delight, the rosy lava and the fine flushings of the snow
being ineffably lovely. Thus one saunters on and on in the glorious

radiance in utter peace and forgetfulness of time.
Yet, strange to say, there are days even here somewhat dull-looking,

when the mountain seem uncommunicative, sending out no appreciable
invitation, as if not at home. At such time its height seems much

less, as if, crouching and weary, it were taking rest. But Shasta is
always at home to those who love her, and is ever in a thrill of

enthusiastic activity--burning fires within, grinding glaciers
without, and fountains ever flowing. Every crystal dances responsive

to the touches of the sun, and currents of sap in the growing cells of
all the vegetation are ever in a vital whirl and rush, and though many

feet and wings are folded, how many are astir! And the wandering
winds, how busy they are, and what a breadth of sound and motion they

make, glinting and bubbling about the crags of the summit, sifting
through the woods, feeling their way from grove to grove, ruffling the

loose hair on the shoulders of the bears, fanning and rocking young
birds in their cradles, making a trumpet of every corolla, and

carrying their fragrance around the world.
In unsettled weather, when storms are growing, the mountain looms

immensely higher, and its miles of height become apparent to all,
especially in the gloom of the gathering clouds, or when the storm is

done and they are rolling away, torn on the edges and melting while in
the sunshine. Slight rainstorms are likely to be encountered in a

trip round the mountain, but one may easily find shelter beneath
well-thatched trees that shed the rain like a roof. Then the shining of

the wet leaves is delightful, and the steamy fragrance, and the burst
of bird song from a multitude of thrushes and finches and warblers

that have nests in the chaparral.
The nights, too, are delightful, watching with Shasta beneath the

great starry done. A thousand thousand voices are heard, but so
finely blended they seem a part of the night itself, and make a deeper

silence. And how grandly do the great logs and branches of your
campfire give forth the heat and light that during their long century-lives

they have so slowly gathered from the sun, storing it away in
beautiful dotted cells and beads of amber gum! The neighboring trees

look into the charmed circle as if the noon of another day had come,
familiar flowers and grasses that chance to be near seem far more

beautiful and impressive than by day, and as the dead trees give forth
their light all the other riches of their lives seem to be set free

and with the rejoicing flames rise again to the sky. In setting out
from Strawberry Valley, by bearing off to the northwestward a few

miles you may see
"...beneath dim aisles, in odorous beds,

The slight Linnaea hang its twin-born heads,
And [bless] the monument of the man of flowers,

Which breathes his sweet fame through the northern bowers."
This is one of the few places in California where the charming linnaea

is found, though it is common to the northward through Oregon and
Washington. Here, too, you may find the curious but unlovable

darlingtonia, a carnivorous plant that devours bumblebees,
grasshoppers, ants, moths, and other insects, with insatiable

appetite. In approaching it, its suspicious-looking yellow-spotted
hood and watchful attitude will be likely to make you go cautiously

through the bog where it stands, as if you were approaching a
dangerous snake. It also occurs in a bog near Sothern's Station on

the stage road, where I first saw it, and in other similar bogs
throughout the mountains hereabouts.

The "Big Spring" of the Sacramento is about a mile and a half above
Sisson's, issuing from the base of a drift-covered hill. It is lined

with emerald algae and mosses, and shaded with alder, willow, and
thorn bushes, which give it a fine setting. Its waters, apparently

unaffected by flood or drouth, heat or cold, fall at once into white
rapids with a rush and dash, as if glad to escape from the darkness to

begin their wild course down the canyon to the plain.
Muir's Peak, a few miles to the north of the spring, rises about three

thousand feet above the plain on which it stands, and is easily
climbed. The view is very fine and well repays the slight walk to its

summit, from which much of your way about the mountain may be studied
and chosen. The view obtained of the Whitney Glacier should tempt you

to visit it, since it is the largest of the Shasta glaciers and its
lower portionabounds in beautiful and interesting cascades and

crevasses. It is three or four miles long and terminates at an
elevation of about nine thousand five hundred feet above sea level, in

moraine-sprinkled ice cliffs sixty feet high. The long gray slopes
leading up to the glacier seem remarkably smooth and unbroken. They

are much interrupted, nevertheless, with abrupt, jagged precipitous
gorges, which though offeringinstructive sections of the lavas for

examination, would better be shunned by most people. This may be done
by keeping well down on the base until fronting the glacier before

beginning the ascent.
The gorge through which the glacier is drained is raw-looking, deep

and narrow, and indescribably jagged. The walls in many places
overhang; in others they are beveled, loose, and shifting where the

channel has been eroded by cinders, ashes, strata of firm lavas, and
glacial drift, telling of many a change from frost to fire and their

attendant floods of mud and water. Most of the drainage of the
glacier vanishes at once in the porous rocks to reappear in springs in

the distant valley, and it is only in time of flood that the channel
carries much water; then there are several fine falls in the gorge,

six hundred feet or more in height. Snow lies in it the year round at
an elevation of eight thousand five hundred feet, and in sheltered

spots a thousand feet lower. Tracing this wild changing channel-gorge,
gully, or canyon, the sections will show Mount Shasta as a huge

palimpsest, containing the records, layer upon layer, of strangely
contrasted events in its fiery-icy history. But look well to your

footing, for the way will test the skill of the most cautious
mountaineers.

Regaining the low ground at the base of the mountain and holding on in
your grand orbit, you pass through a belt of juniper woods, called

"The Cedars," to Sheep Rock at the foot of the Shasta Pass. Here you
strike the old emigrant road, which leads over the low divide to the

eastern slopes of the mountain. In a north-northwesterly direction
from the foot of the pass you may chance to find Pluto's Cave, already

mentioned; but it is not easily found, since its several mouths are on
a level with the general surface of the ground, and have been made

simply by the falling-in of portions of the roof. Far the most
beautiful and richly furnished of the mountain caves of California

occur in a thick belt of metamorphic limestone that is pretty
generally developed along the western flank of the Sierra from the

McCloud River to the Kaweah, a distance of nearly four hundred miles.
These volcanic caves are not wanting in interest, and it is well to

light a pitch pine torch and take a walk in these dark ways of the
underworld whenever opportunity offers, if for no other reason to see

with new appreciation on returning to the sunshine the beauties that
lie so thick about us.

Sheep Rock is about twenty miles from Sisson's, and is one of the
principal winter pasture grounds of the wild sheep, from which it

takes its name. It is a mass of lava presenting to the gray sage
plain of Shasta Valley a bold craggy front two thousand feet high.