of Orithyia by Boreas, the North Wind, the metaphor of a tempestuous love, the Indian mind, plunged in sad superstition, could see nothing in a similar fatality but the revengeful finger of doom. This is not the only case in which we cannot help regretting the substitution of a modern for the more significant or traditional Indian name. No great propriety and still less originality was shown in the selection of such titles as the Riband, the Vernal, and the Nevada. How much prettier, in meaning if not in sound, were Lung-oo-too-koo-yah, the Graceful and Slender One; Pi-wy-ack, the Shower of Diamonds; Yo-wi-ye, the Twisting One; and Tulu-la-wiack, the Rush of Waters. Gladly, too, would we see Mirror Lake reconverted into Ke-kotoo-yem, the Sleeping Water.

The Indian imagination seems to have been more poetically excited by waterfalls than by mountains ; for the names which they gave to the latter were in some cases fantastic and less worthy of appropriation. The two extraordinary rocks on the southern side of the valley, which from their shape and juxtaposition are aptly called the Cathedral Spires,— being indeed as like the west front of a Gothic minster as the architecture of nature could be expected to model them—were known to the Indians as Poo-see-na Chuck-ka, the Acorn Baskets, from the receptacle of that name, shaped like an inverted cone, which is carried on their backs by the Indian women. The three pointed rocks on the other side of the valley, now called the Three Brothers, were Pom-pom-pa-sa, or the Jumping Frogs. The Sen

tinel Rock was Loya, from a plant growing near at hand. The Sentinel Dome was Ho-ko-owa, or the Lizard, from a dark lizard-shaped stain in the rock. The North Dome-that curious smooth cupola of granite that overhangs the entrance to the northernmost of the two eastern forks-was To-coy-a, from the covering over the face of a papoose carried in its basket-cradle on its mother's back. More fitly the Half Dome-most prominent of all the giants of the valley, being as its name implies a great bald hump of rock (4800 feet above the valley floor and 9000 above the sea) smooth and rounded on one side, but suddenly cleft in twain through the middle, as though by the slash of some Titan's axe-was named by the Indians Tis-sa-ack, the Goddess of the Valley. Finally, El Capitan (a name given by the Mission Indians who had borrowed it from the Spanish padres), that magnificent bluff, so familiar from a hundred photographs and sketches, which stands like a sturdy warder at the western threshold of the valley, was known as Tu-tock-ah-nu-lah, the Great Guardian Deity.

There is another respect, besides the waterfalls, in which the late summer and autumn in the Yosemite are the sufferers to the gain of the spring. This is in the matter of vegetation. At all times a rich forest-growth adorns the valley; and it is only by comparison with the celebrated Big Trees (Sequoia gigantea) that grow in the neighbourhood some thirty miles away, and are usually visited in the course of the same expedition, that these noble Yosemite stems, 170 to 220 feet high, straight as an obelisk

and tall as a tower, are not considered giants in the land.

The roadway winds in and out of the solemn sylvan aisles, the light scarcely breaking through the clustered leafy capitals and shedding itself in dust of gold upon the big cones and needles that litter the forest floor. Here are yellow pines and sugar pines, the red or incense cedar, the Douglas spruce, and three varieties of silver fir. Here, too, are the more familiar figures of the common oak and the evergreen oak, the quaking aspen and the willow, alders, poplars, maples, and laurel. The majority of these continue their bounty right through the summer; but it is in the undergrowth and shrubs and flowers that the visitor in the spring finds such an additional delight. Then the open spaces are gay with the festal bloom of the manzanita, with azaleas, yellow and white and pink, with the soft plumes of the Californian lilac, with dogswood and primroses, with the syringa, the butterfly tulip, and the white lily. The trails are bright with their colours and sweet with their fragrance, and all nature smiles.

Being even at its base as much as 4000 feet above the sea, the Yosemite valley enjoys a very equable temperature, the thermometer seldom pointing to more than 86° in summer. The orientation of the cutting is, moreover, the source of a twofold charm. Running, as the valley does, almost due east and west, the sea-breezes that pour in at the Golden Gate come swiftly over the intervening plains and blow an incessant draught from end to end of the gorge.